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Andrea Pitzer
You're listening to Next Comes what from Degenerate Art. This is Andrea Pitzer. Obviously, the situation in which we might have an incoming Harris administration is not what's happening. The adage is only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And so then we have to plan for what is going to happen instead. So what happens when a country decides to put tens of thousands of people into camps? What can history tell us? Here with me now, author Andrea Pitzer, who literally wrote the book on the subject. It's called One Long A Global History of Concentration Camps. It came into my consciousness just a few days ago and I have gotten it and started reading it. And it's excellent. Andrea, thank you for joining me. And unfortunately, writing a history of concentration camps is probably a pretty good practice to at least start to organize, thinking about what comes next. There's just so much to say. I'm going to try to anchor this in some concrete things because I think there's a lot of really valid anxiety and some, also some panicking and I don't want to contribute to that. People may need to just go through that. But I would like to contribute to giving them some concrete ways to think about where we're at. And so first, just with the election that happened this week and a clear Trump victory, we are seeing a return to power, kind of of a past that never got left behind in the world. Said it is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep. That's a famous Mussolini quote. You retweeted it. Do you like the quote? Did you know it was Mussolini? It's okay to know it's Mussolini. Look, Mussolini was Mussolini. It's okay to. It's a very good quote. And we've seen that other places in the world. And I think it's important to realize that this is a trend right now. The ruling conservative party have stumped to their biggest loss its near 200 year history and that sometimes no matter how much work you do, it can be really hard to buck a trend. India's prime minister is set to meet his allies today to talk about forming a government. In a surprise election result, his Hindu nationalist party has lost its outright majority in Parliament. And that's not to put anybody on the hook or to let anybody off the hook. I think we don't have the information to understand everything that happened in the election, but we can understand what are going to be some of the results of that election. It's my hope that we deport every single one of them that we can. And so that's what I want to talk about today. And because there are so many examples in the last hundred years of want to be authoritarians or successful authoritarians coming to power, I want to address kind of three cases, three examples, and each one has a little bit to do with Trump and may give us some indications about what's possible and what's not going forward. And the first one we might as well just tackle head on, because it's the one that everybody knows and it's the references that Trump has drawn since he came down the escalator in 2015 to declare his candidacy. It's Nazi Germany. And so for people who don't know it, Hitler didn't completely have to seize power. He was appointed chancellor at the beginning of 1933, in January. And it was because the Nazis had overall strengthened their showing in the elections that had happened the year before. And so it was thought they could appoint him chancellor and defang him a little bit. And the short version is that the rest is history. And by getting that position, he came in through legitimate channels, and then he used a lot of illegitimate means, both through violence and legislative work. And that's how he gained dictatorship at that point. But even so, it's worth remembering that it was a very violent 18 months, but it did take more than a year for him to really lock in permanent dictatorship. And so even then, you know, things took some time. But he did come in, as Trump has come in, through a the legitimate, established process in that country. At the time, he was a piece of that. And I think what we see with Trump is a similar setting, which I'll talk more about later. But the second case that I want to go to is that strongmen sometimes seize power through coups. And that is where you overthrow an existing government, come in and establish control, usually by pretty violent means. And the example that I want to talk about some today is in Chile. So the first movements were in the morning, 6, 7am and the Navy started to retreat some of their exercises that they were going to implement that day. And it became clear for everyone that something was happening. So in September 1973, actually September 11, Pinochet and a series of generals with him actually had the Air Force bomb the presidential palace in Santiago, Chile. And there's just amazing footage of this, of seeing these jet fighters literally bombing the equivalent of the White House. And that is a common way, it's sort of a shock and fear way, to seize power. And there's a little bit of that with Trump that I'll talk about later. And the third example that I wanted to say is that we have seen frequently where somebody who is in power or in power and leaves power, but not really make a return and then become extremely more authoritarian. And the example I want to use today for that is Vladimir Putin, who came in, was sort of not quite appointed the way that Hitler was appointed, but was brought in as a sort of a useful stooge, actually made some economic reforms, did some things, stepped away from his current office and let somebody else have it, although he was still the absolute moving force behind politics in Russia at that time. But then when he resumed that office is when we began to see the worst of the worst thing happen. So the economic reforms were abandoned. We had Crimea seized. We had the early destabilization of Ukraine that led us to the later one. We see the building up of domestic police to suppress domestic dissent. So that protest becomes really dangerous and no effective movement can grow. The elimination and assassination of rivals. He's running this country, and at least he's a leader, you know, unlike what we have in this country. But again, he kills journalists that don't agree with him. Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe. It's in that second act that the really bad stuff unfolds, even though there's plenty of bad stuff before it intensifies in a lot of ways. And I think that these three examples do apply to Trump today. I think the Hitler example is interesting because looking back at history, you know, the laws were really stretched to allow Hitler to even participate as a candidate. He had been barred from it. There were questions of citizenship. He had renounced his Austrian citizenship. There were all these things that were fudged and bent in order to even allow him to have that sort of legitimate status. And I think we've seen with Trump that the same is true, that the courts should have been. And if not the courts and the legislature, our legislators should have been the ones who would have kept him from having that candidacy. But what we have ended up in is a situation in which he won an election. He won an election he shouldn't have been in in the first place. And so that does put us in a bind. I think the way that the Chile case applies to us is that Trump is not in power, but we know that he's going to be in power in January of 2025. And so the rhetoric that he and his people are using is not the rhetoric. And through the whole campaign, it has not been the rhetoric of people who are going to win an election, hold legitimate power, and exercise it legitimately. November 5th is Judgment Day. January 20th, 2025, is Accountability Day. The rhetoric that they're using is this rhetoric that the people who do coups use when they come in and seize power. It is this rhetoric of terror. It's a rhetoric of shock and awe. It's a rhetoric of people making a show of force and trying to seize more power than they have. And so I think we realistically have to acknowledge, not only from the first example, that Trump has gained a kind of legitimacy from the failures of our institution. And he is going to be acting with some legitimacy that a lot of people are going to interpret as justification for the things he does that we may not, but there will be parts of the public that do. I think from the second example, we see that this rhetoric that he's using is the rhetoric of somebody who is planning to take more power than they have. So this rhetoric of the people who do coups, they're not just going to come in and legitimately run the state. They're not just going to replace the last guy. They are going to severely modify the terms of government in some way. This preemptive effort to install cabinet members by recess appointments, this is a Trump feature. And this is because Trump does not want that exposure of the kind of people that he is going to nominate. So that's number one. Number two, what he wants is, again, to flex against the constitutional order. And the fact that Trump will become the most powerful person in the world in January 2025 is. It's definitely very concerning to have the rhetoric of punishment, of additional power, seizure of all of these things that we see him and his allies discussing. You know, and we'll talk more about what those are in a minute. But I think we have to plan on the fact. We have to plan on the likelihood that they are going to seize more power than naturally accrues to being President of the United States, which is a staggering amount of power to start with. You would never abuse power as retribution against anybody. Except for day one. Except he's going crazy. Except for day one. But the plan appears to be to take more power than has traditionally been the prerogative of U.S. presidents. And the third example, the Putin example, I think that that return to power after a step away, and in Trump's case, it's not just a step away, which Putin did more willingly, I think, than Trump did. There was no coup to try to keep that office. He stepped out Strategically, but Trump did not. And given what happens in a lot of these second acts, and again with Putin as our example, and given that Trump was exiled and denied that power for four years, even though he was the still the head of the Republican Party, I think we have to assume that the round two is going to be much worse than round one, and that not only for all the reasons that everyone else has listed, immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats, and I will wield that power very aggressively. You know, in different pieces that I'm sure we've both read, talking about more effective use of the administrative state, talking about the people who were maybe moderate or thought they would kind of regulate his worst efforts are gone. There are many other reasons to think this, but I think also just looking at history, people who are in the position he's in coming in will do the same kind of damage, but do more of it. So what we're up against right now is, you know, it's a pretty difficult situation. I think that so much of the language that they're talking about and that they're using is because mass deportation is such a central plank in what they ran on and what they've been talking about before and afterward and what he did in his last administration. I think that these examples, more, which I'm going to share in a minute of societies where they've resorted to concentration camps is going to be really applicable. And different people use different terms. Let me just say that for the book I wrote One Long Night, the definition that I used for concentration camps was the mass detention of civilians without trial, usually on the basis of ethnicity or political activity rather than any action that they've done. And I know that people try to stretch this when it comes to immigration to say, well, they crossed the border. They weren't supposed to. Yeah, our system is entirely dependent on immigrants. It draws them in. It relies on them. There's a whole ecosystem in the world that does that. And nobody in the Trump administration has made any moves or ran on deporting people coming from the northern border. And so it's clearly a preferential, ethnically oriented detention. And I'll talk more about the nature of that detention and what makes it extrajudicial, whether it'll be legal or not. It's outside the normal legal system. And that's part of what usually goes along with concentration camps, too. More terrible still were the concentration camps, which from the beginning had been the conspirators chief weapon against Opposition of every kind. I gave these three examples because that's what I've worked on. German anti Nazis were the first victims. But with the war advancing, their numbers swelled to include citizens of all the nations of Europe. But I also think that sometimes people can see things more clearly when it's fairly far afield from their own immediate experiences. So it's kind of a way to see it happening somewhere else, can help you understand like what's happening here. But it's critical that people understand. The US has done this before. Every 30 seconds a so called Mexican wetback enters this country illegally. The number is increasing that we've had mass deportations under Eisenhower, California's rich Imperial and Coachella Valleys guards round up Mexican workers without identity cards and start them on the road back home. That Indian removal was at various decades and in various degrees of horror. Everything from genocide to mass deportation, you know, destabilizing entire Society. In 1829, Andrew Jackson was elected U.S. president. He believed that Native Americans were savages and had no rights to their land and began proceedings to remove the Cherokee from the Southern states to clear the way for white settlement. So we have a long history of this and literally During World War II we had Japanese American internment which were concentration camps, and a majority of the people that were interned in those camps were actual US citizens. But I still do remember that day when armed soldiers, soldiers with guns, bayonets on them, came to our home to order us out. So the idea that we don't have a history of doing this to US citizens or we don't have a history of it at all is not at all true. And I think it's also important to recognize that the Jim Crow era and segregation implied and exercised a kind of police power that is something that we're looking at returning to White southerners lynched nearly 4,000 black men and women and children between 1877 and 1950. Nearly 700 of those lynchings were previously unaccounted for. And an example from 1940, a crowd lynched Jesse Thornton for not addressing a white police officer as Mr. So again, this is not a first in the U.S. this is just a new face on some old trends that have happened both abroad but also domestically. And so with all that bad news frontloaded, I want to take a moment to say there are some really good pieces of news. And they might seem a little bit like half measures, but they're really important pieces of good news. The first is that in I was trying to think of any other situation in which I've studied this kind of repression or potential repression, and I was having trouble coming up with an example where you have a date, when it's going to start. It is an incredible gift that we have two and a half months to think about and begin to plan for how we can keep the most vulnerable among us from being harmed, how we can keep ourselves safe, how we can keep our family safe. And we will continue to wage this fight in the voting booth, in the courts, and in the public square, and we will also wage it in quieter ways. Much, much more often. People have a sense something is coming. They may be in danger for a time. There might be a few arrests. But it's this process when the shocking moment sort of comes unexpectedly, and they don't know how much to prepare or what to do. But we know what we're preparing for, and we know what the timetable is. And so I think that there does not appear to be any effort to dethrone Biden before the administration ends. He's already made noises about handing over power. So we have this magic window in which to plan, which is huge. The second thing, which is also really important, is that we have a military that right now is not coalesced as a force behind Trump. Which is not to say that there are not extremists in every branch, at every level of the military, and that there are not serious issues with this. We've seen reporting on the issues with this, and it's a real thing. But the institutions of our military are very much geared toward remaining apolitical domestically and sort of standing down from situations where they might be influencing civilian rule in the country. And that is one of the things that both harmed us, I think, and protected us. In Trump's first administration, it was former President Donald Trump who considered invoking the Insurrection act to put down protests after the murder of George Floyd, and who has since vowed to send U.S. troops into democratic cities if he is reelected. Because I think generals were reluctant to get involved in the civil political process, even as they were retired, sometimes in ways that we might now wish they really had done more, or at least resigned. Given that Trump always drew them into corruption rather than them drawing him into sanity of some kind. The Insurrection act, as it's currently written is a blank check for any president to bring the military into the domestic realm, I think that it's critical that the military right now not being in a position to back him without reservation also helps keep them from, at least in the first part of this administration, taking part in domestic disturbances. I think that you're gonna see a reliance on some of the, you know, everything from the constitutional sheriffs to border law enforcement agencies. There are more compromised actors that will be willing to do violence for Trump and for his allies. But I think we don't have the military stepping in, which is in places like Chile, just sealed the deal. It was impossible in that moment for people to resist in effective waste. But with this, I think it will buy us time, which I think is huge, and it's useful. The third piece of really good news is that even last night, we already heard governors beginning to stand up, and we see governors of key states already saying what they're going to do, already beginning to take action. And I don't want to romanticize this because it's going to be really hard. And some of the things that they're going to try to do are going to invite massive reprisals that are going to be hard to avoid. He then held up a Bible and summoned some of his top aides, all of them white, to pose for a picture. It came hours after the President unloaded in a conference call with governors of both parties. He urged them to, quote, dominate violent protesters and rioters. We're strongly looking for arrests. You have to get much tougher. You're going to get overridden. They dominate. If you don't dominate, you're wasting your time. They're going to run over you. You're going to look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate. Voice rising the president told the governors flat out, most of you are weak, blaming them for letting the violence spiral out of control. But the idea that New York and Massachusetts, it looks like California and Illinois are already doing that, is going to, I think, strengthen the resolve of some other places to do it. And building that right now out of the gate is important because those people can be talking to each other and on a higher level, a pay level than you or I, have to figure out the ins and outs of the administrative roadblocks that they can put to in place to help protect the most vulnerable people. And so I think that's also really good news, and it's critical in some cases. Again, these things may fall over time, but in the short run, time is what we're looking to have. And I'll talk more about why we want that time in a minute. But another great thing that we have on our side, which could be better, but is still important to notice that it's good and useful, is that we have a still partially functioning court system and we have a civil bureaucracy that provides a lot of benefits to people. And both those things, bad things can happen through the court systems, and bad things can happen through the executive branch, subverting that bureaucracy, but they can't happen overnight. Some things can be put in place overnight, but those are both massive, massive organizations. And the courts have traditionally had independence. And so while there have been some terrible rulings from the Supreme Court and some things that seem openly just corrupt, cases can still be brought on a number of issues. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. There are independent districts, there are independent judges, and things will take their time to work through the system, and there will be so many lawsuits that the Supreme Court will not be able to sort of intervene and allow things to progress on every front on a continuous basis. So it's going to gum up the worst excesses of abusing the legal system. It's not going to go smoothly through the courts, even in things where the administration will gain the power to do some of that harm. They're going to be roadblocked, they're going to be slowed down, not by people who are trying to sabotage their work, but literally by people who are trying to uphold the rule of law and jurisprudence. The target of President Trump's ire was California federal Judge John Tiger, an Obama appointee who blocked the administration's ban on asylum for anyone who crosses the border illegally, the latest in a line of federal judges from The California based 9th Circuit to rule against the administration, most notably blocking the president's travel ban. It's a disgrace what happens with the ninth Circuit. For Chief Justice John Roberts, it was a moment to defend the judge and the independence of the entire judiciary with a highly unusual rebuttal of the president. We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges, roberts said in a statement. There will be people who will do that, who will make some strides with that. I also think a critical thing will be that though Project 2025 clearly has embraced the administrative state in some ways with a goal of using its employees to getting its people in and using its employees to harm where you and I would say they are currently helping. And that is one possibility, that is one way the bureaucracy can work. That is not for the most part, although certainly has done some harm across American history, but in the major benefits programs that come out, it is something that does a lot of good for a lot of people that's going to be hard to end. So people will continue to see the government doing Some of the good things that it has been doing, even the things that the Trump administration would like ended, are not going to be simple to end. And there, I know that there's an open question about elections. Yes, maybe now is the time. Once Donald Trump is inaugurated, we go forward and maybe we have something that passes so that we can have a blanket federal election process that every state abides by. I don't think we're going to be able to see the kind of shutdown of elections that Germany, for instance, was able to do pretty quickly, where Hitler was officially the dictator, and that's the role going forward. I think that that was Weimar Germany, and that was a more unstable situation. The odds that we have a 2026 election are pretty good. And the Congress is going to be up for grabs in that election. And the ending of the benefit and support that people have gotten from the government, should the Trump administration succeed in the short run on ending some of those things, I think is going to result in a massive backlash, which would already be the typical behavior at a midterm election regardless, but would be amplified. And so I think the courts and the bureaucracy are going to be real impediments. Even with the expanded executive powers that Supreme Court has handed to Trump, I think that there's still going to be a lot of things standing in the way. And the fifth piece of good news and this, I don't just mean it like a let's do some shitposting and insult people. I don't mean it that way at all. I literally mean these people are not that bright. And that is a tremendous piece of good news for people that would like to subvert the agenda. And if people would say, well, if they're not so bright, how did they win the election? How did they do these other things? And the answer is, it's really easy to generate hate. It's really easy to smash things up. It's really easy to break down civil society. Most people don't go around doing that. And so, you know, you may not have any experience with that yourself, but it is very easy to destroy these institutions. And so that is not a sign of genius on their part. It is a sign of the money that has been injected into the political system to back the people who promote these agendas. And it's a sign of their willingness just to do tremendous harm. So never in these cases, in history or very rarely, are people sort of masterminds. They are just willing to do the shameless and awful stuff that will garner them power without Regard for what they're breaking. He knew how dangerous it was going to be back in February, and he didn't even tell you. He. He's on record as saying it. He panicked or he just looked at the stock market, one of the two. Because guess what? A lot of people died and a lot more are going to die unless he gets a lot smarter, a lot quicker. Mr. President, did you use the word smart? And so the fact that they're not super smart, I think provides a lot of openings. It provides openings for people who want to resist them. And at the same time, it also provides a lot of chance for infighting. Elon Musk got the first shared press release of any of Donald Trump's appointment announcements. Even the Fox host, who isn't even the richest person at Fox, got his own press release from Donald Trump when Donald Trump announced that he would nominate Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. That's right, a Fox Weekend morning host for Secretary of Defense. And that infighting is what we saw in the first administration. And you see it historically, too. In each of these cases, there's fights between, in Germany, in Nazi Germany, between the guys who want to expand the concentration camp system and people who actually wanted to close it down as late as 1936, 1935 was the big year for it. They wanted to end it and sort of kind of try to come back to a rule of law. But the fighting that went on over that was less about what was the right thing to do to keep Hitler in power, and it was more about the power politics of who was in charge of each thing and who was trying to garner more power for himself. And Trump is inviting so many conflicting and sort of politically unstable actors into this administration that I guarantee you on some levels, you know, we've already seen Elon Musk's interest in clean energy and electric vehicles is going to clash, and he's going to benefit potentially on tariffs on one end from China. But on the other end, the fossil fuel dedication that Trump was sort of putting up for bid appeared at Mar a Lago before the election happened. And saying kind of like, you know, well, what do you want me to do? I'm here. You know, those things are going to come into conflict. What are President elect Donald Trump's drill baby drill policies going to mean for Exxon and the oil and gas industry? I would encourage industry, say, in the Paris agreement, because I think, you know, we need more people contributing their ideas on how best to advance this in a rational, thoughtful way. And I think the administration can do that. And there are going to be real, real fights over it, really bloody fights that I think are going to decimate their control in certain ways and again, provide openings for other people. I think also that these are not, even if they've learned how to work the system, these are not politically stable actors. And you will find the ones that are ideologues scrapping with the ones that are financially mercenary. And it's going to create more confusion in the agenda than it has so far, because when they were running, everybody could just run on the idea of things, right? But governance requires making certain decisions about what goes into effect and what doesn't. And an example for that will just be the sheer costs of the mass deportation program as it's been put forward. And again, 15 million, 20 million, 25 million. You see all these numbers bandied about. But that doesn't happen A, easily. It doesn't happen easily. B, it doesn't happen without a tremendous infrastructure, and C, it's incredibly expensive. How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted $6.5 trillion Harris Biden budget? Well, I think we can do at least 2 trillion. Yeah. Yes, 2 trillion. And if Elon Musk is coming in and cutting $2 trillion out of the federal budget, just like as if that will be nothing and they're going to add the cost of this mass deportation. At some point, all these plans hit reality. And I tried to lay out some of the dark stuff first before I came to some of these good news things, because I don't want to be too rosy in this picture, like really bad things are still going to happen. I want to talk about a few different areas and, like, what specifically will happen, but there are going to be things interfering with that agenda. They are not brilliant wizards. They don't have infinite power. They don't have infinite money. And so there's going to be a lot of chances to for them to spy me themselves, but also for outside people to derail what they're doing. And so I guess the biggest thing to talk about first is immigration. The official signage given out by the RNC last night said mass deportations now, which is a phrase that alarms people on the left, feels cruel to people on the left, is intended to alarm people on the left, but is incredibly popular with the GOP. According to CBS polling, upwards of 85 to 90%. I think the number is 88. Overall, Republicans support a national program to deport all undocumented immigrants. I think the photos that we'll see in textbooks. Should we have photos and textbooks in 50 years? Should you and I live long enough to see that will be those mass deportation now signs, you know, at the Republican National Convention that this was the center and the heart of it. This was the thing that people seemed persuadable on in very, very strange ways. And I think that there's no doubt that the thing we have to plan the Most for for January 20, 2025, is what are we going to be doing when they start sort of extrajudicially seizing and deporting immigrants in this new way? If they were just going to do what they what had been done, then they would just say, we're doing that and ramping it up, but they are selling it as spectacle. And so I think we have to be ready for a spectacle. And unlike, and it seems strange to say this, but Unlike Germany in 1933, I don't think there is tremendous concern for the optics on this. You said in an interview this week that Trump, quote, held back on enforcement during his first administration because he didn't want to look mean, especially when it came to removing undocumented immigrants from interior parts of the country. Help us understand that. What do you expect a Trump administration that is not holding back to look like next year? So I expect the president, who has set the highest bar of all for himself in terms of deportations, to work vigorously to meet that bar and to exceed it. And by that, I mean to deport more illegal aliens than any president ever has before. And he's determined to do that. I think, in fact, the spectacle that they're looking for is going to be one that will generate some terror. I think that it won't be a secret kind of terror. It will be a public kind of terror. And so I think we have to be ready for some pretty severe actions from day one and to be planning for that. You deputize the National Guard to carry out immigration enforcement, and then you also deploy the military to the southern border, not just with a mission to observe, but with an impedance and denial mission. Right. Now, of course, the people who voted for him, but aren't necessarily incredibly xenophobic, convince themselves he's only coming for undocumented immigrants. But I just want to remind the listeners that he has already made clear, along with some of his allies, that people who are currently here legally under various programs are gonna be declared illegal as soon as they can generate the executive orders and get that in place. So Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, for instance, Trump has threatened directly we're gonna see a number of communities around the country that are here legally that will also be targeted for those sweeps. We have already heard Stephen Miller talking about trying to revive and expand the denaturalization program that they worked on in the first administration. And so that's the kind of thing where small errors in paperwork or maybe a misdemeanor since arrival or even the discovery of a misdemeanor before you ever came to the US Any pretext, and I suspect there will be an expansion of even what would count to ridiculous measures will be used to denaturalize people and strip citizenship. There's also been a whole vague area of threatening palace pro Palestinian demonstrators with deportation, threatening journalists with questioning whether their citizenship should be allowed to be in place still. And we should throw Jack Smith out with them to mentally deranged people. Jack Smith should be considered mentally deranged and he should be thrown out. The question of whether people who are born in the US should have birthright citizenship. Different Trump figures and allies have bridged these things over and over on immigration. Some legal scholars believe you can get rid of birthright citizenship without changing the Constitution with the executive order. Exactly right. Have you thought about that? Yes. Tell me more. It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment for an amendment. You don't. And so my guess is they will try to make inroads on them. Some of them will be much harder to use. You know, they'll be harder to find justifications, to even get them before relevant courts to start with. But I think we have to assume that they're going to try on all these fronts. But what we do know is regardless of how successful or not, there will be a deportation blitz. You would establish large scale staging grounds for removal flights. So you grab illegal immigrants and then you move them to the staging grounds. And that's what the planes are waiting for. Federal law enforcement to then move those illegals home. This kind of inevitably leads to a concentration camp situation because first of all, it's not clear that even countries will eventually be able to strong arm into taking deportees. We'll take them right away. This will even countries that like Mexico, where there's a lot of pressure that can be applied and there's a lot of things that can be done. And some of those talks have already happened for other programs. The scale of which they're talking about doing it on is not going to happen overnight. So even for those countries in, let's say, Mexico and Central America, you're going to have a backlog that rises right away. And for other countries, the US May or may not be able to leverage them into taking people at all. And so then assuming you keep this arrest machine going and this, you know, grabbing machine going, they're saying that there won't be raids on day one, that they know who to get and all this. But it's very hard to picture how that happens without some of the uglier parts of this being obvious to everybody who does it. And again, I think they will want to go for the spectacle aspect of it, but they're going to end up with a lot of people that they can't move through. And we've seen this even before in various border crises and border mismanagement from different administrations and this turn to detention. And so the fact, one of the things you can look at in detention history around the world is things tend toward the thing that has already been in that place. That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before. So there's this international movement toward it. But also there's a real local influence who gets locked up. And how they get locked up is rooted kind of in local culture. And in the US that's border detention. That's what it's become in the last, really my adult lifetime. So let's say the last 30 years. And everybody's had a hand in that, every president. And that has helped to lay the groundwork for what the Trump administration would be hoping to do. And so I think that we're going to see real targeting of Latino populations. And whether they're documented or not, there are over, over 22 million people in this country that live in mixed status families. We're talking about over 10 million U.S. citizens. And so what is happening is that we have pushed a new chapter in American history that may see, may see a chapter where we will see mass deportations, mass family separations of American people. And I think that we have to be planning for that. And I'll talk more about how to do that in a minute. I think the other issue that we have to look at is abortion. And clearly, like immigration, reproductive rights have been under attack again my entire adult life. And of course, even before that, even with Roe in place. Don't listen to that man. Bunch of liars. Want you to pay to kill your own baby. And we've already seen that the upending of Roe with Dobbs has a body count. Amber Thurman experienced complication after taking abortion medication and was rushed to the hospital. But reports say doctors waited 19 hours before performing surgery to remove the fetal tissue. And that body count is only going to grow. A lot of talk about the Comstock act to shut down, you know, the majority of abortions in a lot of places that, you know, that people have kind of found a way around. A coalition of conservative groups called Project 2025 has big plans for the Trump administration. And the Comstock act, the 1873 zombie law that prohibits the mailing of substances used for abortion and birth control, I suspect is on the table. And it will probably take some time, but they may actually be able to successfully push that through. And so it's clear that if J.D. vance has much of a role in the administration, that this sort of issues he staked out as a candidate would make him a natural to be in this role. And that's really unfortunate because I don't think Trump is personally that committed to it. I think he's willing to go along with what gets him power, and he was happy to do the harm that he's done. But with JD Vance, it feels like quite personal and that he's going to take this as far as it could go. You know, the talk around ivf, the talk around fertility monitoring, the talk around tracking women across state lines, you know, there's a lot of bad places this could go to, but again, it isn't at all a done deal. There is still tremendous room in which to maneuver even when those spaces become really difficult. And so I don't want to. I don't want to make things simple that aren't. But abortions are going to happen. We know this from history. They are going to happen, and people will be doing things to try to make them as safe as possible. They will be less safe. More harm will come to more people. But there will also be a lot of ways to push back on this at the local level. And I hope people will be smart that are involved with this. But I'll talk more about that in a minute. Unlike the mass immigration and deportation that we're looking at, I think we're going to see the abortion stuff happening more inside a traditional legal framework. So when camps arise, they're kind of run extrajudicially. There might be laws put in place that make them like, quasi legal or more legal or allow certain things to happen, but they don't tend to take over the actual law enforcement system. I think the abortion crisis that is just going to be Expanding. Once Trump comes back to power, I think we're going to see that taking place inside the legal system entirely and trying to create those laws and push those laws within the legal system, which I think makes it a richer area to subvert because again, those courts are going to be slower. People have been planning for this and this is an issue that people have been organizing around for a really long time. So there's a lot of experience in organizing and in the states and communities of color and in the states where there's already been a lot of suppression of these rights, there are people that are active now that are already doing things and that will need a lot of support. But there are avenues that can be pursued legally and things outside the system that might be able to help some of these people. Along with abortion, I think the thing that goes most hand in hand with that issue is the question of trans rights. And unlike abortion, but like mass deportations, trans rights were a trumpeted part of the campaign. Kamala supports transgender sex changes in jail with our money. Kamala even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports. Kamala is for they them. The NFL ad buys tens of millions of dollars of advertising were put into what is so obviously a moral panic about a tiny, tiny percentage of the population that is so vulnerable. And I think that in some ways that is in good ways and in bad ways the biggest question mark. Because on the best end of things, which I don't think we'll end up at, but maybe we'll end up closer to that side than I'm imagining. On the best end of things, maybe it's the caravan, right? It's something that gets trumpeted a lot, that gets yelled about. That is a huge MacGuffin, if you will. That isn't as much the focus after the election is won and when they can do what they want because it is such a small part of the population, my fear is that it's more toward the other end, which is that this is a group that is so, so vulnerable that even since the election we've seen Democrats talking about, well, it's not like I wanted a boy on the football field to run over my girls. It's like, what are you doing? Why would you cede any of this grounded? This is just hate mongering that these people did. And to stake it as a reasonable position I think is terrible. And I fear that Democrats won't stand up for this the way that they might on abortion rights or on the, let's say, cancellation of reduction of Social Security benefits or something like that. But I really hope that as a community, we can recognize how important it is to stand up for trans people just simply as humans, and also to understand that all that is linked with abortion rights. It's all about bodily autonomy. It's about what's being done to women, and it's about what is being done to anybody. That's not sort of the traditional powerholder that we've had in our society. And it's a literal physical restriction. Okay? You can't cross this state line if you're pregnant. Okay. You can't have hormones to your kid, even if they've known since they were two that they were a girl and not a boy. And the idea of policing this is literally about just controlling people. And I know most listeners know that, but I think that trans people are gonna need a lot of support so that the worst case scenarios for them don't happen. Because I think in some ways it's the easiest thing because it's the most foreign to people that may not know trans issues or be close to trans people. It is the most foreign thing that I think that they would be like, well, I'll stand up for these other things, but I don't know about trans rights because they're ignorant about it. It becomes a reason to shy away from it. And I think that it's really critical that we protect trans people, like in this moment, and make it so that the Trump administration will see it as more of a caravan situation, that they'd rather not go further with, that they'd rather drop. Unfortunately, we do see the movement in Texas already. We see Florida, we see trans laws passed that may not be as significant, but which are doing harm all around the country. And so my fear is, again, that we'll go to the worst end rather than the better end. But this is one where I think there might be room for intervention. There might be more ways to derail it and to get people to stand up for it. But that is something that's going to take the general public and CIS people to really do it, because there's not enough trans people to do anything but lead that. Right. They need us to help support that, even if they're the ones that need to tell us what's the best way to do it. That brings us to the other big thing, which it would be easy to set aside right now, but I think it's important not to for a couple of reasons. That issue is climate, and I think it was Dave Levitin who's done a lot of climate reporting who said the other day, wow, we really kind of needed these next four years to be working on this. You know, we really needed to be doing stuff. And so it's, it's less immediate in some ways because it's not somebody who's going to be hit over the head with something and dragged, you know, into a, a van and locked up. It's not somebody who's going to be denied medical care because they're trans or because they're a pregnant woman who needs something. But it's already unfolding. It has been for a long time. Yes. I was speaking with Carla Buen Tampo. He is the director of Copernicus Climate Change Service. And he said, quote, he is virtually certain, based on all of the data, that 2024 will be the warmest year off record. Now, that builds on the fact that 2023 was previously labeled as the warmest year on record. So that is sort of one of those dire situations that are being shared with us today. But we're also being told that scientists have found that global temperatures for the past 12 months were 1.62 degrees higher than levels recorded at the start of the Industrial Revolution. So why is that key? Well, you might recall that number 1.5, keep 1.5 alive. That was the number that global scientists have been using for years, telling leaders that they have to keep the level of warming to that number or around there in order to protect the environment, to limit those extreme weather events and assure there isn't a rapid rise in temperatures. We just are crossing some critical climate thresholds literally this month. And we do need those next four years that are going to partially be taken away from us. And so the magnitude of working to keep as livable a planet as possible, it's kind of weird because it's already here. It's 80 degrees in November in Virginia and we can see the effects that are already happening. Again, weather is not the same as climate, but we're seeing long term weather patterns that have changed. So we are now to climate is very immediate, but it's easy to miss. And then to think of it in the vast scale is so abstract that I think people lose touch with it. And I think Covid is another great example of how for humans, when you start talking on the scale of millions or when you start talking on a global scale, it's just really difficult to imagine what to do. But the truth is that there are things that we can do and that it's going to be even more critical that we do them. When I. When I've done Arctic research again and again, I've met with all these people that are climate scientists that have devoted their life to this stuff, and I've said to them, like, okay, you know, we had this massive collapse of sea ice 15 years ago or 20 years ago. How do you keep going when you know, how are these animals going to reproduce on the ice that's not there? How are they going to travel? How are they going to. How do you integrate all that? It still seems so optimistic, because a lot of them do seem optimistic, and they just say, well, we know what to do. Like, we just have to get people to do it, because there are crises in which you don't know what to do. Right. But we do know what to do. And I think having a clear path to some of what needs to be done is critical. And the one thing they always say that's both dark and encouraging, which is. Right. Kind of the pitch I'm hoping to come in at with people today, dark but encouraging, is it's going to be so much worse if we do nothing. Right. So you have to be not blindly optimistic and not even necessarily hope that you'll get certain results, but you have to go on, because the cost of not doing it would be so much more than the cost of actually even making some of those incremental changes and getting what you can out of it. And so those are the four areas that I think are really critical. And as far as the Trump administration approach to climate, obviously Trump is completely uninterested in it, thinks it's a hoax, has been courting fossil fuel companies. Some big organizations are already reneging their pledges for climate, you know, being green by a certain time or reducing this, reducing that. We're already seeing major groups around the world like just saying, oh, well, we're not actually going to do that. AI is going to solve this problem for us. And so I think that's sort of the general climate that they're coming in. But one of the things that's really good is that the ability to use green energy in a productive way has accelerated so much in recent years that the green energy economy is actually like, we're coming to these touch points where it's going to be more profitable. In some cases, it already is. In some cases, you got to build a little bit more infrastructure. But we can envision it, and we can see how it will get even more efficient. And so Trump is, if nothing else, always interested in money. And Trump's allies are extremely interested in money. And so I think you're going to see these competing interests in the new administration of taking advantage of this and competing with the Chinese, who are doing a lot of things in this direction as well. And I think that there's going to be. This is one of those things where I talked about there's going to be infighting. I think there's going to be tremendous infighting about this, even though the situation coming in is going to start out that we're going to lose a lot of ground on the climate issue. But it's important to say that this is an area in which there can be massive resistance. So just as these governors have talked about protecting immigrant populations and the ways they're going to stand in the way of sort of Trump bulldozing them on that as much as they can, we have already seen in parts of the country people working for green economy and setting up state standards and making state commitments to renewable energy. And that is something that can actually directly mitigate the harm of not doing it at the federal level. And the more that sort of lessons learned and new technologies can be shared between blue communities that are dedicated to it, and the more that even red communities will find it profitable to do it. I think that this is an arena in which a lot of people can make real progress. And this might be an arena for people who are too overwhelmed, and there's a lot of them, and everybody's just going to be wherever they are. But for people who are too overwhelmed to get involved in abortion fights and trans rights fights and an immigration fight, that maybe it's too personal for them, that they feel at risk, that they feel like climate is just as important. It's really, really important. And it can be a way for people who don't necessarily keep their emotional wits about them. When it's like human rights that are involved, there are some people who are really good about that, that just get calmer and cooler and they know exactly what to do and they've got the training. And there are people for whom that's like really daunting and too upsetting. And like, climate is a great path for you. There's all kinds of stuff you can do from the legislative side to getting involved with local organizations, to pressing your communities to be involved in that. That kind of brings us to what do you do right? How do we survive these next period of years? And I would say the first thing is you really don't have to reinvent the wheel. And I know everybody Says that all the time. But it's very important here. For instance, the right to protest is critical. And in a democratic society we need to keep that right. But people organizing protests willy nilly and giving police in certain jurisdictions the ability to create spectacles and intimidate other people, you have to be really strategic. There's a reason that in the Deep south during segregation, they were so disciplined with training and with how they did the protests and when they did the protests. Please do not go off half cock. Find people that are working on the issues that you want to work in and join up with them. Because there's a lot of people already thinking about that on the public level, on the big level. Keep pressure on elected officials. Whether you're in a red area, whether you're in a blue area, you are still their constituent. You can still raise hell about certain things. And if they get enough people raising hell about it, you know, even a few dozen constituents calling them about a problem makes them very sensitive to it. They are always, always, they are sharks, always thinking about their political future. So lean into that and get involved. Where you have somebody that even if it's not your party, let's say you're independent, let's say it's something else. If they are doing a program that you can back, I would encourage you to get involved with it. Where you're building ties between the community and elected officials, they will be have a better understanding of what the government is actually doing or not doing and you will get a better understanding of how official channels really work and then maybe even how to be more effective inside or outside those channels. So pressure on elected officials is huge. There's not going to be big enough majorities in the Senate or the House to afford to lose many people. And so targeted support in blue, red, mushy, purple areas is, could be huge inside your community. So more on the local level. I'm somebody who worked for about a decade in community organizing in the D.C. area. I would say that those community organizations outside official channels are as important or more important than sort of the elected official channels. Make yourself familiar with those. Assess your strengths and weaknesses. There is probably an organization already existing that cares about an issue that you want to work on, that is dying for your skills. Whether you're the fastest envelope stuffer in the history of the world or whether you are a lawyer with immigration law experience that you haven't used in a while. Like there's going to be a place to plug you in. There is going to be a place if you have Spanish language skills. If you, I mean literally make a list of your skills, make a list of your issues, look up organizations and start talking to them. It may be that you can fill a gap or a, a hole in the services they offer in some significant way. But don't roll in expecting to take something over. They're going to want to work with you a while because like, again, they're going to have been doing this, rely on the people that have been doing it. Authoritarians aim to destroy the social fabric, literally down to the street level. We see this with the Uyghur population in China literally putting people in individual homes to destabilize any social connections, like family to family, street to street. And so building those connections and tying into like minded, and maybe even not like minded people in your community is going to be really critical to sort of stop the larger Trump agenda of making people who disagree with him feel utterly isolated, which I know everybody is feeling a little bit this week. I would say on a personal level, use these two months to make safety plans. Do you have a driver's license? It's up for renewal soon. Do you have a passport that's going to be valid for a while? You don't have to be paranoid, just like plan for it. You know, do you have members or sort of chosen family that are behind on vaccinations? Get your vaccinations if you think your job might be in jeopardy if you know your political leanings were to come to light. Get your checkups now, do procedures now, get your preventive care now while you have good health insurance, while you have time, while it's not a stress situation, I am not always good at this myself, but it really is important. And if you had to leave your apartment or your house to go somewhere else in town for time, who would you stay with? Where would you stay if you had to leave your city for a little bit, just think about who would you stay with somewhere else in the country? How would you get there? What would you take? And if you have the means to do it, if you had to leave the country, And I say this not so much that I think most people are going to need to do this, but I think this free floating anxiety eats up people's actual capacity to do real things. And if you just make some of these lists of like, if scary things happen, I have a plan, then your brain says I have a plan and it doesn't have to spin its wheels wondering what would I do? You've already thought about it. And if you don't have great options, you've already wrestled with that and you can put it aside, but most people can come up with some options. And so having a plan for different levels of emergency, even if it's just for short periods of time, is really, really good. I would say. Online support is one area of our society in which there's been so much negativity and bad stuff that's come out of the online era for disinformation. But it is a way that we can absolutely help support people who might be more isolated. So trans people. I mean, the digital world is a great world to offer support to some of the most vulnerable people here. And the worst end of it gets called virtue signaling. Virtue signaling, as many have said, is better than vice signaling. And virtue signaling that is backed up by something is actually productive. And so that can happen digitally. And so let's see, you know, how much we can make that a real support for, for people everywhere. And then in terms of how we get out of this mess, I would say it really is perfectly legitimate to just condemn Trump and be furious at the people that voted for him. And I am not going to plead, just as I wouldn't plead, you know, for somebody if they came and burned your house down for you to go hug them. You know, that feels like what is going on here. At the same time, I think we have to realize that there are these global trends that are happening, and this right wing disinformation sphere is the means by which it has happened for the last hundred years in every authoritarian society around the world. It is this creation of a disinformation sphere. And we have to recognize that propaganda works. And what we are seeing here is that propaganda worked and that ultimately pulling the money that's supporting that out. I don't know about a return to the Fairness Act, Citizens United, we can name a lot of the ways we came to that point, but it's the point we're at. And until we find a way to effectively deal with that, it's going to be very hard to get out from underneath it. And the way that we can do it is through some of those legal means. But while we don't have control of legislatures and we can't be making new laws, the way to deal with it at the community level is to engage with each other and build your silos, build your communities of comfort, be there for each other, and then to the degree that you are prepared to or wish to cross silos, and I don't mean go Be friends with Nazis. I'm saying people whose age group or religion or something else might be different than yours, that cross silo work is the best way we can on the ground in absence of new laws, build sort of more resilient community structures that don't let people be as easily kidnapped. And so the way I think of it to myself is you don't have to wanna reach out to a Nazi, but it might be smart to reach out to somebody who could become one and isn't right now. And so that's how I think of it. People talk about undecided voters. You can think of them as uncommitted social beings, right? How do you keep them from going to this place? The way that it has helped me to think about this, and it may not help anybody else, but it helps me is I, because I come from West Virginia, I come from a family in which many people are Trump supporters. I grew up in a very violent household. I'm familiar with this world of people that would support Trump. And I try to think of it as addiction and addicts. People who are addicted, they both have responsibility for what they're doing and they also need help. And so I think that you can balance that responsibility versus the need for help out however you want to in your head. But to my mind, you can, you can maybe cut off your brother if he's stealing your laptop, right? You don't have to just let people abuse you if they're stealing your stuff and selling it or for drugs or something, but you can also recognize they have a problem and you can try to think about ways to solve it. And so I think that there are key ways that we can be working to try to shore up parts of society that are still vulnerable and haven't gone that way yet. Because what we don't want is for this to get even worse. I guess I'll close with just saying that, you know, this is really hard stuff. And if you find yourself feeling that sense of helplessness, that's what Trump and his allies want you to feel. And so I would encourage you, sometimes maybe you've taken on a task that's the wrong task for you. Sometimes maybe you don't have hope, switch and do something different. Not only is hopefully a muscle, but agency is a muscle too. And the more helpless you feel, and the more you allow that to have you not do things, then the less you're going to be not only doing, but able to do in the future. And it's fine to switch gears and do something else and it's fine to rest, but for you to take care of yourself and the people around you and maybe to help get this country sorted out. Historically, what I've seen is that the people who find a way to keep moving often are the ones who can make a difference. And they are often the ones that, when luck also favors them, are able to survive the situation. And none of us have perfect control over how vulnerable we are or the degree to which we'll be targeted. But when I used to teach self defense and karate for a living, I did all kinds of sexual assault workshops. And somebody deciding to attack you is never your fault. And we want to always remember that there are strategies that we can have and there are things that we can do and focusing on what's possible and not what somebody's about to try to do to you, but what you can do instead, I think is probably our best way to move forward. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this message. To support this podcast, Please subscribe@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts.