Andrea Pitzer (0:00)

You're listening to Next comes what from Degenerate Art. This is Andrea Pitzer. With over a month to go before Trump returns to office. A lot of people are writing to me or talking to me in person, and they're saying that they don't know what's going to happen. Well, we're going to do something with the border and very strong, very powerful. That'll be our first signal and first signal to America that we're not playing games. They're afraid of the threats against immigrant families, undocumented citizens and US Citizens alike. You promised to end birthright citizenship on day one. Is that still your plan? Yeah, absolutely. They're worried about trans kids. Frankly, the Democrats should have used some of it because they went, you know, with all the transgender that they were doing or with the men playing in women's sports, if they wouldn't have done that, maybe they would have done better. Well, they're worried about a rollback on civil rights for black people and LGBTQ plus folks and a lot more populations. To people who see, oh, he's bringing in all of these people from Project 2025. He must know what it is. Well, I don't know what it is. No, I don't know what it is. You still don't know. But I heard certain things that I didn't like. And by the way, I heard certain things that are phenomenal though this clown car of ambitious apparatchiks. I wish you could be a, if you, you know, that are arriving with Trump for round two, you have such potential. If you could be just, just non biased. They have definitely identified some targets. You hurt yourself so badly, but it's hard to be sure exactly how far they'll be able to take things. So no more family separations. You're not reviving. Depends on the family or how best to trip them up. I'm the chief law enforcement officer. You do know that I spoke last week at an event in Roanoke that I'll talk more about later, and one person asked me to go through the worst case scenarios of what a Trump administration could look like this time out, based on the history of other places where, you know, democracy had run into trouble, places that I'd studied. Well, one of the places that you mention in the book, and which of course is in the news now, is Burma and the Rohingya camps there. So can you talk about what you found when you were there in 2015? When I went, it was just two weeks after Donald Trump had declared his candidacy and no one was taking him seriously at that point. But the rhetoric he was using already about Muslims, about Latinos, was exactly the rhetoric that I heard when I landed in situ, which is on the western coast of Myanmar and is the capital of Rakhine State, where these Rohingya camps are located. And it was kind of unsettling to me at that time to not so clearly that this kind of rhetoric is really a universal rhetoric. And the brakes on it seem to be how strong are the institutions in a given place. And I touched briefly on a few small things, but I really encouraged everyone to think about how to take action. I don't want to be here just scaring you instead of spending a lot of energy trying to picture the absolute worst outcomes that we could come to in the US like, we're right at the edge of this, right? But we are not like Nazi Germany. We see these echoes of it that are extremely disturbing. We see the power Trump has, which is also super, super disturbing. He's going to come into office with more power than probably any individual in the history of the world. But we have all this knowledge, we have all this ability to communicate with each other as well. And it is not going to be a short term prospect for all of us to be facing the kinds of conditions that you're most worried about facing. Don't give that up. Don't surrender it before it's even taken. Right. It's necessary to ponder these things enough to know what direction you want to go. But it's just as important not to drown yourself in despair and paralysis. This is a government of the people, right? So we have to act like we mean it. Today I want to talk about some organizing that people did under repression and authoritarian regimes around the world. And some of their actions were planned, some were improvised, and a lot of them were carried out in very difficult straits. Then I want to tell you about a project that one person in Virginia, the state where I live, that she put together in the months since the election. So just in these last few weeks, it's a community that I love to be a part of, and I love it here that you can't go anywhere and not meet somebody that knows somebody that you miss. And at the end, I want to offer some thoughts on the kind of things just about everyone might be able to do right now, before the new year even starts. You've got to help us, Doc. We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas. The examples I'll give are situations in which everyday people have been caught up in Circumstances in which they had not a lot of time to prepare or respond. They also had little on their side at the time in terms of legal and governmental protections being enforced. But they responded collectively in ways that demonstrated their power, drew attention to injustices, and in some cases, got changes made. The first one is a small but powerful kind of organizing in Chile after the military coup that brought Pinochet to power in 1973, the moment that changed Chile forever. The presidential palace in Santiago, La Moneda, under attack. The video footage, an indispensable witness to the military coup in 1973 overthrowing the government of Socialist President Salvador Allende. Thousands of citizens were disappeared or killed. That coup led to a military dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet that lasted 17 years. Under that regime, thousands of opposition supporters were persecuted, tortured and killed by the army. Under dictatorship, women were encouraged to keep very traditional gender roles. How to become a traditional wife? Focus on domestic issues. Number one, embracing ultra traditional gender roles into your marriage. And just to stay out of politics. The man, he is the provider. The main breadwinner, he goes out of the house and works. The woman, the wife, she is the homemaker. She takes care of the home, she takes care of herself, and she does the cooking and the cleaning. They began to meet in sewing and craft groups called arpegillas, and those groups turned into grassroots pro democracy groups. In the context of the dictatorship, this technique became a way for people to process their pain and their grief in a time when there was a great risk of censorship and retribution for speaking out. They made tapestries, which is where the name Arperias comes from. And those tapestries typically illustrated political repression itself. Around the middle ground, we find an empty seat with a question mark on it, referencing the person that has disappeared, taken by the state, and then they were smuggled out of the country and sold abroad, which helped these women and their families survive. They were empowered to say, I'm not commenting on the politics, but as a mother, where is my son? As a sister, where is my brother? Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Santiago tried to protect human rights and organize against the government, which was quite a radical stance in that moment. He eventually asked Pope Paul VI to help a religious human rights organization, the Vicaria de la Solidaridad. The Vicariate of Solidarity was established sort of under the Pope's auspices, which made it harder to reject and to use this politics of care to go out in the streets and protest and to speak openly. And this group tracked detentions. It helped with legal defense, and also fed and supported the poor during some of the most brutal years of suffering, more women got involved who were not necessarily directly impacted by the death of a loved one or the disappearance of a loved one, but who were nevertheless concerned with what was happening. When I was in Chile, I met with Aide Oberreiter, who had been a young member of Chile's left wing party mapu when the General seized power. Aide, her mother and her daughter had been held in various locations and tortured under the dictatorship. She talked to me about her time at Tres Alamos concentration camp, where the Vicariate of Solidarity, this religious group, actually managed to get a sewing machine into the camp for use by the women there. And they were able to make crafts that, like the productions of the Arperias, could be smuggled out and sold to support those women who were in detention, to support their families while they were detained. It's amazing what this kind of organization and resilience can do, even under pretty severe circumstances. So that's the first example, which I absolutely love. The next example is even more dramatic. A system of imprisonment, murder and forced labor. The Russian author of political dissident Alexander Solhetsyn, famously dubbed the Gulag Archipelago. It takes place in the Arctic mining camps of the Soviet Gulag in 1952. It was a system, Solzhenitsyn said, of perpetual motion, which swept up the lives of the rich and poor between 1918 and 1956, leaving millions of corpses and shattered lives in its wake. After guards had opened fire, machine gunning some prisoners at Ekibastuz, all the prisoners refused to work. The next day, in the middle of a concentration camp, they went on strike. Lenin himself actually uses the term concentration camp and talks about the need to put the enemies of the revolution into concentration camps. They also launched a hunger strike. And both efforts went on for five days until their demands were agreed to. Now they still understood they were in the Gulag and they realized that eventually they were going to be punished. And in fact, in time, Gulag officials ended up splitting up. All these prisoners who had organized in Solidarity, broke up that group and shipped them off to other camps. In his book, Death and Redemption is the name of the book. The Gulag and the Shaping of Modern Society is the subtitle. Professor Stephen Barnes, George Mason University, is the author. Barnes explains that this shipping them out to these different camps is what actually launched a wave of strikes across the Soviet Gulag. Solzhenitsyn devotes an entire chapter to it called the 40 Days of Kingir. And these prisoners managed to kick the guards and the Gulag administration out of this camp zone and hold this camp zone over the course of 40 days. It had this unintended consequence, bringing resistance to the minds of even one of the most brutal camps of the gulag, Vorkuta, high in the Russian Arctic. Until then, the camp's incredible remoteness, some favorable conditions, such as relatively good food and entertainment, such as films and newspapers, had kept the camps from unrailing. Prisoners who did cause trouble could be sent to the ball, a prison within Borkuta that was unheeded. Virgil death sentence this was the real legacy of their organizing, was not just what they accomplished in those five days, but actually affecting the conditions and resilience of people in detention in the Soviet gulag in this incredibly bitter landscape. The third overseas example that I want to talk about today is very recent. It's civilian protests in Myanmar's Kachin state in 2023. Myanmar as a country has been under authoritarian rule by military junta for most of its history, since gaining independence from Britain in 1948. I was in western Myanmar in 2015 going into detention camps that held Rohingya Muslims. I went to see the camps. I went to Yangon and then I went to Sitwe, which I'll talk about in another episode. And when I was there, it was during a transition time away from dictatorship. It was right before the big elections were held. But in 2021, a few years later, the generals staged a coup to regain power and the country erupted in civil war, which it's still in now. The background is complicated, but the country's transition to democracy was cut short three years ago by a military coup, with the elected government led by the Nobel Peace prize laureate Aung San SUU Kyi being ousted. People took to the streets in protest, but were met with a brutal crackdown. Many took up arms instead. And in October, several disparate rebel groups united, forming a single nationwide insurgency which has made big gains conquering large swathes of territory. Heavy rare earth elements that are used in electric vehicles and wind turbines are mined in northern Myanmar. And Kachin state is where most of them come from. Because of the new regulations, it's difficult to do that mining in China, or at least to do it profitably. And so Myanmar is right across the border. There are also abundant reserves. These dirty industries are being exported to Myanmar, and then the materials come back to China. It's a billion dollar industry. And Myanmar's civilian government in 2018, before this recent coup happened, outlawed this mining. And for almost as long as Myanmar has been under military dictatorship, the Kachin independence Army has been fighting the dictatorship. Some mines in Kachin State are in areas under control of the dictatorship. Some are in regions controlled by the Kachin resistance. And in either case, Chinese companies extract materials causing tremendous harm to the environment and to residents on the effects of mining. One resident of Kachin State has said, there are no longer fish in the waters. When the animals drink the water, they die. It will burn the soil. It is environmentally, it's a disaster. So in 2023, in the middle of a civil war, against the wishes of both the local independence army and the federal dictatorship, a militia leader threatened to kill those who opposed the mining. More than a thousand villagers gathered to protest this mining and its effects on the community. For a time, they actually forced a halt to mining operations in some regions altogether. And their resistance has pressured the independence leadership to confront Chinese mining companies and is shifting the very nature of the geopolitics in the region. Now, these three cases may feel like an odd assortment to consider, but I wanted a wide range of examples to show how even in the worst circumstances, everyday people can come together to consolidate their power and push to make things better. And I'll note that though the settings for these actions are civil war and concentration camps, all three examples have to do with labor rights or exploitative bosses and corporations in some. As always, of course, America has its own history of repression, and so I want to give you some extraordinary examples from right here in the U.S. lately, we've heard Trump allies praising a vicious racist deportation campaign against immigrants undertaken by eisenhower in the 1950s. But historians who've studied Eisenhower's deportation operation have concluded it was rife with civil rights violations and far from a success. Of course, racist immigrant policies have been a mainstay of US politics for more than a century. One particular example from 1931 is known as the Lemon Grove Incident. And it's worth pointing out here in some detail here in Lemon Grove. It was. The Lemon Grove Grammar School was not segregated at the time in the 1930s. Some families in Lemon Grove and San Diego county at that time were Mexican. And in the wake of the economic hardship of the Great Depression, anti immigrant sentiment had been on the rise and had really been capitalized on for political ends. The social environment, you know, the discrimination during the 1930s towards Mexicans prompted the school board to segregate the Mexican kids from the Anglo kids. Following claims about Mexicans being unassimilable and alien. What were called Americanization schools were launched as a way, a kind of a fig leaf, to create a more hostile Environment for Mexican immigrant families and to introduce segregation in ways that hadn't existed in a lot of school districts. They built a school, which they called a school. The Mexican family was in a community called caballerosa, for the barnyard, the barn. And it was a wooden building that was built on the Mexican side of the tracks. Returning from Christmas vacation that year, the Mexican American children of lemon grove, the overwhelming majority of whom were US Citizens, returned to school, only to be intercepted by their principal, who sent them to a different building for separate instruction. The children instead went home and they told their parents what had happened. Now, the parents had no prior warning or time to plan, but they told their children not to go to the segregated building for classes. Basically, the parents called a strike, a welga against the school. They were not going to the old to the new school, quote, unquote, the barn. They came together and formed a comite de vecinos, a neighborhood association, maybe the only good HOA ever, right? And they brought a lawsuit. Parents, they just reacted in the moment and organized as best they could. But their efforts ended up resulting in one of the earliest cases of successfully fighting classroom Segregation in the U.S. san Diego Judge Claude Chambers ruled in favor of the parents committee. The case was won because in the state of California at the time, it was illegal to segregate white kids, right? And Mexicans were considered white at the time. But ironically, the school board's failure to appeal the case to a higher court, honestly, a court where they might have prevailed in that day and age, led to this history being largely forgotten. And yet it's a landmark moment of just very local, very neighborhood oriented resistance. And it was successful. More than a century before the lemon grove incident, Elizabeth Freeman, an enslaved woman then known as mumbet, brought a court case in Massachusetts. Her master, who was a judge, had been involved in writing the 1773 Sheffield Declaration, which was a statement of grievances by the colonists against British rule. And in that document, there was a line that, heard many times, it reads, mankind in a state of nature are equal, free and independent of each other, and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property. The same rhetoric would soon appear in the declaration of independence and then, a little later, the constitution of Massachusetts. In 1780, Colonel John Ashley is where she had been purchased by him when she was a child and had served him up until she was almost 40 years old. And in that household, she, her sister and her daughter were dwelling. When Mrs. Ashley gave a command to her sister, she disobeyed she took a hot iron out of the fire to strike her. Mombet intervened and had a mark on her for the rest of her life. It is at that moment the phrase all born free and equal is pushing her to not only dismiss herself from this household and run away, but she also then asks a anti slavery lawyer, Theodore Sedgwick, who has been meeting to draft that document on the basis of all born free and equal, aren't I to be free? Their struggle 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 and went to work for Sedgwick, later buying her own house and living a life of freedom and independence. This is just a case of two people in a suppressive situation, but I think it's worth mentioning because there was a solidarity in the two people and then there's the solidarity in bringing the lawyer in. And I think sometimes feel like people feel like if they can't generate a widespread movement, then there's no point in doing anything. But those big widespread movements, like the strike movements in the Soviet Gulag, are critical. And change also can come, sometimes just through two or three people with a motivated, targeted action that they're doing. So that's one of the reasons I like this example much more recently. Less than a decade ago, there were protests over the Dakota Access pipeline. And amid reports that the U.S. army Corps of Engineers had moved the route of the pipeline away from Bismarck, the state capital of North Dakota, for fear that any kind of spill might contaminate the capital city drinking water, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe asserted treaty rights to bar the pipeline being routed through their territory on the same grounds, which is they didn't want their water contaminated either. If it wasn't for Facebook or social media, then nobody would know about our story. The company building the pipeline dug through areas delineated as ancestral burial grounds. On November 2, Sempuwali 20 went live on Facebook to urge participation in a prayerful river action. Everybody's good, though. Everybody's in prayer, though. We got a. We got a couple actions going on. One by the bridge, one by the river, so that he and fellow Standing Rock activists could cross a creek to reach sacred Native land. You feel it. You feel the tension. What are you doing? Your water is under attack. Stand up. Fight back. Private security guards unleashed dogs on protesters. They went in there and they beat up a lot of relatives. We had grandmothers there. They shoved their grandmothers around. They dragged their grandmothers around. The protesters did have some early wins, but eventually the Trump administration gave an easement for pipeline construction. After court challenges, that easement was revoked, but the pipeline was allowed to stay in operation while an environmental impact statement was prepared. This in between state means that on a technical level, the pipeline is not operating legally, leaving it vulnerable to future challenges. Though these challenges may be unlikely to succeed in the coming Trump administration, just as they were ignored under the Biden administration that we're in currently. Yet these protesters raised awareness nationally of the cruel and petty treatment of Native Americans, denied even sovereignty on reservations. More than 200,000 people have watched Isha Hofer's live video from October 27th. We have our cameras in our prayers. That's all we have. It is because of social media that this movement has grown. They were forced to accept accept reservations which have been diminished and disturbed again and again. This is a history because they brought it to light. These protesters, it won't be forgotten. And the work that they've done has left the door open to possibilities of future progress. And in each of these cases, foreign and domestic people were confronted with a danger in a vulnerable moment and found a way to resist. In some cases, the way they organized led to clear victories. In other cases, they brought attention to something that would have happened invisibly even where harm could not be fully stopped. The people who organized laid down a marker and they prepared a true history and preserved it. Those histories can still be used to educate today and in the future, and they may in fact, help prevent future harm. So I think these are a good guidebook to how we can think about the next four years. Some of these stories may feel far away or distant in time. It might still be hard to think about what to work on before the looming threats and actions are taken by the Trump team the second time out. So I have an example of something from the last month to share with you, and it's just the kind of thing that a lot of us could do. Like you, I was trying to figure out what to do and how to deal with the weight of what that's about to happen. I met a woman named Dina Imbriani earlier this year. She is a good friend of a good friend of mine and she lives in the Roanoke area. She runs an outdoor skills business that does a lot of great stuff in her community. And we stayed in touch since my husband and I were driving into Roanoke from Catawba, where we live, and I saw all the Trump signs and gave them all A big thumbs down and some trucks that we passed and maybe some houses that I felt looked like those people voted to end our democracy. It was very cleansing. And the reason why the thumbs down was very cleansing was advice that I got from a 20 year old here in the office, suit in the audience. He's very near dear to me and said that these thumbs down is much more impactful than the Yellow Finger because it's a sign of disappointment instead of anger. We talked the week after the election, and she said she wanted to put an event together, that she wanted to try to find a way to protect the people she saw it most at risk of being attacked in a second Trump administration. I started thinking, who do I know and what can we do? A few days after this event happened, which was just last week, I sat down and talked to Dina about exactly how she put this together. And Dina said that she had first called up Sam Razul. I'm enraged, but I cannot afford to have despair, because the children must have hoped. A Democratic Virginia state delegate representing part of the city of Roanoke, Sam being the guy he is, of course, took the call and chatted, and he's very much a voice of reason. And he was asking me questions like, what's bothering you? What matters most to you? And the things that matter, I think, to all of us really at this point, is women's reproductive health, the refugee community, the LGBTQ community, veterans and seniors losing benefit. You know, all those things. So we talked through it, and he said, okay, well, what talents do you have? She said, well, I know a lot of people, and I know a lot of people who feel the same way I do. And he asked her if she could get together 20 or 30 people. So she approached the owner of the Grandin Theater, and she asked for use of his space to invite people to a community meeting. I never try to sugarcoat things. I think that the next four years will be rough. It'll be very. Even different than the previous administration. They're very well organized. This time, she started by inviting people who were at least marginally known to her because there had been a white supremacist banner hung reportedly by Patriot Front in Roanoke not long before. And she didn't want the event to be crashed by anyone who was just looking to cause trouble. And when I asked her, well, what would you say to somebody who's interested in trying to set up something similar? She said, kind of in the spirit of what Sam had told her, work on your strengths and talents and think about what talents are needed to pull something together and start going through your community and your network of friends and people that, you know, that have those talents as a group. Nobody has to do everything. You can pull those things together as a community. She had invited six or seven different groups from Roanoke to speak. And I asked her why so many different groups? And she was saying that it was important to meet people where they're at and give them a topic that they might feel strongly about. The same things are not going to appeal to everybody. And by having a variety of people who she only let speak for five minutes each, people would have a chance to see what resonated with them and that she felt that everybody that she'd invited would hear something that would engage them. The whole point is to keep the train rolling, to respect your time. There's a lot to talk about. One of the most moving things I thought she said in our conversation was that to actually protect our community, you know, they can contact people, they can contact representatives, they can do things to help support the national sort of fight that's going on to save democracy in a large way. We can talk to them, we can do that through our voting. But to actually protect our community, we need to do that hyper local and in our communities to make a difference, to keep people protected. Dina invited speakers to talk about refugee and immigrant help, women's reproductive health, diversity initiatives, the LGBTQ community. Roanoke is not only a hub for refugees, but it is also sort of the southernmost hub for a lot of women's healthcare now that pregnancy management in healthcare is in crisis across most of the states in the South. Certainly everything to the south of Virginia. North Carolina, is marginal at this point, but Roanoke takes even their overflow for some kinds of procedures. Freedom means choice. This was the scene on the federal court steps in downtown Roanoke this afternoon, as people came to terms with the fact that the Supreme Court could overturn Roe v. Wade. She had each person speak about the projects they hoped to establish going forward and what they were already doing. And more than 60 people showed up. I drove down from Northern Virginia to attend, and my friends Beth Macy and Tom Landon were there too. The author of Dopesick and Raising Lazarus, Beth talked about harm reduction, something near and dear to her heart for years, as well as the new diaper bank in Roanoke. And Tom, who works with Blue Ridge pbs, talked about how local media has been decimated across the country. And he stressed the importance of supporting Cardinal News, the Roanoke Times, and the Roanoke Rambler so that the public can actually realize what's happening in their own community. I spoke too. I'm going to give you the bad news first. I talked a little bit about who would be most vulnerable under a second Trump administration, and I told people to not wait to plug into networks right now before any new crises hit. It's a gift to have this time before January 20th. Okay, it is seriously a gift. I encourage the audience to contact their representatives about what was happening on the national level, but to get busy now building the kind of country they want to see right there in Roanoke on the local level. And by the end of the night, Sam had gathered an action list of specific tasks to help various groups and people who were willing to spearhead those initiatives. You don't have to devote 40 hours a week to this stuff. If you just pick a few targeted things and do it regularly, just the people in this room will make an enormous difference. Plans were made for a second meeting. Dena is planning a website for Do Good Virginia, which is the name she's given her group, and she is coordinating with the additional interest raised by word of mouth for larger groups to be involved in the future after people who attended started talking it up to people that they knew. Of course, most people hearing this podcast don't live in the Roanoke area and they can't participate in Deena's initiative necessarily. But you can consider helping out organizations from Miriam Cava's recommended groups, which include the Palmetto State Abortion Fund and Chicago Books to Women in Prison. Kelly Hayes just posted a list of ways to support Native people right now which includes Indigenous Women Rising and Four Directions, a Native led voting rights organization. I'll post links to these organizations and lists as well as the organizations involved in the Roanoke community event last week. In today's post in my newsletter, if you haven't already subscribed, you can do so@andrea pitzer.com There are free and paid subscriptions. I encourage you to become a paying subscriber for the newsletter because you'll help keep the podcast free and ad free to all listeners. And I think this is important information to get out to everybody right now. Figure out who you like to work with, what you want to work on, who you trust, get engaged and know who you could be interacting with if things get much worse down the road. I think that's really critical in terms of what kinds of actions you can take close to home or any actions at all. It might be tempting to say, well, why bother? The House and the Senate will be against us and they're just going to do everything. Trump wants. It's only my opinion, but I've been right on just about everything. Or maybe you just tell yourself, well, the Supreme Court will just rubber stamp everything that he does. And yes, there's some of that that's going to happen. There's no doubt about it. But really, nobody is asking you to go on strike in an Arctic concentration camp. Nobody is asking you to sew crafts to support your family while being tortured in a Chilean detention camp. And if the courts are a serious challenge now, and they are, just recall how much more stacked they were against Elizabeth Freeman in 1781 or against the Lemon Grove immigrant families in 1931. There's really so much that's possible. And you still have five weeks to dig defensive lines and fortify the trenches to protect your community and find ways to take care of the most vulnerable among us. 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 where you get your podcasts. So hopefully I've made this easier for you and not harder.