← Next Comes What
Next Comes What
Time to Act — Fighting Ignorance While We Still Can
00:29:51
The dismantling of our government has begun, which means fighting ignorance is critical. All of us are due for some education. Read the post that inspired this episode: Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art newsletter to support Next Comes...
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
Andrea Pitzer
You're listening to. Next comes what from Degenerate Art. This is Andrea Pitzer. Each week we'll look at one aspect of authoritarianism to figure out how we got where we are and how to fight back. Last week I talked about protest and why people who can do it with little or no risk right now should start doing it. This week, I want to discuss another important mode of defying Donald Trump's and Elon Musk's attempts to decimate the federal government. Education. We've all been cheering on the courts, and on the whole, the courts are trying Some breaking news. A federal judge has handed yet another blow to the Trump administration, this one regarding the military. A judge blocking enforcement of Trump's executive order, which would block transgender people from serving in the military, saying that the president's order likely violates their constitutional rights. The official ruling has been delayed till Friday to give the administration time to appeal. Trump apparatchik attorneys are making command performances before judges like limp bass getting hauled out of the river. Judge James Boasberg scolded the DOJ for failing to answer questions about the deportations. But as the government fails to follow court orders, more and more will fall on the courts in terms of enforcement, which traditionally hasn't been its main role. President Trump posted on social media calling for the judge to be impeached. Now Chief Justice John Roberts is responding. Justices normally stay out of anything remotely political. So how significant is it to hear from the chief justice on this? Let's not forget that until recent times, it was also highly unusual for presidents to attack sitting judges hearing cases involving them. But of course, Donald Trump has made that the norm. There will be no ideal or consistent way to navigate this part of the crisis for us. For everyday people, the moral to be drawn from this dangerous, nightmare situation is a simple one. Don't let it happen. It's not yet clear what will happen when more enforcement is necessary or when more cases get to the Supreme Court. I think anyone who is claiming 100% certainty of how it will all go is really foolish. But it's true that the current Supreme Court seems unlikely to uphold democracy as the governing system and any number of rulings that might come down the pike in the next year. I think that MAGA has thought this through, the Heritage foundation has thought this through, and they basically concluded, we think the Supreme Court will be compliant enough that we can get away with murder, virtually, literally. And of course, along with the judicial Crisis, we have DoGE attacks, dismantling federal programs and even going beyond offices that are supposed to be under Trump's control. There's the recent memo that suggests phone assistance with Social Security will be decimated or abolished, along with many local offices. What would your life look like for one day without Social Security? If you don't know the answer to that question, Social Security Administration employee and union member Christine Lazott wants you to hear about some of the people she serves every day. It is the preemie babies who most people don't realize that if a baby is born prematurely while they're in the hospital, they can receive Social Security benefits, which also make them eligible for Medicaid benefits. It is the child who's in elementary school whose parent just died, and now they receive survivor benefits so that they're not impoverished overnight. It is every aspect of your life from when you're born to when you get married to when your husband of 50 years dies and I get to hold your hand and pass the tissues. Unionized Social Security workers say Doge plans to cut as much as 50% from Social Security administrative staff, which will likely delay payments to American people. There's what appears to be a DOGE break in at the US Institute for Peace, which is not even part of the executive branch. Now, to be clear, there will be victories like the 25,000 federal employees that Chris Geidner reported have been returned to their jobs last week because of court actions. The Trump administration, in court filings, has for the first time acknowledged that IT fired nearly 25,000 recently hired workers and said agencies were working to bring all of them back after a judge ruled that their terminations were likely illegal. But with Trump's ongoing defiance, my sense is that we are going to have a lot to be mad about on an ongoing basis. And today I want to talk about what to do with the energy from that anger. It depends on you. So I'm not a social media superstar, you know, but I have a few 10,000 followers, and sometimes I post on social media and I get dozens of replies like Nazi bitch or worse. Not even aimed at me, but referring to somebody I've mentioned, somebody who's working for Donald Trump. People write about how they'd like to see this or that administration official raped or sent to a gulag. This happens often enough that I'm seriously not trying to shame anyone in particular. But it does make me wonder what use people think it is to be outraged enough to inject that stuff into the collective information sphere. If it relaxes you to spend a lot of your free time posting insults about Trump stooges in people's replies. I don't understand you, but I won't try to convince you to do otherwise. If, however, you find yourself stressed out and exhausted by ongoing social media exchanges like this, I'd like to propose another path. Outside of a few revved up electeds, the Democrats on Capitol Hill are struggling with how to respond right now. We can and we should continue to push them. It's right for us to expect them to play their constitutional role. But neither the courts nor the folks on Capitol Hill can do a good chunk of the work that needs to be done right now, especially with Trump toadies blocking them. America elected Trump and many of the people who voted for him did so for reprehensible reasons, but many did not fully understand what would happen. I was voting for him based off of the economy the first time around, and I'm seeing a significant decline. Many more who didn't vote at all still have no idea what's coming. My medication, it runs $20,000 a month. Without insurance, I make $800 a month. Oh, that will kill me. That would kill my friends. That would kill millions of people in this country if they lose their health care. However you feel about those people, the non voters and the soon to be alienated Trump supporters, they have one thing in common and it's something that you can help fix on a grassroots level. Ignorance. Another issue to keep in mind is that, as international relations professor Nicholas Grossman pointed out in December, college freshmen today were six years old in the 2012 election. Anne was born at Henry Ford Hospital. I was born at Harper Hospital. No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised. Many eligible voters have lived only in an era in which Trump dominated politics. Maybe they have a few memories of Obama's second term, but they don't have much more. For context, not the Tea Party or the Iraq War, let alone nine, eleven or Watergate. Their entire political awareness is from the era in which Trump has owned our political system. I love women, but this guy, this guy, this is a guy that was old man. This man was strong and tough and I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there. They said, oh my God. They have a similar kind of ignorance as the non voters. But they will never have known a national system or a home community that was not divided over a demagogue. Trump is an aberration in terms of degree when it comes to his lawlessness. While Also being a direct outcome of the American political trajectory since Richard Nixon's arrival on the scene. I come before you tonight as a candidate for the vice presidency and as a man whose honesty and integrity has been questioned or maybe before. We'll just, we'll pause there for today. Trump has deep personal roots with reactionary American figures like Roy Cohn. Mr. Cohn is a person who thinks very little of truth but much of genuineness. He's a master of deception and yet a detester of ceremony. A nice guy who's done and does some lousy things. A protector, a paladin, a friend in court of organized crime. Roy Cohn is not an enigma. He's simply a man who is seen differently by different people. If you engaged in amateur analysis, you might say that Roy Cohn was the kid on the block that all the bullies beat up on. And so when Roy Marcus Cohn was growing up, he was determined to get rich and get even. And he has. He also evolved as a creature inside that landscape. And to be clear, the kids often have more political sense than their elders. Unlike boomers and Gen X, my generation, Generation Z voters went for Harris over Trump, as did millennials to a lesser degree. But as old people, we might still have a role in even a responsibility to demonstrate a different kind of society than we currently have. We can show a different model to the kids that have grown up not knowing any dominant political presence. But Trump and I do not want to fetishize some mystical past. Parts of what has already been lost we cannot get back. One area that Donald Trump and his appointees have been particularly keen to cut has been scientific research that has sparked fears of wide ranging harm to healthcare, climate protection and food safety. The US Government is destroying its capacity to do good things in ways that won't be easy to revive. But we need to hold on to the reality of ways that we've worked together in the past and the real legacy of our history. Dartmouth Professor Jeff Charlotte has mentioned that he teaches students to name and record what is lost. If you don't know what you've lost, then you may not even know how to re establish the parts of society worth keeping. You can lose sight of what's possible. So what did I mean then by saying today's episode is about education? It's our job to speak honestly about what's happening. The shouty voice and jokes about Trump administration officials being the products of incest aren't going to work in this space. I did a whole episode on the quiet voice and how to use it. Doing education is the kind of place where that will be more useful. But you might even need to step further back than that to do the real work of education. Because unless you're already a member of a vulnerable community, it might not be time to come in with a quiet voice to explain things to that community. It might be time to pitch in and help build up that group in some way, and to listen. If you are already an expert on one of our broken systems, maybe you're a retired Social Security worker. Congratulations. You're going to be critical to helping keep people informed and safe. We might need you to lead an initiative right out of the box, but honestly, there are going to have to be a lot of community level leaders who, and many of them won't yet have the background that they're going to need to really step up. And that's not to discourage you at all. I'm just saying it's okay to make mistakes at first. In fact, you're almost guaranteed to. You should take action anyway. And it's true that in its simplest form, education can accompany the very kinds of protests I mentioned last week. As I said then, handing out flyers at a Tesla protest, or putting out stickers that mirror the catchphrases or memes related to a protest. As long as they're comprehensible to the general public, those things can all be great. But there's a deeper kind of education that's necessary. There are a lot of people already harmed by what the Trump administration is doing, and a lot more that are going to be harmed going forward by the previously unsteady and now collapsing safety net. These people are going to be from all walks of life, and connecting with them is a key way to build a movement. This is not just about volunteering or giving a handout, though. Both these things can play important roles. And it's definitely not just giving a lecture about the orange turd or telling people they deserve what they're getting if they voted for Trump. For a lot of people, it's about finding out what their neighbors actually need and working on a kind of mutual support with a deep understanding that we are all in jeopardy right now. It's about building a society that cares about people across the board. This is the thing I'm concerned about. Let us fight passionately and unrelentingly for the goals of justice and freedom. Let's be sure that our hands are clean in the struggle. Let us never fight with falsehood and violence, violence and hate and malice, but always fight with love by now I hope everyone is tired of the New York Times diner profile approach to Trump voters. So please know that I am not encouraging you to locate some Trump voter and spend the next year trying to explore or shift their political views or, God forbid, to accept and validate bigotry in any way. Still, blaming Trump voters for what they brought on themselves when many of them have been bathed in propaganda for decades is a step down the path to the kind of rhetoric that ends up blaming individual users for the opioid crisis, or blaming sexual assault on a woman who got drunk on a date and went home with a guy. It bothers me when people like Elon Musk say that people on those programs are the parasite class. The penalty for bad choices should not be sexual assault or death or the dismantling of a country. Instead, I'm suggesting you look around your community and just see what the needs are. You can focus on a group that's particularly maligned by the president and his allies, but you could also proceed without necessarily applying a political lens to who is suffering. Go to findhelp.org or look online at local services and see who is already working in your area on an issue that matters to you. Plug into that initiative so that you can understand what's critical to the affected community. As our civic society crumbles, we have to reimagine it and reinvent it real time. Reading the news can help you stay informed and understand what's going on, but shouting about national metanarratives from the political realm on social media will not fix anything. If you need to do that for catharsis, fine. But I suggest using some of that time or energy elsewhere. If you don't find a listing for the thing that you think would be neat to do or the thing that matters to you, you can just start doing it yourself. No diaper bank nearby. Start one, even in a small way, handy with tools. Teach neighborhood teens woodworking skills the more integrated the project is with the population it serves, the better. The more integrated you are with the population involved, the better the better. The more it can be people helping one another about developing peer educators from those who already have some skills or can be taught them easily. Even better. Many of these things will hinge on your being willing to be educated yourself. This helps everyone, all of us moving forward. I suspect some areas under strain are going to crack in big ways. Food insecurity will loom larger. We're going to need more basic health care that can be provided through community clinics and the role of libraries as community centers will need shoring up. An executive order issued by President Trump will eliminate the federal agency, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, also known as IMLS. The agency supports libraries and museums across the U.S. this library, for people who are blind or limited in their vision, is one of them. IMLS supports many other libraries across the states. I'm going to argue that every library is going to be impacted. There are 60 systems and about 400 actually individual ones. And I think we touch everyone in some manner. If you're a vet, you could help work on the crises that will be exacerbated by a diminished Veterans Affairs Department or on the psychological toll this abandonment will take on vets. The Trump administration says the goal is to terminate about 80,000 employees from the VA department. Tell veterans we're going to fire up to another 80,000 people who work for the VA. You're telling them that it's already hard to get care. Now it's going to be much harder. This could be a path on educating them, on not taking unlawful or immoral orders somewhere down the road. But in the meantime, there's groundwork that has to be laid. Anyone can, with some training themselves, help people navigate increasingly frustrating bureaucracies. Seniors are going to need help getting their Social Security benefits. Disabled folks are even more likely to have new obstacles to getting assistance. The abandonment of trans people by American elected officials on both sides of the aisle has been shocking. There are a lot of avenues and a lot of needs to support trans youth. In particular, undocumented immigrants are literally being hunted by law enforcement. Even those with green cards are being deported without warning. There are a million ways to help on the immigration front. See what programs are being cut in your community and build a society you want to see on the other side of this current disaster. What does that have to do with education? A lot. There will be obvious ways to do political outreach in a community once you understand its actual needs. If it's a community that you're part of, you may have a special role in doing that. If it's not a community that you're part of, then education is very much a two way street. We're going to have to be willing to stand for principles that guarantee everyone's humanity while being willing to be changed ourselves by this process. I wish we could get the Easter without going to Good Friday, but history tells us that we got to go by Good Friday before we can get to Easter. That's the long story of freedom, isn't it? But I'm making this sound bigger and more dramatic than it will feel. A lot of what needs to happen is grunt work. Just start volunteering somewhere in your community as soon as possible on an issue that matters to you. It doesn't have to be your full time job. Just go once or twice a week, or even once or twice a month. See what additional holes need to be filled, see what things aren't being done that could be. Again, you're going to be educating yourself as much or more than you're educating anyone about politics. Those of you who followed this podcast since last November may have noticed that I go lighter on some of the historical examples these days. For post episodes, I'll still offer some stories from authoritarian countries and different eras from history, but on other days like today, I'll focus less on historical examples that show us where we're headed, if only because the administration is catching up to key elements of what I and many other people have been saying Trump would do in a second term. It's become less difficult for most people who read the news to understand what an authoritarian United States would look like. We are encouraging illegal immigrants to actively self deport to maybe save themselves from being in one of these fun videos. But I know many people are still somewhat baffled by what they're seeing and have questions. So I want to take two questions that came in last week and answer them for everyone. And keep in mind that you can send questions regularly, whenever you think of them, to nextcomeswhatmail.com and I will answer some of the ones that fit with the week's theme or that several people ask about for today. One person wrote to ask about using Elon Musk's Hitler salute as a meme to mock him, and they wondered about spreading that image around and normalizing the siege Heil. And I think this is one of those things where people will differ, and that's okay. As someone who wrote a global history of concentration camps, I personally would not use that image. I wouldn't necessarily expect the staff of any Holocaust museum around the world to do it either. At the same time, I've seen clever uses of it. I'd say the absolute pinnacle was the Nazi salute. That, you know, of course, has become very infamous now. But at that point there was no turning back. Please don't buy a Tesla. Off the top of my head, there's the one that incorporates the arm from the salute into Tesla's declining sales graph, for instance, in a way that links his gesture to his failure to the collapse of his financial empire. That's underway. It's such a historically charged gesture. I would definitely pause to think twice about whether there's a reason beyond the shock of the obscene to use it. But I wouldn't argue that it could never be used. Mockery has an important place in diminishing self appointed gods and tyrants. I think the important thing is to not normalize it or glorify it, attach it to failure. I support Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency. Another person wrote in to ask about protests in a country as geographically vast as the US in terms of some of the examples I gave, and the big really recent one, of course, is South Korea. It's a little bit easier to have a mass protest movement rise up and have an impact when you have a smaller country where populations are more concentrated around just a couple or three key cities. And I don't have time to go into this deeply today, and I do intend to in a future episode, but for now I'll note that the vast size of the country is exactly why the Tesla Takedown protests that we highlighted last week are so ideal. This is the fifth week Robert Campbell has organized a protest in front of this dealership. It's part of a network of protests across the country, Tesla Takedown with the goal of ending Elon Musk's involvement with the Trump administration. Only way we can do that, unfortunately, since Elon Musk isn't elected, is by coming out here and protesting and boycotting. They create a national movement on a local level and it has a real effect. And so I would encourage you to think of other businesses or programs that have a presence across the country and which ones deserve targeting and how best to do that. As Christians across the country and around the world mark the start of lend, many observers give up things like sweets or vices or bad habits. But one prominent Georgia pastor is calling for a different type of fast, and that is to not shop at Target for the next 40 days. The move is in response to the retail giant's decision to revoke its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives after President Trump ordered DEI to be removed from federal agencies and after a Supreme Court ruling related to the topic. I will talk in that later episode about the possibility and ways of creating mass demonstrations in Washington, D.C. and or New York and maybe some other coastal cities. People gathered outside of the Social Security office in Reno to protest the Trump administration's efforts to cut back the federal workforce. But I don't think we even have to have a firm theory of how to do that yet to be nursing an incipient movement on this local level that nonetheless has a national identity that people can feel like they're being part of. Lastly, today I want to take on three pithy sayings you've surely heard referenced in recent months or years, but I want to try to ask you to think about them in a new way. The first one is do not obey in advance from Timothy Snyder. Next is Martin Niemoller's famous quote, then they came for the socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a true unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak up because I was not a Jew. And then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me. The last saying I want to address is Audre Lorde's statement, your silence will not protect you. So first, the Snyder phrase about obeying Obeying has its own gathering momentum in societies on the brink of, or even shifting into authoritarianism. But disobedience also develops its own counter momentum. Addressing the Niemuller, I'd say that because Martin Niemoller was a pastor, it often gets read as a moral cry to do the right thing. And as for Audre Lorde, the sentence before her most famous one is also useful to read alongside it My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. These three quotes are often read ominously, and they can feel like threats, like speak up or else you're in for it. But I want to say this is not some future threat that we're assessing. The threat is already here. So to turn these lines on their heads just a little, I'll suggest that these words aren't only, as they often get used, an abstract moral argument about complicity or responsibility. I would like to read them today as strategic statements. They are the keys for how to stop what's already happening right now. They are people speaking from the aftermath of the kind of harm the government is trying to unleash today. People who have studied or lived the other side of a society that botched it for everyone or for some vulnerable part of the population. In this moment, these lines aren't cautionary. They are calling to us. They are saying there is still time. Speak up. Go do something. And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this mess. To support this podcast, please subscribe@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts.