RE-UP: What's in a Concentration Camp?

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Next Comes What

Episode: RE-UP: What's in a Concentration Camp?

Host: Andrea Pitzer
Date: May 1, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this impactful re-released episode, journalist and author Andrea Pitzer presents a history-spanning and urgent guide to understanding "concentration camps"—from their origins through their current incarnations, including the recent opening of the Everglades concentration camp under the Trump administration. The episode deconstructs how language, history, policy, and propaganda shape the American and global use of camps to detain vulnerable civilian groups for political purposes. Pitzer offers context, historical parallels, and actionable steps for resistance, drawing clear lines from past atrocities to contemporary threats to democracy.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Defining Concentration Camps and Their Purpose

• Pitzer clarifies what constitutes a concentration camp: "mass civilian detention without real trials, targeting vulnerable groups for political gain, based on ethnicity, race, religion, or political affiliation, rather than for crimes committed." (03:00)
• She distinguishes such camps from prisoner of war camps but notes the historical fluidity of these categories. (03:26)

2. Historical Roots: From Empire to 21st Century

• Concentration camps first emerged in late 19th-century Cuba as instruments of imperial control, later spreading to other colonial and wartime contexts. (03:53–05:10)
• Prior systems of forced relocation (e.g., Native American reservations, Spanish missions) were direct precursors. The "mass production of barbed wire" and use of automatic weapons enabled camps to expand dramatically. (05:10–05:38)
• Waves of mass detention occurred globally: WWI internment, Soviet Gulags, British camps in Kenya, and U.S. use in the Philippines. (10:09–12:16)

3. Mechanics of Modern Camps & “Kangaroo Justice”

• Modern camps rely on circumventing standard judicial processes: "They're setting up expeditionary, let's call them mobile courtrooms to... deport people immediately... These are kangaroo courts and kangaroo justice." (06:48)
• The Trump administration is described as politicizing the process, installing loyal judges and expanding the system’s reach. (06:48–07:18)

4. Who Gets Targeted and Why

• Pitzer emphasizes the pattern of targeting the most vulnerable, typically marginalized ethnic/racial/religious groups, for political gain.
• Expanding the net to include, for example, a Russian scientist or a Canadian resident, is described as "adding to the general terror, further solidifying their power," not as evidence of equal-opportunity detention. (09:42–10:09)

5. Democracy, Propaganda, and Entrenchment

• Democracies can reverse such regimes—but only if citizens mobilize. Camp systems often become entrenched unless both external factors and internal struggles combine. (11:32–11:49)
• Propaganda and political advertising since the 1920s made public acceptance easier. Once a camp system is in place, it tends to expand. (12:37–13:06)

6. The Role of Language: “Concentration Camp” vs. “Auschwitz”

• Pitzer addresses the controversy over naming: is it appropriate to use "concentration camp" for today's U.S. detention sites? She contends it's accurate and educational:

  "For me... it's important to use the phrase concentration camp because I'm trying to inform people about this arc that camps have had affecting tens of millions of lives worldwide across more than 100 years." (20:09)

• Comparing U.S. sites directly with Auschwitz is misleading and counterproductive, both factually and rhetorically. (21:58–22:28)

7. Connecting Past and Present: U.S. History of Detention

• The episode draws direct lines from the U.S.'s history of slavery, Native American removal, and racially motivated incarceration to present immigration detention practices. (15:19–16:29)
• High U.S. incarceration rates and tolerance for harsh conditions make new atrocities possible. (17:04–17:27)
• The Trump administration’s escalation is presented as a continuation and intensification of existing policies. (17:27–18:05)

8. Paths to Resistance: Practical and Strategic Action

• Pitzer advocates nonviolent resistance, noting its historical effectiveness ("Nonviolent campaigns had a better track record" – 24:13).
• She counsels against planning or publicizing violent actions, emphasizing community and legal tactics instead. (24:20–25:15)
• Strategies for resistance include:
  • Supporting detainees and their families by working with local organizations and legal aid (25:15–26:42)
  • Educating immigrants and the public about their rights (26:42–27:19)
  • Mapping and exposing local detention facilities and their funding (27:19–28:00)
  • Lobbying elected officials and building multi-level protest movements—both local and national, and making protests visible and inviting to others (28:00–29:38)
  • Linking the anti-detention struggle with a broader anti-corruption movement:

    "Anti corruption has been a powerful force in politics... It may be the only way that some Trump supporters who feel too bound up with him will be able to walk away." (30:00–31:49)

• Community acts, even among just a few people, can collectively build pressure and solidarity to turn the tide (31:49–32:41)

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On defining concentration camps:
  “History is full of moments in which hindsight provides the only clear [direction]—this is not one of them.” (02:51 – Historical Narrator)

• On justice denied:
  “These are kangaroo courts and kangaroo justice.” (06:48 – Andrea Pitzer)

• On naming and history:
  “I don't think it's disrespectful to the memory of the dead to use the term concentration camp. But saying that the Everglades concentration camp is equivalent to Auschwitz... isn't true.” (20:53 – Andrea Pitzer)

• On propaganda and limits of empathy:
  “It usually takes years of propaganda... but exposed to enough, a majority will either embrace their neighbors being rounded up or tolerate it out of fear and confusion.” (13:06 – Andrea Pitzer)

• On historical cycles:
  “The damage done by concentration camps has never stopped the reflexive enthusiasm for their use.” (19:25 – Historical Narrator)

• On action:
  “There are so many ways that you can push back, and you don’t need to wait for a guru or an influencer to tell you what to do.” (23:07 – Andrea Pitzer)

• On nonviolence:
  “Nonviolent campaigns had a better track record and were much more likely to have created democratic breakthroughs—like way more likely—than their violent counterparts.” (24:13 – Event Host/Moderator)

• On anti-corruption as unifying force:
  “Saying ‘Trump is deceiving you’ or ‘MAGA is brainwashed’ is unlikely to change anyone's mind. But saying ‘we are all, every one of us, getting cheated every day’ is tremendously unifying...” (29:38 – Andrea Pitzer)

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• [03:00] – Pitzer’s working definition of concentration camps
• [05:10] – Technological evolution of detention (barbed wire, automatic weapons)
• [06:48] – Current administration’s “mobile courtrooms” and kangaroo justice
• [09:42] – Expanding targets, terrorism by policy
• [12:37] – Growth of camps post-WWI; role of propaganda
• [16:23] – U.S. legacy: slavery, citizenship exclusions, Japanese internment
• [20:09] – Rationale for using the term “concentration camp”
• [21:58] – Dangers of “Auschwitz” comparisons
• [24:13] – Efficacy of nonviolent resistance
• [27:19] – Rights education and local organizing
• [29:38] – Importance of anti-corruption framing
• [31:49] – Building solidarity in communities

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Tone and Style

The episode maintains a clear, analytical, and urgent tone, balancing moral clarity with nuanced historical explanation and pragmatic advice. Pitzer’s language is direct, conversational, and, at times, impassioned—but always intent on equipping listeners to understand dangers and act for change.

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Summary Takeaways

• Concentration camps are a recurring, adaptable tool for political power—enabled by language, law, and propaganda—and have taken many forms from Cuba to the U.S. South to the Soviet Gulag.
• The Trump-era expansion of detention camps, particularly the Everglades camp, is not an historical aberration but part of a well-trodden legacy.
• Naming matters; honest and nuanced use of “concentration camp” is important, but careless equivalence with sites like Auschwitz can backfire.
• Resistance must be strategic, community-based, and, above all, nonviolent—focusing on both immediate aid and broad structural change, including anti-corruption movements and local-to-national protest.
• The preservation and reinvigoration of democracy depend on mass, collective engagement to thwart the normalization of detention and the erosion of rights.

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For further insight and resources, visit andreapitzer.com.

Transcript

[Andrea Pitzer]

As you probably know by now, I am officially out of pocket finishing my next book, Snow Blind. But for now we wanted to re up some of the most critical classic episodes that we have recorded of Next comes what and that's what we're bringing you today. And today's re release is the name what is in a concentration camp. And I think this is still relevant because it is a guide to understanding our new concentration camp era and how to fight it. Get out my swan the Trump administration's opening of the Everglades concentration camp this month has triggered a lot of fury. I wrote a piece this weekend for MSNBC that looked at the facility and compared it to our global legacy of detention camps, especially concentration camps. The headline they went with was don't call it Alligator Alcatraz. Call it a concentration camp. They didn't keep the one I offered, but I don't have a problem with it. My main worry? That some people seemed to read the headline and not the piece itself. That headline launched a thousand posts calling for referring to the Florida camp as Alligator Auschwitz instead. I'll talk about naming a little bit later in the episode, but honestly, I'm worried less about naming than I am about making sure that people will understand what's going on in the Everglades.

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

Those afternoon thunderstorms easily create flooding, and in swampy areas like this one, plenty of mud. Already reports of flooding inside the facility.

[Andrea Pitzer]

I've been studying concentration camps in one form or another since 2008.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

We're going to cover six continents and a century of camps, so hold on tight.

[Andrea Pitzer]

I sometimes forget that most of my audience encounters just one or two things I've written or said on video, but they haven't actually followed every word I've written in the last 17 years.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

Why would you do that?

[Andrea Pitzer]

So it's good to stop and occasionally provide context. That might be helpful.

[Event Host / Moderator]

On behalf of the Harvard Bookstore and our co sponsor this evening, the Nieman Foundation, I'm very pleased to welcome you to this evening's event with Andrea Pitzer presenting her new book, One Long Night. We're pleased to have C span's Book TV here taping today.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Today I want to talk about what a camp is, what they've looked like in the world and in the US and how we can reclaim the country from a political system that gives rise to such monstrosities.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

History is full of moments in which hindsight provides the only clear this is not one of them.

[Andrea Pitzer]

In Saturday's piece, I defined concentration camps as mass civilian detention without real trials Targeting vulnerable groups for political gain based on ethnicity, race, religion, or political affiliation, rather than for crimes committed before Nazi

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

extermination factories rose in Europe, before the first prisoner entered the Soviet Gulag, before the 20th century had even begun, concentration camps found their first home in the cities and towns of Cuba.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Breaking that down, we're talking about camps for civilians, so, not prisoner of war camps. There are no perfect bright lines between camp Systems. And sometimes POWs have been intermingled with civilian detainees, but typically they've been separate.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

The modern experiment in preemptively detaining groups of civilians without trial was launched by two generals, one who refused to bring camps into the world and another who did not.

[Andrea Pitzer]

These concentration camps emerged in the last half of the 19th century, though Martinez

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

Campos found Cubans dangerous and unconventional fighters. He described how they had nursed Spanish wounded who fell into their hands and returned prisoners of war unharmed. He could not, he telegraphed to Spain, raise the stakes in brutality against an opponent he felt to be honorable, and

[Andrea Pitzer]

began as imperial projects establishing control in colonial regions, usually fighting independence movements.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

I cannot, he wrote, as the representative of a civilized nation, be the first to give the example of cruelty and intransigence. So Martinez Campos was recalled. A man whose nickname was the Butcher was sent in his stead, and the first concentration camps came into the world.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Did mass relocation and detention happen before that? Absolutely. And you can't get to concentration camps without the Spanish, British, and US Government abuse of and genocide against indigenous populations around the world. In the centuries before concentration camps arose,

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

I mentioned the Spanish mission system and Native American reservations, because those are all the closest precursors, not just geographically and in time, but they are most kin to those things.

[Andrea Pitzer]

What made concentration camps, a new form of. Of that kind of prior detention that was already existing was the patenting and mass production of barbed wire.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

It's going to take a lot of

[Andrea Pitzer]

people to hold these people.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

Well, it turns out if you order a whole bunch of barbed wire from Oliver Brothers in Pittsburgh, you don't have to have that many people.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And automatic weapons, the other invention that

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

makes it possible to have a small guard force holding a large number of people in a fixed setting.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Think of it as going from the atomic bomb to a hydrogen bomb. And in that definition, when I talk about not having real trials, the truth is that most people who end up in concentration camps historically haven't had any trial. But where there are trials, they are expedited end runs around the standard judicial process. The Soviet Union had trials, too, in which no real defense could be presented. And the length of gulag detention went in waves every few days, sometimes with countless people in a row in getting whatever was the sentence of the day. In colonial Kenya, British judges meted out detention to hundreds of people at a time with the wave of a hand. In the current case, the US Is importing non immigration judges over from the National Guard and giving them boot camp training to handle immigration. Governor DeSantis has proposed using National Guard,

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

deputizing them as immigration judges to get

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

through this massive backlog of people, people

[Andrea Pitzer]

in the immigration court.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

Would you be open to that?

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

Yes, he has my approval. That wasn't too hard to get, was he didn't even have to ask me.

[Andrea Pitzer]

They're setting up expeditionary, let's call them mobile courtrooms to plan to try and deport people immediately. Given the vetting of service members at prior events that we've already seen, we're likely to end up with a Trumpist bench of judges at these facilities, further politicizing an already nasty process. These are kangaroo courts and kangaroo justice. For those who say that the communities involved are not being targeted on the basis of race or ethnicity.

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don't belong.

[Andrea Pitzer]

I don't think that caveat holds water because the current lead on immigration detention, Stephen Miller, has said publicly that America

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

is for Americans and Americans only.

[Andrea Pitzer]

It's no mystery what he means by this. His anti immigrant stance has been traced at least as far back as his high school years.

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash?

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

And we have plenty of janitors.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And we've seen the distinct targeting of people of color from the Trump administration.

[Event Host / Moderator]

Stephen Miller had this meeting in late

[Andrea Pitzer]

May where he said, why don't you

[Event Host / Moderator]

try Home Depot and why don't you try 7 11? And lo and behold, here, just weeks later, we saw the targeting of Home

[Andrea Pitzer]

Depots in L. A, running from its current priorities on visa restrictions globally, going all the way back to Trump's first weeks in office in 2017, trying to ban Muslims.

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

And we all recall what he said about Africa. African countries, those Nigerians S hole countries. The biggest group affected by the expansion of the Banhe said would never go back to their huts if we allowed them to come to the United States. Right? And so we just see him going from one prejudice to another, from one racist version of this ban to an expanded racist version of this ban.

[Andrea Pitzer]

We do see Others who get swept up in the net, like Harvard scientist Ksenia Petrova.

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

She brought back frog embryo samples for her lab, and the says she knowingly broke the law in failing to properly declare them. A typical customs violation results in a fine. But Petrova had her visa revoked, was detained and flagged for deportation.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And there's a Canadian detainee who has resided in the US since age 10 who was reportedly abducted. At a green card interview this week,

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

she says her parents brought her to the United States from Toronto when she was just a little girl.

[Event Host / Moderator]

The US Is my country.

[Andrea Pitzer]

You know, that's where I met my husband. That's where I went to high school, junior high, elementary.

[Event Host / Moderator]

That's where I have my kids.

[Andrea Pitzer]

This diversification of the target pool to occasionally include Russians or Canadians is less a sign of any lack of bias and more a sign that the government will preferentially target people of color, but is happy to simultaneously target those who have publicly opposed Vladimir Putin, as Petrova has.

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

She's been a vocal critic of the Russian government and its actions in Ukraine and and fears persecution if deported there.

[Andrea Pitzer]

But honestly, they're happy to add more individuals to the pool because it adds to the general terror, further solidifying their power. Over the last 130 years, concentration camps have existed on five continents. Monarchies have imposed them, democracies have embraced them. Communist Party run nations have adopted them. There is no national political system that hasn't resorted to them, because every culture has fault lines unscrupulous political actors can use to divide a country's population.

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

What unites Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites, and Big Pharma lobbyists. It isn't the ideas of Thomas Jefferson or even of Karl Marx. It's hatred. They hate the people in this room.

[Andrea Pitzer]

As many have noted before me, the most vulnerable groups are usually targeted. But once mass detention is established for one group, it becomes much easier to extend to other groups than it was to set up in the first place. Whether camps persist and become entrenched is often a question of internal power struggles, and sometimes also depends on whether there's external war happening.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

After defeating Spain handily, we inherited the Philippines, where there was also a rebellion underway, and we ended up using concentration camps ourselves in that conflict.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Democracies are more likely to undo a concentration camp regime. This is likely due to the fact that citizens in a democracy have occasional chances at removing their leaders.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

So in the space of a decade, concentration camps come into the world and are used as colonial outposts in a Number of locations.

[Andrea Pitzer]

In each case, camp systems rise out of national and international influences.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

After that, they die down for a while because the results are so horrific that people want to distance themselves from them.

[Andrea Pitzer]

During World War I, when internment of aliens became a global phenomenon, occurring in dozens of countries and even more territories, most parts of the planet developed some kind of procedure and bureaucracy for the preemptive mass detention of civilians.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

During World War I, this idea of preemptively detaining civilians becomes too convenient to resist.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The international culture and trend became even more pronounced after World War I ended. In the 1920s and 30s, camps became ubiquitous.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

They aren't seen as a bad thing at all. They're seen as an unfortunate necessity of the modern era.

[Andrea Pitzer]

After the rise of both advertising and political propaganda created potent psychological weapons to sell even really nasty things to the public, the kind of demonization necessary to create a concentration camp regime became exponentially easier to do.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

So you get the Gulag in the Soviet Union, which is very tied up also with the history of forced labor in Tsarist Russia, but becomes a new phenomenon combined with this specific idea of concentration camps.

[Andrea Pitzer]

It usually takes years of propaganda, regardless, to get people to accept camps. But exposed to enough, a majority will either embrace their neighbors being rounded up or tolerate it out of fear and confusion. Yet because of the role of national culture in identifying who gets targeted from the beginning, each ruling party, when asked about its camps, is emphatic that their country isn't running camps like those other horrible ones that you've heard or read about elsewhere. Theirs are different, they will say, because this particular group is a real threat to public safety or to the nation and deserves to be locked up. So more boots on the ground means

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

we arrest more bad people, make this

[Andrea Pitzer]

country safe, and there will already be some people who believe that.

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

You voted for Trump.

[Andrea Pitzer]

How do you feel now?

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

Horrible. Horrible.

[Andrea Pitzer]

What did you vote for? I voted for change, but I didn't

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

vote for this change. And like her husband, she too supported President Trump's promise to launch the largest deportation program of criminals in American history. My wife is a very.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Well, up until 18 days ago, was a strong believer in what was going

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

to happen the next four years, but we feel totally blindsided, betrayed.

[Andrea Pitzer]

International trends combine with specifics from each national culture to make camps possible in a given place.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

So the outcomes are quite different, and they don't as much cross pollinate as they rise out of these same roots.

[Andrea Pitzer]

With that in mind, it's worth Looking at U.S. history and the roots of the current immigration detention crisis. From Its very beginnings, the US has arbitrarily targeted groups for relocation, detention and political gain on the basis of who had citizenship.

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

So I believe one of the most pressing problems for us to face as statesmen is to redefine the meaning of American citizenship in the 21st century.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Indigenous people received the rights, on paper, at least afforded to US citizens only a century ago, though they've faced ongoing oppression on many fronts in the years since. The transatlantic slave trade legalized the kind of cross border human trafficking currently embraced by the Trump administration for deportations, and they made it into a hallowed American institution. Jefferson wrote a draft of the Declaration of Independence, including a long passage that denounced the slave trade. Slavery is a war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty by captivating and carrying Africans into slavery and miserable death. It was the only passage of the Declaration removed by the Continental Congress on the demand of the Georgia delegation. Asian Americans found themselves denied citizenship decade after decade in the U.S. and during World War II, Japanese Americans who were in fact citizens, found themselves herded into camps all the same.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

Everybody at first called them concentration camps because they didn't know about death camps yet, but the government called them war relocation centers.

[Andrea Pitzer]

From Japanese American internment to, to Jim Crow to native reservations, the rights of citizenship for minorities, even once secured on paper, have long been contingent and unfulfilled. It has to be said that civilian detention as a whole in the US likewise has a shameful history with tremendous abuses in the prison system. The United States itself has routinely had the highest incarceration rates among democratic nations around the world. Acceptance of atrocious conditions of mass incarceration and staggering numbers of prisoners.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

Higher rates of incarceration than under Stalin

[Andrea Pitzer]

as an integral part of American society has helped to pave the way for acceptance of a brutal immigration system.

[Event Host / Moderator]

Today, after 9 11, we saw so much more money funneled into the system, into border security, into immigrant detention, and

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

the detention system doubled.

[Event Host / Moderator]

We're in that situation again.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Much of what Trump is doing in terms of immigration, immigrant detention, comes from policies carried out by prior presidents who have all in recent decades, enacted policies further brutalizing immigrants.

[Event Host / Moderator]

People are being packed into overcrowded cells. People are not getting medical care. They're in conditions where they're languishing.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Though to be clear, it's possible to make bad policies worse.

[Event Host / Moderator]

And they're doing everything they can to expand, expand, expand, both here in the US and also seeing be now detained in third countries abroad.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Monstrous systems can always be made crueler. And right now, the Current administration has its foot on the accelerator. So I promised to address this question of naming. So I want to turn to that now. Is it important to call these things concentration camps? Should we compare it to Auschwitz? Is that disrespectful to this singular, specific, horrific span of history?

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

I want to underline that Auschwitz was sort of an Alpha and Omega of

[Andrea Pitzer]

camp systems to date.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

It had forced labor, it had massacre and executions, it had detention in barracks

[Andrea Pitzer]

as we sort of think of the

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

classical model from a number of German camps.

[Andrea Pitzer]

When I wrote my book, it was in part because some people didn't know any history of concentration camps except Auschwitz.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

It was a regular concentration camp. It was also part of the extermination camp system. And so even though it had these roots, it went into a place that no other place had gone before or since.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Some knew about the pre death camp sites like Dachau or had heard about the Soviet Gulag. But there was little understanding that the camps had risen out of these specific colonial settings at the turn of the 20th century. I wanted to write about how we had gotten to Auschwitz and what happened after it.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

The damage done by concentration camps has never stopped the reflexive enthusiasm for their use.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Because of course all the camps around the world didn't disappear even as humanity began to confront the horrors of Nazi extermination.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

The Nazi example looms over everything. But if we go back to the very beginning and see how the phrase emerged and what it's meant over time, I want to sort of bring that definition back. Because we're much less likely to face gas chambers at Auschwitz. We're much more likely to face a situation like we have with the Rohingya today or something that was meant as a detention, that was segregation, but to sort of quell riots and violence that was happening then. If you don't wrap it up, if you don't reintegrate those people, they are labeled the enemy and it turns into something much more dangerous.

[Andrea Pitzer]

So for me, as an individual, it's important to use the phrase concentration camp because I'm trying to inform people about this arc that camps have had affecting tens of millions of lives worldwide across more than 100 years.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

As Justice Antonin Scalia said of Japanese American internment, you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again.

[Andrea Pitzer]

I want my readers and listeners to understand that we have a lot of history that suggests that what's happening right now in the US isn't going to vanish on its own.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

I talk about that when a system is sort of choking on itself. And I think that is a danger sign. It can also be a sign of health when it's choking on itself that there's some remedies that are still available

[Andrea Pitzer]

to allow it to choke. We're going to have to act. I think political leaders who are opponents of camps should consider naming these camps for what they are and should work to educate people about what a concentration camp is. But what individual people call these camps is less important to me. And there may be times where even public officials use different names in talking to different people. Sometimes you're going to be calling attention to the grim history we're repeating. At other times, you might want to persuade someone who's bought into propaganda about immigrants in the past by talking about the physical setting and the treatment of people in these facilities instead of using a phrase that will trigger them. I don't think it's disrespectful to the memory of the dead to use the term concentration camp. But saying that the Everglades concentration camp is equivalent to Auschwitz is, to my mind, a different matter. It has two problems. The first is it isn't true. People know that a million detainees haven't been murdered in the Everglades this week.

[Historical Narrator / Expert]

But it was understood right after the war that it was a horrific thing. That was a new innovation in sort of modern horror. But the thing that happened also as a result of that understanding was that the bar was kind of reset for concentration camps, and anything less than that somehow became not a concentration camp. It so changed the whole way that these camps were viewed that anything less than that still seemed permissible.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The second problem is that as things get worse in the detention system under Trump, and they will. How can you convey what changes are going on if you've been misrepresenting what's been happening all along? Dissident humor can be fantastic and powerful stuff, but I think memes and hyperbole tend to render concentration camp information into a reality show rather than actual reality. And that tendency has been weaponized in powerful ways by the right.

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

Hey, Biden wanted me in here, okay? He wanted me. It didn't work out that way, but he wanted me in here.

[Andrea Pitzer]

My sense on this issue is that it's better not to let the administration set the terms of how we talk about it. Alligator Alcatraz seems aimed at terrorizing and entertaining, so I wouldn't use it. Substituting Auschwitz seems even worse for its dishonesty and for letting the administration set the framework for our language. But really, it's up to you. I'm not here to give you rules as much as I'm trying to help people think about what is true and what is real and what will be effective. I promised today talk about ways to resist the expanding concentration camp regime. And unlike my usual rambling list, I want to be strategic in how I explain it today. Giving a framework to how I'm thinking about it might help you come up with other ideas on your own, because I want to be clear. There are so many ways that you can push back and you don't need to wait for a guru or an influencer to tell you what to do. In terms of how to start First, I want to say a word about people suggesting violent and illegal acts. I generally address nonviolence on here because those have typically been the most effective movements.

[Event Host / Moderator]

Nonviolent campaigns had a better track record and were much more likely to have created democratic breakthroughs like way more likely

[Andrea Pitzer]

than their violent counterparts, and they're the easiest to study in terms of what works. I myself endorse nonviolence while understanding that even those who commit to nonviolent action frequently end up charged with assaulting police officers or faced with other bogus charges.

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

My dear fellow clergyman, while confined here in the Birmingham City Jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities unwise and untimely.

[Andrea Pitzer]

I have no illusions that committing to nonviolence completely protects protesters.

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

In any nonviolent campaign, there are four basic steps collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist, negotiation, self purification, and direct action. We have gone through all these steps

[Andrea Pitzer]

in Birmingham, but after the Everglades camp opened last week, I saw people talking about armed liberation of the camp or making drone attacks on it. I would like to respectfully say that if you're posting on social media about taking these kinds of violent actions, you have already removed yourself from being an effective agent of the violent action you're expressing an interest in taking. And honestly, there are so many things you can do that are likely to make a significant difference without you having to be convicted of a crime because you posted it on social media before you did it. The most immediate thing I would recommend you do is to push back on these developments on the ground level near you. Start with where suffering is already happening and work backward to see strategic places where you can insert yourself to alleviate harm or to gum up the concentration camp machinery. That means helping detainees and families of those already detained or deported. You can reach out to church groups, immigrant nonprofits, cultural associations, and many other places to see how you can help you may have invaluable skills that are rare, or just the patience to do grunt work that's necessary. It's all important if we take a step backward in the process of harm. From there, we can consider how to keep people from being caught by ICE in the first place. Their education efforts to help immigrants know their rights, which is not always sufficient but has already saved a lot of people from arrest.

[Event Host / Moderator]

If you're undocumented and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or what we often think of as being the immigration police, stop you on the street or stop you in a public place. Know that you have these following have the right to remain silent. You do not have to speak to an immigration officer. You do not have to answer any questions. You may ask if you are free to leave. If the officer says no, you may exercise your right to remain silent. If you are asked where you were born or how you entered the United States, you may refuse to answer or you may refuse to remain silent. If you choose to remain silent, however, you must say so out loud.

[Andrea Pitzer]

When you know those rights as well, you can be more effective at helping people. In addition, there are people helping to file requests for virtual hearings for those who have to attend court. But if fear arrest by ICE and stepping back to an earlier stage of the problem, we're faced with the issue that facilities even exist for this kind of detention in your community. So find out where immigrants are detained in your state, county or town. If you can't find out, email or call your elected representatives and ask them. Ask them to find out too. Trace the networks. Trace the money. Find ICE facilities. Work on cutting access and funding and economic partnerships with agencies or businesses locally. Meet with philanthropists, business owners and religious leaders and ask them to partner with you to respect the rights of all area residents and to deny the use of area locations for detention. Taking another step further back invites the question of how is this legal to do in the first place? Pressure your elected officials to protect immigrant rights as key to protecting everybody's rights and tell them that immigrants are critical to the country and to your community. Ask them what they're doing to protect everyone. Public protest against these policies and concentration camp detention doesn't meet a need the way that offering direct services or volunteering with a non profit does. But it's also critical by clamping down on immigrant rights, the administration is clamping down on every American's rights. Nearly everything that's been set as a priority in the second Trump administration, and a lot of what was tried the first time out appears aimed at imposing dictatorship. Public dissent is a critical right and key to blocking dictatorship. It has to be exercised on a regular basis all over the country if it's to be kept. The bigger demonstrations become, the more they will break through the silos and the harder they will be to dismiss as the work of paid subversives. Big protests, especially those that seem fun alongside the serious messaging, start to feel like the honorable side, like the winning side to more people. But in addition to big national movements, we need local demonstrations too. You organizing even a small one in your community, especially if it's in a deep red area, will help make the connections for those who might otherwise never see or hear what's happening in their neck of the woods. The more you can call out local detention sites and actions, the better. Many people don't realize where their money's going or even know how their community is tied up in the nationwide Immigration Detention Project, handing out flyers at protests or carrying signs can be key sources of information for people who don't get a lot Mamdani responding in a statement the President of the United States just threatened to have me arrested, stripped of my citizenship, put in a detention camp and deported, not because I've broken any law, but because I will refuse to let ICE terrorize our city. We will not accept this intimidation. And if you can close the loop by connecting local actions to a national network, you'll likely learn best practices that help you feel the energy boost that comes from support and solidarity on the largest level. You don't even have to focus on the immigration issue to tackle this problem. You can help other targeted groups, or you can take the most panoramic view possible and focus on corruption. I firmly believe that one of the best ways to shift the American trajectory is is to fuel an anti corruption movement. An anti corruption campaign has universal appeal. Saying Trump is deceiving you or MAGA is brainwashed is unlikely to change anyone's mind. But saying we are all, every one of us, getting cheated every day is tremendously unifying to Democrats, Independents, non voters and Trump supporters alike. Anti corruption has been a powerful force in politics at home and abroad across history, and I think it will continue to be useful because corruption is at the heart of most of what Trump is doing. It may be the only way that some Trump supporters who feel too bound up with him will be able to walk away.

[Trump Supporter / Opponent (Various)]

He wants to distract from what I fight for. I fight for working people, I fight for the very people that have been priced out of this city and I fight for the same people that he said he was fighting.

[Andrea Pitzer]

An anti corruption movement allows those potential voters to be swept up without making them the intensive and resource draining singular focus of outreach. So whether you go big or small, local or national, or all of the above, remember that re knitting our communities together more tightly is the only way we can get past this and emerge with a better country. You have to demand your officials represent our interests and not just those of wealthy, powerful donors. You have to know that people have your back and they have to know that you have theirs. Just get three or four friends or neighbors or co workers or acquaintances from a college course or your rock climbing class or pickup basketball or your church or your quilting or discord group. Decide to do something together and then get started. And that's it.

[Event Host / Moderator]

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 at andreapitzer. Com and consider giving Next comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts.