Episode 2: The Concentration Camps Are Here (With Andrea Pitzer)

The US government has set aside $75 billion for a detention system designed to eclipse the existing prison system, with almost none of its already-limited oversight. Warehouses are being converted into facilities to hold thousands of people. Disease is already breaking out. Reports describe people lying in feces, children held for weeks, medicine withheld, legal representation blocked.

And yet something else is happening too. In Minneapolis, Chicago, LA, and beyond, people are building networks of shared resistance that are already having a measurable effect. Six planned detention facilities have been canceled. Entire offices are seeing staff quit. Senators in red states are calling to push back. The movement is working.

In this episode, host Elad Nehorai sits down with Andrea Pitzer, author of three books including "One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps," who has spent more than a decade researching the history of mass detention systems across the world. Together they explore the 130-year history of these systems, how they rise out of cultural fissures rather than being imposed from the outside, and why the early stages of every camp system look so similar, whether in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Chile, or the United States today.

They discuss what Andrea calls "the concentration camp tendency," the impulse to isolate and render people alien. They examine how that tendency has been legitimized across administrations. And they get into what may be the most urgent question right now: Andrea's research suggests there is typically a 3-to-5-year window to dismantle these systems before they become entrenched. We may be near the end of that window.

Andrea also lays out concrete, practical ways to get involved, no matter where you are or how much experience you have with organizing. The Saltbox Project is tracking warehouse acquisitions. Dan Sinker's team has shipped 500,000 whistles. Illustrator Megan Kowski created downloadable ICE zines that communities are folding and distributing across the country. People are finding ways to use their actual skills, and it's adding up.

About Andrea Pitzer:

Andrea Pitzer is a journalist and author of three books: "One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps," "Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World," and "The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov." Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, Vox, Slate, and many other publications. 

She visited Guantanamo Bay twice while researching "One Long Night" and has spent more than a decade investigating the global history of mass detention. 

She hosts the podcast "Next Comes What" and publishes the newsletter "Degenerate Art." Find her at andreapitzer.com and on Bluesky at @andreapitzer.bsky.social.