Andrea Pitzer (0:00)

You're listening to Next comes what from Degenerate Art. This is Andrea Pitzer. Remember the dress? The one that set the Internet on fire? It all started with a simple plea for help. Millions fought over whether it was white and gold or black and blue. Scottish singer Caitlin McNeil posted to her Tumblr site. Guys, please help me. Is this dress white and gold or blue and black? And with that, the Twitter hashtag the dress was born. That people could perceive that dress in two completely different ways and that they were so confident about what they saw was a fascinating social test. And it's also a way into thinking about a key issue that has come up a lot for me and maybe for others, too. It's a way to consider the worldview that seems to have swallowed so many Americans right now. No, I know one bill that he passed. Name it. Okay, well, look at what he implemented with security in the border. I'm sorry. No, you're good. You're good. Security in the border. Roe versus Wade. Okay. The economy was up under Trump. Roe v. Wade is a decent answer. That's from the Supreme Court, but that's a decent answer. So you're pro life, I'm pro choice. And it's a path to understanding how bigotry flourishes and what we might do about the baffling resistance to facts that so many of us are seeing. So three years of increasingly problematic Internet history, getting into Pizzagate, and then QAnon just sort of spiraling. He lost family relationships. He lost his job. He lost girlfriends. He lost everyone he knew until that day that he came to the Capitol. When I started researching my Concentration Camps book over a decade ago, I encountered all the evil that had been done to vulnerable groups who had been targeted by ruling parties and governments. And I'd expected that. And I braced myself to research some of the worst acts ever committed by humans. So I started with when that phrase emerged, which was in Cuba in the 1890s. And from there, I looked at how this idea of rounding up a whole bunch of civilians, non combatants, and putting them in detention without trial, how did that get to be seen as a good idea? And it turns out it's been tried all over the world again and again. But a different, unexpected kind of encounter also began happening. People would say things to me like, there's just something inherently evil about Germans that led to Auschwitz. And it was a common statement. And if I didn't see a basis for it, I could at least understand the permanent outrage about the Holocaust. But when I was looking at camps During World War I, I found that the trope of Germans as inherently evil predated the Nazis altogether. There are children who are instructed by their teachers to cut German songs out of the music books that they use in their classrooms. There is a public Stein breaking fest at one point to keep people from drinking German beer. There's even in one town in Ohio, a really gruesome slaughter of German dog breeds. But it's important not to let these ridiculous stories overshadow what is really a wholesale destruction of an ethnic culture in the United States. And then two years ago, I was in Moscow doing archival research when Putin launched his massive invasion of Ukraine. This attack at the train station, clearly a violation of the laws of war and an apparent war crime. These are people desperately fleeing war. We've seen extensive war crimes, crimes against humanity being committed over the past year, and it is. It's just one thing after another. In so many ways, Russia has taken a page from its own playbook and targeted Ukraine's most vulnerable. And when the horrors of Bucha and Mariupol unfolded not long after that, the rapes, the torture, the murders, a few friends and acquaintances from Central Europe and former Soviet republics said privately and sometimes even publicly, that Russians were subhuman, that they possessed some kind of essential badness, maybe even on a genetic level. It makes no sense to us, but the Russians don't think like this. The Russians have a strain of brutality which comes from centuries of brutality, Mongol invasions, and almost in a sense, an approach to civilized, you know, any form of warfare which demands, requires, in their view, mass strength, but utterly merciless. One intelligent and very educated friend suggested that, of course, the genes themselves were not more primitive in Russians, but maybe epigenetic expression, meaning how and when genes get turned on or off, maybe that was different in Russians and somehow made them fundamentally different than Ukrainians or Estonians. And in the same vein, I know Israelis who excused brutal conditions imposed on Gaza even before the reprisals for the bloody October 7th massacre. And they would say things like, well, they voted for terrorists, and so they all just have to bear responsibility for the suffering of their people. And after October 7, some of them said even worse things. Republican Tim Wahlberg is heard off camera saying Gaza should be dealt with, like, quote, Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And now in the last year, I've seen acquaintances online discussing Israelis as uniquely evil. And now the world may very well be saying it about Americans for electing Donald Trump not once but twice, given the potential harm that he may do. And what I'm Addressing here isn't the slurs of obvious and manipulative bigots like Ben Shapiro saying Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. Well, as I say in an article entitled Here's a list of all the giant bad dumb things I've ever said, was that dumb? Well, yes, that's a dumb tweet. And not only, but it is also important to mention that the next few tweets clarify that that tweet is specifically referring to the Hamas leadership, which by the way, BBC I've seen is relatively reticent to condemn. No, actually it wasn't. What you went on to do and say. You are correct about the slurring Arabs. It's not all Arabs that want to live in open sewage and blow things up. It's just Palestinians, you went on to say. No, it's the ones who take sides against Israel in the Israel Palestinian conflict. Population is rotten to the core, you went on to say, not Hamas. I'm talking about educated and usually thoughtful people who, in the face of state sponsored atrocities, begin to see a willingness to commit evil as an essential characteristic of some group of people. The more research I did for my book, the more I realized that dozens and dozens of countries had run concentration camp systems, locking people up on the basis of who they were, rather than any specific crime being committed. The history of concentration camps extends back to the late 19th century when two inventions, barbed wire and the automatic rifle, made it possible for small numbers of guards to control large populations. It became clear there was no essential aspect of Germans or Russians or Americans that led them to do it. Colonialism definitely had a central role in launching camps in the second half of the 19th century. But post colonial societies also sometimes took camps up. Where, I wondered, did that kind of hatred come from? Hate is an action. Hate takes time, hate takes energy, and even it demands sacrifices. One thing I expected to find, and did find, was that in societies that developed concentration camps, prejudice existed on a national level against the people who ended up in detention. Overall, social or economic tensions got worked and funneled into resentment against particular groups of people. Now you can't get elected going to the American public and saying, I want to. I want to cut your funding for your schools, I want to cut funding for your Social Security, I want to cut your pensions and I want to shower all that money on the very rich. You can't get elected that way, but you can get elected going to the American public saying, we're in mortal danger as a country because something has gone terribly wrong with our society. And in each case there was bigotry involved. But it's important to note that it wasn't just bigotry. It was bigotry amplified and channeled to bring somebody else power or money. We see it in religion, we see it around gender, we see it around abortion, we see it around same sex marriage, and we certainly see it in terms of welfare and criminals and illegal aliens. It's a bigotry that gets tapped to further a delusional narrative that eventually competes with and displaces reality. So I grew up in a very religious household with what today would be considered a Trumpist worldview, a worldview I'd absorbed large parts of without even realizing it. And then in high school I had a government teacher who was a creep. I knew not to trust him, but in his class he had us read Newsweek, which was a serious magazine at the time. I remember reading an article about demonstrations during the Vietnam War that contradicted what I'd been told at home. Now, I disliked my stepfather, but I believed a lot of what I'd been raised with, and I disliked my teacher. But the magazine reporting seemed to be based on a lot of sources. I remember being aware that there were two different narratives going on. It was like the dress in the buzzfeed story. Decades later. Yes, it is dividing people into two very distinct camps, white and gold versus blue and black. And the issue is taking on really a life of its own. But I was stuck for a while between the two narratives. I could still live inside the narrative I'd grown up with, but once I was aware of this new narrative, new to me, I could go back and forth for a time. Both stories made sense depending on how I looked at them, but neither felt definitive. I have to say it was really uncomfortable because I understood they were mutually exclusive. And it was not until two or three years later, until my sophomore year at college, that I read enough history to see the ways that my upbringing had misrepresented the world in some pretty fundamental ways. We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam, acted according to what we thought were the principles and the traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in the light of those values. Yet we were wrong. I believe we were terribly wrong. This month before the election, there were also two Americas on offer. America is for Americans and Americans only. In a post election opinion piece for Scientific American last week, computational social scientist Duncan Watts wrote about how the results of the election could be explained by two factors, a global anti incumbent trend and the more successful Republican narrative, which defeated the Democratic narrative. And also in Scientific American psychiatrist Robert Lifton this week had a piece about entering a state of what he called malignant normality, when society has made falsehood and destructive behavior into everyday and accepted acts. And the stories we tell in response to that malignant normality, the stories that insist on a true and meaningful narrative are critical. I personally have been looking at how nonfiction narratives work for more than a decade and founded a site about it in 2009 for the Nieman foundation for Journalism at Harvard. For that site, back in 2010, I talked with political scientist Michael Jones about his research into how narratives work in politics. And we were talking about climate as a central issue back then. And he described the two stories about the environment that the public was presented with. And he noted that for a long time, experts and a lot of other people simply believed that, as he said, you just present better information and you get better policy outcomes. Democrats have worked very hard to build a platform of inclusion. If you look at the actual substance of what they want on issue after issue, it's a very inclusive platform, but I think it reads to a large number of Americans as an elitist, inaccessible party. But instead, understanding of climate change eroded over time and became politicized. And Jones argues that when it comes to the public, in his words, they see uncertainty, they see a scientific community that doesn't have consensus. That's because the anti climate forces have put together a better narrative, one that focuses on uncertainty. And on the flip side, a movement that is essentially a billionaire special purpose vehicle in the Republican Party has started to read to a lot of people as a working class movement. Of course, it was also because of media coverage that tended to give equal attention to both sides of this question, without noting that scientists overwhelmingly understood the reality and the risk of climate change. But Jones's research suggested that the story that was presented about policy options was really vital. He suggested that politicians have to take these narratives in hand and understand they're building a framework to explain the world to voters. My most empathetic read of some of this drift towards Trump is that a lot of people are grasping for a story, a source of meaning, a way of explaining what they're feeling, what their life has been like to themselves that is different from the stories they've tried before. Even journalists, he suggested, have to be more aware that whether they like it or not, whether they somehow imagine themselves as completely objective or not, they are also building narratives for the public. The way he put it was that when you Put a pencil to paper or you type on your laptop. Every word you select is an act of prejudice. This idea, you're not manipulating anything or you're just putting facts out there. I don't know about that. And we saw it again and again with Trump over the last decade on nearly every issue where there were two narratives, and one of them was rooted in reality. In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in, they're eating the cats, they're eating. They're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country. He managed to capture the audience for the conspiratorial narrative and fuse it to the larger vision. He was selling this vision of himself as dear leader and protector, whether the women like it or not. Back before Trump was ever a candidate, Jones research likewise found the most important variable in the narrative was the hero. And Trump was very much willing to put himself forward as that hero. One man. And that man, ladies and gentlemen, that man took a bullet for you. He took a bullet for democracy. My sense is that a lot of people imagine themselves as exempt from any kind of simplistic story that they could see through it. And it might be comforting to think so. But what I found around the world was that in societies that had been exposed to years and years of constant propaganda, almost anyone could be susceptible. The badges on our caps, have you looked at them? What? No. A bit. They've got skulls on them. Have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them? I don't. Hans, are we the baddies? I've mentioned it before in the podcast briefly, but the unintentional social experiment that saw people in the UK bathed in transphobic stories for years in national media is a good example. A pretty educated and informed group of readers in Britain were exposed to stories that were different than what most people in the US saw. And it all starts back and goes back to last weekend. And that's when J.K. rowling responded on Twitter to a headline she read online that read, creating a more =Covid 19 world for people who menstruate. And she responded by that by saying, you know, I'm sure there is a word for these people, followed by a number of deliberately misspelled versions of the word woman. As a result, a particular kind of transphobia emerged, a regional one that had been rationalized as being feminist. And I'm not at all arguing that people in the US weren't and aren't alarmist about trans People too. I think we've seen plenty of it. Evidence of that. And I'm not arguing that there wasn't bad media coverage here on our side of the Atlantic either. But what happened in England with that? It was just possible to see the specific effects of a particular narrative on a given population, how it shifted public opinion in real time. It was almost an experiment that you could watch unfold. This is terf, named after the acronym Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, often used as a slur in the gender debate. Imagining the stars of the Harry Potter film franchise staging an intervention for author J.K. rowling over her gender critical beliefs. We've experienced death threats and like I had a. My mother has been targeted on social media. And again, this was an educated, high information group that fell for it. Under the right conditions, anybody can be vulnerable. And an outside observer might be able to see how strange it can be when a narrative takes hold like that. But when you're the person bathed in propaganda, everything begins to fit together and seem coherent. Oh, you haven't been listening to allied propaganda. Of course they're gonna say we're the bad guys, but they didn't get to design our uniforms. And their symbols are all, you know, quite nice. Stars, stripes, lions, sickles. And once you're inside that narrative, it's almost impossible to step away from the worldview. You just can't see the actual dress anymore. You're seeing your idea of it. Kim Kardashian tweeting, I see white and gold. Kanye sees black and blue. Who is colorblind? I want to be clear that we can absolutely hold people responsible for what they do on an individual level. But on a societal level, it's critical to understand that the story of the 20th century is that given enough time and exposure, propaganda works and large segments of the population will be co opted. We have no ambition in Iraq except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people. It's tempting to believe that there is some essentially bad other, whether it's Israelis or Palestinians, Germans or Trump voters or Americans. But really, you're just doing the work of the worst people in the world if you accept that. Even about Trump voters. They're a messy coalition of competing priorities. To make them a monolith also gives them a power that they don't really have. Are there Trump voters and a lot of them who voted on purpose for the harm that will come to immigrants, to pregnant women, to trans people? Yes, absolutely. And I'm not attempting to exonerate anyone for supporting A demagogue. What's more, the people who voted out of greed or hate are unlikely to change. Even the people who voted for a false narrative out of ignorance may not be retrievable, but we need to stop that last group from growing. Our only choices are to increase turnout, recruit non voters, or persuade those who've bought into a false narrative to leave it behind. He stood on the steps of the Capitol waiting for the storm, this like prophesied day where, you know, all the evildoers would be rounded up and he had a come to Jesus moment where he was like, I'm seeing people in MAGA hats beat police officers. If we're going to move past where we are, we have to understand that the effect that propaganda has on selling a narrative to vulnerable people, we're going to have to do a better job of counteracting the dangerous and paranoid narrative by limiting its reach or by offering something better. I see people with foreign accents making all the money. I see Negroes holding jobs that belong to me and you. Now I ask you, if we allow this thing to go on, what's going to become of us real Americans? I've heard this kind of talk before, but I never expected to hear it in America. The story of the atrocities of the 20th century, as I said, is it's the propaganda works, and it works on Americans just like it works on other people who face constant exposure to it. This fellow seems to know what he's talking about. Yes, he knows all right. Take it away, brother. What's the answer? What are we real Americans going to do about it? You'll find it right here in this little pamphlet, the Truth About Negroes and Foreigners. Building a counter narrative is harder if you feel any actual obligations to the public, if you choose not to rely on empty lies and promises. So it's a difficult task that's ahead of us. How do we talk to our family members who are into this stuff? He had a loving family there waiting to do an intervention. And then for a year he sort of went to therapy and started de radicalizing himself. But it took a really long time. My reporting from around the world parallels the numbers mentioned in a recent Boston Globe opinion piece on authoritarian personalities. I don't agree with every point the author laid up, but a few basics she explains, are important to know. Only about a third of people are really authoritarians, and they're not all just Republicans. And those people have a kind of cognitive inflexibility and a closed off personality that accompanies it. They're particularly vulnerable to narratives of grievance and punishment. Others can be manipulated into supporting paranoid narratives through the creation of fearful stories that generate panic over things like crime and immigrants. The official signage given out by the RNC last night said mass deportations now, which is a phrase that alarms people on the left, feels cruel to people on the left, is intended to alarm people on the left, but is incredibly popular with the gop. You probably already know if you're in that group of people who actively want to see somebody punished. But what you can't know is whether, under the right circumstances, you might be hoodwinked into accepting a false alarm, into diving into hysteria through fear. And all of us are more vulnerable than we'd like to imagine. I know a little old lady who owns a mitten store in Michigan. For her, this is a religion, right? This is all about Jesus and good versus evil. For Justin, this was about an online game almost. He did the puzzles. There were a lot. There's. There's a very gamey aspect to this, where this purported q person behind QAnon released these sort of puzzles. So this is what drew him to it. It really does change for each people. For each person. Yoga moms in New Mexico are latching on to QAnon because they think they're saving the children. Something we talked about. So it really has something for everyone. It's uncomfortable to think about how society draws out different parts of any individual. In Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning wrote about how average Germans in a reserve police battalion during World War II were transformed into monsters. These men were all fellow Germans when they came here today. Now, they were split into rival groups, suspicious of each other, hating each other. They were being swindled, all of them. But the man who was really being fooled was Hans. He was pure German according to Nazi standards. To him, they promised everything, and he fell for it. People living in a community with good institutions tend to evolve toward their best selves, and dysfunctional or punitive institutions tend to bring out the worst in us. In the long run, the answer is to build a world with stronger communities instead of leaving gaps in which people get isolated and they're encouraged to nurse their grievances against imaginary enemies. Everything they're doing to me is about preserving their power and control over the American people. If I renounce my beliefs, if I agreed to stay silent, if I stayed at home, if I said, I'm not going to run, the persecution would stop immediately. They'd go on to the next victim. Who's next? But they'll never, ever do what they did to me. And I want to be clear, these aren't just competing narratives about the country or about the world. The answer to what color the viral sensation dress was, it's just a fact. Whatever colors you saw, the real dress was black and blue. After her post went viral, Caitlyn shared a follow up photo of the dress being worn. And it turns out it's a victory for Team Blue and black. There is a knowable reality, but we have to make it visible and comprehensible. I mean, I really can't think of anything worse as a symbol than a skull. We have to connect worlds with vulnerable people, meaning most of the population, and we have to bring them to an idea of what the country is and what it could become. We made our decisions in the light of those values, yet we were wrong. I believe we were terribly wrong. And I believe, therefore, we owe it to future generations to explain why. On the big picture side, perhaps the most important thing to remember is the narrative that's built around hatred and exclusion is being funded and driven both directly and indirectly by people with big pockets and a strong desire to change society for their personal benefit. They're doing it so they can get the kind of laws and workforce that will maximize their power and profit. They're using these sort of coded appeals to say to people, two things. One, the biggest threat in your life is not concentrated wealth, it's minorities. And two, government coddles minorities. And all these government assistance programs, it's all about giveaways to minorities, oppose them. Of course, there are true believers like Stephen Miller in Trump's political world. People who are dedicated to obscene, inhumane policies. With your votes, you can smash this broken establishment. But their power and the movement as a whole is bankrolled by people using Trump's voters and his culture warriors for cynical ends. This is the 18th time that I've come to the floor to expose the dark money scheme that has captured and controlled our Supreme Court. Changing local and even national law to break the power of billionaires to buy politicians and judges is going to be the key long term to fixing what ails us. A reclusive far right billionaire supercharged Leo's dark money operation with a 1.6 billion dollar donation to a LEO front group. You heard that right, $1.6 billion. The man behind this new slush fund is a billionaire named Barry Said, has a long history of funding far right front groups, climate denialism, as well as a national network of state level think tanks that promote business deregulation and fight Medicare expansion. In the meantime, let me be clear. You don't have to be one of the people that reaches out to those who've already been captured by a delusional narrative. That doesn't have to be your job. The most important work to be done on this front, on the daily level, is to build a world in which libraries, schools and universities are shored up to record and protect accurate history and knowledge so there's a truth in place from which to build a positive narrative. A world in which communities support their most vulnerable populations leaves fewer people to be picked off by cynical profiteers. So run for school board, become a library volunteer, show up to community events. Resist lazy narratives yourself so that you don't become a sucker for people who want to use this crisis to terrify you and make money off you. Here in America, it's not a question whether we tolerate minorities. America is minorities, and that means you and me. So let's not be suckers right where you live locally. Build a world that will make it harder for people to check out of reality or get seduced by paranoid conspiracies. Let's be selfish about it. Let's forget about we and they. Let's think about us. After my camps book came out, my brother asked me if it was hard to write it knowing that people over and over devolved to become their worst selves, that humanity turned again and again to cruelty. But what I'd found wasn't that at all. While it was true every country had the potential to be the bad guys and often did become the bad guys, it took years of money and concerted propaganda efforts to turn a population towards supporting or committing the worst behavior. Even the relatively quick shift, let's say, to Japanese American internment in the US during World War II could never have happened without decades of anti Asian immigration policy rhetoric and violence that were already in place. Most people don't accept a false narrative right away. It takes a long time. They have to be trained to it and sold on it over and over. And that means that there are times and places to intervene in that process. The good news, relatively speaking, is that the voting population is largely split. A very small percentage of people have made the difference in the last several elections, all of which could have gone either way. We don't have to move heaven and earth, we just have to shift turnout a couple points. And if it's too late already to undo the harm that Trump's narrative has already done and is now doing. If some people may be beyond saving, it's not too late to keep it from capturing more people. To offer a narrative that's both true and inspiring, not just to the ignorant and confused, but a narrative we can use for ourselves about real motivation on how to move forward. Find the people who share important parts of your idea of what that would look like and work with them. That's really what we all need to do right now. 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.