Trump's trying the authoritarian handbook. Will it break him?

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "Why Tyrants Spy at Home and Start Wars Abroad"

Podcast: Next Comes What
Host: Andrea Pitzer
Date: March 5, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, author and host Andrea Pitzer examines how authoritarianism is enabled and protected by two tactics: foreign military aggression and enhanced domestic surveillance. Using the backdrop of the recent U.S. bombing campaign and assassinations in Iran, alongside controversial government demands of major AI companies, Pitzer argues that these strategies reflect—and imperil—American democracy, with particular attention on Trump’s administration. She explores why strongmen spy at home and start wars abroad, what history teaches us about these maneuvers, and how informed citizens can resist.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. AI, Surveillance, and the Clash with Government

• Anthropic and OpenAI’s Divergence (00:16–07:30)

  • Anthropic refused U.S. government demands to relax safety guardrails on its AI tool, particularly relating to domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. This was a principled stand, drawing both praise and condemnation.
  • Dario Amadei (Anthropic CEO) and his company were publicly denounced and banned from federal contracts after the standoff.

    "It's about the principle of standing up for what's right." – Expert/Analyst [01:22] "The red lines we have drawn... crossing those red lines is contrary to American values. Disagreeing with the government is the most American thing in the world." – Expert/Analyst [05:03]

  • Sam Altman and OpenAI, under pressure, cut a deal with the government, reportedly including ambiguous assurances it wouldn’t be used for “domestic spying”—a claim critics found dubious.

    "I think it just looked opportunistic and sloppy." – Sam Altman quoting his own statement [01:45] "You get the sense that someone at Anthropic knows how the intel community misleads by using definitions of words that are different than everyone else believes." – Mike Masnik via Andrea Pitzer [06:30]

• Concerns Over Expanding State Surveillance (17:09–19:17)

  • Government demands for access to AI tools are tied to wider ambitions for AI-driven mass surveillance—paralleling authoritarian states.

    "ICE has built massive AI-driven surveillance systems capable of pulling data on most American adults in the name of national security." – Expert/Analyst [17:09] "The monitoring of civil rights groups and campus leftists, along with the surveillance of students who came out against genocide in Gaza..." – Andrea Pitzer [18:25]

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2. U.S. Military Strikes on Iran and the “Epic Fury” Operation

• Details of the Attack (07:39–09:39)

  • The U.S. bombing and targeted assassinations in Iran—code-named "Epic Fury"—killed top Iranian leaders, including the Supreme Leader.

    "The attacks wiped out key Iranian leaders, including Defense Minister Amir Nasir Zadeh... and, most significantly, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei..." – Andrea Pitzer [07:39]

  • Operations were launched despite recent negotiation progress; civilian casualties included the bombing of a girls school.

    "...more than 153 people, many of them children, after a strike hit a girls school in southern Iran." – Andrea Pitzer [08:58]

  • The Pentagon allegedly used Anthropic’s Claude model in the strikes, even after the company was blacklisted.

• Motivations and Political Calculus (10:03–12:54)

  • The administration justified the attacks as necessary to neutralize Iran’s nuclear ambitions, despite evidence of diplomatic breakthroughs.

    "Iran negotiators had agreed not to only not to have an atom bomb, but to reduce their refined uranium... and to submit to an unprecedented degree of oversight.” – Expert/Analyst [10:11]

  • Analysts pointed out the attacks seemed designed to undermine peace, escalate chaos, and create conditions for further surveillance and repression at home.

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3. Parallel Expansion of Domestic Authoritarianism

• ICE, Detention, and Civil Liberties (13:08–14:57)
  • The government is accelerating the expansion of ICE detention centers and justifying abuses under the guise of national security.

    "ICE has been quietly buying industrial warehouses... with plans to turn them into a network of immigration detention and processing centers..." – Expert/Analyst [13:22] "They are currently harming countless people on the streets, from assault to murder, and in dozens of cases, killing detainees in detention." – Andrea Pitzer [14:26]

  • The administration’s rhetoric conflates “security” with increasing the power to detain and surveil, blurring boundaries between “domestic enemies” and foreign foes.

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4. Historical and Global Context

• Authoritarian Tactics: War Abroad, Surveillance at Home (15:06–19:17)
  • Pitzer traces the authoritarian playbook: start foreign wars for unity and justification; domestically, deploy surveillance and repression.

    "Violence overseas is, in concept... a plea for unity... even when that trouble is engineered." – Andrea Pitzer [16:07] "Domestic surveillance, however, works in the opposite fashion. It is meant to intimidate..." – Andrea Pitzer [16:30]

  • Historical parallels to U.S. interventions—from Iran in 1953, through COINTELPRO and post-9/11 surveillance—illustrate that these are not novel, but ongoing challenges.

    "In 1953, the CIA helped orchestrate the removal of Iran's Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossaddegh..." – Expert/Analyst [18:03] "The high point of accountability... took place when I was a child. With the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s." – Andrea Pitzer [18:49]

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5. Why the Authoritarian Strategy is Failing (20:31–24:26)

• Polls & Popularity (20:31–24:26)

  • Despite attempts to unite the public behind foreign aggression, polling reveals Trump’s approach is profoundly unpopular.

    "President's biggest problem is that he is already effectively a lame duck... his net approval rating has been between minus 10 and minus 20 points..." – Expert/Analyst [21:00] "A Sunday poll from Reuters Ipsos showed that roughly 1 in 4 Americans surveyed approved of the president's actions." – Andrea Pitzer [24:09]

  • In contrast to post-9/11 unity, Trump’s maneuvers have not won public support, partly due to the visible lack of justification and international isolation.

• Potential Limits of Surveillance Power (25:24–26:40)

  • Political scientist Marcel Dersuss notes that while surveillance may help secure power temporarily, it creates brittleness and paranoia in regimes, and cannot prevent internal resistance.

    "Even the most technologically advanced dictatorships remain susceptible to internal fractures that no algorithm can anticipate or prevent." – Andrea Pitzer [25:24]

• Citizens Still Have Agency (26:49–29:43)

  • Ultimately, citizens want freedom and have means, even under competitive authoritarian systems, to push back, protest, vote out enablers, and support organizing.

    "The most important thing right now is to mobilize as many people as possible against the government and to try to punish anyone politically and economically that continues to enable Donald Trump." – Expert/Analyst [29:43]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Authoritarian Tactics:

  "This drive for domestic surveillance, as well as the bombs dropped on foreign countries, are tactics drawn straight from the authoritarian's handbook."
  – Andrea Pitzer [15:06]

• On Public Support & Accountability:

  "But a weak ruler is still a weak ruler... these aren’t just vast corporates making, you know, some type of machines or cars... these are men who own global communication platforms. And those global communication platforms are now allied to the US Government, which we can see quite clearly is acting in an authoritarian way."
  – Carol Cadwaller (via Andrea Pitzer) [25:10–25:24]

• On Surveillance Limits:

  "Surveillance may even help secure a hold on power, but that power becomes brittle, closed off, and paranoid. Further, relying on surveillance to suppress dissent undermines trust and legitimacy."
  – Andrea Pitzer [26:08]

• On Problematic Leadership:

  "The leader becomes heroic in his defense of the nation … Violence overseas is, in concept … a plea for unity … even when that trouble is engineered."
  – Andrea Pitzer [15:54–16:07]

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Important Timestamps

• Anthropic/OpenAI controversy explained: [00:16–07:30]
• Details and impact of U.S. Iran bombings: [07:39–12:54]
• Interconnection of ICE, DHS funding, and domestic repression: [12:54–15:06]
• Historical examples and lessons: [18:03–19:17]
• Polling, public reaction, and limits of power: [20:31–24:26]
• Surveillance as a brittle tool; expert analysis: [25:24–26:49]
• Call to Action and ways to resist: [29:10–29:53]

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Final Takeaways & Call to Action

• Pitzer urges listeners to resist authoritarian overreach: contact representatives, participate in protests, demand accountability from corporations, and support organizations fighting surveillance and rights abuses.
• She promotes an upcoming organizing call with activists, emphasizing community action and historical memory as means of resistance.

"You can support the legal work of organizations like the ACLU... In concrete ways, push back against ICE kidnapping and the expansion of immigrant detention in ways large and small."
– Andrea Pitzer [29:53]

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Summary prepared for listeners of "Next Comes What" – for more action items and resources, visit AndreaPitzer.com.

Transcript

[Andrea Pitzer]

In an era of perpetual breaking news,

[Donald Trump]

I don't get bored. There's nothing boring about this.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Two developments in the last week have been particularly huge.

[Donald Trump]

But. And it will be. It'll be spectacular. Be the most beautiful ball. I believe it's because I built many a ballroom.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Last Friday, the public got word that Anthropic was refusing to go along with government requests to be allowed to use its LLM Claude in ways that violated its own safety guardrails.

[News Correspondent]

All of this matters because now the template for every AI military deal and what comes after it, this is sort of set the precedent.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Late that night, Sam Altman spoke up for OpenAI to say they had cut a deal with the government.

[News Correspondent]

Across town, Open Air employees, they are heading into work this morning as well. They are being greeted by fresh messages on their sidewalks as well against the deal that Sam Altman signed over the weekend.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Why did Anthropic balk?

[News Correspondent]

What's interesting too, is a lot of the messages on the sidewalk, they're directed towards OpenAI employees, asking them to use their voices and call out what's happening. And remember the that nearly 100 of them signed a letter before the weekend backing Anthropic's position over their own company's deal.

[Andrea Pitzer]

They were concerned over measures related to the conduct of war and the possibility that the government would be able to conduct domestic surveillance inside the United States. Dario Amadei is at the center of a new kind of firestorm.

[Expert/Analyst]

It's about the principle of standing up for what's right.

[Andrea Pitzer]

What's wrong, in his view, is why his AI company, Anthropic, has been banned from the federal government. Altman was met with fury.

[News Correspondent]

Anthropic's Claude app hit numbers. One spot on the app store dethroning chat CBT for the first time ever,

[Andrea Pitzer]

as his company's concessions to government demands were followed by military strikes on Iran.

[Expert/Analyst]

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he thinks his company shouldn't have rushed its recent deal well with the Defense Department. In a post on X, Altman said, I think it just looked opportunistic and sloppy.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The other new crisis was, of course, the military strikes on Iran.

[Donald Trump]

I picked those drapes in my first term. I always liked gold.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The assassination of Iran's top leaders, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The US Government seems not to have thought through what the operation it is named Epic Fury will lead to. Why wasn't there an evacuation plan? And who do you send planes to get people out?

[Donald Trump]

Well, because it happened all very quickly or.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Or the real risk that it will create a much worse situation for not only the Iranians and the global economy. Global gas prices have soared this week amid fears of a lengthy disruption to the world's most critical choke point for oil shipments, which have effectively stalled as the threat of attacks from Iran has deterred vessels from passing through the Strait of Hormuz that it doesn't actually seem to care about.

[Expert/Analyst]

This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they're down, which is exactly how it should be.

[Andrea Pitzer]

But also the administration itself believe it's

[Donald Trump]

going to be the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world. And when you hear all that hammering out there, you know why? The first lady is not thrilled.

[Andrea Pitzer]

So today I want to talk about the U.S. bombing and assassination in Iran.

[Donald Trump]

She said, will the pile drivers ever stop?

[Andrea Pitzer]

Want to talk about this question of domestic surveillance of American citizens?

[Donald Trump]

Citizens, you know, they go from 6 in the morning till 11:30 in the evening. Can you imagine?

[Andrea Pitzer]

Here I'll look at how these issues reveal Trump's boneheaded yet dangerous authoritarian ambitions and why they might not work the way he hopes they will.

[Donald Trump]

You know what? To me, that's a beautiful sound. She doesn't like it. I love it.

[Andrea Pitzer]

As always at the end, I'll talk a little about what you can be doing right now to push back on all of this. Late last week, a statement from the tech company Anthropic made clear there were two limitations on their use of tools.

[Expert/Analyst]

We have these two red lines. We've had them from day one. We are still advocating for those red lines. We're not going to move on those red lines.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Limitations they claimed were part of their agreements with the US Government and cases in which it was either not yet safe or not lawful to use their tools.

[Expert/Analyst]

I think we are a good judge of what our models can do reliably and what. And what they cannot do reliably.

[Andrea Pitzer]

One was mass domestic surveillance and the other was fully autonomous weapons.

[Expert/Analyst]

It doesn't show the judgment that a human, That a human soldier would show friendly fire or shooting a civilian or just the wrong kind of things.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The company's statement announced that the Department of War has stated they will only contract with AI companies who accede to any lawful use and remove safeguards. In the cases mentioned above, they have threatened to remove us from their systems if we maintain these safeguards.

[Expert/Analyst]

The red lines we have drawn, we drew because we believe that crossing those red lines is contrary to American Values. Disagreeing with the government is the most American thing in the world.

[Andrea Pitzer]

After some back and forth, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared that Anthropic was a supply chain risk, a first for an American company. And President Donald Trump ordered every federal agency to stop using Anthropic's products.

[Donald Trump]

It'll be spectacular. It'd be the most beautiful bull.

[Andrea Pitzer]

He later threatened the company with, quote, major civil and criminal consequences if they didn't remain supportive during the period in which the government would transition to new providers.

[Expert/Analyst]

It feels very punitive and inappropriate given the amount that we've done for US national security.

[Andrea Pitzer]

After initially supporting Anthropic's position, Sam Altman of OpenAI reversed course and cut a deal with the US government.

[Expert/Analyst]

In his ex post, Altman said OpenAI was working with the Pentagon to amend its agreement, including adding language saying the company's AI technology wouldn't be used for domestic spying on Americans.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Altman expressed confusion as to why Anthropic hadn't made the same deal, claiming OpenAI had adhered to similar principles.

[Expert/Analyst]

It's unclear why the Defense Department appears to have agreed to red lines from OpenAI similar to those that Anthropic was seeking. And it has a lot to do with, I think, a culture clash.

[Andrea Pitzer]

But Tech Dirt's Mike masnik suggested that OpenAI had in fact caved and had done so on domestic surveillance, surveillance inside the United States. CEO Sam Allman also came out and said on X that the Pentagon had affirmed that they won't be using OpenAI's models for department of War intelligence agencies. So things like the nsa. Maznick wrote. You get the sense that someone at Anthropic knows how the intel community misleads by using definitions of words that are different than everyone else believes.

[Expert/Analyst]

We have stood up for the values

[Andrea Pitzer]

of this country, and the people at OpenAI simply don't know or don't care about that. As my colleague Erin Wu wrote about earlier this week, the language in the agreement between OpenAI and the Pentagon is a bit vague. And there is a lot of wiggle room in terms of the Pentagon being able to use OpenAI models, models for things that, you know, employees might not be super thrilled about. Hours later, the US bombed Iran.

[Donald Trump]

When I hear that sound, that beautiful sound behind me, it means money. So I like it.

[Andrea Pitzer]

According to the Pentagon, more than 100 aircraft were launched. The first 24 hours of this campaign were described nearly as twice the scale of the 2003 Shock and Awe campaign, attacking more than 1,000 targets the US Israeli attack was to prevent peace, not to advance it. That's the headline of a new article in Counterpunch by the economist Michael Hudson, who details how President Trump opted to attack Iran despite progress made during last week's U.S. iran negotiations in Geneva. The attacks wiped out key Iranian leaders, including Defense Minister Amir Nasir Zadeh and Revolutionary Guards commander Mohammad Pakpour, and, most significantly, in terms of governance, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. In the piece, Hudson writes about the significance of comments by Oman's foreign minister, who appeared on CBS's Face the Nation Friday, one day before the U.S. attack.

[Expert/Analyst]

If the ultimate objective is to ensure forever that Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb, I think we have cracked that problem through these negotiations by agreeing a very important breakthrough that has never been achieved anytime before.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Several hundred civilians also appear to have been killed, including more than 153 people, many of them children, after a strike hit a girls school in southern Iran. It seems that the Oman foreign minister flew to Washington so he could directly address this issue, saying more progress had been made and that the deal was going to be won. Better than Obama? Obama's he didn't trust Jared Kushner to convey the level of progress that had been made. Despite the condemnations of Anthropic from Hegseth and Trump in the lead up to the unprovoked strike, it was later reported that the Department of Defense had actually used Claude Anthropic's large language model for the attacks.

[Expert/Analyst]

Everything we have done has been for the sake of this country, for the sake of supporting U.S. national security. We believe in defeating our autocratic adversaries. We believe in defending America.

[Andrea Pitzer]

There appear to be few plans for next steps other than encouraging the Iranian people, thousands of whom have just been slaughtered in recent weeks by their government, to rise up against it.

[Expert/Analyst]

The fact that progress is being made and that Iran negotiators had agreed not

[Donald Trump]

to only not to have an atom

[Expert/Analyst]

bomb, but to reduce their refined uranium,

[Donald Trump]

to shift the refined uranium outside of

[Expert/Analyst]

the country and to submit to an unprecedented degree of oversight made it urgent that the United States attack Iran immediately.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The administration has expressed a willingness to continue bombing Iran for the next several weeks.

[News Correspondent]

President Trump says the conflict could go

[Andrea Pitzer]

on forever, though munitions are reportedly very low, which might make that complicated. Declaring the US has unlimited firepower to fight Iran. All this is tied together, but my wife isn't thrilled.

[Donald Trump]

She said, this is getting crazy, the

[Andrea Pitzer]

attacks on Iran and the weakening of safeguards on using AI for domestic surveillance.

[Donald Trump]

I said, don't worry about it. We'll be all finished up in a few months.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And so it's no surprise that it took no time at all for Republicans to try to use Trump's war provocations to their own ends.

[Expert/Analyst]

Neville Chamberlain can say, we'll have peace in our time if we just ignore it. And one day it'll get better. It's not getting better.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Senator James Lankford from Oklahoma appeared Sunday on ABC News using the administration's attack to try to force progress on funding the Department of Homeland Security's budget, which Democrats have been blocking due to abuses by ice.

[Expert/Analyst]

He said, let's get DHS funded again. By the way, we, we need to make sure we're defending the homeland by also funding what's happening here at home.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Republican Congressman from Nebraska Don Bacon put out a statement saying about DHS funding that if Hakeem Jeffries votes, then it's on him.

[Expert/Analyst]

Democratic lawmakers in the nation's capital still blocking legislation to fund the Department of Homeland Security until Republicans agree to new rules for immigration officers.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The argument is apparently that the government may have to defend Americans against attacks from outside the country.

[Expert/Analyst]

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem slams the blockade.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The latest Democrat led shutdown of DHS is reckless, it's unnecessary, and it undermines the American national security. And that Trump's overseas provocations meet. It's riskier to leave DHS unfunded at this moment. I think it's imperative that we fund DHS now.

[Expert/Analyst]

I think the likelihood of a terrorist

[Andrea Pitzer]

attack against the United States is very, very high. But what they're saying in reality is that Democrats should let the government's own current attacks on its own people by ice.

[Expert/Analyst]

Her brother said that Renee Goode was someone who could make you believe things were gonna be okay despite all the hardship, because she chose optimism as well

[Andrea Pitzer]

as the attacks on Iran continue due to the potential outside attacks on Americans that might materialize in response to our aggression.

[Expert/Analyst]

Alex Preddy was a Boy Scout, a choir member, an outdoorsman from Green Bay who lavished attention on his beloved dog, Jewel. His sister called her brother someone who had a way of lighting up every room that he walked into.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The government wants us to let ICE abuse US residents, detain noncitizens and citizens alike without censure or punishment, shoot American citizens without investigation, and let the CAMP system expand indefinitely.

[Expert/Analyst]

For months now, ICE has been quietly buying industrial warehouses around the country, reportedly with plans to turn them into a network of immigration detention and processing centers to hold tens of thousands of detainees

[Andrea Pitzer]

all ostensibly in order to keep Americans safe.

[Expert/Analyst]

If you kill Americans, if you threaten Americans anywhere on Earth, we will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation, and we will kill you.

[Andrea Pitzer]

That argument is made no stronger by deliberately adding the death of civilians overseas and the threat of foreign terror groups on top of the current violence by ice.

[Expert/Analyst]

But only a few hours after they were gunned down by your agents. You called Renee a domestic terrorists. You said Alex committed an act of domestic terrorism. Alex's parents responded to your calling their son a domestic terrorist. They said the sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The medium is the message, and it's not subtle. This is more than 800,000 square feet, and if it opens, it could be one of the largest detention facilities of its kind in the country. They are currently harming countless people on the streets, from assault to murder, and in dozens of cases, killing detainees in detention. We ran into Doris Kyle Shami and her husband Greg as we left the site.

[Expert/Analyst]

The administration is ruining this country and

[Andrea Pitzer]

it's tearing apart communities, tearing apart communities that we need.

[Expert/Analyst]

And they're good people.

[Andrea Pitzer]

They are assassinating and kidnapping foreign tyrants along with murdering school children over the weekend.

[Expert/Analyst]

You know, this has got to stop.

[Andrea Pitzer]

They want to seize the power of life and death over everyone, the truly evil and the truly innocent and all the regular people in between who are just trying to live their lives. This drive for domestic surveillance, as well as the bombs dropped on foreign countries are tactics drawn straight from the authoritarian's handbook.

[Donald Trump]

And we're doing very well on the war front, to put it mildly.

[Andrea Pitzer]

I would say they tend to work in different ways. However, starting foreign wars and entanglements traditionally unifies the country.

[Donald Trump]

Somebody said on a scale of 10, where would you rate it? I said about a 15.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The theory is that faced with a greater outside threat, the people will rally to their problematic leader.

[Donald Trump]

I think we have great support.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Citizens can be prevailed upon to put patriotism over politics. The leader becomes heroic in his defense of the nation.

[Donald Trump]

Everybody that seems to want to be a leader, they end up dead.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Violence overseas is, in concept, if not in execution, a positive argument, a plea for unity, and a vision of the nation's identity and future in a time of trouble, even when that trouble is engineered.

[Donald Trump]

And it's. It's an amazing, amazing thing that's taking place before your eyes.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Domestic surveillance, however, works in the opposite fashion.

[Expert/Analyst]

These are robotic police officers already operating on streets in China, using cameras and artificial intelligence to monitor and manage people in Real time.

[Andrea Pitzer]

It is meant to intimidate rather than to persuade the opposition.

[Expert/Analyst]

U.S. experts call this authoritarian AI technology designed to watch, to predict, and in some cases to act automatically, to strike

[Andrea Pitzer]

fear into the hearts of the President's foes. On a hypothetical level, even before surveillance is conducted, and China says the US is doing this too, to consolidate power and suppress dissent, strongmen tend to want to be able to preemptively identify the opposite position and discredit, detain, or even destroy it.

[Expert/Analyst]

A Georgetown University report found. ICE has built massive AI driven surveillance systems capable of pulling data on most American adults in the name of national security.

[Andrea Pitzer]

But intelligence is required to do this, and much of that's not allowed under current law.

[Expert/Analyst]

This report from ASPI says AI is turbocharging surveillance of China's 1.4 billion people with as many as 600 million cameras. That's roughly three cameras for every seven people.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Authoritarians have always sought to solidify or expand their power by surveilling the people.

[Expert/Analyst]

Algorithms used to flag what authorities call abnormal activity, even forecasting protests before they happen.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And they also tend to seek these foreign entanglements.

[Donald Trump]

When crazy people have nuclear weapons, bad things happen.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Think Mussolini in Ethiopia, the entire Nazi enterprise. Or Argentina with the Falklands.

[Donald Trump]

So we're in very good shape now.

[Andrea Pitzer]

But the US has its own history with both approaches.

[Expert/Analyst]

In 1953, the CIA helped orchestrate the removal of Iran's Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossaddegh, after he nationalized the country's oil industry,

[Andrea Pitzer]

particularly violence abroad, including assassinations and bombings and governments entirely overthrown.

[Expert/Analyst]

Mossaddeq was removed. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi consolidated power as a monarch, and Iranians hope to become a working democracy, were dashed.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Our country similarly has a grim history when it comes to surveillance. The monitoring of civil rights groups and campus leftists, along with the surveillance of students who came out against genocide in Gaza, for instance.

[Expert/Analyst]

Tactically, it worked. Strategically, the long story arc tells a very different story. Decades of the Shah's autocratic rule fueled opposition that culminated in the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The high point of accountability for both kinds of authoritarian style actions I'm discussing today took place when I was a child. With the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s.

[Expert/Analyst]

We have a particular obligation to examine the NSA in light of its tremendous

[Andrea Pitzer]

potential for abuse, which hampered these authoritarian tactics at home and abroad.

[Expert/Analyst]

It has the capacity to monitor the private conversations of American citizens without the use of a bug or a tap.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Jimmy Carter carried some of the Committee's concerns forward.

[Expert/Analyst]

I remember speaking to the general Counsel of the nsa, when we began getting information and indicating we needed to get more information. And he said to me, but the Constitution does not apply to the National Security Agency.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Since that time, Ronald Reagan dealt deliberate blows to the Church committee advances and to Carter's executive orders. In terms of illegal international entanglements, the war on terror did even more damage, as well as the drone attacks that became commonplace under Republicans and Democrats alike. Meanwhile, surveillance likewise became a perpetual tug of war with the rights of Americans, all too often threatened by government or corporate ability to profit, literally or metaphorically, off of information that can be quietly gathered.

[Donald Trump]

I want to let you know that, and we will continue forward, but it's a great display of military strength.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Wannabe and established authoritarians have to keep a lot of plates spinning in order to stay in power.

[Donald Trump]

We rebuilt our military during the first

[Andrea Pitzer]

term, and they're loath to ignore their best tools for doing so.

[Donald Trump]

And we're using it a little bit more than I thought we would have to.

[Andrea Pitzer]

So will bombing work for Trump? Will he be able to get away with expanding US Surveillance as well?

[Expert/Analyst]

Poll numbers show a majority of Americans with a negative view of Iran and the negative view of President Trump's handling of this situation.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The president's biggest problem right now is that he is already effectively a lame duck. As US And Israeli strikes on Iran

[News Correspondent]

continue, new CBS News polling shows most

[Andrea Pitzer]

Americans here at home disapprove. He is profoundly, chronically unpopular.

[Expert/Analyst]

I mean, overall, his net approval rating has been between minus 10 and minus 20 points in the past few polls, if you take an average of them. But if you look among independents, he's been floating at about minus 30 points. Oftentimes, the numbers with independents have been absolutely awful. And I'm just not quite sure how an administration can be politically alive when you have numbers that are that poor.

[Andrea Pitzer]

In Contrast, after the 911 terror attacks, George W. Bush popularity was stunningly high, reaching 90% by the end of that month. For more, we're joined here in New York by Nargis Bajokli. She's an associate professor of anthropology and Middle east studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. The world, too, was behind the US in grieving the dramatic loss of thousands of lives in a terror attack.

[News Correspondent]

It's important to note that the Supreme Leader did not go into hiding this time like he did in June. He didn't go into bunkers. And so in many ways, and because he was killed in his compound, he wanted to be martyred this time around.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Force, he was dying of cancer already.

[News Correspondent]

He was 86 years old.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Though Europe and Canada have been hedging their disapproval now, it's clear that the US did not gather support or in some cases even inform its allies about the attack on Iran.

[News Correspondent]

And that has significant meaning within Shia culture. And this is why we're seeing protests happening in Pakistan as well as in Bahrain, as well as India and across the Muslim world. Because he was not just a leader of a country, but for many Shia Muslims, they also saw him as a spiritual Leader.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Back in 2003, after instigating war on terror, torture and black sites, and escalating violations of human rights, George W. Bush unleashed an unnecessary and destructive war on Iraq, deeply misrepresenting the nuclear capability and threat represented by Saddam Hussein.

[News Correspondent]

We're only in day five of the war now, and I think part of what we're seeing is that the Israelis and the Americans have underestimated Iran's capabilities to strike back hard against the region.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And even then, Bush managed to get reelected by the American people.

[News Correspondent]

Iran is going to continue to fight this and to inflict as much damage, not just on Israel, but importantly on the American security architecture in the Gulf region.

[Andrea Pitzer]

But Trump is not Bush, and it isn't 2003.

[News Correspondent]

This is the danger of this moment. This has already turned into a regional conflagration, and this could turn into a regional war of a scale that will make the past 25 years of forever wars in the Middle east seem like a walk in the park.

[Andrea Pitzer]

There was no 911 to lift Trump's popularity before he began his bombing campaigns.

[Expert/Analyst]

Ask people, do you think the administration has clearly explained what the US Goals are? And you get a big number who said no. They don't think that they've done that yet.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The attack on Venezuela was deeply unpopular. The assault on Iran has somehow been even less celebrated.

[Expert/Analyst]

61% of independents disapprove of the president's handling so far with Iran.

[Andrea Pitzer]

A Sunday poll from Reuters Ipsos showed that roughly 1 in 4Americans surveyed approved of the president's actions.

[Expert/Analyst]

The NBC poll matching other polls, like a CBS News poll published yesterday saying 56% of Americans disapprove of the military action, while 44% approve of it.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Even with some of the slippage later, these are not good numbers for Trump.

[Donald Trump]

Right now, you see a very, very deep hole. But in about a year and a half from now, you're going to see a very, very beautiful building when it

[Andrea Pitzer]

comes to domestic surveillance. How terrible that OpenAI was willing to do what Anthropic would not. There are certainly ways in which the use of AI for surveilling the resistance to Trump could do harm. Now, our next guest says Americans are

[Expert/Analyst]

living in a surveillance state, and she is sounding the alarm about the dangers of techno authoritarianism. British author and award winning investigative journalist Carol Cadwaller.

[Andrea Pitzer]

But a weak ruler is still a weak ruler. I say it's a kind of power

[Expert/Analyst]

that the world has never seen before,

[Andrea Pitzer]

is that these aren't just vast corporates

[Expert/Analyst]

making, you know, some type of machines

[Andrea Pitzer]

or cars or whatever.

[Expert/Analyst]

These are men who own global communication platforms. And those global communication platforms are now

[Andrea Pitzer]

allied to the US Government, which we can see quite clearly is acting in an authoritarian way. And recent work out from political scientist Marcel Dersuss suggests that expanding surveillance, possible through technological advances, may have drawbacks for governments using those techniques. As Dersuss wrote, even the most technologically advanced dictatorships remain susceptible to internal fractures that no algorithm can anticipate or prevent. But technology can give an authoritarian the illusion of control.

[Donald Trump]

So that's a lot said in a short period of time, but you can witness it for yourself.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Surveillance may even help secure a hold on power, but that power becomes brittle, closed off, and paranoid. Further, relying on surveillance to suppress dissent undermines trust and legitimacy.

[Expert/Analyst]

Happy to welcome the show. Coming to us from Germany, Marcel Dersis.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Something that has to be kept. Even when a government is operating under competitive authoritarian models, tyrants generally fall.

[Expert/Analyst]

Yeah, I mean, it's a complicated question, but, you know, so people, by and large, they want freedom. You know, they don't want tyranny.

[Andrea Pitzer]

What bombing abroad and the threat of greater surveillance at home make clear is that in the end, Trump and his allies are doing these things for the same reasons.

[Expert/Analyst]

They want to have a say in the way that they're being governed. So, you know, every tyrant constantly has to be afraid of his own people, and the people that he needs to be most afraid of are the people closest to it.

[Andrea Pitzer]

As Spencer Ackerman said just this week, the war on terror was always being waged simultaneously at home and overseas.

[Expert/Analyst]

So the advisers, you know, the, the generals, those intelligence officials that keep them

[Andrea Pitzer]

in power, we're seeing US Foreign policy and domestic policy fusing together.

[Expert/Analyst]

I am from Tehran. There were constant bombings. There are 50 to 60 bombings daily. Very scary. It's, it is unimaginable for the people with children.

[Andrea Pitzer]

I would add that the killings there and the killings we have recently seen here at home serve the same purpose. And it is not the safety or well being of Americans. We can and should express our fury over Iran, over Venezuela, and over the threats the administration is spouting about Cuba.

[Expert/Analyst]

Will you make a public commitment today to rule out US Regime change in Cuba? Regime change, yes. Oh no. I think we would love to see the regime there change. We would like to. That doesn't mean that we're going to make a change, but we would love to see a change. There's no doubt about the fact that it would be of great benefit to the United States if Cuba was no longer governed by an autocratic regime.

[Andrea Pitzer]

There is of course, the immediate horror of lives lost.

[Expert/Analyst]

Can you give us an update on what the administration knows, what you know now about the reported strike on a girls school in southern Iran on Saturday? All I know, all I can say is that we're investigating that. We of course never target civilian targets, but we're taking a look at investigating that.

[Andrea Pitzer]

But damage is also being inflicted on the idea of solving political conflicts without resorting to war.

[Expert/Analyst]

America, regardless of what so called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And on the very concept of international relations that are not simply oligarchs, eliminating the existence of political institutions and accountability

[Expert/Analyst]

all on our terms with maximum authorities. No stupid rules of engagement, no nation building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The standard responsive that I talk about on any number of weeks remain helpful.

[Expert/Analyst]

B2s, fighters, drones, missiles, and of course

[Andrea Pitzer]

classified effects you can demonstrate.

[Expert/Analyst]

But in fact, you know you have your best chance of creating a democratization if you can topple tyrants through non violent means. So mass protests, bringing our people into

[Andrea Pitzer]

the streets, you can let your representatives know how deeply you don't approve of these military strikes.

[Expert/Analyst]

I think when it comes to the US in particular, you know, because there are still meaningful elections, you can work

[Andrea Pitzer]

to elect people who are committed to ending this kind of warmongering.

[Expert/Analyst]

The most important thing right now is to mobilize as many people as possible against the government and to try to punish anyone politically and economically that continues to enable Donald Trump.

[Andrea Pitzer]

When it comes to surveillance, you can support the legal work of organizations like the ACLU that challenge government surveillance of American citizens and to address the broader, tangible, growing threat from our increasingly authoritarian government. You can join a 5051 call. I'll be on Thursday, March 5th to speak in concrete ways about how to push back against ICE kidnapping and the expansion of immigrant detention in ways large and small. With me will be Frank Abe, who has dedicated decades to memorializing the detainees of U.S. concentration camps for Japanese Americans established during World War II and following the legacy of the people that were detained there. On the call as well will be Sarah Parker, national coordinator for 50 51, who has done astounding work in Florida to secure reproductive rights and more to resist this administration. We may also hear from on the ground organizers who have successfully repelled attempts to secure warehouses for detention purposes in their communities. I hope you'll sign up to join us. And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with one person who's looking for ways to survive this mess. To support this podcast, please become a paid [e-mail] and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts.