The State of The Degenerate Union

Summary

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Podcast Episode Summary

Next Comes What – "The State of The Degenerate Union"

Host: Andrea Pitzer

Date: October 10, 2025

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Overview

In this episode, author and historian Andrea Pitzer reflects on the first year of her newsletter and podcast, offering a sobering analysis of the rise and entrenchment of authoritarianism in the United States, focusing on Donald Trump’s current administration. Drawing lessons from global history and the ongoing "concentration camp tendency" in American policy, Pitzer explains how strongmen rise, what tools they use, and—critically—what citizens, activists, and local officials can do to resist, based on both past and present models at home and abroad.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Take Stock Now

• Pitzer launched "Degenerate Art" a year earlier to chronicle crises in America, and now, with Trump’s return and escalation of authoritarian policies, she sees an urgent need to synthesize core lessons from the past year.
• "It seems like a good moment to stop and consider the most important parts of what I've tried to cover in the last 12 months." (Andrea Pitzer, 00:12)

2. Devolution from Threat to Harm

• The Trump administration has moved past merely threatening liberal democratic norms:
  • Historic federal cuts—$1 trillion to Medicaid, potentially removing 17 million from healthcare
  • Unprecedented crackdown on immigrants, expansion of law enforcement and military into domestic affairs
  • Use of law enforcement and military power against political opposition
• "The federal government has been deliberately wrecked by Trump and his allies in an ongoing project to extract wealth for the richest Americans and deny benefits to the poorest." (Andrea Pitzer, 01:42)

3. History as Both Warning and Guide

• Drawing from Pitzer’s research on global concentration camps, she warns of the U.S. expanding both domestic and international detention networks without due process:
  • Constructed facilities and increased civilian detention resembling historic camps
  • Parallels between current U.S. policy and 19th-century Cuban and German precedents
• "When people think of concentration camps, they tend to think of Auschwitz...But I really wanted to look into how we got to that point." (Andrea Pitzer, 03:38)

4. International Context: Gaza and Beyond

• Examines recent Israeli actions in Gaza as aligning with the "rogue state" status initiated by the U.S. War on Terror; argues U.S. and Israeli conduct shows the global normalization of humanitarian violations.
  • Warns against ignoring global connections—“those are also critical for those people and for us going forward.” (Andrea Pitzer, 06:00)

5. Media Degradation and Propaganda

• Billionaires buying up media, e.g., Bari Weiss at CBS, connections between Fox News' founding and American authoritarianism
• "Journalism is starving...shedding workers in ways that begin to echo the kinds of silence and blackouts that arise...in other police states." (Andrea Pitzer, 08:09)

6. The "Concentration Camp Tendency" at Home

• Tracing this urge to exclude and harm:
  • Trump’s attacks on Haitian immigrants; denial of services to marginalized groups (trans, homeless, Black, and Latino communities)
  • National-level policies echoing those from colonial America and Operation Condor in South America
• "The attempt by government to isolate and remove targeted groups from the general population...is the necklace threading through all the policies that are currently choking the country..." (Andrea Pitzer, 34:46)

7. Adapting to Accelerating Authoritarianism

• Comparison with historical strongmen:
  • Putin's quick consolidation (and the repression and militarization that followed)
  • Hitler’s second act – the window of opportunity for resistance shrinks fast, but does exist
• Pitzer notes Trump's second administration is moving far faster than historical analogs.
• "I noted that Trump was coming into office with more power than Hitler possessed in Nazi Germany on arrival in 1933..." (Andrea Pitzer, 13:20)

8. Institutional Failures and Points of Potential Resistance

• Congress's near-total capitulation; a Supreme Court rubber-stamping executive initiatives through mechanisms like the “shadow docket,” (27:14–28:09)
• Lower court judges continue to mount pockets of resistance, sometimes at personal risk.
• "Threats to federal judges in 2025 have already outpaced last year's numbers." (Andrea Pitzer, 28:40)

9. Political Infighting as Both Threat and Opportunity

• Trump’s physical decline and power struggles among surrogates (Hegseth, Miller, Rubio, Vance) may create fractures that can be exploited by the opposition.
• "There will be infighting between the officially legal branches and the more extrajudicial branches...It will lead to some worse things...but also to many opportunities to derail the larger Trumpian agenda." (Andrea Pitzer, 32:20)

10. Everyday Resistance: Models and Effectiveness

• Cites Erica Chenoweth’s 3.5% rule and global research suggesting nonviolent mass participation works.
  • "The value of protest and the possibility of a return to healthy democracy—these are real." (Andrea Pitzer, 19:53)
  • "Getting at least 3.5% of a country's population engaged in an opposition movement is generally sufficient to force significant change." (Andrea Pitzer, 19:53)
• Local initiatives: running for school board, supporting immigrant legal defense, getting ICE out of communities, and joining "No Kings" protests.
• Citing historical resistance from enslaved people and parents striking against segregated schools, Pitzer reminds listeners that oppressed people have always found creative ways to push back.

11. Practical Guidance

• Beyond "spectator democracy": calls for organizing, aiding the vulnerable, and creating parallel structures for after Trump.
• "You can work on building that world now. Support those who are doing work you can't." (Andrea Pitzer, 37:59)
• "Outside of the groups directly targeted with violence today, public apathy is a greater danger to the country than actual oppression in this moment." (Andrea Pitzer, 40:49)

12. Notable Examples and International Lessons

• Resistance successes in Brazil, South Korea, and France
• The need to fight the "concentration camp tendency" on all fronts, not just rollback one or two policies

13. Closing Reflections

• Expresses gratitude to co-producer Jason Sattler (LOL GOP), contributors, and subscribers
• Requests continued support, participation in Q&A, and urges listeners to share the podcast and get active

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Memorable Quotes

"It’s a bigotry that gets tapped to further a delusional narrative that eventually competes with and displaces reality."
— Andrea Pitzer, 00:42

"What can history tell us given that several years of my work around the world centered on the global rise of concentration camps and their persistence in the world?"
— Andrea Pitzer, 03:22

"The federal government has been deliberately wrecked by Trump and his allies…"
— Andrea Pitzer, 01:42

"The value of protest and the possibility of a return to healthy democracy—these are real."
— Andrea Pitzer, 19:53

"America is singularly poised to act in ways that most citizens and residents of other countries mired in hardening authoritarianism were not. Which again is not to say there are no risks."
— Andrea Pitzer, 40:49

"We can absolutely do this, but we will have to overcome seeing democracy as a spectator sport."
— Andrea Pitzer, 41:57

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 00:12 – Why take stock now & summary of the year’s threats
• 01:42 – Federal government’s deliberate damage & new authoritarian moves
• 03:22 – The global growth and meaning of concentration camps
• 06:00 – International (Gaza) context and the U.S. role
• 08:09 – Collapse of independent journalism; media billionaires
• 11:33 – Trumpian symbolism and right-wing extremism (Waco, Branch Davidians)
• 13:20 – Analogies to Putin and Hitler, rapid pace of U.S. authoritarianism
• 17:18 – Key lessons from resistance history: judiciary & dissent
• 18:10 – The power and importance of humor in resistance
• 19:53 – Protest's effectiveness: 3.5% rule and other research
• 25:05 – Global resistance models: South Korea, Poland, France
• 34:46 – Concentration camp tendency in U.S. policy
• 37:59 – Building for after Trump: supporting democracy
• 40:49 – Public apathy as the main risk; opportunities for civic action
• 41:57 – Final call to action and gratitude

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Tone & Language

Andrea Pitzer’s tone is urgent, historically grounded, and resolutely activist. She moves fluidly between personal reflection, global/historical context, and practical guidance, always maintaining a direct and unflinching approach to current threats. Her references to historical analogs are precise, and her language is concrete and vivid, especially when describing both the dangers (“the concentration camp tendency”) and the pathways for resistance.

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Key Takeaways for Listeners

• American democracy is in an acute phase of crisis; authoritarian policies are already inflicting harm.
• History shows both deadly warning signs and practical blueprints for resisting and reversing autocracy.
• Everyday actions—running for office, supporting vulnerable community members, showing up—matter deeply.
• Protest and mass engagement, in sufficient numbers, are proven tools to force change.
• The "concentration camp tendency" must be resisted at every level, not normalized or tolerated.
• Even in dire times, pockets of hope and opportunity for resistance exist, both from infighting among authoritarians and from protected civil liberties still available.
• Listeners are urged to participate: become active, build institutions for the future, and fight apathy.

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For More

• Send Q&A questions to nextcomeswhatmail.com
• Participate in No Kings protest actions on October 18 (virtual training available before)
• Support or subscribe to Andrea Pitzer’s work at andreapitzer.com

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Transcript

[Andrea Pitzer]

One year ago, I launched Degenerate Art, the parent newsletter of this podcast. The podcast itself launched a few weeks later.

[Interviewer]

Is this crazy?

[Andrea Pitzer]

After the election we are seeing a return to power, kind of of a past that never got left behind in the world. And it seems like a good moment to stop and consider the most important parts of what I've tried to cover in the last 12 months. Fallon told me after 9, 11 and and the turn toward black sites and torture around the world that he thought the US had become a rogue state. And also look at the current trajectory of the country.

[Interviewer]

We call them the water drugs and the world the drugs that come in through water.

[Andrea Pitzer]

A lot of new subscribers have come aboard in the last month, which probably offers another good reason to round up the most useful parts of what we've talked about in this year. 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. I started out with a lot of historical analysis trying to illustrate the crises that were already tripping up the country. It's a bigotry that gets tapped to further a delusional narrative that eventually competes with and displaces reality and specific kinds of threats the US Would face. From a second Trump administration, we begin.

[Interviewer]

To largest domestic deportation operation in American history.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Later it became less necessary to clarify the threat because the administration moved from threat to direct harm.

[Interviewer]

We have an insurrection act for a reason.

[Andrea Pitzer]

So after that I focused more on what kinds of action are still possible in our current historical moment to break the momentum of the administration or even push back on it in useful ways. So run for school board, become a library volunteer, show up to community events. And today the federal government has been deliberately wrecked by Trump and his allies in an ongoing project to extract wealth for the richest Americans and deny benefits to the poorest. What critics are calling Trump's Big ugly bill includes some $1 trillion in federal cuts to Medicaid and could kick 17 million people off health care. It makes the largest ever cuts to food assistance benefits, could cause the closure of nursing home homes and rural hospitals across the country, raises housing and energy costs and supercharges Trump's crackdown on immigrants, all while extending Trump's tax cuts for the rich and delivering massive new tax benefits for the wealthiest Americans. Trump is using federal law enforcement against cities run by his political opponents and is working to expand his power to use the US Military in a similar fashion.

[Interviewer]

It's unconscionable. This has never happened before. They're calling out troops onto the streets of a state that doesn't want them, and they're not even telling us where they're going to go, what they're going to do. This hasn't happened, I don't think, since the Civil War.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Now I want to talk about some of the most important history I've laid out in this newsletter across the last year. I want to address exactly where we are now and what we're likely to face in the coming months, and I'll make some specific suggestions about the most effective things you can do to halt or reverse Trumpism in America.

[Interviewer]

So what happens when a country decides to put tens of thousands of people into camps?

[Andrea Pitzer]

What can history tell us given that several years of my work around the world centered on the global rise of concentration camps and their persistence in the world?

[Interviewer]

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.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Many of my historical examples rise out of that world, one which has become only more relevant with the massive increase in funding for civilian detention without meaningful trial and the ongoing construction of a massive national and even international detention network by the United States. So when people think of concentration camps, they tend to think of Auschwitz and the death camps, because looking back from today, it looms so much larger than everything else that's happened in history. As it should. We should remember it first. But I really wanted to look into how we got to that point. Just a housekeeping kind of note.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about that.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Subscribers will have a chance to ask questions for a Q and a we're doing to celebrate our anniversary, the answers to which will eventually be posted for everyone, but will go to subscribers first. You are a paid subscriber who wants to ask a question. Send it to Next comes what? All one word. Next comes what? Mail.com and we'll gather those questions and answer them in a bonus post and a bonus episode of Next Comes what In the newsletter. I usually have Tuesday and Friday posts and I try to provide some relief and distraction from everything that's happening. So later in the week I usually include stories from my strange childhood, my time teaching karate and self defense, doing arctic research and running a record store. But not all simultaneously. I didn't become a writer for a living until I was almost 40 years old. The Tuesday posts are the ones that provide the basis for this podcast and they focus on what's happening to the country and how to stop it and have been the cornerstone of both the newsletter and the podcast. I'm familiar with this world of people that would support Trump and I try to think of it as addiction. Before the election, one of the first thing I covered was events in Gaza and the ways that the Israeli government was in danger of repeating 19th century concentration camp history from Cuba.

[Interviewer]

Do these actions intent on limiting aid into Gaza and West bank, taken under the pretense of security operations, comply with international humanitarian laws and norms? Are these the actions we should expect from one of our closest democratic allies.

[Andrea Pitzer]

In the world, forcibly demanding relocation of whole populations on short notice and moving them into increasingly worse conditions while declaring open season on anyone who remains would become a genocide. By continuing to supply vast quantities of arms for the Israeli response to the horrific October 7th terror attack, supplying them long after it was known that tens of thousands of women and children had been killed in Gaza are continuing to be killed. Biden is not helping the nation retreat from this rogue state status that we entered through the global war on terror. If anything, I probably didn't pay enough attention to that and cover it enough early on, although I'm not sure it would have stopped it. It would have raised awareness. So I encourage people to not ignore what's happening in other parts of the world right now because those are also critical for those people and for us going forward. Unfortunately, Israel succeeded in isolating and dividing Gaza from the rest of the world, meaning your experience as a Gazan Palestinian person living in Gaza is different than your experience if you're living elsewhere. For example, kids in Gaza grow up afraid of the sky. When you look at the sky in Gaza, you can't differentiate Is the sun.

[Interviewer]

A cloud or is this a smoke?

[Andrea Pitzer]

Another thing I covered early in the newsletter was how journalism in the United States is in serious Trouble.

[Interviewer]

As a 27 year old producer on the Mike Douglas show, Roger Ailes overheard Richard Nixon, waiting to go on the air say it was a shame that a man had to resort to gimmicks like television to get elected. Mr. Ailes replied, Television isn't a gimmick, and if you think so, you'll lose.

[Andrea Pitzer]

I said that billionaire investors have created propaganda channels in the private sector which abet the interests of authoritarian types.

[Interviewer]

In 1996, Mr. Ailes joined the News Corporation to found a new cable television network, Fox News. Fox News passed CNN in the ratings in 2002 and has remained the dominant news channel ever cable news channel ever since.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Remember that Fox News was created as an antidote to the successful removal of Richard Nixon from the presidenc. Monday marked the first day on the job for the newly installed editor in chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, after she sold her right wing digital media outlet the Free Press to CBS's parent company Paramount Skydance for an astounding $150 million. Other non Murdoch national media may lack overt complicity, but tilt heavily corporate and are not inclined to unsettle advertisers. Apple TV plus says it's postponing the release of a new show and the move is drawing some criticism. The show, starring Jessica Chastain, is called the Savant. It's about an undercover investigator who infiltrates online hate groups to stop mass shootings. Meanwhile, journalism is starving, especially at state and local levels, shedding workers in ways that begin to echo the kind of silence and blackouts that arise due to repression and in other police states. Weiss will report to Trump ally Paramount CEO David Ellison, who took control of Paramount through the merger with his company Skydance Media. David is the son of one of the richest men in the world, recently declared the richest for a little bit, billionaire Larry Ellison, executive chair of Oracle, who Trump has proposed to make part owner of TikTok. The Ellison family is also set to make a bid for CNN's parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, which would also include owning, for example, hbo. I would say in the year since I wrote that situation has only become more dire with more billionaire takeovers, more stooges being put in at high levels and I think that dealing with that crisis in journalism is something we'll have to do going forward, a CBS correspondent told the Independent. The fact that we don't have money to pay journalists, but we have money to pay Bari Weiss between 100 and $200 million is indicative of what the Ellison's true goal here is and it's not journalism. I also wrote a year ago about the backyard fascism of Trump advances attacks on Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. He just said Haitians are eating dogs and cats. Can you affirmatively say now that that is a rumor that has no base basis with evidence and how he was threatening to unleash law enforcement violence on civilians his first day in office?

[Interviewer]

If I have to.

[Andrea Pitzer]

But it wasn't just a meme.

[Interviewer]

Create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do.

[Andrea Pitzer]

That Trump understands so clearly he cannot yet get atomized local groups to do this work for him and must direct the police to do it. Shows his hand and underlines his precarious positions. And I think in the years since we have seen that is still the case, and that is good news for us that Trump has still not got local populations to do his work for him completely and in the way that he wants. So that provides us a little bit of hope. And honestly, even if Trump would have lost the election, the country as a whole is in trouble over these larger questions. Waco, Texas, where that's where Donald Trump decided to relaunch his 2024 campaign. Tell us about it.

[Interviewer]

Well, it's a highly symbolic place because as you Remember back in 1993, the Branch Davidians at Colt had a compound called Mount Carmel and Waco and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms thought they were stockpiling weapons, which they were. And they had a siege that went on for 51 days. It culminated on April 19, 1993, with an inferno and more than 80 people dying, inspired a right wing militia movement and including a guy named Timothy McVeigh, who two years later to the day bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. So here Donald Trump goes back to Waco, and when I asked Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist and maybe who he still talks about most important outside advisor right now, Waco, what were you doing? He said, we are the Trump Davidians.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Yet the fact is Trump didn't lose and that violence he had threatened was soon unleashed. And that's the legacy of what most of this episode will be about today. In the opening episode for this podcast, recorded a few days after the election, I took a look down the barrel of a second Trump administration and what it would likely bring. 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. I discuss Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency after a performative period away and how his second act institutionalized repression and the creation of a massive military force directly under his control. When he resumed that office is when we began to see the worst of the worst thing happens. That force has made it almost impossible for domestic opposition to his rule to survive.

[Interviewer]

He kills journalists that don't agree with him. Well, I think our country does plenty of killing.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Also, Joe, in that same episode, I noted that Trump was coming into office with more power than Hitler possessed in Nazi Germany on arrival in 1933 after being appointed chancellor through a similarly legal process that was nonetheless dodgy in terms of whether he should have been disqualified. Can you talk about how those concentration camps How Hitler managed to do this. Well, I'm glad that you asked about that. I noted that even back then it took more than a year for him to establish unquestioned authoritarian powers. It was a very violent 18 months, but it did take more than a year for him to really lock in permanent dictatorship. And five years before the first mass roundups of German Jews happened. So as Americans, we would have some window in which to act to save the country, is what I predicted.

[Interviewer]

The authors of Project 2025, they kind of feel like their time was worth it because a significant amount of the policy proposals in this thing have already been implemented.

[Andrea Pitzer]

With more in progress, I will say that the US Government is currently moving much more quickly.

[Interviewer]

President Trump's evisceration of the federal workforce, his focus on establishing a federal government loyal to him, ripped out of the first chapter.

[Andrea Pitzer]

I considered the case of Chile in which Pinochet came to power through a coup, and noted that though Trump wouldn't take power in 2025 due to a coup, the election victory was in many ways the fruition of the 1-6-21 coup that was put down. The Trump administration has agreed to pay.

[Interviewer]

Nearly $5 million to the family of Ashley Babbitt.

[Andrea Pitzer]

She is the MAGA rioter who was shot and killed by police after she breached the Capitol on January 6, which Congress and the Supreme Court in the end, failed to treat as to democracy that it was. It was a hard and fast 63 vote with 6. The 6 Republican appointed conservatives on one side ruling for former President Donald Trump, and the three Democrat appointed liberals ruling for special counsel Jack Smith in his effort to try to bring the former president to a criminal prosecution. There was no effort by the chief justice in this, this case to reach out to the left at all. It was clear even then that his rhetoric and planning for his second administration were framed as overthrowing the existing limits on the presidency and the destruction of democratic government itself. 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. He aimed to establish dictatorship for day one. The biggest mistake I made in my predictions a year ago related to Congress in the settings I'd looked at around the world where authoritarianism was on the rise. I said that legislators often ended up too weak or too complicit, and so they were unlikely to stop Trump's ascent, and that part was correct. But I also said that Trump's immigration plans would take enormous amounts of money to inflict on the country. I think that we're going to see real targeting of Latino populations, whether they're documented or not. I predicted that neither the Senate nor the House would have a comfortable majority, or at least one comfortable enough that they would be willing to cut the social programs that would need to be cut to make mass deportations happen on a vast scale for an extended period. I failed to see just how completely elected representatives and senators would buckle to Trump refusing to stand up in any way for their own constituencies.

[Interviewer]

For nine already struggling rural hospitals here in Tennessee, many of these facilities rely on Medicaid funding to stay open.

[Andrea Pitzer]

I've talked repeatedly in the last year about how in my concentration camp research I found that the two key elements in being able to resist or revert authoritarian rule we're keeping at least a semi independent judiciary and holding on to the ability to dissent, particularly the right to public protest. Without either of those, it becomes very difficult for a country that's going awry to correct course. On this podcast, we focused a lot on different forms of everyday resistance, from New York to Washington to Los Angeles to San Francisco and even abroad. Tesla takedown A global day of peaceful action demanding an end to Elon Musk's influence over Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency and its sweeping federal cuts. We also did an episode looking at the role of humor.

[Interviewer]

So a lot of people have said every type of thing about him. A lot of people have drawn him. Do you know how much you got to hate somebody to draw them?

[Andrea Pitzer]

A lot of people.

[Interviewer]

Drawings take time.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And groups like Otpor in Serbia, they put a poster of President Slobodan Milosevic's face on an oil barrel, and they left a large stick near it in a shopping district. The fun that shoppers had while waiting in line eventually brought police who arrested the barrel. They couldn't arrest the people standing around. They didn't know who'd put it there. So they took the barrel and that went viral. Individuals like Francarame and Dario Fo in Italy likewise publicly mocked corruption and authoritarianism, sometimes at great cost to themselves. And in 2003, Fo and his wife, Franca Rame, put together a vicious, hilarious performance that mocked Berlusconi directly. A kind of a puppet show telling a tale where the prime minister, through a horrible accident, ends up with part of Putin's brain when Putin is assassinated by terrorists. Linking comedy with Social change at the smallest and most mundane levels. George Orwell said a thing is funny when in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening. It upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution.

[Interviewer]

The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one. Don't let it happen. It depends on you.

[Andrea Pitzer]

For those who want to be sure that engagement and protest are somehow more than just feel good tactics covered several useful studies to keep in mind. No single research result is definitive, but as a whole they seem to indicate that the value of protest and the possibility of a return to healthy democracy that these are real. Many people have cited Erica Chenoweth's work suggesting getting at least 3.5% of a country's population engaged in an opposition movement is generally sufficient to force significant change. Where the 3.5% rule comes in is that in our book we argue that mass participation is a critical reason why nonviolent resistance is more likely to win. It's easier to get huge numbers of people participating in nonviolent resistance from all walks of life, and it's a much more inclusive technique of struggle. A study by tieslink and Melios on the much vilified Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd's death indicates that those protests played a measurable part in Joe Biden's 2020 victory. The research also suggests that this is a quote the effect of protests is relatively large in counties with smaller, whiter and lower educated populations. More recently, we also looked at the U turn study of massive political changes in the direction a government is going across more than a century. Researchers at Sweden's University of Gothenburg and at the University of Liverpool in the UK found that more than half of all authoritarian shifts were followed by shifts toward democratization. And in the last 30 years that number was nearly 3 4. What's more, some 90% of U turns led to greater democratization. In the end, no one study represents all of reality. But this study is a helpful way to get a snapshot from a greater distance of where we are now. Elsewhere I've tried to address why both international and domestic examples of oppression and resistance sense offer useful models. I don't know if I would go.

[Interviewer]

As far to identify someone specifically as a fascist, but I'm speaking as a.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Historian who understands when you say fascist, I do immediately think of Mussolini, I think of Hitler. Self identified fascist. The single most to my mind, similar.

[Interviewer]

Identifier is an absolute blindness to any kind of defeat. Anything that doesn't fit into into your.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Worldview to Pretend that the blight afflicting America today can only be understood through European fascism or Russian autocracy would be foolish. Heinous acts of oppression have been part of U.S. history since the country's founding. Much of what Trump is doing seems aimed at rolling back the historical clock for the express purposes of removing power and agency from not only political opponents, but also people he sees as actually less than human. But a broader pool of examples of how events can go is helpful in knowing what might come next. Australian outsourcing of migrant detention to Manus Regional Processing center in Papua New guinea and the nation of Nauru at the beginning of this century and led to horrific outcomes. There was insufficient water supply and sanitation there. In Nauru, at the detention facility, the conditions were hot and humid, also saying that there was inadequate health care. And so almost all of them suffered in terms of their physical and mental well being with the help of our country. South American dictatorships collaborated with each other in extrajudicial detention in the 1970s and 1980s through Operation Condor. Last year in Chile, the Supreme Court validated judgments against the architects of the Condor program, which was central to torture and disappearances. And it was an operation the US assisted in, just as it had supported those dictatorships. That operation very much foreshadowed Trump's partnership with President Bukele for the deportation of immigrants in the US to abominable detention conditions at Sicot and El Salvador this year. But the problem is not not only the way in which the prison is constructed, but because of Buke and basically de facto martial law in El Salvador. When you are put in that prison, you have no due process, you have no visitors. The past in these cases predicted the path that international expansion of deeply punitive refugee and migrant policies would take. Positive examples of overseas change exist, too. In the last year, we've highlighted the Supreme Court and protest movements in Brazil. We've looked at the role of protest and legislators. Bravery in South Korea.

[Interviewer]

South Korea's president declared martial law basically in the middle of the night, effectively accusing the opposition of trying to destroy the country from within. And then, almost as quickly as the declaration had been made, Parliament, including members of the president's own party, pulled the rug out from under it.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Poland is currently mired in a struggle paralleling that in the US we must.

[Interviewer]

Do everything we can to ensure that Poland remains Poland, rich in its cultural heritage, in its attachment to what is enshrined in our national community, to the symbol of the cross and to Christian.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Values, with some defeats and some victories. For democratic governance. France has shown us how to hold former leaders accountable through legal channels. And of course, our own history offers countless ways that we could use to model our actions today.

[Interviewer]

They built a school they called a school. The Mexican family was in a community, called it called Caballeriza, or the barnyard, the barn. And it was a wooden building that was built on the Mexican side of the tracks. Basically, the parents called a strike a huelga against the school. They were not going to the quote, unquote, the barn.

[Andrea Pitzer]

So I've looked at events here in the US stretching all the way back to the colonial era to show examples of successful defiance of oppression from enslaved people. Elizabeth Freeman, an enslaved woman then known as Mum Bet, became one of the test cases for slavery in Massachusetts, cases that led that state to becoming the first one to abolish slavery in 1783. Bette changed her name to Elizabeth Freeman, later buying her own house and living a life of freedom and independence. People with many fewer options than we have now. Latino communities, queer communities, and many others. Nearly a year after Trump's re election, we are in fact facing an expanding network of domestic and international concentration camps, creating the first global network of camps run by a superpower created through bribery and coercion. We can expect this to get worse.

[Interviewer]

We took the freedom of speech away.

[Andrea Pitzer]

With very few exceptions, the current US Supreme Court has been rubber stamping almost everything the administration has asked of it. It, as we've noted across the year, this is largely being done via the.

[Interviewer]

Shadow docket, which is the title of a book by Stephen Vladek, a University of Texas law professor. So it's an umbrella term that basically describes everything the Supreme Court does other than the 60 or so big merits rulings we get each term. That's the ones that we're used to seeing big headlines about. It's only about 1% of what the court does. 99% of the dispositive rulings the Supreme Court hands down, are these unsigned, unexplained orders. Most of them are anodyne, but increasingly a lot of them are not, which.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Doesn'T demand legal theory or accountability from the justices.

[Interviewer]

So In September of 2021, Justice Alito gave a speech at Notre Dame Law School where he says, oh, these aren't precedents. Well, the court has apparently changed its.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Mind and makes it nearly impossible for lower courts to have a sense of any body of law that they can use to rule going forward.

[Interviewer]

Way too often, the best predictor of who's going to win a shadow docket Application is the partisan valence of the dispute, where the justices seem to be siding with Trump policies, but against Biden policies, with red states but against blue states, where the absence of any explanation deprives us of any reason to feel confident that there are neutral principles here at work and not just political actors act.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And politically, we have covered case after case in which lower court judges are trying to uphold the best aspects of constitutional law and democracy, at times risking their lives. New Data from the U.S. marshals Service shows threats to federal judges in 2025 have already outpaced last year's numbers. Congress, as I mentioned, has caved completely to Trump failing to fulfill even the constitutional framers expectation that they could be relied on, if nothing else else, to ensure their own power as a branch of government. As a Republican, I am very disappointed in my party and I'm very disappointed in you, because you do have the power to call the House back. You did that or you refused to do that just for a show. I am begging you to pass this legislation. My kids could die. The elected opposition has a few members that have found productive ways to engage. But Democratic Party leadership is flailing in the face of relentless, relentless overreach from the executive branch.

[Interviewer]

If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm.

[Andrea Pitzer]

From the beginning. We've seen governors like J.B. pritzker and Maura Healey defying Trump on immigration. Others have stepped up intermittently. Donald Trump and his billionaire buddies are determined to take over this government to make it work better for themselves and worse for everyone else. We've seen local demonstrators push back in Chicago and in la, Some of the biggest days of protest in American history have been building slowly towards civic engagement that might be sustained enough to be a real force in ending the current regime. And this is just the start in terms of what to expect in the coming months. We should expect increased tension in the judiciary as lower courts hold the line.

[Interviewer]

I want to bring in Jan Crawford.

[Andrea Pitzer]

These guys who are in the Solicitor General's office and are filing these cases in the Supreme Court are very strategic. And so they're only bringing cases to the court that they think they, you know, on an emergency basis, that they think they may be able to win. The Supreme Court, now back in session, tries to allocate more and more discretionary power over state violence and punishment to the executive branch. You've got major cases involving President Trump and some of his policies. In addition to that, that you have a range of some of the most hot button social issue cases that the court now is going to confront. Trans rights, gun rights, a death penalty case, a campaign finance, a reform case, and a challenge to a key part of the Voting Rights Act. The courts have already been and will become more entrenched in a power struggle going forward. Oh, and we haven't even talked about birthright citizenship.

[Interviewer]

No, we haven't.

[Andrea Pitzer]

A power struggle has also already begun in the executive branch, though we only get glimpses of it. It a country that builds concentration camps, as we can clearly label the Everglades camp that the administration calls Alligator Alcatraz. To be a country that does that is a country that has embraced extrajudicial means. History is full of moments in which hindsight provides the only clear view. This is not one of them. Using these extrajudicial approaches shows that Trump can't quite get what he wants from the law as it currently stands. Governor DeSantis has proposed using National Guard, deputizing them as immigration judges to get through this massive backlog of people in the immigration court. Would you be open to that?

[Interviewer]

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

[Andrea Pitzer]

The current legal framework is often bad enough. The extra judicial component is always worse. The good news is that they will be. They are already in conflict with one another. There will be infighting between the officially legal branches and the more extrajudicial branches. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a puppet of a cohort that wants to use traditional tools, we can look at him that way.

[Interviewer]

This is why we're fighting the fake news media. This is why we're fighting slash and burn Democrats. This is why we're fighting hoaxters. Hoaxters.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Stephen Miller's power resides with the rapidly expanding extrajudicial forces of ICE with respect.

[Interviewer]

To the federalizing of the California national guard under Title 10 of the US Code. The President has plenary authority which have.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Been part of our system for some time, but which have become the rogue forces operating far outside the bounds of legality. Miller appears to have the most control right now, in part because Hegseth is incompetent. But as a minister without a truly high ranking post, he is vulnerable. But they won't be the only ones fighting. Trump is in decline.

[Interviewer]

I'm very careful, you know, when I walk downstairs, like I'm on stairs, like these stairs, I'm very. I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just try not to fall.

[Andrea Pitzer]

So the knives are probably out even more than they would be in any authoritarian enterprise. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is surely envisioning an expanding role for himself, and J.D. vance, though he is as hapless as Hegseth is the actual next person in line for the presidency.

[Interviewer]

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]

Every one of these men has surrendered any scruples long ago, and they will be jockeying for position. It will lead to some worse things for America, but also to many opportunities to derail the larger Trumpian agenda. When I met with survivors of torture and political repression in Argentina and other South American countries, I found that decades after dictatorship had ended, left and right remained a permanent fissure in the political landscape. Unlike countries that were defeated in war, such as Germany and Japan, there was no full reset of the government. The side that embraced dictatorship still believes more or less that they were right to do so. And my sense is that we have to assume that even if democracy survives in the US this is the future that we should expect for decades to come. We can appeal to a broad range of voters with a positive vision, but there is no simple way to convince people who have accepted authoritarianism to return to democracy. Expanding those in the democratic camp has to come through recruiting those weakly allied with power now, or those who have not engaged politically before. We can do that by offering a better future for everyone, not just for the 1%. On a broader level, we have to root out what I framed as the concentration camp tendency the desire to exclude those deemed endorsements undesirable from society and carry on as if they didn't exist. The attempt by government to isolate and remove targeted groups from the general population, to subject them to deliberate harm, punishment, isolation or death. It's the necklace threading through all the policies that are currently choking the country, and taking off one or two beads is not going to be enough to save us. We've covered this through looking at the administration's actions when it comes to homeless people. I wanted to talk with Brian Goldstone, an expert on this topic with a heartbreaking book called There is no Place for the Literal Physical Assault on cities with large black and Latino populations.

[Interviewer]

There's a reason why slavery was never outlawed in jails and prisons in America.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The act of slurring, harassment and denial of care, or even attempts to erase the existence of trans folk. This concentration camp tendency is larger than the current Trump era to talk about how it has played out in the past and how it's likely to play out now. I talked with Aaron Reichland Melnick.

[Interviewer]

I'm a senior fellow of the American Immigration Council on an immigrant rights nonprofit.

[Andrea Pitzer]

With politicians across the board demonizing immigrants and using immigrant detention as a political football for personal gain.

[Interviewer]

You see this all the time when people say things like, well, you've been in the country for 25 years, why didn't you get your citizenship already? Congress has affirmatively made it impossible for a person to do that.

[Andrea Pitzer]

We see it too in mayors and governors going out to performatively dismantle homeless encampments without consideration for the serious policies and approaches that are successful in reducing homelessness and its accompanying ills in five years.

[Interviewer]

We both created the program and halved the long term homelessness in Finland.

[Andrea Pitzer]

But the immediate crisis is Trump with what appears to be increasing physical incapacity from mobility issues to bruises and swelling.

[Interviewer]

One thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a president, but he would bop down those stairs. I've never said da da da da da da bop bop. He'd go down the stairs, wouldn't hold on. I said it's great, I don't want to do it. I guess I could do it. But eventually bad things are going to happen and it only takes once.

[Andrea Pitzer]

At 79 years of age, Trump has decent odds of dying in office. In an episode about what comes after Trump, I encourage people to think about and work towards something in the world that you would like to have in place when Trump is gone. What you choose might be an effort that you'll start knowing you will never see the end of it. It can be anything, a library, a school, something even smaller. But you can work on building that world now. Support those who are doing work you can't. To shore up democracy, we especially need to make sure that every immigrant charged has legal representation.

[Interviewer]

If you've got a law degree and you're interested in working on this, we have an opportunity, a whole mentorship process and training so that people can learn how to take cases and help people with bond or maybe with asylum or something else.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Use other existing organizations to help. You may already belong to one. The New York Bar association recently condemned the targeting of civilians in international waters by the administration.

[Interviewer]

There's a reason we don't allow we shouldn't allow our drug warriors to act as judge, jury and executioner. It's because they have made many, many, many tragic mistakes in the past and end up killing lots of civilians.

[Andrea Pitzer]

There are many such possibilities. Local organizations and actors can very much take on these roles and you can help. Mayor Brandon Johnson in Chicago just banned city property use for immigration enforcement. You can work on this exact project close to home. My name is Oliver Merino. I work at the Immigrant Legal Resource center and I live in Alexandria. We've addressed before how to get ICE out of your neighborhood. One of the things to understand is.

[Interviewer]

About mass deportations is it requires local collaboration.

[Andrea Pitzer]

So talk to your city council, talk to your mayor's office and ask what they're doing on these fronts. Organize meetings with officials to address local harms to vulnerable populations in your community. If you are a veteran or military adjacent, you can take a role in helping to stop the normalization of war actions inside US borders through peer to peer education or simply by tying service members more deeply into a civilian community. We see grand juries refusing to indict. We've seen Sandwich Guy in DC taking public action that inspired millions. Frog Guy in Portland went toe to toe with ICE and made them back up. Not every story is one of easy defiance. We saw. We saw Marimar Martinez shot repeatedly while protesting ICE in Chicago.

[Interviewer]

We're getting more details about a controversial incident involving ICE agents, two civilians, and what Homeland Security says was obstructing. But new information and inconsistencies are making people question the government's version of what happened.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Not everyone will want to take these kinds of risks, but the rest of us can spread the word of how ICE lies about these encounters, which in turn reinforces jury skepticism and judges decisions. Going forward, most gatherings are still more rallies than confrontation, so your risk really is pretty small. On October 18, you can join what is likely to be millions of Americans who will turn out for no Kings events across the country. In the days prior to that, no Kings will be holding virtual training sessions, some in English, some in Spanish. It is critical that we continue to build a politically engaged country in order to create a visible opposition to Trump. Outside of the groups directly targeted with violence today, public apathy is a greater danger to the country than actual oppression in this moment. I've said it a dozen times in the last year that one of the biggest differences between the US and the countries that I've studied that fell to authoritarianism is how free most of us still are. For now, we are singularly poised to act in ways that most citizens and residents of other countries mired in hardening authoritarianism were not. Which again is not to say there are no risks. But on a day to day basis, most of us are able to speak without fear of arrest or detention. We can gather without the likelihood of bodily harm, and we need to speak out as loudly and as often as possible to check the power that the President is trying to grab. Every time we do so, we throw more sand in the gears of his attempts to clamp down. We can absolutely do this, but we will have to overcome seeing democracy as a spectator sport in order to salvage the best of what America has been and to create a new and better country. I want to say thank you to Jason Sattler, also known on social media as LOL gop, who has partnered with me since the election to produce this podcast. Thank you to the many people who have talked to me for the newsletter or who have have appeared on the podcast itself. And thank you to the paying subscribers who make it possible for me to let everyone have access to the posts and episodes. I hope you'll continue to support my work going forward. Don't forget if you are a paying subscriber to send in your questions to nextcomeswhatmail.com and we will do that special episode. And if you are not yet a paying subscriber to generate art, you can find a subscription link in the second paragraph on the [e-mail] 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 [e-mail] and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts.