Concentration camps using forced labor are alive and well today in America. But there's a lot we can do to put an end to them.

0:00 Introduction – Delaney Hall strikes & forced labor in ICE detention today

3:13 Overview – A survey of forced labor in concentration camp settings

5:45 Nazi work camps – Forced labor from 1933 through WWII

6:55 Why detention makes forced labor worse – expendability, punishment, profit

9:44 Pre-Nazi precedents – Shark Island / German Southwest Africa (early 1900s)

10:33 World War I – Ukrainian Canadians interned as "enemy aliens" in Alberta

12:09 The Russian Revolution & Gulag – Forced labor under the Bolsheviks

12:26 The Gulag system – Expansion, quotas, starvation rations, the Dead Road

15:01 Post-WWII & the Iron Curtain – Western vs. Soviet models of camp labor

18:00 US domestic roots – Slavery, the 13th Amendment exception, convict leasing

22:01 Scale of deportation – The administration's 15–20 million target

24:46 Resistance – Gulag uprisings, Free Alabama Movement, the Menocal lawsuit

27:42 What you can do – Calls to action, spotlighting strikes near you

30:21 Outro

Race nostalgia has infected nearly every political argument made today. A look at what it is and how to stop it.

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This week, Andrea Pitzer considers the prioritization of white South Africans in US refugee policy, noting that they make up literally the only refugees currently being admitted to the United States. She explores how that policy is part of a larger map of racial grievance that has already led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people of color around the globe--a choice enthusiastically embraced by the current administration. Laying out a theory of the angry daddy as the model deliberately adopted by Trump and his fellow travelers, Andrea explores how it gets injected into politics as a promise to not only provide for the chosen followers of the leader, but also to punish those deemed less worthy.

Walking listeners through the ways that solidarity with racially aggrieved white communities frames the entire political enterprise running the government today, Andrea then turns to the ways the same concept likewise animates the strategies adopted by those who see themselves as opposing Trump. She questions the tendency to seek macho white male candidates, as if these are the only politicians capable of securing democracy. Looking at the recent expanded damage to the Voting Rights Act inflicted by the Supreme Court and the frenzy of gerrymandering it has unleashed, Andrea explains how the tendency to raise up white men as savior candidates on the left will only speed and amplify the disappearance of candidates of color from office nationwide. The episode closes with some way to think about taking action to address the corruption and crony networks that make this kind of resegregation possible.

0:00 White South African Refugees and Trump's Race-Based Immigration Policy

1:16 The $100 Million Taxpayer Cost of Afrikaner Refugee Policy

3:27 White Solidarity and the Roots of MAGA Race Nostalgia

7:22 Strict Father Politics: How Authoritarian Psychology Drives Voter Behavior

12:25 Strategic Racism: How Politicians Use Dog Whistles to Divide America

17:26 USAID Cuts and the Hidden Cost of White Refugee Policy

20:42 Andrew Sullivan, Demographic Change, and the Eugenics Trap

23:41 Democrats Adopting White Solidarity Tactics to Win Back Voters

28:18 How to Fight Corruption and White Supremacy at the Local Level

Why are elected Democrats punishing the very people who voted for them?

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This week's episode tackles the tendency to criticize Democrats when Republicans are the principal drivers of authoritarianism in the U.S.right now. Andrea Pitzer tries to answer the perennial question "What do you want Democrats to do, if they don't control any branch of government?" Her response boils down to giving examples of harmful actions from several Democrats voters had hoped would do more.

She considers Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer's recent appearance with Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has endorsed genocide against Palestinians and encouraged violence in the West Bank. She also considers recent actions taken by three governors: Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, and Jared Polis of Colorado. These Democratic governors have undercut their party and democracy alike—in one case by pardoning an unrepentant criminal election denier who betrayed her office, in others by inviting the state police to brutalize demonstrators or by ignoring the will of the people and the legislators of her own party.

0:00 – What Do Voters Want From Democrats Right Now?

1:18 – Democrats Acting Like an Opposition Party: Early Examples

5:35 – Chuck Schumer's Failure to Lead

7:18 – Schumer at the Israel Day Parade With Bezalel Smotrich

8:59 – Virginia Governor Spanberger's Veto Spree Against Her Own Party

12:53 – Colorado Governor Polis Frees Election Denier Tina Peters

15:33 – Delaney Hall: What's Happening Inside the Newark ICE Detention Facility

21:27 – Mayor Ras Baraka vs. Governor Sherrill: Who's Actually Fighting Back?

26:23 – Why Democratic Politicians Must Oppose Authoritarianism — Lessons From History

Four hundred years of propaganda is way too much. Here's how we can push back.

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This week, Andrea Pitzer traces the introduction of the idea of propaganda and its role in nearly everything bad that's being sold to the American people today. She begins with the pope's recent encyclical warning of the dangers of AI, and then steps back to another pope, one from the seventeenth century, who introduced the idea of propaganda to the world. In between, she looks at Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who created wartime propaganda and then made a killing using the same tactics to sell cigarettes to women.

From misrepresentations to stunt marketing, the half-truths and open lies of propaganda are still very much with us. All these tactics boil down to treating human beings as things, cheating people, and dividing humanity. Andrea considers the useful tool that machine learning could have been if the billionaire class had been satisfied to develop it for use in the big-data, tech, and science worlds that reflect its actual usefulness. Instead, they've sought to maximize profits by selling humanity a lie about how it can be a companion, a therapist, and a creative genius. Andrea closes with how to recognize the dangers and build a world that's more resistant to propaganda.

0:00 – AI, Propaganda, and the World Being Built Without Your Consent

0:40 – Pope Leo's Encyclical: What the Catholic Church Gets Right About AI

1:57 – Edward Bernays: The Father of Propaganda and the World He Made

5:52 – Cigarettes, Coups, and Corporate Manipulation: Bernays' Real Legacy

8:04 – How Social Media Primed Us for a Concentration Camp Society

16:16 – AI Is the New Propaganda: Tech Billionaires and the Myth of Intelligence

23:08 – Father Coughlin to Trump: A Century of Demagogues and Groupthink

26:24 – How to Think Beyond Propaganda and Build the World You Actually Want

26:46 – The AI Resist List: Global Movements Pushing Back on Big Tech

28:36 – Say What You See: Anti-Propaganda as a Radical Act

Wild-eyed extremists running our government have resurrected hateful pseudoscience.

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This week, "Next Comes What" looks at the various ways that the administration has adopted discredited historical views on eugenics and turned them into policies that have already killed hundreds of thousands of people. From RFK Jr. undermining vaccine programs and environmental regulations here at home to DOGE cutting lifesaving USAID programs abroad, the US government is actively dismantling the nation's public health apparatus.

Andrea Pitzer talks about her reporting decades ago on the history of American eugenics and the legendary Buck v. Bell case that the US Supreme Court used to allow involuntary sterilization of people deemed defective. The episode has a cameo from someone Andrea met back then: Paul Lombardo, a leading US voice on bioethics and the history of eugenics. Lombardo frames the current administration's policy as not just influenced by our eugenic legacy but as actually adopting eugenics.

Andrea also addresses the ways that current obsessions with fertility, purity, and genetic superiority are reanimating discredited principles of eugenics. Though the federal government's footprint in public health is too massive a lift for local programs to replace through small-scale efforts, the episode closes with ideas on how to keep a record of what's happening, push back politically, and stem the effects of the current eugenic tide until this administration can be consigned to the dustbin of history.

0:11 — MAHA's American Eugenics: How Trump and RFK Jr. Are Reviving a Dark History
2:26 — The Origins of American Eugenics: From Francis Galton to Madison Grant
4:57 — RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary: Anti-Vax, Germ Theory Denial, and Public Health Sabotage
6:17 — Purity Culture and Pseudoscience: The Eugenic Logic Behind MAGA Health Policy
10:01 — Carrie Buck and Buck v. Bell: The Supreme Court Case That Enabled Mass Sterilization
12:27 — What a Leading Eugenics Scholar Says About the Trump Administration
14:40 — USAID Cuts and Global Eugenics: How Foreign Aid Destruction Fits the Pattern
16:50 — Pro-Natalism, Birth Rates, and the Billionaire Push to Control Who Reproduces
21:55 — Negative Eugenics in Immigration Detention: Disease, Neglect, and Population Control
28:59 — What You Can Do: Protecting Public Health in Your Community

There are a lot of ways to cure our ailing country. Here's how to convince the patient to cooperate.

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Here's a link to the Duke panel on public health and families in immigration detention that Andrea mentions in the episode: https://warpwire.duke.edu/w/MUoJAA/

This week's episode of Next Comes What considers our crisis of democracy through the lens of medicine. Andrea Pitzer looks at recent rulings by U.S. courts on the Voting Rights Act and mifepristone, as well as a billionaire purchasing his second copy of the Constitution and suggests that what's wrong with our society will take more than just elections to fix (though elections remain critical!).

Andrea uses a framework of public health to think about how improvements can happen. If diagnosis is understanding what's going wrong, what condition we're dealing with, prescription is figuring out what the best treatment options are. There's a lot of solid diagnosis out there from people doing incisive analysis of our democratic collapse, and a number of good suggestions on how to fix our systems and fireproof them from future authoritarian threats.

But the hardest part of public health work is getting individuals and communities on board--getting people to buy in. Andrea runs through ways that do and don't work, arguing that there's no need to coddle racists or endorse hate to meet people where they're at. She argues for creating a vision of a society that people will want to be part of, one that will deliver for them and invites them to come along. In the end, we'll have to get some people involved who aren't on board yet. Andrea closes by arguing that the patient is treatable, and that in fact countless successful local examples of organizing and successful change are already happening around the country.

A guide to understanding our new concentration-camp era and how to fight it. A re-release of a Next Comes What from July 10, 2025.

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In this episode, Andrea Pitzer lays out the definition of a concentration camp and breaks down each part of it. She looks at international trends in concentration camps across the last century and the specific U.S. history that has made the country vulnerable to propaganda demonizing immigrants and others. Addressing the advantages and disadvantages of comparing modern detention facilities to concentration camps and even Auschwitz, Andrea explores why what we choose to call these places matters. Coming to the conclusion that the new camp in the Everglades is a concentration camp and signals a massive expansion of extrajudicial detention that threatens all Americans, Andrea offers listeners a big-picture plan for how to strategically insert themselves into efforts to combat the concentration camp trend, from local projects to national movements.