Classic authoritarian tactics reveal what Trump is hoping to do, but they may backfire.

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The latest "Next Comes What" covers two significant events from the last week: the massive bombing attack conducted by the U.S. and Israel on Iran and OpenAI's announcement that it would partner with the government just hours before the attack began. Andrea Pitzer looks at the guardrails OpenAI competitor Anthropic had attempted to set up in recent weeks, drawing red lines around fully autonomous weapons and any use of its products for domestic surveillance. And she outlines how Open AI appears to have agreed to something that Anthropic would not in order to seal the deal with the government. Both the bombing of Iran and the possible opening of floodgates for increased domestic surveillance reflect two classic strategies of wannabe and established authoritarians.

Andrea explains how such leaders use external conflict to try to unify the people behind problematic policies, and expand domestic surveillance to suppress dissent. But right out of the gate, the war on Iran is unpopular with the American public. And recent work from Marcel Dirsus suggests that increased surveillance can actually work against tyrannical aims over time, creating the illusion of control, as governing elites become more isolated and paranoid. Trump may very well not get what he wants out of either tactic. Andrea closes the episode with some thoughts for how to take action.

The US is detaining pregnant children in Texas and limiting their access to health care. We shouldn't tolerate this obscenity.

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Our episode this week looks at events in San Benito, Texas, where pregnant immigrant minors are being detained by the US government. As recently as 2024, the facility was kept from receiving pregnant minors due to mismanagement of medical appointments and care plans. More importantly, the former head of the Office of Refugee Resettlement during Trump's first administration has explained that moving pregnant girls there from around the country is done entirely to keep them from getting access to abortions.

Andrea Pitzer discusses the significant risks that pregnant adolescents face in giving birth compared to women in their twenties. She also looks at the history of pregnant detainees in Argentina under dictatorship, where hundreds of women were killed after giving birth, their children handed off to members of the military or their allies to raise as their own. The toll of that especially heinous family separation has torn families apart for generations in Argentina.

Small fixes to ICE brutality can be dangerous, because they run the risk of entrenching what we want to stop.

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

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This week's episode begins by considering the reforms to ICE operations that some Democratic leaders are demanding, as well as remarks by Hillary Clinton last weekend in Germany. Andrea Pitzer argues that what Democratic leadership is calling for runs the risk of making the overall Trump project on immigration permanent. She looks at how the talk of reforms is well-intentioned, but by failing to likewise address the larger problem, the opposition could solidify the expanding network of camps going forward.

Andrea considers three examples from the history of detention at Guantanamo of how small shifts had huge, unfortunate repercussions, The first is from Bill Clinton's first term, and shows how an attempt to save the lives of some migrants in detention at Gitmo was successful, but it came at the cost of leaving the site a legal black hole with no guaranteed rights for detainees. The second example comes from the post-9/11 era, when the Supreme Court gave minimal rights to detainees in the third year of War on Terror abuses there, but did so without addressing the larger abomination that Guantanamo represented. Andrea's third example looks at the expeditionary project model used in 2007 to build Camp Justice for the big trial of 9/11 suspects expected to take place on the island. That trial has still not happened. But in recent weeks, the same expeditionary model has been funded through a Navy contract to stand up detention camps for immigrants on a vast and expedited basis inside US borders. Andrea closes with recent successes from everyday people and ways that anyone can take action to stop ICE and close the camps.