What’s the Deal With Concentration Camps? (Half the Answer #67B, with Andrea Pitzer)

Trent and Caitlin talk with author and journalist Andrea Pitzer about the modern concentration camp model, its history and public perception, and the concentration camps the United States government is operating and hopes to open in the near future.

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Resources

Andrea's website

Andrea's newsletter

Andrea's book on camps

Andrea's book on Nabokov

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Transcript

**Caitlin M. Green [00:00:30]**
Well, happy days are here again. And this is Half the Answer, where understanding a question is half the answer. I'm going to keep saying "happy days are here again," because now I'm trauma-bonded to it. It's my insecure attachment comfort animal at this point. So that's where we're at. I am your co-host Caitlin Green. With me is Trent Nelson, and I have come to understand that Trent has brought me a particularly special guest today, someone I'm very excited about. Who you got, Trent?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:02]**
Hey, absolutely. The "happy days are here again" will continue until morale improves. That's the ticket.

We both got inspired by that song in different ways. Caitlin, we have absolutely brilliance today on the show, brilliance personified. We have a great friend of the show — we're looking forward to having her back, it's only our first time here. Her name is Andrea Pitzer. She is an author, she's a writer, she's a podcaster, she's a mom, she's a black belter, and if you run into a polar bear, she'll be the one you want to hang out with, because she's licensed to handle those in rough situations as well.

But to be fair and honest, all joking aside, we're here to discuss a very difficult topic today. Caitlin, we're here to discuss — it is not polar bear self-defense. Let's leave the polar bears alone. Don't they have enough to worry about? We're here to talk about detention centers, which we should rightfully call concentration camps. And we briefly touched upon this discussion when we had Jonathan Katz on the program last time. We also, I believe, touched on it briefly when we spoke with Gillian last time. This is really important stuff. Andrea, thank you so much for finding some time to come on and talk with us. We know that you are in high demand. Such a pleasure, of course, even with terrible times. Can you give us a bit about yourself, more than I gave with my bio, and then we need to just jump in and ask: how did we get here? And I suspect that'll take some history as well. And then we'll get to exactly what's going on right now and how to stop it.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:59]**
It's not polar bears. It's not going to be self-defense against polar bears. Dang.

**Andrea Pitzer [00:03:13]**
Well first, thanks for having me on. Great to be a first-time guest and already be invited back. That's pretty awesome. I feel like I can't lose from here.

So in terms of who I am, I am a journalist. I've written for a lot of different publications — the Atlantic, New York Review of Books, LA Review of Books, New York Magazine, Outside, bunches of places. And I've written three books. I am here talking with you today because of the second of those three books, which is called *One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps*, and it looks at the rise of concentration camps in the world. Sort of the question I wanted to answer was, how did humanity get to Auschwitz, and what happened to this idea of concentration camps afterward? And I was really singularly unqualified to write the book, to be honest.

I was working on my first book, which was about Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian-American novelist. And camps came up again and again in his life and in his works. It was a variety of camps — World War One internment, the Gulag, Nazi camps. I went to Neuengamme, which is a concentration camp memorial in northern Germany, where his brother had died. And I spent some time there. And while I was working on that book, I thought, I need to read a general history of these camps. When did this idea of rounding up civilians as a group, preemptively, without criminal charges and no real trials or due process — when did this come into the world? How did we start this? And it didn't exist. And so I decided, okay, it has to be written.

Now, I went to Georgetown University, School of Foreign Service. Writing, international affairs, politics, history. Maybe I wasn't the most unqualified person to write that book, but I was not a camp specialist. I met people who had spent 30 years studying one camp, but there was no book that actually did the broad panoramic view of it. And I thought it was so essential, I wanted to write it.

And so I should be clear — these are modern concentration camps that I'm writing about. And I make that clear because there is a real heritage of this kind of detention that we have to nod to. Concentration camps can't enter the world without some of that previous stuff. And the most important parts of that history of locking up groups of civilians without any due process or trial — we have to look at the Americas, Africa, Asia. It's a lot of colonial powers and imperialism doing early versions of this, particularly in the Americas under Spanish rule, and then under British and later American rule, with Native American genocide and removals. You do see a lot of things that look very much like modern camps.

But this early thing that happens at the end of that period, the beginning of modern concentration camp history, is you have the invention, patenting, and mass production of barbed wire and automatic weapons. So suddenly you can hold a ton of people with a really small guard force. So the 1890s — when you have this birth of this stuff, where you have these camps framed by barbed wire, where you're rounding people up, and it becomes part of an engineering logistics thing of just literally, how many people could we get? So I looked at that on six continents across 130 years. There is no political system, there is no continent that hasn't done this — except for Antarctica.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:06:11]**
I understand that some people would say it cheapens what happened to my people, right? To say that this other thing is the same category of item. But I don't think it does cheapen it, personally. And as somebody who doesn't have family who's been in camps like that, I feel that it helps me to understand the weight of what my government is currently responsible for, right? To say this is this serious — we are attempting to reconstruct something that is as bad as it gets.

**Andrea Pitzer [00:06:47]**
Basically, what I found was that it is always an end run around the existing legal system. So whatever legal system is in place — and some of them we would have found really terrible, right? If we look back at history, these were not necessarily democracies. These were not necessarily good legal systems. They were sometimes very punitive. But setting up these kinds of camps is an end run, something you can't quite do under whatever the law is at the time. So it's a grab for power, to entrench power or to expand power on the part of a political, usually authoritarian-style, leader or party. And it is always done starting with vulnerable groups in that society.

And from the beginning, from the 1890s forward, I found that as soon as there was a second camp setting to compare the first one to, people were already saying, no, no, no, our camps aren't like those camps. These people are really dangerous. And I say that not just to make a joke — I mean, it is kind of funny — but at the same time, when we have these discussions about what can we call a concentration camp, if you've got historians saying, I have bad news, you guys, you really ought to be paying attention.

And I understand why some people who may have lost family members in the Holocaust, or potentially in the Gulag as well, but particularly the Roma, the Sinti, and the European Jews that faced genocide from the Nazi camps, may not want to embrace that term. I personally use it, and I think it's important for a lot of public-facing people to use it so that people understand, whatever you want to call it, the trajectory that we're on.

**Andrea Pitzer [00:09:04]**
And it's important to also note — both in terms of observing the Holocaust and understanding where we're at, so two very important reasons — that what people often think of as concentration camps are actually a set of about a half dozen death camps that were established mid-war by Nazi Germany, around 1942. Those were the actual camps that were meant to kill people and process those deaths as quickly as possible. And I think that it is still a singular phenomenon, one that we don't want to repeat.

But what most people don't realize is that for almost a decade before that, the Nazis had an open concentration camp system that they were running, that actually allowed them to arrive at those death camps later. And so it's that earlier history — if you discount everything before the death camps as somehow not concentration camps, then you're discounting places like Dachau, which was never a death camp, but which I think we could all agree was very much a concentration camp. So think Dachau, not Auschwitz, for this particular discussion.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:10:44]**
Right, well, if we just for a moment take ourselves away and look at what the word is — concentration. What are we attempting to do? We are attempting to bring certain groups of people into small, readily understood areas to manage them. And while we can look at places like Cuba and Argentina and Germany and Russia and all over — Hitler was very fond of how we handled the Native Americans. He thought that was very well done, and he was inspired by that as well. So certainly there are blemishes on our history. And we don't even have to go back to the Native Americans — we can go back to World War Two, where we had camps that we concentrated people in.

**Andrea Pitzer [00:11:51]**
Yes, absolutely. And we can go back even before that. In the 1890s, the very first one I was talking about was a policy of reconcentration by the Spanish in Cuba. They were putting down a rebellion, and it was actually the public descriptions of and reporting from Cuba in the US that turned everyday Americans so much against what the Spaniards were doing — this policy of reconcentration, in which women and children were starving to death and getting sick because they were concentrated in these really unhealthy conditions.

Americans were donating food, and the train companies would carry the food to the coasts, and ships were bringing it down to Cuba to try to save these lives. Which is how the Maine — for anybody who remembers their Spanish-American War history — that's why the Maine was there. It was accompanying those ships, and it blows up in the harbor. We go to war, Spanish-American War, which the US wins quite quickly. And then suddenly we have the Philippines as a colony. So within a couple years, we are then instituting concentration camps in the Philippines. And it had things like waterboarding — things that we have seen come up again in American detention. So yeah, this is a long cycle, absolutely including Japanese-American internment during World War Two. We ourselves have already done this.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:13:16]**
And Katz did bring all that Cuban-American history as well, and it does bear repeating. Because you just brought up how that reconcentration inspired this adamant push by many Americans, including one Quaker gentleman whose name was Smedley Butler, who joined the war because of what you just said, Andrea. Because he heard of this horrifying behavior from the Spanish, and he said, we have to do something here. I know I don't want to fight, but we have to protect these people.

So let's go from there. You mentioned the Japanese internment camps. Of course, the World War Two concentration camps, the death camps — they are in very many ways famous. You had mentioned how part of your inquisition regarded what happened with this idea after the war. So what can you tell us about concentration camps over the last 80 years?

**Andrea Pitzer [00:14:42]**
So the big sweeps of it — after World War Two, quite soon after, the world split into a binary. The Cold War developed, and it became a largely bipolar world, in all the good and bad senses of that. So you had Soviet sphere of influence, US sphere of influence.

In the Soviet sphere of influence, you found a number of camp systems arise. These have tended to be the largest ones in history, on the model of the Soviet Gulag — this idea of re-education through labor, enemies of the state, counter-revolutionaries, people that didn't accept the revolution, that were seen as reactionaries. And again, it's important to emphasize that this is always being done adjacent to a legal system. Even in those countries, there is a functioning or dysfunctioning legal system, and the camps are a separate thing. This is administrative detention. It's always an end run.

And so you have in Vietnam a similar model. In Korea, you see a little bit of the same. With Khmer Rouge, that was sort of an entire nation that was turned into a concentration camp by its revolutionary leadership. But you see the Chinese openly modeling theirs on the Russian Gulag, and you see behind the Iron Curtain, in Eastern Europe, a lot of similar kinds of detention. You see a little bit of it in Cuba as well.

However — people think, well, of course, that's what happened to concentration camps. But actually the Allied side, the non-Russian allies from World War Two, actually returned to that turn-of-the-century model from Spain and the Philippines. Because they themselves are then fighting a lot of independence movements in Africa. People want to be independent, and they're trying to break off from the British, from the French. And so what you see there is a return to those early military-style operations, where they're trying to put down a rebellion. They cordon off different parts of the population. They clear the community out, forcibly remove women, children, everybody, and then in those contested areas, basically whoever's left is considered a terrorist.

And this is actually the birth of — if you've ever heard "we have to destroy the village to save the village" — this is actually part of that whole system of how it unfolded in Vietnam. But what you did not see was any of this go away. You did not have Auschwitz again, right? But the stuff that led up to Auschwitz actually proliferates tremendously around the globe. And I will say, even in the US.

After the Japanese-American internment ended — which, to remind everybody, did principally detain US citizens. Even the idea of enemy aliens from World War One was made worse because it was actually inflicted not just on that population, but also on US citizens of Japanese-American descent in that part of the country. And people think, oh, well, that went away, we'll just get rid of what's happening now, just have an election, it'll be easy.

People don't know that after World War Two, when Harry Truman was still president, Congress gave him — against his will — gave the president the power to declare a state of emergency and to detain those he deemed a threat in concentration camps. And he begged them not to do it. He said it would be a long step toward totalitarianism to maintain camps like that. And they were so in favor of it, they did it over his veto. So it passed. Those camps were maintained for more than a decade. There was a plan for how you would run those camps if he declared that emergency. And it was not until Nixon, if you can believe it, that that was taken off the books. So those camps persisted. The country really just dodged a bullet that that was never used during the 1960s protests.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:19:07]**
That's a lot. No, no, it's good. Here's something about me — I have a really tragically bad history background, because my teachers didn't care or something. For some reason, my high school American history teacher spent an entire school year on the Spanish-American War, which means that there wasn't time for other things. And so there's so many things in history that I hear about for the first time by being a co-host of this podcast, and it is eternally embarrassing for me, but I just have to swallow the embarrassment and take it like a grown-up, and I'm learning now.

**Andrea Pitzer [00:19:52]**
I grew up in West Virginia, and my history teachers, for the most part, were football coaches. I remember people running up to the front and looking through the answer key in the back of the teacher's book before he would come in, because he was out smoking outside. And I remember one of them was like, people were shouting "guns Leopold butter," which had to be about the Congo. So I grew up very much with a history background like you. So I'm empathetic to that, and I'm here to answer whatever questions you might have.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:20:37]**
Well, let's jump into that and move forward. Harry Truman, famous for people not thinking that he was going to do very well, or that he would be a very conservative president — that's what Jim McBurney of the Carolinas thought, that's what a lot of the more conservative Democrats thought when they fought for him to become the vice presidential nominee. Why don't you think that America did use those concentration camps across the '50s or the '60s? Certainly we had lots of revolutionary ideas coming across during that time, and certainly there was a lot of civil unrest. Johnson and his Great Society have been credited for many things, as well as Vietnam. How do you think we avoided that pitfall that we are now maybe falling into?

**Andrea Pitzer [00:21:49]**
I think that certainly McCarthyism was rampant, so there was a tremendous risk when you combined civil unrest with McCarthyism. I think there was such a strong sense of this idea of "we are a nation of laws." And again, to emphasize, the existing legal systems that camps are an end run around are often really problematic. And I would put Jim Crow laws in the US in that extremely problematic category. People were restricted. There was all kinds of violence. We're past the brunt of it, but there's still absolutely the threat of lynching. We have the Eisenhower period, where there are massive purges of immigrants.

So it isn't that we were so awesome, but I think there was a sense that we were supposed to be a nation under law, a law-abiding nation, and that was part of the selling point that the right would use — that these protesters, they're unlawful, they're illegal. But absolutely taking their rights away from them, I think, would have been seen as too much. And the civil rights movement was so good at understanding the optics of what they were trying to do. And that was a lot of suffering that they had to endure, to have people understand just what was happening privately when nobody was looking — if this is what happened when people were looking.

And I think the idea of moving against whole communities — and probably honestly white kids in colleges — would have made the people in power seem lawless and abusive in ways that they knew wouldn't be tolerated. And it's also possible that there were voices of moderation. Harry Truman, not necessarily somebody we think of as FDR too, begged Congress not to do this in the first place with these camps. So I think sometimes people will surprise you, as I think we are seeing the beginnings of now — some people who might not have liked Trump but maybe didn't mind him either, but saying, this is too far.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:24:16]**
Yeah, I think we're seeing a pattern of that — that idea of peaks into the lawlessness and the cruelty that America gets right now. When we hear about a specific child that's been put in the Dilley center in Texas, it gives people a sense — if I'm aware of how things progressed for Liam Conejo Ramos, with his little bunny hat, if I saw what happened to him, I can imagine how it is for all of the other families that are in that center. And I find that unacceptable. If that's the thing that got out to the public, we can all sort of infer and extrapolate and realize that we need to do something about it.

**Andrea Pitzer [00:25:02]**
And I think we've seen that — particularly with Liam Conejo Ramos, with Alex Pretti, with Renée Good. I think we see what may be fairly extreme cases, but we also know there are a lot of people whose stories we are not hearing or seeing. And so having those visuals — in our propaganda-saturated, siloed world, having those literal viral video moments of little boy in blue cap, somebody being shot in the face — those become not just journalistic stories. They become iconic historical moments that creep into TikTok, creep into Instagram. Everybody has seen those. And I think so many people manage to live without attending to all the stuff that we talk about here and that you talk about on your shows — they just have checked out because they don't feel like they have a stake in it. And I think some of those people are actually going to be super empathetic if they know what's going on.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:26:09]**
The Alex Pretti picture — the one picture where they're holding him and the gun is to the back of his head. That one is going to be known forever. I mean, that is an iconic picture in the worst sense of the word.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:26:26]**
Yep, and I go to protests, and I see the blue hat depicted in a lot of places — Liam's hat. So yeah, there's definitely ways that people are connecting to this.

**Andrea Pitzer [00:26:37]**
And it's because it shows the lawlessness of what's happening. And one of the things I worry about is, if we undo this part of it but we leave that the police get to do this to minority communities when nobody's looking, we keep the seeds of it coming back. And those communities still have to endure what everybody is seeing now. It's not justice, it's not fair. But something like those three incidents makes it clear this is not about law and order. There's no way to make the argument that shooting that guy — the ICU nurse — in the back is about law and order.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:27:12]**
And that's the case that MAGA is trying to make, right? We are the party of law and order. We are going to relieve society of the undesirables, because they're all criminals and terrorists and whatever. And so we're gonna restore law and order, no matter how many laws we have to break to do it.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:28:21]**
It's destroy the village to save the village, right?

**Andrea Pitzer [00:27:33]**
That is exactly it — with the British in what was then Burma, what's now Myanmar, and in British Malaya. They were in a number of different places doing these kinds of things. And particularly in British Malaya, there's actually a record of a British leader of that fight saying something very close to: to keep the law for a time, we have to break the law. And it's this idea of a state of exception — you create a window in which, to preserve the law, we're just not going to observe it for a while, because we have to do this one thing. And concentration camps are also that.

But it's also — we always have to ask, there is some group that has to be removed from society. And so when some people ask about slavery — isn't slavery the same as concentration camps? And it's not a better-or-worse thing, I don't mean it that way, because chattel slavery is horrific. But it's more like two different modes. The concentration camp tendency is to take groups of people outside of society and remove them. With slavery, you're actually forcing a group into your society to exploit the labor. Labor is often a byproduct on the camp side, but with slavery, the expropriation, the taking of that labor, is at the heart of it.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:29:03]**
Well again, you noted: what power does. Power reveals as much as it corrupts, right? We see a situation with Truman, who, as you noted, was not considered FDR Jr., who has very strong liberal notions and tendencies once he becomes president. And the same can be said regarding Nixon in reverse. Here is a man who was vice president, he was a representative, served in other capacities as well, and the amount of power that he got turned him into a psychopath, even more than he already was.

**Andrea Pitzer [00:29:42]**
Nixon is a good example of one kind of way that some of this happens, in that he believed that he himself was above the law. He came to believe that he was so critical for the country — his own god complex, right? But he had none of the charisma. I mean, he got elected twice, which is kind of extraordinary in retrospect, but there was no cult of Nixon the way we have a MAGA cult today. There were hardcore die-hards for sure, but there's a certain number of people in any society — somewhere around 25%, we don't know exactly, but we can ballpark it — that are reactionary, that like authoritarianism, that want this. So Nixon was always going to have them. Trump is always going to have them.

But this weird cult of personality that has developed — whether it's because of his charisma levels, or because he had other people in his administration, when he would start doing the drunk uncle stuff — literal drinking drunk uncle stuff that Trump does all the time without drinking — there were people in his first administration who would shut that stuff down. And eventually, when Watergate happened, there were enough elected Republicans, particularly with the 18-minute gap in the tape that appeared to have been erased, that some said, enough, I won't do this.

And those guys are gone right now from the House and the Senate. Massie is the only one we're seeing who's sort of carrying on in a consistent way. We do see with the Epstein files, Mace and Boebert — it's interesting to see some of the fissures that are developing. But right now, we haven't seen, outside of maybe Massie, what appears to be an actual principled stand against some part of this. We do not see the people who believe in this idea of America saying "enough, we're going to stop this" the way we did at Watergate. And that's one of the big hurdles we have to figure out between now and next January, when potentially a blue wave may have brought some other people in.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:32:12]**
We are — Nixon is an interesting one, because certainly he has very many horrible tendencies and questionable ideas. But if you read what Pat Buchanan thought of Nixon, having worked for him during that time — Buchanan is not sold on Nixon's conservative credentials. He's like, I've never met a man who believed in nothing, right? And that's Pat Buchanan talking about Richard Nixon, somebody we consider to be very conservative.

**Andrea Pitzer [00:32:50]**
Yeah, we've come into a real nihilism. But Nixon — this is hypothetical on my part, I'll admit I'm a little out of my lane here — but I don't think Nixon would have embraced the inanity of MAGA, even if it delivered him the MAGA stuff. He had a certain intellectual pride in himself, an arrogance. I think you have to surrender that. Look at Ted Cruz. Look at Marco Rubio. Look at Lindsey Graham, who started out in 2016 knowing exactly what was going on, and now have bought in. I don't think — not because he was a good person — that Nixon wouldn't have done it. I think Nixon could not have brought himself to humiliate his intellect so thoroughly. He had too much pride for that.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:33:37]**
Yeah. When JD Vance was named as the running mate, I was kind of surprised, because I remembered him saying, I'm a Never Trump guy, that guy's almost Hitler, he's an aspiring fascist, I don't like him. And then it took me a little while to realize that the reason he was so attractive to Trump as a vice presidential nominee might actually be how completely he brought him to heel — to be like, this is somebody who you can make reverse course on any principled stance he ever thinks he's taken, if he thinks he's gonna get something from you. So that's a pawn. That's a good pawn. That's the one you want on your side.

**Andrea Pitzer [00:34:28]**
I think Trump would not be able to have a rival in that position. Anyone that he could see as keeping him from a third term — because in his mind, he is thinking about that. I don't know how heavily he's thinking about it, but we have seen him thinking about it. So having anybody that might even be a threat to that would be too much.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:34:50]**
Anybody who thinks that the president is just going to pack up shop and leave in 2028 has not been paying attention over the last ten-plus years. I don't care if it's unpopular to say — Trump is not going to leave voluntarily. We're going to have to tell him to get out.

**Andrea Pitzer [00:35:18]**
Well, I actually absolutely agree with that part. I think he might leave voluntarily, but it is up to us, the people, to make that inevitable — whether it's out on the streets, whether it is electing people who will stand against him in a more serious way than some Democrats are at this moment, although some are doing quite well with it. I think he is a coward, ultimately, and if it is made clear to him that he will not be allowed to stay —

But this is a little bit like, I think of Mitt Romney now getting all this credit for calling Russia the big threat. I don't want to give him that credit, because the truth is, since Putin has been around, they have always been knocking. Trump was the only one that opened the door, and it was only by opening the door that all this bad stuff happened. And in the same way, I think there are lots of people that would like to have power but don't. But if that possibility is not there, if you don't indulge it, as the Republicans should never have — the Cruzes and the Lindsey Grahams, they never should have indulged any of this. And I think as soon as you shut that down, Trumpism becomes a much, much tinier force. Now, we still have to resolve the camps. We still have to resolve fascism. There's going to be a lot left to resolve. But JD Vance is not going to be the inheritor of Trumpism.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:38:48]**
I see MAGA Twitter accounts that will be like, okay, so we've got Trump 2024, we'll have Donald Trump Jr. 2028 and 2032, and then it'll be Ivanka and then Barron. And it's always met with just derision, because everyone's like, you already lost us at Donald Trump Jr. That's not happening.

**Andrea Pitzer [00:37:33]**
Well, I'll give you one example in the world where that has happened, because I think it's instructive as the exception. Although first, a little caveat — the US very much has those tendencies, which I think we have to be careful about. If you look at the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Bushes — it's something in humanity, you have to watch out for that tendency we have with the familiar and the known.

But I think it's much more a function of propaganda, and it can only work really effectively when you have year after year, or even generation after generation, control of all the information that people are getting. And the only example that we have of that is North Korea. I believe this could happen in any country if you had that kind of control. If you could douse people in propaganda morning, noon, and night for decades, then everybody is susceptible to that. But that kind of control of the information sphere, particularly in this era, is really hard to do. And so that's why we don't see the ability to create family heirs that have that kind of power.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:40:13]**
And I totally agree. You can't even get many of these folks — statistically speaking, you can't even get them to come out and vote for your side if Donald Trump isn't there, right? So I don't know if we get sold as a people on our leaders in the same way.

**Andrea Pitzer [00:39:11]**
And it's true — Donald Trump Sr. is an invention of the American psyche. I mean, he's been racist since before he was famous, so who he is is not just a result of that. But where he is is absolutely a result of — you could have the Central Park Five debacle happen in the first place. It is where you have infotainment as the primary news source. He is a creation of American culture from my lifetime. He is like if you could manifest every single ugly part of pop culture and each president before him — in my lifetime, Donald Trump is the worst, literally. If you picked out the worst couple of elements from each, he's just a ball of that. And so I would say that unless Barron magically is somehow the same cultural creation, which is impossible — you can't pass that particular kind of personality, because it's a cultural creation.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:43:34]**
So with that being said, Andrea, it's like you knew which direction we were headed in. We got through the '60s and talked a little bit about Nixon. We won't spend much time on Ronald Reagan because we don't want to. But we should recommence sort of where you just got to — the early 2000s, the War on Terror, post-9/11 America. Can you give us perhaps a different speed run of what that allowed for us, whether practically speaking or intellectually speaking? How did this set the stage for where we are now?

**Andrea Pitzer [00:44:23]**
Well, you saw black sites right around the world. These places that we sent people to. We were actually corrupting our allies by having them do extralegal things. Once again, we have this end run around what's really legal by hosting these black sites where people could be tortured, where they could be held.

And we had things like Abu Ghraib, which wasn't actually a prison, but where a lot of people were detained because it was suspected there was a problem, but we didn't know who they were yet. Even the legal prison systems that you sometimes have in a wartime setting were bastardized. I've talked to people who did detentions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it was a shitshow. It was totally random.

And Gitmo became an outgrowth of that. And then the famous imperial boomerang theory — things that we do abroad in colonialism tend to be brought back into the heart of the imperial country. You do see a related phenomenon in which those things work their way — literally, prisoners are brought from some of those black sites to Gitmo as the courts start to assert more power about what the US is doing. And then you see it being injected into our society now.

During that timeframe, we corrupted those allies by having them do that. And in some cases, they've had to pay restitution. In some cases, they got in trouble in Europe because this was in violation of law. And then we fast forward to last year. If you remember, in the spring, Trump sent mostly Venezuelans to CECOT under Bukele. And so we are basically paying millions to support a place that people are sent to, often without due process, and never leave. We are helping to support a concentration camp-type setting there. We're actually deporting people to it.

We are meanwhile now sending people to many, many other countries. Just last week we heard about Cameroon and what's happening there. It's my belief that we are actually institutionalizing that informal black site network that we had at the beginning of the War on Terror 25 years ago. We are actually paying money, making contracts with these countries. We are destabilizing democracy around the world by creating a network of black site detentions that looks very much like concentration camps, and we are associating it with detention which is expanding exponentially inside the US today.

And so our current camps are a fusion of that Gitmo history and that border detention history. All you need is somebody like a Trump to spark it into something much bigger.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:47:34]**
I think you're 100% right, Andrea. For many people, obviously we remember the famous Nazi line — only following orders. But for many people, we are just thinking about getting our job done today, getting food, going home, seeing the children. And this is not an excuse, to be sure, but this is the way that we often see life play out, society play out.

I'll quote an apocryphal, likely apocryphal, Woodrow Wilson quote, because there's hardly any evidence that he said it: "Once you lead the people into war, they will forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. The spirit of ruthless brutality will enter every fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the streets." And that's what I thought about as you were just explaining.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:49:00]**
I think Stephen Miller says it in his mirror every morning — "I would like to make concentration camps." It's part of his daily affirmations.

I was thinking about that ICE officer in Portland whose audio was recently released, where he had literally a young person on a motorized bicycle tailing him. And in the audio, he's calling the police — I think the Portland police — and he's like, I need you to deal with this kid who's following me on the bicycle, because I'm about to have to shoot him. And it's literally just a kid on a bike doing ICE watch, following him but not impeding, not threatening, nothing. Just on a bike.

And the way he was thinking was like, I don't want to be followed and observed, because that sucks and makes me uncomfortable and might get me in trouble. And what do I have at my disposal to deal with this? It's gonna be violence, because I have a bunch of violent weapons at my disposal, and I don't really have qualms about it. And my ultimate goal is just no more kid, please. And so that's what we end up with.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:50:47]**
Yeah, well, again, it's the policeman on the beat, as you just alluded to. We can look at Trayvon Martin, and we can say it's the man in the street as well, right? You create this environment, as you noted, this pressure cooker — there's violence everywhere, there are invaders everywhere, everyone is trying to attack me, everyone is against us. And it breeds these sorts of reactions.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:51:46]**
And it's decades of slander against them too. Of like, well, I'm looking at this guy, and I just think he's got to be a terrorist or a criminal or a murderer or something, because look at him, right?

**Andrea Pitzer [00:51:56]**
Well, I'm so glad you said that, because that goes back to what I was saying before, and it's so important for everybody listening. You don't get to that without generations of targeting particular groups. You can't. But the good news is also that that propaganda has to be sustained.

And so if you only had propaganda — that guy, he doesn't just shoot the kid. He knows he can't, he knows it's probably not a good idea just to shoot the kid. He wants to shoot the kid — and I don't mean to minimize it — but that's really good that he doesn't think he has the ability to shoot the kid in that moment. And if you have enough propaganda for long enough, everybody would accept, oh, of course he shot the kid, the kid was a terrorist, right? But we're in this in-between state.

And so absolutely building that counter-narrative — and I don't think we should resort to untrue propaganda for it — but we should absolutely resort to viral memes and TikToks and all this stuff, to get out this idea of: what a snowflake, oh my God, the kid is following me on a bike. No, you don't get to shoot the kid. That's not an option. That's horrible. And you're a bad person if you do that. And you're a bad person if you go to work for ICE. You shouldn't work for ICE. That's a shameful thing. Tell your kids, if they're thinking about taking jobs — don't take jobs with ICE.

So much of it is to create our own information atmosphere, whether it's through creating news institutions, which I think we're sorely lacking in — ones that aren't even accidentally bound up in power structures. The New York Times still has a tremendous amount of great reporting, but it is also tremendously bound up in having a certain relationship to power. And even with the goodwill of people inside, it's very difficult to escape that historical relationship. And so we have to rethink what our news outlets can look like. But we also have to — everyday people have to create this in our own communities through the things that we do.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:54:14]**
And we're starting to see that. I've long described it as the forest — we've got some big trees that are starting to fall. The branches of the canopy are starting to detach and fall away, and light is shining through. And you're seeing lots of smaller publications developing and serving the proper position, which is to be fighting for the people — explaining information to the people, fighting power, speaking against power.

**Andrea Pitzer [00:55:07]**
Yeah, there's all kinds of great stuff that is happening. I see some things like traditional outlets that have shifted ownership — the Philly Inquirer is doing great stuff, an old stalwart that has transformed itself. We have Marissa Kabas from The Handbasket — I'm sure we all read her stuff regularly — who is just a champion in amazing ways. We see LA Taco, that's like a taco review thing, and they have become this amazing news source. But we also see a lot of people more in the style of Marissa, on the ground — the 19th, and there's just so many different groups around the country that are rising up.

One thing I think we have to keep in mind, though, is the risk. With what we've seen with the way the Washington Post has collapsed, with the LA Times collapse, with what we saw in terms of Peter Thiel appearing to be instrumental in Gawker's demise — we need some of those big trees to have the ecosystem last, because the ability to fight the government if the DOJ comes after you in a legal battle and you are a small, independent news org is really tough. And so I would love to see — I am trying to give up on the wishful thinking of billionaire funding stuff, because that's so pernicious and it never seems to work the way that it ought to. I would love to see an investor take a chance, not just as a philanthropist but as a news enterprise, and come up with local newsrooms that could be like an AP feed to each other. So even the stuff you guys are doing is a part of that.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:57:19]**
That's another friend of the program right there. We've got many friends of the program, and they all come on to talk well. Andrea Pitzer, you are one of them. Now, we're not done yet, because we have spent the whole discussion getting to today. And today we have concentration camps, and we have pernicious and nefarious individuals who are looking to purchase warehouses, looking to develop these camps all around the country. We spoke about it quickly with Katz. Andrea — what's the deal?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:58:05]**
"What's the deal with concentration camps?" That's going to be the name of this episode.

**Andrea Pitzer [00:58:11]**
So where we are now is that, a while ago, Stephen Miller is said to have imposed this 3,000 arrests a day quota. They deported about 400,000 people last year. It's not markedly different than what the prior administrations have been able to do. They're just making it noisier and more violent and more of a public spectacle.

Their limits right now are on hiring. They need a lot more officers — both to run the system they're talking about for deportation, but also what the system is kind of evolving into, which is a law enforcement agency that has loyalty to the president. Which is something that you tend to see in concentration camp settings — a secret police that takes people off the street, that answers only to the party in power.

That's good for us, that they're having trouble hiring. That's another reason to make it super shameful. The downside is that they are skimping on all this training, and so I think people are more trigger-happy, more ignorant. But as I have been saying for a while now, the answer to this is not better training for the guards, right? I don't think that by itself is going to somehow fix the problem, although having that lack of training is a significant problem.

Where they're having a lot more success, with some setbacks, is expanding detention beds, and they have big goals on that. Right now, they have about 70,000 people in detention. When they first started this warehousing initiative, which has been coming out over the last couple months, the goal was to have 80,000 more people in detention. And some of those have been getting interrupted, which is kind of amazing.

Because the federal government does have the ability to seize land and infrastructure in some cases, particularly where it can be related to national security. And courts tend to give the executive a lot of leeway on this. Yet we see lots of people pushing back on this warehouse-ification. In some cases, in Republican areas, by doing the kind of not-in-my-backyard — they make it so unpleasant. There was a quote, I'm sure you saw it, from the woman who was saying, well, I support President Trump for this, but I don't want my kids to have to see it. I don't want them to have to deal with escapees. And I think it's fine to lean into that, because in those cases, people who have Republican US senators, Republican US governors — those people, with a call to the administration, can kind of undo it, right? They can stop it.

But I do think you're going to see some go through. Other people are looking at infrastructure and zoning laws. There's a great Urban Institute report that talks about what's legal and what's not. If you just pass ordinances that are not letting ICE do these things, the courts will not uphold them. So how you frame what you are doing as a city or a town or a community, if you want to use those kinds of laws, is extremely important.

I see people doing really creative things about making choices about what kind of community they want to live in on a broader level, which I think is great. We do see, however, with this Navy contract that they're pushing through, there may be other ways to not necessarily take warehouses, but to start standing up camps with a lot of money available in an expedited fashion. And I think that's what's coming down the pike, and we're going to have to develop a new set of creative tools to handle that.

But the thing I have found — first of all, I am inspired and in awe of the millions of ways that Americans have been responding to this. The Portland frog is genius. I don't care if people sometimes make fun of it, like, what does that do? It does a lot. But we also have these concrete things — the lawyers representing Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Liam Conejo Ramos are doing incredible work.

And across the 130 years of camps that I looked at for my book, the things that made a difference in terms of undoing the camps quickly typically are: to have at least a semi-functioning judiciary, and to have the ability and willingness to have public dissent. Those two things — if you can protest, and if you have a partially functioning court system, then it is possible. And we are freer right now. Most Americans are freer to push back than any of the places that I studied where camps had come this far along.

And I think it's a particular sign of our heritage. We have two American heritages. One is nested in Native American genocide and chattel slavery and all of the terrible things. But the other one is also this amazing history of resistance, right from the beginning, to injustice. And I don't think anybody that claims only one of those is American is being accurate. But I do think we can choose which one we want.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:03:15]**
All right, agreed. We got two wolves. You heard it here first, guys, we got two wolves inside of us.

**Andrea Pitzer [01:03:40]**
It's not a polar bear — you got two polar bears inside you. Don't shoot the bear. That's the other thing.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:03:48]**
Even though we got Andrea — don't shoot the bear. Well, thank you for that. We know we have to let you go sooner than later. We would like to end our wonderful chat on a positive note. How are we gonna defeat the fascists? How are we going to save our neighbors, our comrades, our Americans, our human beings?

**Andrea Pitzer [01:04:31]**
We absolutely have avenues. One thing I will say is, don't let me hold you back, because there is no single received answer. There's no one weird trick, okay? That's not the way it works. You don't have this stuff rise up without a lot being wrong in the society. So it's going to have to happen on a national level, but it's also going to have to happen on a local level.

One of the absolute best things you can do is literally walk out your front door, go to a demonstration, or just connect yourself in some way to an existing organization. If you're a person who is nervous in public, you're agoraphobic, you have a small kid, whatever — you can make a phone call, you can email somebody. Tie yourself into some group, because you don't even know what you can do until you're talking to people who are doing stuff.

But literally, diaper banks in your hometown are part of the answer. Us being more connected where we are locally has a huge effect. There was a study done about the Black Lives Matter protests, and it turns out they actually helped swing the election to Biden. And do you know where they made the most difference? They made the most difference in rural, less educated, and whiter parts of the country. And this is just my theory, because I'm not a political scientist, but I believe in those places, the people who saw those demonstrations were either tuned out politically or in a right-wing silo in terms of information. And just seeing that made them go, wait, maybe is there some part of this that I'm not getting? Because those people look normal. This is a normal person, I know that person.

And so doing stuff in your community nearby, whether it's public or whether it's just privately — getting a 3D printer and making whistles — there's a million things people are doing that's critical. But also at the federal level, in the end, we need to elect people that are going to help claw back this stuff. We need to have Democrats pushing hard against Republicans, not sounding like Republican-light. Because if we just go with Republican-light, then what we're going to end up with is nicer camps, right? Not a Goldilocks level of camps that should be okay. It should be no — we should not have detention at the heart of our immigration system. And we have the means to do that at the federal level, and we have the means to do it close to home by fighting the expansion of these things. And I truly think that we can do it.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:06:56]**
Bertram Gross's *Friendly Fascism* is an important read for anybody who's listening who would like to pick that up. As he famously noted, Ronald Reagan must be the nicest fascist in the world — all right, but still a fascist all the same. Andrea, you are supreme. We will have you back if you can find more time for us. Before we let you go, will you brag about all the places that people can read your stuff, find your books, hear you talk, hear your rants, other than right here with us? Give us all the tea, please.

**Andrea Pitzer [01:07:33]**
Well, God forbid you want more, but if you do — I am at andreapitzer.com, which is my website, which will link you up to everything. That includes my books, and it includes a link to my newsletter, which is called *Degenerate Art*, which is a Nazi-era reference, if you want to look it up. And it also includes a link to my podcast, which is *Next Comes What*, which is also on YouTube and Spotify. And there are also links to my many articles that I've been writing about all this stuff. So if you go to andreapitzer.com or you find me on Bluesky at Andrea Pitzer, one word, you will have a bounty of as much as you could possibly want.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:08:13]**
And one more thing — Andrea gave us so many wonderful tidbits regarding how we can make a better, positive impact, how we can be the change that we seek. But you've heard this host of the program go on about it for episodes upon episodes: hold the door, look at somebody and smile at them. You can even compliment them on how beautiful it is today, how beautiful life can be. We have to be human. Don't go to the self-checkout. Say hi to the little old lady who's doing the groceries, and talk. Be human. That's how we remain human.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:09:20]**
That's when I start growing my own vegetables. Finally, it's going to happen.

**Andrea Pitzer [01:09:23]**
Well, I think that's a really great point, because the separation of all of us is a huge part of fascism. And I am a kind of a misanthrope myself, and so it's a serious thing if I'm saying that being out and actually connected with your neighbors is critical in this moment. I personally, just to walk the walk, have been — all the people that I should have been inviting to have dinner with and to meet with — I have actively been doing that for the last four months. Even though I do not have time to do it. Because I honestly think that is a piece of the answer. So do your curbside groceries, but learn your guy's name.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:10:21]**
I won't dox him now, but I do know my curbside delivery guys.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:10:27]**
Well, you know that understanding your question is half of an answer. Andrea just said it in another way just a moment ago. And until we do this thing all over again — this has been Half the Answer with your colleagues Trent R. Nelson and Caitlin M. Green, and we will catch you all real soon.