The budget bill unleashes a detention system that threatens every American, but we can still act.

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/america-s-not-so-secret-police

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Watch the video of this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oldNLnCJy5w

Police-State Blues

This week, Andrea looks at how police-state tactics are increasing across the country, not least with the debut of a new concentration camp in the Everglades. She draws parallels between the US and Nazi Germany (this is what people are always asking about) and shows how, in fact, our tilt toward authoritarianism now has many more echoes from that era than existed in the U.S. during Trump's first administration.

The episode also considers the effects of the budget bill and how such massive funding for ICE detention and related projects could lead to repetition of another part of history in a different country: 2016 Russia, where the creation of an army-size National Guard under Putin's control marked the point where internal dissent and any significant opposition to his rule became almost impossible. Andrea suggests that we may be rapidly approaching a similar lockdown, but we aren't there yet. She lists a dozen things you can do to stop the ICE power grab.

The Supreme Court uses the shadow docket to stick a knife into due process. But every toehold matters when you're taking back the country.

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/rogue-scotus-on-the-loose

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In this week's episode, Andrea Pitzer looks at Monday's Supreme Court ruling, which permits the government to send immigrants from U.S. soil to countries they did not come from and to which they have no connection, places where they might be tortured or trafficked. The decision, on the shadow docket, included a dissent but no explanation of the majority's rationale.

Andrea considers what this means in terms of rights for immigrants and everyone else, and how—barring future decisions limiting it, clarifying it, or reversing it—this decision is likely to lead to violence, abuse, and concentration camp patterns of detention for those we deport abroad. She also explores how the time required to negotiate agreements with countries the US will need to bully or bribe into taking detainees will lead to even worse overcrowding in existing US detention facilities. With news of plans for a new Florida detention center nicknamed "Alligator Alcatraz", officials are emphasizing the role of pythons and other reptiles to keep prisoners on site. The episode finishes with some examples of local communities fighting detention facilities and ideas for what you can do to take action yourself.

Millions hit the streets last weekend to secure democracy and change America.

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/there-is-no-final-boss

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This week "Next Comes What" focuses on the five million (or so) Americans who turned up in cities and towns across the country last Saturday for No King's Day. Andrea Pitzer looks at the arc of nationwide protests from 2017 and 2020 and connects 2025 to them as a way to think about what's unfolding: a mass movement capable of rejecting Trumpism and transforming the country. Framing the fight for democracy as an ongoing effort rather than any "one and done" phenomenon, she stresses the importance of continuing to show up between the big events. Andrea recounts her reporting from two Saturday demonstrations in Falls Church, Virginia, where she lives, and considers what happened in the rest of the country. Often hopeful, yet touched by tragedy, June 14 was a wake-up call made and answered by America itself.

People in the streets of LA and staff at NIH show all Americans how to stand up to power.

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/standing-up-to-power

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In this week's episode, Andrea Pitzer looks at actions in Los Angeles and at NIH from recent days as models for how we might each be able to shore up democracy in our own communities. She runs through a timeline of how ICE arrests in California drew residents to protest, which was met with violence by law enforcement. After the Trump administration triggered then escalated the crisis, the president took the likewise unnecessary steps of deploying the California National Guard and U.S. Marines. Andrea considers the destructive nature of these actions and the threat to democracy that they represent, as well as highlighting a few ways that Californians found to resist this overreach.

The second half of the episode focuses on an interview with Rui Carlos Sá, a program director at NIH, whom Andrea first met at a "No Kings" demonstration in February. As one of the signers of Monday's Bethesda Declaration calling out the damage the new administration is inflicting on the National Institutes of Health, Sá talks about the importance of NIH and how he made the decision to stand up publicly. Andrea closes with a look at things we can do to follow in the footsteps of people speaking out in DC and LA, with an emphasis on the upcoming "No Kings" demonstrations across the US on Saturday, June 14.

The Trump administration is accelerating the concentration camp tendency worldwide, worsening conditions people are held in around the globe.

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/the-concentration-camp-tendency-part-2

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This week, Andrea Pitzer looks at overseas expansion of the concentration camp tendency that sits at the heart of federal policy right now. This exclusion of whole groups from society is something the US is actively promoting overseas. By making plans to or actually sending people to Libya, South Sudan, El Salvador, and Panama, the current administration is creating an overseas network of concentration camps. As the US leads the way, problematic detention is being tipped over into more dangerous territory. Meanwhile, massive cuts to US aid globally are staggering international efforts to deal with political and economic crises abroad, including reducing rations in refugee camps in several countries. Andrea considers what everyday Americans can do at home and abroad, offering the example of Camden, Delaware, where community outcry ended a collaboration agreement between local police and ICE.

Stick around for the details of a June 11 event at noon ET hosted by Harvard that you can sign up to attend virtually, where Andrea will be joined by former Kamala Harris policy advisor Ami Fields-Meyer and resistance-movement researcher Erica Chenoweth in conversation about ways irregular detention is expanding and how we can strengthen democracy. (Register here: https://ash.harvard.edu/events/concentration-camps-and-the-machinery-of-repression-lessons-for-saving-democracy/.)

The constitutional right that keeps you from disappearing—and why Trump wants to suspend it.

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/disappearing-bodies

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What dives into the writ of habeas corpus and how it protects U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike. Andrea Pitzer considers Stephen Miller's comment that the administration would consider suspending habeas corpus depending on how U.S. courts rule on immigration cases underway now. She looks at how ruptures in these kinds of guarantees led to dictatorships lasting more than a decade in places like Chile and Nazi Germany.

Turning to events closer to home, Andrea walks listeners through the times habeas corpus has been suspended in the U.S., and how battles over it dominated key cases in War on Terror detentions at Guantanamo. The establishment of military zones along the border and the arrest of Newark mayor Ras Baraka compound the issue of who gets to detain people and who gets to contest those decisions. Andrea closes by looking at what people are doing to take action, and what you can do, too.

Who really invents the world we all live in? We do.

What matters more than money to Trump and his billionaire allies?

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/the-concentration-camp-tendency

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This week's episode looks at a common theme uniting the cruel policies of the second Trump administration: the concentration camp tendency, an attempt to remove whole groups of people from society. From the homeless to trans people and the mentally ill, from Black folks to immigrants, our current president is looking to erase people from daily life, or even to physically expel them from society altogether.

Andrea Pitzer discusses this approach, in which groups not complying with an authoritarian's idealized society get excluded in a widening circle. As a country we've allowed a billionaire class to rise, one that preaches a gospel in which they should never be inconvenienced or interfered with, no matter what cost that has for others. Andrea looks back to a book on young children that explains this phenomenon and shows how even preschoolers can understand it. Yet we've let an exclusionary impulse capture the nation. It doesn't have to be that way, and we can stop it.