← Next Comes What
Next Comes What
Not A Reality Show — Sooner or Later, We're All at Risk
00:25:18
A local community tackles Trump's destructive agenda and politicians who collaborate with it. Read the post that inspired this episode: Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art newsletter to support Next Comes What: Do you have a...
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- [00:05]
Andrea Pitzer
We are not watching a reality show about a crazy president that's destroying the country. Right. We're in it, but a lot of people are still acting like they're watching it. And that's why this face to face stuff is so important, because you realize the reality of it and how it's going to affect everybody you're listening to. Next comes what from Degenerate Art? This is Andrea Pitzer. Be sure to subscribe@Andreapitzer.com so that this podcast can remain free for everyone. All over the country, people are trying to figure out how to push back against Elon Musk and Donald Trump to stop the damage that they see happening to the country. Quote, the Nazis got better treatment, end quote, during World War II than Venezuelan migrants. That is according to a judge at a hearing today. The US has a long history of successful resistance movements as we've talked about before. And most often it's marginalized groups who have shouldered the burden, often fighting for their survival and simultaneously improving life for all of us. The days are numbered for DC's Black Lives Matter Plaza after pressure from Republicans in Congress. D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser says it will be changed. I think it's very shameful because the attack on diversity, equity and inclusion and the attack on protests such as Black Lives Matter, I think it's an attempt to erase us and our struggle and our history. This time out, a rogue administration is swinging a baseball bat at the federal government itself, which is beginning to affect people across the board.
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Unknown Speaker 1
Elon Musk fired the people who maintain our nuclear weapons.
- [01:56]
Andrea Pitzer
Over a 10 day period in March, the Social Security website has crashed from.
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Unknown Speaker 1
Four times thanks to Doge. The men we paid to guard the most vicious ISIS terrorists in the world in Syria walked off the job.
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Andrea Pitzer
The current administration is threatening the future of the US postal system.
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Unknown Speaker 1
Apparently all of this mayhem is chaired by the President of the United states and by 20 somethings with laptops and nicknames like Big Balls. But I've been doing this for a long time and I know that Moscow and Beijing and Tehran and Pyongyang cannot believe their luck.
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Andrea Pitzer
We are now looking at at potentially $500 billion in taxes that will go uncollected.
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Unknown Speaker 1
Now we come to learn that people in the most dangerous and sensitive jobs on the planet put extremely specific pre decisional discussions about a military attack on signal. Everyone here knows that the Russians or the Chinese could have gotten all of that information and they could have passed it on to the Houthis, who easily could have repositioned weapons and altered their plans to knock down planes or sink.
- [03:05]
Andrea Pitzer
Ships, people are unhappy. According to the market tracking site car gurus, Tesla now has the most common electric vehicles on the used car market. The majority of the used Teslas are selling for around $30,000. Just three years ago, the average cost of the used car was 70,000. Some people have been on the front lines of calling leaders to account for decades. But those who are newer to taking action in their community are now trying to find their forward. And this isn't something that can happen instantly. To be organic and represent a community is a process. Today I want to talk a little bit about that process. Along with my trip yesterday to Roanoke, Virginia, I want to look at the challenges facing a blue dot in a sea of red when dealing with unresponsive representatives. My hope is that this episode will let people around the country who may not yet be plugged into action against the Trump administration administration get a glimpse of one place that's working out what exactly to do. On Thursday, my friend Dina and Briani messaged me to ask if I would come again to Roanoke and if I could speak to a group of protesters on Monday. The way that authoritarian societies destroy whatever democracy they already have is by peeling off individual groups. And as soon as you make one group dispensable, this happens every single place I've looked. You make one group dispensable and inhuman, then all it takes is moving the goalposts. Those of you who have been following me for a while know that Dina decided after the last election that she needed to do something. I started thinking, who do I know and what can we do? So she set up a group called Do Good Virginia, which is gathering people who want to help. And at the first meeting where she also asked me to speak, it was made up mostly of her friends and about 75 people or so came. He's going to come into office with more power than probably any individual in the history of the world. But we have all this knowledge, we have all this ability to communicate with each other as well. And it is not going to be a short term prospect for all of us to be facing the kinds of conditions that you're most worried about facing. Don't give that up. Don't surrender it before it's even taken. Right. The last meeting had over 300. It's about three and a half hours by car, if you're lucky, from my home in Northern Virginia to Roanoke. But I said I would go. And since I live just inside the Beltway, it's easy for me to cover big national events in the nation's capital. And for you, my readers and listeners, I've reported from D.C. on Inauguration Day.
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Unknown Speaker 2
The tale of two cities in one district.
- [06:04]
Andrea Pitzer
From USAID headquarters, the day news came down that Musk wanted to shutter it. This is a killer.
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Unknown Speaker 2
In terms of their cutoff of HIV.
- [06:15]
Andrea Pitzer
And AIDS preemption, it's a killer. From the steps of the Capitol Building on President's Day, which was celebrated in a protest as no Kings Day or the land of the free and the home of the honest citizens of America, that's all you get. And most recently at the March for Science. And that is a fact. Typically it is true that the urban centers and capital cities are where the end stages of the fates of nations are decided. Whether it's by people or by tyrants, those people are in big trouble, so they better cut it out. But in large nations that cover multiple time zones, what happens in other cities and towns across the country often plays an important part too. And it can pave the way for those end stages. Martin Luther King Jr. S letter from a Birmingham jail it is unfortunate that.
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Unknown Speaker 2
Demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative comes before his.
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Andrea Pitzer
I have a Dream speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington and after that speech in the District of Columbia. King would later join the march from Selma to Montgomery.
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Unknown Speaker 2
I know you're asking today, how long will it take? Somebody's asking, how long will prejudice blind the visions of men? I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long because truth crushed earth will rise again.
- [08:08]
Andrea Pitzer
How long?
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Unknown Speaker 2
Not long. Because no lie can live forever.
- [08:14]
Andrea Pitzer
Any movement to stop the abuse of power and presidential overreach that's going to succeed in the US Is likely to need roots nationwide. So I'm always glad to set foot in other places than my own backyard. I spent most of a decade teaching martial arts and self defense. As director of outreach for a Washington, D.C. based nonprofit. I founded a violence Prevention bulletin that was in the US and overseas. I got grants for community programs. For a few years I taught as many as 18 classes a week all over the region. At that point I was very much in the community activism space. Later I moved into journalism and actually I felt more at home there. My personality is more geared to be interested in nuance and open questions. I wanted to consider how past events were continuing to play out today. From eugenics to climate change. And since childhood, I had also wanted to be an author. And eventually I shifted to writing books that dealt with some of those same themes. Books laying out difficult history and how that history applies to us now is really where my heart is. They are my first and greatest love and my favorite work to do. Has the Trump administration set up concentration camps in Texas for migrants? The answer is yes, according to at least one expert, Andrea Pitzer, the author of One Long A Global History of Concentration Camps. However, my 2017 book on concentration camps and the disintegration of the societies that use them hadn't ended any detention systems around the world or even kept Trump from being elected or enacting his border policies. And so with his return, I realized I still had this knowledge that I felt like it was key to share. Can you talk about how those concentration camps, how Hitler managed to do this? But I would probably need to do something different, which has left me in this weird space between being an author and a journalist and sometimes having a public role, actively working to limit the harm that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the Republican Party are doing. Now. People have always found ways in the most extreme political situations to fight that. And nobody is asking you to do that. Right? We're not asking you to do that kind of extreme stuff. We're just asking you to show up. It is not a comfortable space for me, but it's the place where I think I'm most useful right now. And these are critical times for reinforcing democracy. So I set out for Rona because they asked me to, because I wanted to tell you what they're doing on the ground, and because I believe that in this moment, we all have an obligation to help where we can. And my friend Dina was hoping to leverage the energy of a weekly Monday noontime protest happening in her city by holding a talk with breakout sessions right afterward. We have to step up. We have to be the leaders that we wish they were meeting, right? And we can. We absolutely can. We can be the leaders that we want to see. We can make the world that we would choose to live in, not one that they're going to shove us into. This week is spring break in the school system in Roanoke, meaning that some people, like teachers who might not normally be able to attend weekday protests, were able to show up, and they were thinking that turnout would be particularly solid this week. And Indivisible is the group that's been cheerleading these weekly Monday protests in front of Ben Klein's Roanoke office. We're out here because our representative Ben Klein won't call a town hall meeting and listen to what we have to say. He only parrots back with the GOP leadership tells him to, and he refuses to come and talk to us face to face. Klein, if you don't already know, is the congressman for Virginia's 6th district, and voters report him being less than responsive when they share their concerns about layoffs by government agencies and local employers. We are united in the House behind President Trump's agenda. I went early enough that I could go to that demonstration myself and see what was happening on the ground. Some 300 people, maybe more, stood on each side of the street in front of the truest building there, and a woman named Beth Deal appeared in the crowd, striding around in a black costume with rainbow streamers and a no Kings sign. Notably, she was also on stilts. An hour later, she would lead one of the breakout groups at Dina's gathering. I talked to another woman in the crowd who said she'd written a note about her concerns to Representative Klein, only to get a two page letter in response extolling the virtues of doge. I went into the truest building and tried to go to Ben Klein's office myself just to see if someone was there. But now a sign sits in the lobby saying that all visitors must register because Klein's office is just one of the tenants in the building. I asked if I could go up to his office, and two men at the desk said that they could not let me up. I asked if I could go take a picture of his office door, and nobody was hostile, but they explained it was private property and they would have to call the owner to give me any kind of permission, given that I had committed to speaking after the protest. I didn't want to take the time to see whether it was possible to get permission to take a photo of Ben Klein's door, so I left. Back in the crowd, there were at least a half dozen Ukrainian flags. Some people had added Canadian flags to their intricate signs. Others had resurrected posters they'd carried the day before in a demonstration to support the U.S. postal system. I spoke to some attendees who already knew people that had been laid off. Others were worried about those they knew who relied on Social Security and Medicaid, saying the repercussions of federal layoffs were going to have big effects locally. Dina had gotten the word out about her organizational meeting over the weekend, letting people on the mailing list know that we would all gather after the Monday protest. So more than a hundred of the protesters walked down the block to the library after that protest and I gave a short talk. I tried to let them know that I had interviewed people in places that succumb to authoritarianism and that things can get very dark. Everybody, every single person in this room and in this city are going to be at risk with just the things the administration has already said it wants to do, but that we have many more tools still available to us than people in those places did. The sooner we use them, I suggested, the better off we all would be. Our disengagement, honestly, in society is killing us. I also talked about how meeting people where they're at is not the same as letting others throw whole communities under the bus. You have to meet people halfway. And I would say that's half right. The way that that's half right is that you need to let everybody aboard. Even if it's a Trump voter that you're bad at, even if it's your cousin that you just can't stand, Even whoever it is, if somebody is willing to do the task that we're trying to do, they get to come aboard. So we cannot exclude anybody. Not the Trump voters, not the immigrants, not the trans people. I talked about a lot of things and just that morning I had seen reporting about the United States student association, a group for college students that hasn't been active since the 80s and they've resurrected themselves with more than 100 students in over a dozen states joining to take action. A Kentucky group that defeated school vouchers in that state is relaunching to try to help save the U. S. Department of education. People all over are taking just the kinds of action that everyday people in the community organizing session on Monday were thinking about the very kinds of things that they were working on.
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Unknown Speaker 3
Voters across the country are making it clear that they want to be heard even when their elected officials do not have the courage to show up. So progressive grassroots groups like indivisible decided to help them organizing so called empty chair town halls where concerned citizens can speak their mind to Republicans in congress who've done nothing to stand up against the Trump administration and to Elon Musk, even if those Republicans aren't physically there.
- [16:59]
Andrea Pitzer
Now, of course, big questions remain, such as how best to support and expand the efforts of those who are already helping and how best to call out or replace elected officials who aren't doing their jobs. I continue to highlight the Tesla takedown protests because they've been the most visible symbol of the 2025 protests, galvanizing people to take action with a very specific goal. And they're becoming popular enough that they're triggering some reactionary backlash. Elon, I want to thank you. I know you've been through a lot with this. In West Palm Beach, Florida, a man was arrested for threatening protesters with his car. In Berkeley, a counter protester began waving a stun gun at people in the crowd before an emeritus professor grabbed him by his hair, dragging him off his bicycle, at which point police took him into custody. Just a thank you to the Doge team. You know, these are, a lot of them are just kids. You know, they're just trying to help out and they're very talented. What we're seeing in terms of backlash is a really good reason that the Tesla takedown people have done things like they're doing and did last weekend in D.C. turning it into a dance party and things like costumes and consciously labeling an action as non violent or turning it into a dance party, we're getting down. Like Tesla stock prices are great ways to keep counter protesters who are looking for violence from getting a foothold easily and also make it harder for law enforcement to accidentally or deliberately misread the situation and potentially be arresting the original protesters. We don't need to do violence to achieve the goal, which is to basically deplete Musk's fortune by highlighting the fact that he is destroying our government.
- [18:49]
Unknown Speaker 4
Musk, of course, is exerting tremendous influence over many federal agencies. Democrats on Capitol Hill have expressed deep concern over Musk's Starlink company and efforts underway that might allow it in some way or another to take over a $2.4 billion contract between the FAA and Verizon. Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote that the potential deal reeks of the most corrupt, self serving abuses that federal procurement laws and principles are intended to prevent it.
- [19:23]
Andrea Pitzer
All praise to those who are finding creative ways to respond. And I encourage you to look for your own cut it out. Protests remain a visible face of all the other work that's going on, from volunteers to non profits to unrecorded actions that, you know, we won't know that people have taken that are still changing lives. And protests are also a way for people to interact. I myself, having only been to Roanoke four or five times in my life, recognize people I saw in the street. Others knew me from this podcast. This is how you build a community. And their protest Monday made the front page of the Roanoke Times the next day. So they're also expanding awareness of what's happening there and how people are beginning to resist. It is possible to win people over one at a time before you gain supporters in droves. And you might be surprised how few people it takes to make a difference. Someone I've mentioned before here and talked about again yesterday to the crowd is Mark Fallon, who stood up against torture at Guantanamo. He got shut out of it because he refused to go along with that. He had described to me at one point his shock over how few people it took to dismantle an entire legal system and remove human rights protections and any obligation to the rule rule of law. And we're seeing some of that now with Doge Right and with Elon Musk. The opposite of that was something I saw this week in a post by the CEO of Blue Sky, Jay Graeber. She was quoting Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigozhin, who said when a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order. Now, I'm not a woo person, so I don't want to over interpret a scientific analogy to apply to the behavior of people, but I do believe, and I have seen, that a small number of people can be the coherence that stabilizes everything. And I've been thinking a lot about resonant lines that have made an impact on people from our recent troubles in the U.S. one of them, from Trump's first administration is by Lauren Morrill, a Georgia based author of books for young adults. And I'm sure you've heard the line before. She wrote in 2017 I don't know how to explain to you why you should care about other people, and I think that's a sensation a lot of people had. For those who have empathy in general, it's shocking if other people don't. But for those who are more mercenary, or if you want to be generous, maybe we'll say less trusting of other people or less trusting of interdependence. Now, I do know how to explain to you why you should care about other people. And the answer is because caring for each other creates stability. Stability is contagious. If you want to live by your own wits in the whirlwind and chaos, with the world against you, then you're all set. We're already there. But if you want a stable society, we are going to have to care for each other. After this organizing event following Monday's protests, several people talked to me about what was going on with them, and the stories of two women in particular struck me most. The first had moved to the US Years ago from the Dominican Republic, she understood dictatorship, she said, and the kind of organizing that was happening right there in Roanoke was important. You have to find the big issue that moves everybody, she said. She thought it might be Medicaid and Medicare, and she was trying to find a way to help. Another woman took me aside just before I left to drive home. I had talked to her briefly on the street outside Ben Klein's office, but only for a moment. She asked about the research I had done for my camps book and wondered where in the world I had been. After we talked a little, she explained to me that her family was originally from South Korea and had fled oppression there. She said she recognized the way that the administration was eating away at everyone's rights. She saw that government was turning its back on the people, but she was having trouble getting her neighbors to come out and do anything to stop it. They just think someone else will take care of it, she said. But her family had been through this before and she knew better. Sooner or later, everyone else will realize it too. But it's incumbent on us to act now while we still have so much latitude to change the trajectory of what's happening. If the people of Roanoke can come together to find their way, even if they don't know where they'll end up yet, so can the rest of us, in whatever ways, work for each of our communities. And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this mess. To support this podcast, Please subscribe@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts.