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Next Comes What
Why Speaking Out Matters
00:30:41
DC shows how to push back against a government clamping down on vulnerable Americans, and how to stand up for what we believe in. Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art newsletter to support Next Comes What and read Andrea's posts...
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- [00:00]
A
You're listening to. Next comes what from Degenerate Art. This is Andrea Pitzer. Each week we'll figure out how we got where we are and how to fight back. In the last week or so, we've seen shocking brutality from the Trump administration.
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B
We took it out. And you'll get to see that a.
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A
Boat was blown up, ostensibly crewed by Venezuelan drug dealers.
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B
These particular drugs were probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the.
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A
Caribbean that was said to have killed 11 people. You're looking at video shared by President Trump that his administration says shows the military striking a boat from Venezuela. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has suggested that many more such acts will be forthcoming wherever they are and wherever they're operating. There are early reports, in addition, that Barry Weiss, a pundit and editor who sees herself as a truth teller. The world has gone mad when we're not able to say that Hunter Biden's laptop is a story worth pursuing but appears to be more of a toady to power.
- [00:55]
B
When you say aloud, I just think it's a provocative thing. You say, you say, you say we're not allowed to talk about these things, but they're all over the Internet. I can Google them. I can find them everywhere. I've heard about every story you mention.
- [01:05]
A
May be given some kind of position with CBS News. I might as well shut up. CBS has apparently already agreed not to edit interviews with administration officials, even if they misrepresent the truth or wildly distort the facts on the ground. Supreme Court Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch chastised lower court judges, saying that they may sometimes disagree with this court's decisions, but they are never free to defy them.
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B
What goes around comes around.
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While the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein's loathsome system of sexual predation went to Capitol Hill for a stand with survivors press conference to refute the president's claims that the Epstein matters are all a hoax.
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B
Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?
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Meanwhile, speaker of the House Mike Johnson claimed that the President had merely been an FBI informant in the Epstein sex ring.
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B
I don't know if I used the right word. I said FBI informant. I'm not sure. I wasn't there. This is in my lane.
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A
On Saturday, I went to Malcolm X Park with thousands and thousands of other people for the we are All DC March. It was an attempt to reclaim the city from federal intimidation and lawlessness, targeting city residents and visitors.
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It's been almost a month now of just pure chaos.
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A
What do all these things have in common?
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B
And there's more where that came from.
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A
The point of today's episode is that knowing what your own principles are and then broadcasting them to other people, this matters.
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B
So it's your contacts feeling then that that boat had nothing to do with drug running? Doubtful. Doubtful.
- [02:44]
A
Virtue signaling matters. Do you stand for anything?
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B
This just doesn't make sense. When you're drug running, you don't fill your boats with people because it takes up space and it takes up weight. At maximum, you're going to have two people on there. These were probably migrants making a run for it.
- [03:02]
A
If so, how would anyone be able to tell?
- [03:05]
B
There's one thing and one thing only that Mr. Trump cares about, and that's his popularity. So I think the MAGA base, this is a bit of red meat.
- [03:13]
A
Today, I'm going to address the importance of standing up for your values in a time where the implicit and explicit shared principles that have built the best of what the United States is, are being destroyed day by day, right before our eyes. Why did you come all the way from Detroit?
- [03:31]
B
You know, nowadays we have to stay together and we have to stick together.
- [03:40]
A
Now, I could pull any number of outside historical examples out to parallel what's happening right now in the U.S. so.
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B
In Italy in the 1920s, liberal leader Giovanni Gioletti, hoping to tap into Mussolini's mass appeal, included the fascists on his Liberal Party's list for parliament.
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A
Like legislative elections, in which centrist parties ended up helping to set up authoritarian regimes. By virtue of the centrist party's unwillingness to stand up for the best principles.
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B
Of the Republic, German conservatives, as early as 1929 forged to work an alliance with the Nazis, trying to draw on Hitler's grassroots appeal to shore up their own party's declining base.
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A
But honestly, this episode is less about historical situations.
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B
In both of those cases, liberals in Italy, conservatives in Germany, mainstream political parties abandoned their gatekeeping role and let extremists in the door. Both cases obviously turned out to be a pretty tragic miscalculation, because as I've.
- [04:36]
A
Said before, we are singularly poised to act in ways that most citizens and residents of other countries mired in hardening authoritarianism, were not. We even have more options than those facing rising oppression in places like Hungary and Turkey have had in recent years when they have faced similar political degradation.
- [04:57]
B
Viktor Orban, did anyone ever hear of him? He's probably, like, one of the strongest leaders anywhere in the world, and he's the leader of. Right. He's the leader of Turkey.
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A
Of course, some people welcome What Trump is doing.
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B
Well, I would love the National Guard to come into the Windy City of.
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Chicago, but in this way, I don't think we're different than any other society. In the absence of heavy, prolonged propaganda, any country will have a baseline of somewhere in the universe of one quarter or so of its population that is willing to embrace hardline authoritarianism.
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B
And, Sergey, you were saying a lot in the Oval Office. I figured you're somebody that likes to speak with his really wonderful MAGA girlfriend.
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A
My sense is that what's happening in the US today follows that model and that beyond that vicious 25%, let's call it, most people either do not support Trump at all.
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Negative net approval rating for Trump every single day. Every single day. In my aggregate polls since March 12. Since March 12, in terms of number of days, 180 days in a row, he has been underwater, or they have.
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Only weak support for him due to having been deeply propagandized against the alternatives.
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They lied.
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Again, we see the malleability of his support with the tremendous dive he's taken on issues that he ran on.
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B
Let's talk about issues. Okay, Trump's not approving. I got crime, immigration, foreign policy, the economy, trade. There's a whole slew of red. And this isn't Republican red. This is negative red.
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A
People were propagandized to believe he stood for nebulous ideals that pushed their vague ideas about what America is or who is really American, even as he also ran on the policies he's now carrying out. You pick this marginalized group, in this case the immigrant community, and you double down on ensuring that the American people create this image, right, that immigrants are really the villain, the ones that are taking your jobs, that are. That are stealing your wages, et cetera, et cetera. Which means that along with the chunk of people who believe very much in the xenophobia and white supremacy and extrajudicial violence of the Trump administration.
- [07:16]
B
And I think Donald Trump is offering a different perspective, offering boots on the ground, which is essential if we really want to stop crime in these neighborhoods.
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There's a group of Americans who somehow voted for him based mostly on vibes, without really having understood what he stands for. It's a bait and switch of sorts.
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We're going to lose 25 or 30% of the farmers in this country if they don't do something. It has to be done. And it's not just here. It's everywhere.
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Farmers are making a cry for. For help before it's too late.
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Mr. Trump, you looked at me, sir. And you said, I love you, Mr. Trump. I need to see the fruit of your love.
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And those policies are proving to be unpopular, as are his ideas about who's American.
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Trump's net approval rating among age 18 to 29. He was plus 2 back in late February. Look at where he is now. My God, that is a 32 point drop since the beginning of this year. How about Hispanics? He was at minus six. A little bit underwater, but not too bad. But look at where he is now, -34 points.
- [08:22]
A
This is a moment in which offering people a different vision can have an impact, and each one of us can help articulate what vision we think should shape government. It doesn't even have to be a complex theory of politics. My feeling is that the reason most people aren't acting right now to save democracy is twofold. The first reason is that even where laws exist to protect speech, the administration has, in a matter of months, created an environment in which there are low grade penalties for criticizing the president or speaking out against the administration's actions.
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I just have a question because I'm.
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Not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching.
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Texas A and M University is facing heavy political pressure. After the video showed a student confronting a professor on over LGBTQ content in the literature class, University President Mark Welsh said the dean and department head overseeing that course have been removed.
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The second reason people are hesitant to act, in my opinion, is related.
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This comes as a survey by the American association of University Professors says many Texas university faculty are looking for jobs out of state, with many worried about political interference and their ability to teach freely.
- [09:36]
A
Things are bad enough now that it's uncomfortable to speak out. It's not legal, and I don't want to promote something that is against our president's laws as well as against my religious beliefs. Yet at the same time, people still feel free enough personally that it seems silly to speak out or to act with any urgency about the fall of democracy. Well, I've already been in contact with.
- [10:04]
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The president of A and M, and I actually have a meeting with him in person to show all of the my documentation tomorrow.
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They're wondering what exactly has changed in their lives. And for a lot of people right now, it's not much. So they feel like alarmists or worse, like posers. But still they have this growing fear that the country is spiraling that they get from looking at what's happening around them. Trump's first administration came and went with a lot of the same hateful rhetoric their thinking goes, and it was succeeded by a traditional democratic president. In their minds, the institutions held. Are we really that far from normal electoral politics?
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B
That's what's at risk is in each.
- [10:49]
A
Time we change precedent, we are changing the contours of a right that people thought they had. And once you take that away, think of how much more is at risk later. I'd like to suggest that the institutions have been degraded in a variety of ways over the past decade and that this increasing quieting of dissent, the pressure to self censor, is extremely dangerous.
- [11:17]
B
Have we seen this before in history.
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Where the government tries to control the history on display in museums?
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B
Yes, without a doubt. You know, various countries, Soviet Union and actually back in the old days, Egyptians and Greeks and Romans also did this. But more recently, I guess in the 20th century USSR, North Korea, it's reshaping.
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Government agencies, television, newsprint, state governments, universities, all the key institutions we rely on for information and to act on our behalf as intermediaries.
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How much are you spending, would you say, over the next few years? Oh, gosh, I mean, I think it's probably going to be something like, I don't know, at least $600 billion through 28 in the U.S. yeah. No, it's significant.
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A
Not all of this pressure comes from the administration or its allies. Before Trump was reelected, universities clamped down on protests against the Israeli government's atrocities in Gaza. New claims from University of Michigan students who say undercover investigators have been following and recording them due to their participation in pro Palestinian protests on campus. Rather than trying to thread that needle on supporting the safety of Jewish students who were at times lumped in with the Israeli government by protesters, several large and prestigious universities began supporting, or at least tacitly collaborating with authorities punishing their own students.
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The university didn't deny the surveillance accusations in a statement.
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A
But we see pressure too, to from the venture capitalist and corporate worlds with crypto and generative AI. There's now pressure to somehow do even vaccines, one of the two or three greatest inventions in human history in terms of their ability to protect people and to save lives. For decades, vaccinations were required for West Virginia students to go to school. This year, there are some questions surrounding those requirements. This pressure extends to Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. Interfering with State policies in places like West Virginia, my home state, where the Board of Education recently defied an executive order from the governor when he tried to override its lawful mandatory vaccination program.
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B
Yesterday, Secretary Kennedy said that an executive order by Morrissey from January that calls for exemptions to West Virginia school vaccine requirements, quote, upholds West Virginia's religious freedom and parental rights, end quote.
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A
And I see people saying, well, maybe Democrats really did go too far in their rhetoric or in bending over backward to facilitate inclusion. There are dozens of examples that I could share with, with you and with.
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B
And you often say, you say, sort.
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Of knows this and you say, we're.
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Not allowed, we're not able. Who's the people stopping the conversation? Who are they?
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But things like DEI that they cite were deliberate efforts to bring more people into society. What's happening now is very much the opposite. Using the law, executive power, threats against corporations, and bringing universities to heal. The federal government is pushing for the active exclusion of nearly every kind of minority community. But it's worth signaling what you believe in, because we are now seeing how quickly civil society can disintegrate when people don't stand up.
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Our nation is broken. We've had political assassinations recently. In Minnesota, we had an attempted assassination on the governor of Pennsylvania.
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The administration is using language and images that directly embrace past and current authoritarians. People are being kidnapped off the streets.
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Well, here's the rhetoric again, right? You just met, disappeared. That is a ridiculous thing to say because ISIS doing the same thing we've done for decades.
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A
Over the weekend, the President was posting Apocalypse now memes about a federal invasion of Chicago by the newly renamed War Department, including a line that read Chicago about to find out why it's called the Department of War. Illinois Governor JP Pritzker has been standing up to the rhetoric of the Trump administration.
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Mr. President, do not come to Chicago.
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And he may be making Trump nervous about following through.
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We're not going to war.
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Asked last week if he were going to commit to the kind of action in Chicago that he had undertaken in D.C. trump began to hedge and suggested that maybe they would send the guard to places where the governors would be appreciative and would ask for help.
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B
I cannot for the life of me understand how the Democrats think this is some sort of winning political message. Yield, man. Let the troops come into your, into your city.
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A
But I want to turn for a moment to the march in D.C. last Saturday. Thousands of people that participated in this march marched about two miles through the city, starting here at Meridian Hill park and going all the way to Freedom Plaza. There were several huge banners. One of them looked like a king sized pink bed sheet with the Banksy flower throwing guy, but instead he was reaching to launch a submarine sandwich. I saw an oversized Palestinian flag, union banners, other ones saying Trump must go now. End the occupation, D.C. statehood now, and many others. The rain held off until after the march and the speeches, but the noontime heat was blistering with the crowd sweating in unison but staying out there for hours anyway. In the park, off to one side, a mini marching band made up of some drummers and brass instruments played Bella Chow. We are here because it has got to stop. It is not fair, it is inhumane, and we gotta get Trump out of here. When it came time to march and coming on 16th, I ran into a friend near U Street. As we walked downtown together, we passed the Foundry United Methodist Church, which rang its bells for the marchers. A banner on the front of the church welcomed everyone. No matter what you believe or doubt, your age or ability, your race, color or ethnicity, your immigration status, your gender identity, or whom you love. The energy was great. There were lots of retirees who were more willing than anyone else to show their faces. In the photos that I took, they expressed the understanding that people with jobs could more easily be targeted through their employers, especially in a town like D.C. filled with federal employees as well as nonprofits and contractors subject to government pressure. There were a lot of young people out, and a lot of black folks, too. DC Proper is a wonderfully diverse city, and unlike some of the other DC Area marches I've attended since Trump's return, there were also groups of Latino marchers who were understandably more reluctant to identify themselves on the record or on camera.
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B
They brought me here undocumented. I have become a citizen since I have served in the United States military.
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Their presence was particularly brave given the degree to which law enforcement has been harassing the undocumented.
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And this just bothers me. What's happening here is not the freedom that I serve to protect those with.
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Green cards and citizens alike. If officers suspect at all that they might be immigrants. The day after Sean Dunn, the sandwich guy, got arrested, somebody was talking to me about what had happened, and they were saying how stupid he was for throwing away years of his life with the prison sentence he was likely to get, and all just for a stunt that was some kind of momentary satisfaction.
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B
Now Customs and Border Patrol agents are being assaulted by Subway sandwiches. And no, that's not a joke.
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The same person asked me what good demonstrating would do anyway, if it's all.
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Just theater, you can show your ass, you can stand there and cuss in their face, and they have to put up with that.
- [19:23]
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And yet the same person was saying to me, where is everybody? Why aren't people doing anything about this? And My answer then about done, was that we didn't know what would happen to the sandwich guy. We didn't yet know what kind of impact that visual would have, but that it was funny and it got a lot of attention. And obviously no one was going to be injured by having a sandwich thrown at them.
- [19:46]
B
You think, well, how is a Subway sandwich going to hurt somebody? Maybe you dive out of the way. When you do, maybe you hit your knee on the curb, maybe you hit your face or your nose on the curb, maybe you drop your rifle, maybe it goes off. Who knows what happens?
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Even though it didn't look like a complex bit of long planned guerrilla theater, it might still end up being really effective. I told this friend and I said that it was important for other people to know that D.C. residents hate what's being done to the city. I would have never imagined having the National Guard in place in this town terrorizing people. The intrusion of federal officers, the threats to home rule, demonstrations won't fix the problems, but they help let people know how many others out there are unhappy about it. And that can be a basis for action.
- [20:46]
B
If you have a problem with that authority on the street, the place to take that up is not on the street. The place to take that up is in a court of law. The place to take that up is to file a complaint.
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We are seeing that, that D.C. grand juries are refusing to participate in this federal overreach with at least seven cases so far in which they've rejected indictment on charges that are clearly disingenuous or excessive.
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Just to put that into context, I've been covering the criminal justice system for more than a decade now. And prior to a month ago, I had never covered a grand jury rejection.
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And honestly, the fewer the people who stand for a principle, the easier it is to eat away at its edges. People no doubt thought certain principles were safe. That immigrants play an irreplaceable role in making this country function. That the US Government and many of its citizens have treated black Americans abominably and should seek to address that harm.
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Think about Rosa Parks. Did she scream? She didn't throw anything.
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That women should have political and legal rights.
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You can disagree with the government, the police, even the president, without hurling insults or food.
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That people should be able to vote without food. Fear of intimidation. But we have seen the current administration attack those ideas head on. Immigrants are described as animals. Domestic violence was described just this week by the President speaking into a microphone as not a crime.
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B
You know they'll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime.
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A
See, the administration is vice signaling here. Their virtue signaling is vice signaling and it is projecting a promise to create and protect an all white America. This is literally what they are working to do using Nazi propaganda methods. We see Homeland Security posting ads reproducing Nazi propaganda, sometimes using the same language and more often using similar images.
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B
A caption above reads which Way American Man? That appears to be an allusion to the title of this book, which Way Western man, which was written by a white nationalist named William Gailey Simpson.
- [23:02]
A
Elimination of women and people of color from leadership roles except where they're brought back for strategic reasons I've talked before about the theory of the mushy middle that sits between the hardcore authoritarian supporters and those who prioritize flexibility and inclusion in society. Propaganda energizes its base and both persuades and intimidates the mushy middle to think that authoritarian rule has a lot of support, that the dictator is inevitable, that he guarantees security, and that he has popular support. People fall for it every time. A lot of people, and some of them, yes, are willing to go along with the harm someone like Trump will do, even if they know that carrying out these kinds of harms is wrong. But a lot won't. Unfortunately, the Democrats as a whole are currently not trying to recapture that mushy middle and pull it toward a defense of rights or freedom or government's role in protecting things like health care. Instead of persuading that mushy middle and rallying it, they seem to be trying to represent it, which puts them in a position of not standing for anything. What this means is we have to virtue signal to show up in community meetings, to show up on the streets, to create a wall of virtue signaling that puts pressure on everyone from local mayors to ICE agents and National Guard around the country and on our elected representatives. Last week I criticized Ben Smith of Semaphore for refusing to acknowledge that democracy is in jeopardy or to treat it as a concept to which he owes any coverage as a journalist. One thing I do know about Smith is that when he was at BuzzFeed a decade ago, he backed up his reporters when they were attacked. I think Smith is like a lot of people, he's part of that mushy middle, someone who's willing to shift his priorities according to the current political winds or the current political situation.
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B
So thank you for incredibly incredible leadership, including getting this group together. Thank you, Bill. That's very nice.
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A
What virtue Signaling does what it can accomplish, especially when it's followed by action, is to set that tone of expectations or normalcy. I went to a high school where there were plenty of racists, but no one in my Hometown in the 1980s ever did a Nazi salute. During the first Trump administration, we saw them begin to creep into public until Elon Musk eventually threw that salute on stage. There are countless other examples of how Trump's rhetoric moved the bar and expanded. What kind of hateful or discriminatory behavior happened in our schools and our communities. And it turned out that universities and corporations were just as susceptible to influence. Vice signaling works and empowers other people to follow virtue. Signaling is a key way to combat this. Just standing up for what you believe as often as you can opens the door for others to imagine what they could do, too. It strengthens the courts that are trying to uphold the law while risking censure from judges like Kavanaugh and Gorsuch. It reassures vulnerable communities that people around them might have their backs. What the federal government has been doing in D.C. itself is unique because of the District's retrograde political situation, in which it lacks voting representation in Congress. The US Government has an outsized say in what happens in the District. So D.C. showing up is literally representing in a way that its residents aren't allowed to at the polls. As the march wore on, one thing was clear. There will be more demonstrations like this in the future.
- [27:11]
B
It's not the first, and it won't be the last.
- [27:13]
A
D.C. showing out that way can set the stage for other places to refuse in more directions, given that they have more say in what happens there. Just like we've already seen in Los Angeles and Chicago, residents can show up in ways that help protect those being targeted and tell agents of a police state that they're unwanted. Social consequences for carrying out Trump's mission are a good thing. These next few months will be critical as the administration tries to consolidate its power against opposing voices. Ideally, those who are least vulnerable will take the greatest risks. Hello, sandwich guy.
- [27:51]
B
No one in history ever said, I didn't agree with him until he hit me with a sandwich.
- [28:01]
A
Whether you plan a complicated operation or community effort, or maybe you just join in somebody else's project at the last minute, you never know what kind of impact you're going to have, and sadly.
- [28:14]
B
That is the real story.
- [28:15]
A
But there's value in everyone showing in some way what it is they stand for, what principles are bedrock to the society that you want to live in. Ask yourself. Figure it out.
- [28:27]
B
That's right. And so I think there's two steps, which is one step is building some trust in ourselves, and the second is testing it out with people that we trust.
- [28:35]
A
Let others know how you feel. From your family and neighbors to your representatives to your whole state or country. It can be horrifying to see all the ways our societal institutions are caving to federal demands, often preemptively. The professor's firing isn't just about a single classroom clash. It's really part of a bigger shift in how colleges may be forced to handle lessons on gender identity. You might be tempted to wonder, did they believe in any of those programs, in any of those ideals all along? The answer is no. They adopted programs to protect and address human rights and civil rights because decades of pressure and action made it the socially acceptable thing to do. They did it because virtue signaling on the part of the public made them think they had to.
- [29:28]
B
Okay, I'll do this. I'm going to do this. Let's go. But this election is now over. Congress has certified the results. I don't want to say the election's over. I just want to say Congress has certified the results without saying the election's over. Okay?
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We can insist on human decency and rights. We can prioritize a country that takes care of its people. We can take advantage of the pendulum swinging back the other way. But in order to create that advantage, before we can act to build that country, we have to imagine that world and we have to speak up for it. And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what?
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Please share this with anyone who's looking.
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For ways to help each other survive this mess.
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B
To support this podcast, Please subscribe@Andreapitzer.com and.
- [30:19]
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Consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening and thank you for watching. If you do have the means, I encourage you to become a paid subscriber and you can do that@Andreapitzer.com and just go to the newsletter link, which is in the first paragraph of the homepage, and you can sign up from there.