MINI EPISODE: And It's Only January (with Andrea Pitzer)

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Introduction – 00:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: Welcome back to another mini episode of Relationscapes. I'm journalist Blair Hodges joining you from Salt Lake City. Let's talk about what's going on right now.

We're only halfway through January, and already there's way too many huge things happening to even think about covering them all: The U.S. kidnapping the de facto Venezuelan president. An announcement from the chairman of the Federal Reserve that he's being targeted by the Trump administration for prosecution because the president wants to control monetary policy. A queer mother in Minneapolis was shot in the head in broad daylight by ICE, and the government's been trying to portray her as a terrorist instead of taking responsibility.

And that's just the first 16 days of the month. All this stuff has really left me reeling, I have to be honest. So I'm trying to find productive ways to deal with it. I invited Andrea Pitzer to join me to talk about what we can do.

Andrea is a journalist and an author. She wrote One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps. She also hosts a great podcast called Next Comes What and writes a newsletter called Degenerate Art. I recommend all of it. You can check it out at her website, andreapitzer.com.

Are things really as bad as they seem? And what are we supposed to do about it? That's what we're talking about today in this mini episode of Relationscapes.

 

A Barrage of Terrible News – 01:07

 

BLAIR HODGES: Andrea Pitzer, welcome to Relationscapes.

ANDREA PITZER: Glad to be here, Blair.

BLAIR HODGES: There's a lot going on right now, and I'm wondering how you're handling this barrage. You cover a lot of it on your podcast, so I know you're plugged into the news. How are you dealing with all the January badness we're facing?

ANDREA PITZER: Well, there's a couple different ways I'm dealing with. One is that if I can't keep up with everything every single minute, it's okay. Because part of the attempt with all this stuff—people will use the word distraction, which it might or might not be—but I think is definitely to wear down people who don't like what's going on right now.

And so to the degree that you just keep staying in there and getting more worn down, you're not useful to yourself or anybody. So sometimes I just remind myself I don't actually have to know everything at every minute, every day, and that that's okay.

And I'm also taking—and everybody will have their own thing, perhaps, that they'll want to do—but I play guitar really badly, and I have started getting together with a couple of people and playing guitar badly with them. And they also don't—you know—they're not particularly proficient. And so I think that reminding yourself of the things that matter, sort of outside the moment, is also a really important thing.

BLAIR HODGES: You talked about people that are getting worn down. And I feel that. There are times when I just need to step away from my phone or try to be a lot more conscious about how much time I'm spending on social media, because my feeds are mainly news-oriented.

And I do think that's right, that people get worn down and then maybe burnt out and kind of unplugged. But I also think the barrage of news also keeps people from even trying to plug in to begin with.

And I wonder if there aren't more people out there who are the kind of people that would say, I'm not really into politics, who see all this mess happening and to them it's just like, oh, people are just being—you know—just saying crazy things, as always, about politics.

So I also worry about that effect, that there's so much going on that it's also disincentivizing people from trying to plug in to begin with.

ANDREA PITZER: I think that that's a real concern. And I have talked to some social scientists that are actually measuring that effect—the people who are just saying, this is all exhausting and it's upsetting. I've got friends on both sides and I'm just checking out, right?

And I think in some ways that is one of the biggest—well, not the biggest—but that is one of the biggest dangers that we're facing. And that, I think, is actually a goal of having so many things going on at once.

There's gonna be a group of people that say, I don't wanna get in trouble. I'm gonna keep my head down. But there will also be a group of people who will say, I can't deal with this. I don't know what to do, and I don't understand it, and I'm just gonna not be involved in politics.

I'm now not a political person. They'll sort of declare themselves that, and they will stop watching news, they will stop voting. They will stop—to the degree that they were involved in these things in the first place—even paying attention.

And I think in this sort of shattered information landscape we live in now, where some favorite traditional outlets are doing some really strange reporting that I think is not the kind of reporting they would have been doing 30 or 40 years ago, and other ones have been kind of overtaken—you think of CBS under Bari Weiss as doing something quite different than the Walter Cronkite tradition, as problematic as that old tradition was.

Yeah, I think we have to say that is one example where it's measurably worse now. And so people don't even know where they would go if they wanted to get good information. There is good stuff out there, but it's now harder to find.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I mean, speaking to that—problems with the old model—I think there's definitely the gatekeeping that could happen. We had a couple of channels that would cover the news, and everybody was kind of hearing the same stories. And there are some problems with that, because who was controlling the stories and all of that stuff.

Now it's just—it doesn't even feel like there's a real news cycle anymore, if that makes sense. There used to be a story that would kind of dominate the conversation for at least a week or two, and we just don't have that anymore. Yeah.

ANDREA PITZER: One of my kids, when he was younger, would always say, okay, guys, what's the big story this week, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

ANDREA PITZER: And it's like, oh, the submersible blew up. Or there would just be something that everybody was talking about. And now there are still things everybody is talking about, but it feels like it changes every hour. Right?

And it will feel in your circle like everybody is talking about that. And then sometimes you will go to another place or into another community and you will find that people don't have any idea what you're talking about.

And I'm not just meaning the perpetually online people, of which I am one, who know some meme or some joke or something that people outside it don't know—that's not unusual. And certainly the youths today know a whole bunch of things that I don't know.

But what I do see more and more of is something that will qualify as a major news event inside one group of people will not exist, you know, to the people who are those ones that you mentioned that have checked out. They will simply be completely unaware of it in a way that I think—when you used to see newspapers in vending machines.

When you used to see—I mean, not the vending machines.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

ANDREA PITZER: Those little newspaper machines. Yeah, yeah. I mean, or you used to see your alt-weekly when you would go in a store to buy things. You know, you just don't have that exposure.

And also the breakdown of local television news is another huge factor in, I think, people just not even being aware what's going on at the national level.

 

Does the US Have Concentration Camps? – 06:26

 

BLAIR HODGES: I mean, by the time this episode comes out, who knows—really, anything could happen. It really does feel that way. As I mentioned in the intro, though, Minneapolis is under siege right now as we're having this conversation, with documented and undocumented people alike being arrested out of the blue by ICE.

And I wanted to talk to you about this because you've done a lot of work and a lot of research on totalitarianism, and especially as it comes to things like concentration camps. You wrote a book called One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps. Is it fair to bring up concentration camps when we're talking about the context of what ICE is doing right now?

ANDREA PITZER: I think it very much is. And to be honest, I actually started sounding the alarm in this regard during the first Trump administration, when we saw family separations and this sort of deliberate creation of these spectacles of people behind chain-link fences crowded into cages.

And this was clearly part of what they were trying to do, was to create this visual of kind of animals in cages and making arguments that this is how the problem ought to be dealt with.

Back then, I said, hey, we're repeating some grim history here. This is still the early stages. And, you know, when the electorate brought Biden in, some of that was put on pause. And certainly the spectacle of it was put on pause.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

ANDREA PITZER: But the reason I wrote that book—and I pitched that book and sold that book and wrote 95% of it before Donald Trump ever got elected the first time—so just to be clear, the policies that have brought us to where we are today are something that have been part of American society in some pretty dangerous ways.

And for people who are wondering, what does this have to do with concentration camps, I'll just say: for the book, the concentration camp definition that I used was the mass detention of civilians on the basis of some aspect of identity. So that could be race, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, without due process, usually for punitive reasons, and for some kind of indefinite time where you don't know how long you'll be there.

And I went all over the world and looked at examples where this had happened from the 1890s—how we got to Auschwitz, what happened after Auschwitz. I went to Guantanamo to see, did that sort of qualify or not? How would that fit into this picture?

And I have to say that if people still had questions—and they did, because they didn't know this history that I knew, and maybe they had their own objections to using the term concentration camp, which is a loaded term for sure—if they had those hesitations back in the first Trump administration, I think people now are getting a clearer idea of what happens when you don't stop this.

And when you start it a little bit, but you don't adequately reverse it—let's say, under Biden—when you don't make clear breaks with this policy, where do you end up?

And where that is now, people might say, are there concentration camps in Minnesota? Minneapolis? Did I miss something?

But what has happened is that while some people were paying attention and while a bunch of Americans, I think, didn't realize it, ICE's budget has been increased by tens of billions of dollars and is specifically earmarked money for expanding detention capacity.

And we are already in situations where existing detention facilities—even before Trump came back in—were extremely dangerous, extremely unhygienic, unhealthy places.

And there is now, with things as they call Alligator Alcatraz, which I tend to refer to as the Everglades Camp, again this dangerous, deliberate attempt to create this punishment spectacle in which one group of people, on the basis of who they are, are described as so dangerous that they have to be taken out of society.

Right? And I think a lot of people realized with Alligator Alcatraz that we were heading toward that. But now where we are is we are building mega facilities at Fort Bliss in Texas and across the country to hold more and more and more people.

And there was just a murder at one of these facilities—literally, the medical examiner labeled it a case of homicide—where a man was choked to death.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

ANDREA PITZER: And I think if you wonder how do you get there, the way you get there is through what we're seeing ICE doing now on the streets, which is these sweeps.

One woman who was interviewed said they came to her house and said, do you know where Hmong people live? I mean, this is not like we're looking for a criminal, right? This is, do you know where these people?

She said no. She just kind of played dumb. And they said, well, what about Asians? Like, are there any Asians near here? And so it's clear that as much as, as Americans, we don't like to think of ourselves as doing this kind of thing, we are already doing it.

BLAIR HODGES: And we have a Supreme Court that says it's okay. I mean, Brett Kavanaugh famously now has said, hey, you can stop—

ANDREA PITZER: Kavanaugh stops. It's okay if you stop even U.S. citizens, was the Kavanaugh stop, because they'll be let go very soon. It'll be no problem.

Meanwhile, we had a trans kid who was blinded last week. I don't know if you saw that. And it's horrific. And they're going to have a lifetime of medical and health consequences from this.

And again, it is not all right to do this to non–U.S. citizens, in my opinion. And yet the fact that they are willing to do it to children.

They threw a munition of some kind into—I don't know if it was a gas canister or tear gas, I'm not sure exactly—but they threw it into a van that had six children in it. A six-month-old baby stopped breathing.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Three kids were hospitalized.

ANDREA PITZER: Yeah. They all had to get checked out.

 

Why Is This Train So Out of Control? – 11:48

 

BLAIR HODGES: So here's my question about this, Andrea. Back when—during the first Trump administration—when that recording leaked where we heard children crying, yes, that put the brakes on the whole family separation thing pretty hardcore.

We saw the administration at least be like, okay, kind of pretend to stop. And they didn't fix the problems that it already caused, but it at least sort of put the brakes on things.

Biden gets in office. He changes the cosmetic things, but the apparatus underneath it—the actual machinery—continues. Trump gets back.

My question is then, why does something like the gas canister thing happen? The kid getting shot in the face, Renee Goode being murdered—none of this is putting the brakes on any of this like we saw in the first administration.

Why did it stop then, or at least appear to? And this time there just doesn't seem to be any stopping this train.

ANDREA PITZER: So first, later we can talk about there is definitely stopping this train that can happen, and I think parts of it are already happening now.

But it's really going to rely on us just speaking not as somebody who has a rosy vision of America today, but more as somebody who's looked at history in the past and how these things change.

I do have specific thoughts on that. But for why it hasn't already happened—why, if you will, the conscience hasn't been shocked.

BLAIR HODGES: Last time it did stop, kind of.

ANDREA PITZER: Well, it put a pause button on it for sure. And that's sort of what I wanted to say, just about the Biden thing.

Biden was actually doing some different things. Biden was prioritizing criminal detentions, right? He was looking for people.

But the apparatus of the detention, right, and the willingness to include some of those COVID restrictions because they were trying to appease the Republicans and getting them to vote for things.

BLAIR HODGES: Immigration negatively in general, like not challenging the false narrative that immigrants cost us money, or that they're living off of government money, or that they're criminals, or whatever.

ANDREA PITZER: That they're all criminals—more than Americans, not even starting Americans, more than native-born Americans. Exactly.

And so I think that it was a pause button, and Biden did prioritize different things, because now we do see—and I think this is much worse—we see now people with no criminal record. Overwhelmingly, people without criminal records are being detained.

And personally, I am less concerned about some of the criminal record population that gets arrested, but even that population, I think, has been treated pretty horrifically in that system.

And we have criminalized—you know, crossing the border is a misdemeanor at worst—and we have turned it into, you can die for this, right?

I mean, we have turned it into as high-stakes as, again, your family may be splintered, you may be permanently injured. You may be, as one man was, deported and delivered and died almost as soon as he arrived in the country that we deported him to because of the conditions we had kept him in here.

You know, now it is such a high-stakes thing. And I think the reason—to answer your question from before—the reason it's different now is this is the second administration, and they know that they have a small window in which to make this happen and get the country, I believe, under a more authoritarian control via a sort of police-state vehicle.

And they have spent years—many, many people have spent years—demonizing immigrants to make them seen as a population you could do this to.

And the way this playbook goes all around the world for more than 100 years now is that you create that one population, you build the police force ostensibly to address them, and then you expand it to include the people who are against you. You expand it to include other target populations that you don't like.

And I think we are already seeing the beginning of that expansion. I do think they're rushing it too quickly because they don't have time.

Why don't they have time? They don't have enough time to go more slowly, as other states have, because they don't yet have full authoritarian control of the country.

And this is one of the hopeful things for us, is that by the time you saw this level of detention and this level of street violence in the other places that I've studied around the world—including places like Nazi Germany, which is the one people know about a little already; they don't know about a lot of the others—you do not still see the kind of freedom that you or I have to do this podcast, for people to go out on the street and mock Gregory Bovino to his face.

You don't have the ability to still do that. And so we still have a lot of resources that those people didn't have.

And there are elections coming up. And while a lot of the authoritarian apparatus is being put in place—the budget has been approved to expand this hugely, to acquire this police force and expand it in the way that they need to—and it is basically loyal to the president, right?

That's the big danger. You don't want something that doesn't have an independence, that's accountable to other authorities, that is only accountable to the president instead. And that's what we've got now.

And that's, you know, sort of what Border Patrol has kind of overwhelmed ICE, which was bad enough to start with. But that mentality, which is a really aggressive and defiant kind of police force, is what we are developing—but they don't have it yet.

And the institutional apparatus that we still have in place, I think, is enough for us to insert ourselves.

But why are they doing this? Why are they moving so quickly? Why aren't the brakes on it?

They are determined. This is their shot. This is it. So they are trying to make it happen as quickly as they can.

But if you look at the numbers, the country is turning against ICE in a huge wave. I mean, the slipping that's happened—it’s enormous.

BLAIR HODGES: We'll get that in a minute. Sorry to interrupt.

ANDREA PITZER: No, no, it's fine.

 

Not All Camps Are Created Equal – 17:04

 

BLAIR HODGES: I just wanted to make one more concentration camp point before we get there. Because when people think of concentration camps—and myself included—for so long, I just thought of Auschwitz. I just thought of Nazi Germany. I didn't think of these other contexts.

And so I do see some people objecting to calling places concentration camps, saying, well, you know—even some people saying it's antisemitic if they don't quite understand that concentration camps aren't limited to that.

And your work is so valuable because you're saying, you know what, concentration camps don't have to be Auschwitz to be very bad and to be something we need to get rid of.

ANDREA PITZER: That's absolutely true. And I do think it's critical—whenever you're talking about concentration camps—it's critical to say that there has not been anything else like Auschwitz and the death camps in the time since.

They were a dedicated group of death camps—basically the mass production of death at scale using factory-style methods. And they were adopted in the middle of World War II.

And they were deliberately an attempt to figure out how to kill off tremendous numbers of people.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, there was a numbers problem, which is horrible, because how do you feed people?

ANDREA PITZER: But also literally they had forces steamrolling through Poland, through all these countries that had whole villages that were all Jewish, right? And so they wanted people off the land. They wanted that removal. How would they do it? They had the Wannsee Conference.

But what people don't realize—many people don't realize—is that there was an entire concentration camp system in existence in Nazi Germany for almost a decade before that.

And in the beginning, it took almost five years—actually, it was a little over five years—before they started doing mass roundups of German Jews. It was almost five years.

And what were they doing in those five years? They were focused on stripping Jews of citizenship, making them alien, trying to force them to self-deport, actively deporting them.

In other cases, we are already repeating that chunk of history. But what else were the camps used for?

They were used to target and harass queer people, right? Especially gay men—some lesbian women as well—and certainly the trans community, as it was known at that time. But particularly gay men, who were seen as not fitting the Aryan model, the Nazi model.

And you saw them targeting the homeless. Camps were used broadly to target people who were on the street, who were seen as vagrants.

And I think that people imagine that it was day one that Jews were rounded up and put in this situation in Germany. And that's not the case.

It took years of propaganda to turn the population to where they would actually focus on—not these people that were sort of social outliers that they had already been trained to be uncomfortable around, around queer people, around homeless people—but to actually target for death a population takes a lot of work.

And it takes a tremendous amount of focused propaganda from a government that has control over media.

And so, again, this is where we are repeating—we are actually pretty far into that five-year period before the Germans started rounding up Jews.

You know, we're three years into that in terms of the similar kinds of things we're doing. And you see, interestingly, similar targeting as well, right? Homeless, queer people.

You know, so this toxic brew that I try to describe to people—or think of it as a cake. Let's say if you use the same ingredients and you mix them up and you cook, you're going to get a similar dish.

And so we are not going to have exactly what were Nazi camps. But what I've been trying to warn people is, okay, here we're replicating what Chile and Argentina did in the 1970s and 1980s.

Over here, this is looking a little bit like gulag approaches from the Soviet Union. And some of it also actually looks like the Nazi methods as well.

And we have open neo-Nazis. We have Elon Musk giving Hitler salutes. We have Stephen Miller replicating the words of some of the worst Nazi leadership.

So I think my experience so far has been that people who are at least reading the news have a much better understanding this time of the kind of danger we're in.

And so it's a little bit of a relief now that I don't first have to convince them that there are issues with what's going on.

You know, now people are like, oh, shit—you know—yeah, I can say that on here.

BLAIR HODGES: You can.

ANDREA PITZER: You know, like, what do we do now? They're starting to see these parallels.

So part of my work is a little bit easier in trying to get people to understand the situation we're in.

Leave Nobody Behind – 21:35

BLAIR HODGES: Before we move on, I just want to also thank you for including homeless folks, LGBTQ folks, trans folks. You've covered this stuff on your podcast, in your newsletter.

They get overlooked sometimes, even by centrist Democrats and supposedly progressive people who think that's—that we don't need to be talking about that.

So I want to thank you for not shying away from talking about those things. I think it's really critical, and, well—

ANDREA PITZER: What I would say about that—and there is some validity, I think, to people who worry about, oh, if we spend all our time talking about trans people, we're going to freak everybody out, because people don't understand trans people, even people that are sympathetic—you know, so I understand where they're coming from with that.

But I think the serious danger is if you let a wannabe authoritarian, or really any society, do that to any group, then you yourself are running the risk of allowing it to be done to whole groups.

So this idea of, well, we don't want anything bad to happen, but we're going to kind of go along with this rhetoric because we want to make these gains in this other place is super, super dangerous.

So while I understand people who say we need to be talking to voters about the things that matter to them in daily life—and I would say, yes, that's politics, right? You have to do that—but that doesn't mean you have to throw people under the bus.

BLAIR HODGES: Correct.

ANDREA PITZER: There is a way, and I would say that we have seen it to a certain degree more than most people realize, with Abigail Spanberger’s running in Virginia and also with Zohran Mamdani running in New York.

Where I think if you come across as not throwing anybody under the bus and not hiding from people's questions—

BLAIR HODGES: And weirdly cagey. Who was testifying, I think, yesterday, when they're like, can a man get pregnant? And the person wouldn't answer the question. They're hemming and hawing.

And I'm saying, just say, you know what? Cisgender men cannot get pregnant. They don't have uteruses. But trans men, who sometimes have uteruses, can and have been pregnant. Moving on. This isn't difficult.

ANDREA PITZER: You can address it in the way that's ideal for the moment. Like, there it needed an answer, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Exactly.

ANDREA PITZER: And you can pivot to the thing that then ties that community into the whole. You can actually reestablish the humanity of that community.

And one way that Abigail Spanberger did it that I thought was very good—at one point she was asked about all those ads that her opponent ran, really trans-bashing, like horrific, awful stuff, really bad.

And they said, well, what do you think? Do you think that's right? Do you think about bathrooms? Do you think about this?

And she just said, you know, I think about the kids who are going to see those commercials.

And again, for Virginia, which is not New York City, she is not going to let those people be thrown under the bus.

Because who are those kids that are going to see it? Trans kids are going to see it. Trans kids’ friends are going to see it. Cisgender kids are going to see it.

And what they see are adults who are saying this group of kids is legitimate to attack.

And so I thought, like, that's a good way to do it.

Zohran Mamdani just went way out on a limb and took his little office—portable office desk that he took everywhere—and he went and he set it up in a part of the community that allowed him historically to point to what was around him and memorialize the trans community as it had evolved and gotten its rights in New York City.

And that he was standing up for that.

BLAIR HODGES: And in both cases, I cried watching that video.

ANDREA PITZER: Well, in both cases, I think the answer is you can absolutely—and I don't know why people don't do this more—but why people don't answer the question on their own terms, right?

To say, you know what? I see what you're doing.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

ANDREA PITZER: And I'm here for every Virginian.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

ANDREA PITZER: Or I am here for every—

BLAIR HODGES: And that includes trans people.

ANDREA PITZER: And that includes trans people, and your grandma in a nursing home, and your dad on the factory line.

And you know what? Here are the policies I'm going to do that are going to help everybody.

So I think, yes, politically, you have to not be dumb and get caught in someone else's thing they want you to spend all your time on as a politician. You can't do that. You can't just get stuck in answering the question that they want you to.

BLAIR HODGES: Also, you look sus if you're just trying to avoid it the whole time. It looked so sus when she just wouldn't answer the question. I'm like, don't do this.

ANDREA PITZER: If you look strong enough to answer it head-on and immediately talk about why you're running and how you're going to help everybody, so that anybody who's listening understands you're on their team too.

You're there for the trans kids, you're there for the union guys, you're there for the homeless. You're there for the people that don't vote for you.

You know, I think there is a certain kind of superpower in being big enough to take it on and move immediately past it, to say, like, I'm not going to buy into this framing that you have.

Yes, I'm here for trans people. I'm here for these people. I'm here—and reassert yourself.

BLAIR HODGES: But I think what Mamdani did was then he also boosted it in other contexts, too. So I agree with the answer-it-and-pivot.

But I also think we need to control the narrative better. And what Democrats, I don't think, are getting is public opinion has shifted so much on trans people, in part because of all the negative messaging.

So positive messaging, as well as answering the bad-faith questions, needs to happen—for lack of time.

ANDREA PITZER: Let's see another episode.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Oh, like I said, there's so much.

ANDREA PITZER: Stuff. But I think it's critical to say what's happening to immigrants is not separate from what's happening to the homeless and queer people and women and Black folks.

We are seeing this attempt to atomize and isolate whole communities, even from each other.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes.

ANDREA PITZER: And I think we have to say that, wait, these are camps. Like, we are literally building a concentration camp society.

We sent those guys to El Salvador without due process. We are helping to spur the creation of an international concentration camp network.

You know, it is a disastrous moment, but it is also still a very stoppable moment.

And so I think this is a time where we have to get our resolve together for how we're going to address it.

BLAIR HODGES: And one lesson is, after this is done, we need to go about dismantling the institutions and systems that make this kind of thing possible.

We can't just say, okay, we got our guy or our person, and we're good to go.

 

Will Things Get Worse? – 27:39

 

BLAIR HODGES: So you wrote this week that you think our national crisis is actually going to get a little bit worse before it gets better.

We're going to get to the hopeful stuff we're about there. But I maybe wanted to ask: is there anything you do predict?

Like, is there something you would predict that's going to happen in terms of how that national crisis would get worse before it can get better?

ANDREA PITZER: I think you're going to see—I mean, there's a lot of ways it could. Having done this work, you know, and looked at all these different places, I don't want to create just a—whatever's the opposite of greatest hits, worst hits, you know, from these regimes.

But I will say that I think we are going to see a good deal more.

And, you know, people are talking about ICE moving to Maine, to California, to New York. And I think in some of those cities you are going to see more desperate and more violent responses.

It's going to be a little bit harder to show restraint as we get farther into this. And you may even see sort of bad actors coming in and taking a role.

And I think that there are a lot of things—and we can go to this in a minute—that everyday people can do to stop that.

But I think you're going to see more success—there's a good chance of more success—in media painting protesters as violent and dangerous in a way that has been hard to do in Minneapolis so far, just because Renee Goode—it's really hard to make her look dangerous.

Because cisgender—well, yeah—cisgender white women, queer or not, don't come across in the media typically as threatening, right? They're not a danger. In fact, this is the myth of protecting women who are sort of blonde and, you know, a certain look.

And that's not taking away from her at all.

But I think you're going to see them working to more strategically get to and access communities where the optics are going to be ones that more Americans are going to be uncomfortable with because of this latent prejudice.

It's going to be easier to play some of those things in. And so I think resisting the kind of prejudice that we saw with Black Lives Matter—that's going to be more key going forward.

And I think media has done—media is such a weird general term. We're in a rush, so I don't want to break it down too much—but you have seen actually some pretty good reporting debunking the government stuff.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. What outlets are you directing people to?

ANDREA PITZER: Well, like Marisa Cabas—the Handbasket—is doing some really great stuff.

There's a group called Bolts that looks at election-related stuff and how things are actually changing on the ground with these special elections that are underway now. That is useful.

Wired, 404 Media, Mother Jones, The Guardian is doing some good stuff.

And there are still good people at a number of different places. But I think you just have to be more suspect.

There's a lot of power speaking to power at some of the places that I've had subscriptions for years and now have stopped them for the time being—New York Times, Washington Post, all that stuff.

It's hard. There are still—I have friends that are still there doing good reporting—but it became a question of what I wanted my money to be funding.

BLAIR HODGES: Same, same.

ANDREA PITZER: And there's ways to get around the—

BLAIR HODGES: Paywall. But I didn't say that.

ANDREA PITZER: Yeah, well, I mean—and that's one reason to be on something like Bluesky, where you can go to gift links usually. Or you can go to archive.org, right, and you can be looking up links.

So there are ways to access it. It is harder than it used to be.

But what I will say is I think there has been some good media out there really breaking news and covering stuff.

And I think that the administration, the longer this goes on, is going to get better at blocking access to that stuff.

They're going to do things like cordon off things to keep people from being able to cover it. They're going to get into communities that are maybe almost entirely communities of color.

BLAIR HODGES: We need people filming, though. We need people with their cell phones out, basically.

ANDREA PITZER: Right. But then if they can get into a community that's overwhelmingly the community they're targeting, then it's easier to paint it as everybody in this scene is a person of color, they're all a danger, they're all terrorists, and people are more likely to believe it.

So this is why we have to stand against this kind of stuff all the time.

BLAIR HODGES: Really quick—how do you pull all those audio clips in your podcast? It's like you've got all these audio clips that you kind of intersperse throughout. How are you collecting all this audio?

ANDREA PITZER: Okay, so that is my magical secret weapon, which is Jason Sattler, who is also known as lolgop, was formerly on Twitter and is now—who I follow—is now on Bluesky and has a site called thefarce.org.

But he actually came to me—had interviewed me back when the camps book first came out in the first Trump administration.

We've stayed in touch since and decided that—I was already doing this newsletter—and after Trump won the election, he wanted to start turning parts of it into a podcast.

And so a lot of the most clever clips—I mean, sometimes I'm directly referencing something and he'll put the clip in that I'm describing—but other times he will bring in all different stuff from across the week and do really clever things.

So that is all his genius in the editing.

 

What Can We Hope For? – 32:33

 

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, cool, cool.

That's Andrea Pitzer, host of Next Comes What and also author of the Degenerate Art newsletter. You can follow her at andreapitzer.com.

All right, let's get to the good stuff here.

You say you're not really big on giving a lot of advice. You're personally allergic to self-help books and podcasts, something that you've said.

So that being said, what are you inviting people to do? You say, don't train yourself into powerlessness. That's a phrase you've used. What are we going to do instead?

ANDREA PITZER: Okay. And for those of you that are self-help book authors, it's nothing personal against you.

I used to teach karate for a living, too. And, you know, when you have a black belt and I taught hundreds of people every week around the city in D.C., people look up to you in a way I think that is very dangerous.

If you get sort of seen as a leader or self-help guru or anything, and they forget that they can do this.

And so the overwhelming thing I would say is get involved close to home.

One of the things that has happened is we now have access, if we go out and look for it, to all this information you and I have been discussing today, right?

These huge meta-narratives of meta-narratives and what's the future policy and what are they thinking and what Stephen Miller is thinking—like, that's my guess. That's your guess.

Spending a lot of time on that is not useful, especially if you don't have your own podcast or you're not teaching people how to use that.

You know, if you just eat up all your mental energy projecting yourself kind of into every situation, you won't have enough left to do anything.

And so I really encourage people: if you don't know what to do in your community, find the groups that are doing things.

There are all kinds of immigrant aid groups, resource groups.

If that feels a little politically difficult with your job—for instance, to get really involved with that might be problematic at your job—church groups.

Many of them are, as we have seen in Minneapolis, doing amazing things.

Many Catholic groups have been doing incredible stuff around the country, aiding a lot of the Latino immigrants that we've been seeing targeted.

And many, many, many of them have shelter programs, food programs, job programs, helping take care of families whose breadwinners have been deported.

So it's all pretty simple stuff.

But you can get involved in local demonstrations, which are also critical.

You can get involved in ICE policy—talk to your local city council, talk to your state representatives, get ICE out of your community.

A lot of this can happen at the really close-to-home level.

You can change the quality of life and the degree to which your city, your town, your county is or isn't looking out for its most vulnerable members.

And once you plug into that, that's when you actually learn, as I call it, what your secret superpower is.

Right? You may have a skill that is really needed. Or you may just find an opening.

There's—I’m forgetting her last name, I'm not going to be able to pronounce it right—but it's like Piatkowski. Her name is Megan.

She's just an illustrator. And when she saw this current crisis hit, she started creating zines for every part of the country, getting them online digitally so that people could download and print, fold them themselves.

And it is like: know your rights, how to deal with ICE, where you can contact people for help if you see ICE in action.

BLAIR HODGES: I’ll link it in the show notes.

ANDREA PITZER: And then Dan Sinker, who is an online guy too, realized, hey, you know what? I'm going to go get a 3D printer, and I'm going to start printing whistles. And I'm going to put out online, I will ship these whistles to any community that wants them.

And he's been printing hundreds and hundreds of whistles at a time.

BLAIR HODGES: Wow.

ANDREA PITZER: And so it's all of these little things that you might say, that's not going to change the big picture.

But the big picture we can do with demonstrations, we can do with elections, we can demand of our elected reps.

But I actually think the most important part is to be out in the community, changing things on the ground where you live.

And that's not just a rosy optimism kind of thing. We are literally going to have to reinvent civic life in this country to get past this phase.

So we are going to have to—even if you're like me and you're an introvert and you don't really want to be around people that much—this is what we have to do.

And I know that because there was research, even with all the Black Lives Matter backlash that we saw in the summer of 2020—huge backlash, horrible portrayals on Fox News, all this awful stuff.

Those protests actually—social scientists have analyzed it—made a difference in electing Joe Biden. They actually could measure the difference that it made.

And do you know where it made the most difference? It made the most difference in areas that were whiter, smaller, more rural, less educated.

And they don't yet know why. But my theory on why—which is worth what you pay for here, but you can consider it at least—is because of so many people checking out and because of our fractured news environment.

I think those protests were the only times that people in those communities saw, wait a minute, maybe there's some other story that I didn't know about these protests.

Maybe there's something happening here that I didn't get if my neighbors are out doing this.

And I think we have to do that in every community across the country so that people understand that the received narrative that we're getting from the national level—we have a real narrative right here at home.

And in the same way that politicians have to speak to conditions on the ground for their constituents and what's going to happen, I think we as people in our community have to assert what's happening and what kind of community we want to live in.

Does that make sense?

 

Working Together – 38:21

 

BLAIR HODGES: It does. And I think we have to be prepared for it to take a long time.

I'm reading the graphic novel March with my 10-year-old right now, and we just got through the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

And I had forgotten—I’ve read March before, and I've had classes in civil rights history and all this stuff—I forgot the bus boycott lasted longer than a year.

This isn't something that's going to happen overnight, and we need to be prepared to be in it for the long haul.

And you've also called on people to avoid infighting if we can.

I know there's differences of view—for example, on whether we should say abolish ICE or not.

Now, I'm a hardcore abolish ICE. I don't want ICE. We don't need it. It's a new thing. I think it needs to go away. I think that money needs to be redirected—investments into visa programs and into immigration courts and helping expand immigration in a positive way.

But other people are saying, we can't say abolish ICE. I can't get elected.

And I know there's different electorates around, but you're inviting people to avoid the infighting about that stuff. Don't spend time policing—just do your thing.

ANDREA PITZER: I think there's room for all of us.

And if somebody is saying, no, the thing we have to be doing is this, then what I say is, yes—go do your thing. Go do—I’m serious—go do your thing.

Literally, somebody criticized—I had posted a photo of somebody at a march that had made this huge handmade sign, and somebody wrote to criticize their choice of words in it.

And I didn't give them a hard time, but that was part of what spurred me to just say, oh my God, go make your sign. Make—you might have a better sign.

And I don't mean that facetiously. No, no—you literally might have a better sign.

Your theory—not yours, but abstract—your theory for why we should do something other than say abolish ICE, maybe that's the secret thing. That's the middle way that nobody's been able to figure out yet.

Go work on that. Don't stop people from what they're doing. Go do your thing or gather people to you to do that. I think that's really legitimate.

My big concern with this—and this goes to the centrism thing that you mentioned at the top of the intro—the thing is, I think on the left the real tendency is to compromise in advance.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes.

ANDREA PITZER: Oh, well, they're not going to like this, so let's not use this. And who are they? They are not the people that support us.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

ANDREA PITZER: And so right now, first you have to build a movement of people that share your goals and are committed to what you want.

And I think you have to audaciously say what you want in that moment.

It's going to get worn down, right? There is no doubt politics wears all that stuff down.

Why would you start at a position you don't even agree with and let that get worn down?

And I'm not saying it has to be always adversarial. But I think in that multitude of everybody coming out with what they really believe and want to work toward, finding what the overlap is—you work with everybody on that.

You work on your own stuff on the side.

This is how you build a healthy movement that takes back the government that we have.

Because I guarantee you Stephen Miller is not sitting in D.C.—Russell Vought is not sitting in D.C.—saying, well, what do the Democrats think of this?

And I'm not saying that we should be like those assholes. But I'm saying we should be aggressive in the demands for humanity and respect and for decency and for changing funding so that ICE doesn't have tens of billions of dollars.

And people can do that how they think it's best. And each of us is going to work on that.

And over time, those things get funneled into common ways to address it.

But to start at the beginning trying to push everybody through that small part of the funnel—when that comes later—is ridiculous.

Let everybody in who has a productive thing.

I mean, a lot of people hate Will Stancil, who is this guy that ran for Congress and is an online personality.

And this last week he's been driving around in a car chasing ICE.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

ANDREA PITZER: And all these people that I had seen be critical of him before are like, go Will Stancil.

And I think that's a perfect example. You don't have to agree with everybody.

It might even be the online person you find the most annoying who will find a really good thing to do and will make a significant contribution.

And sometimes I'm the jerk—maybe. Maybe I'm the one who's like, people are like, oh God, it's concentration camp lady again, right?

And that's fine. Maybe that's how they feel about it.

And yet we are going to be able to work together.

So the idea is not that we ever have to be perfectly aligned.

Right? There's going to be tensions and all that stuff.

But I would absolutely say don't give up on your biggest asks before you even get started.

 

Do People Know What You Think? – 42:57

 

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, before we go—I've been trying to think of the best way to ask this question, because I don't want to be a downer here.

But I'll just put it to you like this. Opinion polling does suggest that Trump’s massively unpopular right now. People are not happy with what ICE is doing.

There's a lot of polling that suggests that.

And you say—here's a quote—you say, it's clear that the more they hear about what's happening, the less tolerance the American public has for this illegal overreach.

Okay. I'm still really afraid of voter disconnection.

I'm still really afraid that there are a lot of people out there who really, truly are not paying attention to any of this.

I think of the huge Harris rallies that were going on before the election. It made it look like there was this huge movement behind us.

And of course she received fewer votes than Biden. And we can go into why that happened and everything.

But the point is, is there the risk of the appearance of a movement that might not pan out?

And I guess—I mean, there's really not much we can do about it—but do you worry about this?

Do you project a confidence as part of a, if I put it into the world, maybe I can help it come about? Or are you worried about this at all?

ANDREA PITZER: Definitely.

And I think that—I mean, having said what's happened in—

BLAIR HODGES:Well Dammit, Andrea!

ANDREA PITZER: No, no, no—but there's a definitely, but.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, okay.

ANDREA PITZER: So the definitely—I'm agreeing with you part—is if immigration sentiment can shift this radically in this short period of time, then it's super malleable, right?

It is super changeable, which means there could be things that would shift it back the other way. And part of that is—I mean, one of the things that the last hundred years has taught me—is propaganda is really effective. Done over time, done relentlessly, it will change the terms of the conversation. Even for people who don't support the government, they will start to incorporate its caveats and its well-what-abouts.

And you'll see that come to be. And that's part of why we are where we are on immigrants now, is because there's actually been a really concerted anti-immigrant campaign against them. So I think that just because those polls have swung so much in our favor, it doesn't mean they stay in our favor. But the fact that they're that changeable, I think, is a serious opening. Right?

BLAIR HODGES: If we talk about it.

ANDREA PITZER: We have to continue to raise the issue, to bring it up.

And I was talking to somebody last night—and I'm not going to name names because I'm trying to give them their space—but they have been saying to me for a year now, well, when are people really going to show up? When is it going to be like South Korea, with millions in the streets?

And, you know, the first thing I'll say is it is like—we are really getting there. The protest movement that has been building, we've had some of the biggest one-day events that have ever happened in American history. So there is no doubt that movement is growing. We have to grow it quickly enough that as the authoritarianism is rising and the movement is rising, that we can outswamp it, right? That's the goal.

There's no fixed thing. And so that's why I'm perfectly willing to tell you, yes, I am concerned.

I believe 100% that the American public can come out, has the capacity and even the ethics and morality still in the majority of Americans, if they see what's happening, and we have the capacity to stop it. But it is not going to happen on its own.

And this person who always comes to me and says, when are people going to really show up and do this?

And I say, have you started yet? And I don't mean that lightly at all. I literally said to them, here are the programs that are in your area. Here are the things. And I said, have you started doing anything yet? They said, no. And I said, it isn't going to happen until people like you actually start doing it.

Unlike many places around the world where this point was too late for people to stop the worst of what would happen, we are still at a place where we can do it. But it 100% depends on getting the stories out, politicians emerging who will stand up for this, as we the public show up more and get more of this story out.

And as more of this violence happens, I think there will be an opportunity for politicians to step up.

But what has been clear is that universities, companies, politicians—they are not going to do it until we make it happen.

And so I just—like every listener out there—you know, not only do you have some skill that will be useful somewhere, but literally being part of this is going to be the critical answer.

And if not enough people do it, then we're going to have ongoing authoritarianism.

I mean, the U.S. could go either way.

And I think it totally has the capacity not to sort of fall as we know it, but it is not a given.

People should just not assume that somebody else is going to take care of it.

BLAIR HODGES: This is why I love your voice. This is why I wanted to talk to you.

I'm so glad that you took time to come on my show, because you have a realism that's grounded in history, that's rooted in the present, that somehow finds reasons for us to hope without being overly optimistic or trying to put icing on a cake.

So thank you for all of the work that you're doing, and I'm just going to stay tuned. I really love what you're doing.

ANDREA PITZER: Thanks for having me on, Blair. I'm always happy to talk about this.

BLAIR HODGES: Stuff.

And I'll close with this from your latest newsletter. I hope people will check it out—the Degenerate Art newsletter. Go to andreapitzer.com. You said, "I've asked listeners before to think about where they stand and whether anyone around them in real life would know what they believe."

Let's let people know what we believe. Thanks for doing that yourself, Andrea.

ANDREA PITZER: Thank you, Blair. Take care.

 

Outro – 48:41

 

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to another episode of Relationscapes.

And thanks to Andrea Pitzer for joining me.

I recommend following her wherever she's available on social media and also through her newsletter, Degenerate Art.

And I've been enjoying her podcast for a while now. It's called Next Comes What.

Before I go, I'm going to recommend a fellow traveler episode. This is another episode of the show that you might check out if you enjoyed this one.

It's called “Border Separations” with Efren Olivares.

We talked about Trump's 2018 zero-tolerance policy that separated families. It's still as relevant today as it was back then, unfortunately.

So if you're interested in learning more about that from a really powerful voice, check out “Border Separations” with Efren Olivares—another episode of Relationscapes.

Mates of State provides our theme song.

I'm Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City, and I hope to see you again soon here on Relationscapes.