Advertise on podcast: Autocratic Despair: The Podcast

France is on fire, and the most thoughtful Frenchman alive has thoughts. Dr. Craig Johnson, UC Berkeley lecturer and PhD in Global Fascism Studies, opens at a seven. The days are getting shorter, the ennui is setting in (second week running for that word, a show record), and the thing driving his number is France’s slide into a youth uprising that the far right is, in his view, perfectly positioned to exploit. For listeners who haven’t been following it, and most Americans haven’t, Nick and Craig lay out the story from the start. In mid-September, French high school students began blockading their own schools over teacher shortages, crumbling buildings and classrooms that don’t work. University students joined on October 1. Within a week it was teachers, parents and the trade unions, nationwide, and the grievances widened from schools to everything: the cost of living, fuel prices, wages, pensions. The Yellow Vests, the movement that shut France down over gas prices in 2018, came back to join the kids. The weekend before taping, around half a million people were in the streets. In Limoges, the nineteenth-century City Hall, a building that survived both world wars, was set on fire and its roof collapsed. In Paris, protesters pulled apart the base of the statue of Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic. There were eighteen hundred arrests in a single weekend, and the hardest number in the story is this one: by early October, French authorities reported more than five thousand arrests, the large majority of them minors, and Human Rights Watch has documented teenagers seriously injured by police munitions. The show treats that part with the seriousness it deserves. Is it a psyop? Craig says no. He reads it as an earnest expression of the same thing happening to young people everywhere: an economy that has stopped working for them, aging populations, rising costs, falling wages, and a political system that seems to offer no way out. He places it alongside youth uprisings in Nepal and elsewhere, and explains, for American listeners, what the French word for suburbs actually means. The banlieues aren’t white-picket-fence neighborhoods. They’re dense high-rise communities on the commuter lines into Paris and Lyon, home to many of France’s non-white citizens and residents, chronically underinvested in and treated as a labor pool. He connects it to the French right’s long project of defining France as white and secular, and to the strange history in which the same right once insisted Algeria was simply France. His worry is about what comes next. Youth explosions historically go one of two ways: they coalesce around a transformative demand, or they fizzle into disorder that becomes the justification for a right-wing crackdown. Without organization, leadership or concrete demands, Craig fears this one is headed for the second, with France’s presidential and legislative elections ahead and the National Rally waiting. He reaches for a Dead Kennedys lyric to make the point, which leads to the revelation that Nick, a child of the Thrasher-magazine era, thought all of that music sucked. Nick’s contribution is to consult the most thoughtful Frenchman alive: Victor Wembanyama. For the non-basketball fans, Nick explains who Wemby is: twenty-two, from the suburbs of Paris, seven-foot-four, the number one pick in the 2023 draft, Rookie of the Year, an Olympic silver medalist, and the man who took the San Antonio Spurs to the NBA Finals this year. Nick’s case for trusting him starts with how he moves. A seven-footer who handles the ball like a guard and blocks shots from impossible angles has to know where every single thing in the room is at all times, which makes him, in Nick’s estimation, the most spatially aware person in France and possibly the world. Then there’s the crying. When Wemby wept on the court after big playoff wins, critics, including his own mentor Kevin Garnett, said he was too emotional. Wemby’s answer to a French reporter is one Nick calls a better read on masculinity than the entire manosphere has produced in a decade: it’s a fear of judgment, social codes, and he refuses to carry the burden of hiding his emotions. He also turns down sports-betting money, which in today’s NBA is almost unheard of. So what does the most aware man in France say? That these are systemic inequalities, so deep-rooted that he’s glad young people are speaking up, that he hears them and supports them, and that he got out of that system only by luck. Nick is careful to note he said it before the fires and the mass arrests, and that supporting the kids isn’t endorsing what happened in Limoges. And Craig agrees with Wemby’s diagnosis, if not his optimism. Nick holds at six and a half, and his driver is a story the show decided to defend when nobody else would: Katie Zacharia, Trump’s White House press secretary for exactly five days. Announced on a federal holiday, first briefing on Tuesday, out by Friday, felled by the revelation that the Pepperdine Law graduate who called herself a lawyer had never passed the bar. Nick’s contrarian take is that this was the dumbest scandal of the year. You don’t need to be a lawyer to be the press secretary. You need to be a liar, and she was both. She was set up to fail by a communications office that had no interest in helping the new hire, and, he argues, she was secretly the best press secretary in history: she ate an entire week of headlines in the same week federal agents searched a congresswoman’s home. Hit a grand slam in your first at-bat, then retire. And the administration that has sanctioned international judges and gone after law firms drew its line at disrespecting the bar exam. Craig takes it somewhere sharper. This White House is a reality show, and people are hired for how they play on television. That’s the job. He quotes Werner Herzog, explaining why he watches professional wrestling: you must not avert your eyes. Craig can’t look away either, and on a show about authoritarian spectacle, that’s the most honest thing anyone can say. He calls it one of the best fifteen minutes of fascism he’s ever seen. A comedy about fascism, a commedia for your particular brand of tragedy, and somehow genuinely fun. Stare into the abyss with friends. Connect with us today! Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.

Dr. Craig Johnson opens this week’s Autocratic Despair at a seven, and he gets there fast. On the morning they recorded, federal agents searched the Washington home of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota as part of an immigration investigation reportedly tied to paperwork her late father filed when she was a child. Craig, a UC Berkeley lecturer with a PhD in Global Fascism Studies, walks new listeners through what denaturalization is, who the United States has historically stripped of citizenship (war criminals, terrorists, Nazis who slipped in after the war), and why it has never once been attempted against a sitting member of Congress. He calls it a new low, and the show agrees. Nick Mortensen, the former comedian from Green Bay who serves as the show’s audience proxy, explains how this summer the State Department convened a symposium on “far-left political terrorism,” and Marco Rubio told foreign officials the left is now counterterrorism’s target, and then the government published a hundred-page report titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism” naming forty-three people and groups as tools of Cuban subversion. Black Lives Matter, CodePink, the Democratic Socialists of America, the mayor of New York, Ben of Ben & Jerry’s, George Floyd, who is dead, and Ilhan Omar. The list came first. The search warrant came later. Craig connects it to the Red Scares of the 1920s and 1950s and to the way a real kernel, foreign influence networks like the one tied to Neville Roy Singham, gets stretched until it covers anyone the administration doesn’t like. They also work out, live, what happens to a House seat when its member is removed. Short version: nobody gets appointed, and the district goes dark. Co-host Nick Mortensen is also at a 7, but for completely different reasons. Nick's driver, which is about an invitation nobody sent. For the first time since 2002, the United States didn’t invite the OSCE, the 57-nation body whose observers have watched every federal election for twenty-four years. The only other countries to shut them out recently are Russia and Belarus, which prompts a lengthy and possibly libelous comparison to Wisconsin’s exclusion from lists of top party schools on the grounds that amateurs and professionals don’t belong on the same list, and Craig’s confession about why he chose Berkeley over Madison: a union, and a couch on fire in the street on his visit day. Nick concedes the honest kernel, which comes from David Becker, one of the most credentialed election experts in the country, who says the observers’ absence will have zero effect on the election’s security. Nick spends a while convinced Becker is having an existential crisis, then looks up his résumé and realizes the crisis is his own. Becker’s right about the ballots. The question is why an administration wouldn’t want an independent report saying the election was clean, and who’s watching instead. The Justice Department says it’ll send a record thousand federal monitors in November, drawn from a gutted Civil Rights Division and volunteers from somewhere in the government. Picture the home team telling the league not to send refs this year, because their assistant coaches have it covered. Nobody’s saying the game’s rigged. Nobody would accept it from the Bears either. The back half of the episode is a tribute, and the show means it. Nick and Craig play an extended clip from the subscriber-only Weekender edition of The Muckrake, hosted by Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman, which Jared generously let them run outside the paywall. The clip is from a Byron Donalds for Governor event in Florida, where a woman takes the microphone and the conversation turns, unexpectedly and sadly, to grandparents’ rights and a grandson she hasn’t seen since August. What Jared does with that moment is the reason it’s here: fifteen different contexts, all of them right, delivered with an insight that makes everyone else in this space look like they’re guessing. Nick says plainly that The Muckrake is the standard this show measures itself against, that it may be unreachable, and that getting seventy percent of the way there would make for a pretty good podcast. Craig takes the clip somewhere new: why the grandparents now voting in American elections are Gen X as much as boomers, why Gen X has voted more conservatively than the generations around it, what mass politics looked like when millions showed up to rallies, and what atomization means for a country where nobody knows what anybody else knows and the only politics that cuts through is grievance. Nick predicts Christopher Rufo has just found his next campaign. It’s an episode about authoritarian drift told by two people who would honestly rather be laughing, and mostly are. A commedia for your particular brand of tragedy, on the subject of fascism, from a Green Bay dad and a Berkeley scholar who keep finding a way to have fun with the end of the republic. If you subscribe to one thing this week, make it The Muckrake Weekender. If you like this show, you’ll love that one. Connect with us today! Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.

Dr. Craig Johnson opens this week’s Autocratic Despair at a seven, which on his logarithmic scale is as low as he’s ever been, and the reason is Brazil. The first round of the presidential election put Lula da Silva, the incumbent, at about 45 percent, behind Flavio Bolsonaro, son of the jailed former president Jair Bolsonaro, at 47. Craig explains the two-round system for American listeners, why no candidate in Lula’s position has won a runoff since Brazil’s return to democracy, and what it means when nearly every major country in Latin America is already run by the right. Nick, who has a documented fandom for Don Jr., gets the parallel immediately: a president goes to jail and the country turns to his son. Craig’s answer to “what actually happens if Flavio wins” is the heart of the number: the rollback of environmental, indigenous, queer, racial and gender protections, Jair walking out of prison, and the end of the dream of the left that grew up under the dictatorship. Then he tells you about Lula himself, a man who taught himself to read, lost a finger in a factory press, and spent decades organizing a machinists’ union under military rule, and about the interview that brought Craig to tears: “I was you yesterday. Be me tomorrow.” The comedy will return. Not yet. Nick’s number goes to six and a half, and his driver is a sentence he says carefully: it looks like the regime is soft-launching its next ethnic cleansing. To explain, he introduces two men. The first is Christopher Rufo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the most effective activist on the American right of the last half decade: the man who took “critical race theory” from an academic term to an executive order in three weeks, then did the same to “woke” and “DEI.” Nick gives Rufo his due and then reads the 2021 tweet in which Rufo explained his own method, in public, in advance, and dares anyone to stop him. Craig’s read on what that is, historically, is one of the throws of the week. The second man is Bo French, former Tarrant County Republican chair, ally of the True Texas Project, and now the GOP nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, whom Nick admits he cut from an earlier episode because an accurate description would have strained credulity. He gives you two items from the file and lets you decide whether you’d have believed him. One involves a poll about Jews and Muslims that got Dan Patrick to ask him to resign. The other involves Native Americans and the word “deport.” French’s post about a photo of Indian-American students cheering at a Texas football game is what gave Rufo and his co-host Jonathan Keeperman, who posted for years as “Lomez,” an excuse to release a podcast episode titled “The Indian Question.” Craig, who studies fascism for a living, stops the show when he hears the title: for the non-fascists in the room, that is not a dog whistle, it’s a klaxon. He explains where “the Jewish question” came from in nineteenth-century Europe and what the answer to it was called in 1942. Nick walks through what Rufo and Lomez proposed, including forced deportation of the unassimilated, a complete immigration ban, and an “assimilation hazing” of vulgar racism for the citizens allowed to stay, who must, in Lomez’s words, prove their American-ness. Craig introduces the concept of provisional whiteness, the deal Jewish Americans were historically offered, and explains why it’s now being offered to Indian-Americans with a condition attached. Nick asks the question he’s been building toward: is this a trial balloon for the next phase of ICE? Craig’s answer is unhedged, and then they go somewhere stranger: what this means for J.D. Vance, whose wife is Indian-American, whether Nick Fuentes or Rufo gets to pick the next scapegoat, and why the man who’s the best there’s ever been at this might be gambling on a group too small to rally a country against. Then Craig says the quiet part about his own career. He wishes he studied wigs. A colleague at Berkeley wrote a history dissertation on wig culture, and when you tell people that, they say “huh, neat.” When Craig tells people he studies fascism, they say “what’s going on, help me.” He would like, one day, for his master’s degree to be irrelevant. And then the show turns. During the Packers game, Nick saw three national ad spots for the Texas Senate race, two for Ken Paxton and James Talarico and a third featuring Angela Paxton, Ken’s ex-wife, explaining why you should vote for him, without once saying his name. Nick has questions about the earlier drafts of that script, the negotiation that produced the final one, and what she got out of it, and he answers them in voices. Craig’s reaction is three words involving Hillary Clinton. Then Nick does something you don’t hear on political podcasts: he takes a self-inventory on air. He has been enjoying the True Texas Project’s podcast more than he can explain, he nearly majored in feminist history, he’s been uncomfortable with a national conversation about men who enjoy watching women degrade themselves, and he wants to know whether his disgust for these women’s politics is a permission structure for something older and uglier. Craig, a scholar of religion, has a word for it, and it’s the one you’d expect from a scholar of religion. Naomi Wolf and The Beauty Myth come up; Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene come up; the pitfalls of critiquing people who deliberately play a trope come up. It’s the most honest ten minutes the show has done, and it’s followed immediately by an extended, mostly Nick-driven investigation of boners, their management, and the advice his father gave him. This is a comedy podcast about authoritarianism. The commedia is load-bearing. From there, frankly and without flinching, the Cornell 7 case: a reopened criminal investigation into an alleged 2024 assault at a fraternity house, and why the national conversation has been about the woman rather than about what seven young men did to each other’s conscience. Which leads, by a route only this show could take, to Craig’s unflinching scouting report on the Bay Area AI orgy scene. He has not attended. He has opinions. Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter fanfiction, Millenarian heresy disputes, Wiccans, the specific sock situation of the men who are deciding the next forty years of human existence, and the sentence that explains the entire tech economy are all in there, and they are not being quoted here. Curtis Yarvin, Destiny, Vivek Ramaswamy and Marco Rubio make appearances. So does a ferret. A week of autocrats in Brazil, a soft launch in Texas, and a scouting report nobody asked for, delivered by a Green Bay dad and a Berkeley fascism scholar who would rather be studying wigs. It’s fun. It shouldn’t be. That’s the show. Names Mentioned: Lula da Silva, Flavio Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro, Marielle Franco, Donald Trump Jr., Zohran Mamdani, Christopher Rufo, Jonathan Keeperman (“Lomez”), Bo French, Dan Patrick, J.D. Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nick Fuentes, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, Paul Singer, Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos, Rudy Giuliani, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, Ken Paxton, James Talarico, Angela Paxton, Julie McCarty, Hillary Clinton, Curtis Yarvin, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Naomi Wolf, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Destiny, Cornell, Chi Phi, Balaji Srinivasan  Connect with us today! Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.

Netanyahu came to New York, and Nick's number held at six. That's where this week's Autocratic Despair begins: with the Prime Minister of Israel on the floor of the United Nations, dozens of delegations walking out before he opened his mouth, and a comedy podcast from Green Bay, Wisconsin trying to figure out how worried to be about a man who called the people leaving the room moral cowards and then told the ones who stayed that their leaders thank him privately. Dr. Craig Johnson, UC Berkeley lecturer and PhD in Global Fascism Studies, opens at a six as well. He went camping. He is personally more relaxed. The world, he notes, has not let up. His driver this week is a story most Americans missed: Saudi Arabia and the part of the European Union that handles fossil fuel imports from the Arabian Peninsula, and what happens to gas prices when a kingdom decides it has leverage. Nick, a former comedian and manufacturing professional, admits energy markets are not the show's area of expertise, then asks the only question that matters to a guy with three kids and a crossover vehicle: how much further can it go? Craig's answer involves earthquakes, poisoned rivers, and the phrase "not quite enough." Then Netanyahu. Nick's driver walks through the week as the audience proxy who reads the news and can't quite believe it. Donald Trump spoke at the UN too, just not the same day, because he had Xi Jinping and his wife at the White House and, as everyone is saying, nobody has ever been tougher on China. Craig adds the detail that Trump apparently floated selling Xi American weapons. Craig's read: what, you like Vietnam surplus? They already have those. For listeners unfamiliar with the man, Nick does the three lines: Prime Minister of Israel, longest-serving one they've ever had, not well regarded at home. Under indictment for corruption in Israel. Facing an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court abroad. Election in a few weeks. And newly not well regarded in New York, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged to arrest him if he set foot in the city, called him a war criminal, and declared him not welcome. Nick's honest assessment: Mamdani probably lacked the jurisdiction, so it's close to nothing, but it isn't nothing. Netanyahu's response was to cut a promo. A video aimed at the mayor by name. Shame on you, Mr. Mamdani. Then he did it again from the UN podium, working in Mamdani's friendship with streamer Hasan Piker for good measure. Craig notes Netanyahu's party has been running ads in Israel with Mamdani edited in next to prominent figures, which tells you something about who the campaign is actually for. Craig also observes the strangest thing happening on the American right this year: it's splitting on Israel, and neither the right wing of the party nor the center is going to be pleased with any of this ahead of the midterms. The speech itself gets the full treatment. The walkout. The moral cowards line. The claim that attacking Iran was one of the easiest decisions he's ever made. West Bank settler violence dismissed as the work of juvenile delinquents, which prompts Craig to do a real explainer, for new listeners, on what the settler movement is, where it came from, and why it's been part of Israeli political culture since the aftermath of 1967. Craig on the diplomatic corner Israel has backed itself into is one of the best stretches of the episode: not a lecture, an explanation of how a country ends up with its prime minister yelling at an empty room.  You'll have to hear it. Then the mic drop. Netanyahu closed by declaring that Israel didn't commit genocide, Israel prevented genocide, and that the finding against him is the greatest lie of the century. Nick's reaction is the emotional center of the episode, played straight and then not: that's a real load off his mind, because this whole thing is a sticky wicket, he hasn't been watching it closely because every time he looks it doesn't look good, the United States is definitely complicit in the sense that we supplied the weapons, and he doesn't want to be seen as antisemitic, of which there's plenty going around without him. So he'll defer to the expert, and Netanyahu says it isn't one. Craig's summary: up is down, war is peace. The show does not resolve the question this week. It names the discomfort of a person of ordinary decency trying to look at something and finding he'd rather not. That's the autocratic despair the title is about, and it's why the number stays at six instead of moving. And then, because this is a show about fascism that is somehow genuinely fun, Nick tells Craig about the pants. He was at the Home Depot on Saturday returning a toilet seat for the second time in six weeks. What he found there, and how close he came, is a story about brand loyalty, pocket architecture, the elite fraternity of men who know a specific Timberland work pant, the correct number of backup pairs to keep in a package at the ready, and the moment a 48-year-old father of three understands what he has become. There is a detour through Japanese selvedge denim and the ethics of not washing it. Craig reveals that he has had the same Tyvek wallet with a picture of the band "Devo" on it for 20 years.  If you want to know what pants Milwaukee Tool is selling now, whether they're electric, and whether he bought them, listen. The episode closes on a milestone. It's episode 22, but it's the twentieth Nick and Craig have done together. Craig says it took him a couple of episodes to understand what they could do, that the comedic cooperation keeps getting better, and that the balance between entertainment, education, and politics has found its shape. Nick tells the audience the premise they've never actually explained: he and Craig didn't know each other. Nick was a listener to Craig's other show, 15 Minutes of Fascism, and could hear a man getting depressed in the funniest possible way throughout 2024. He reached out. This is the result. A commedia for the specific tragedy of watching your country drift toward authoritarianism, hosted by a Midwestern dad and a scholar who has, against all odds, hung in there while the dad does things. They're taking listener questions for the twenty-fifth. Send a link to your group chat. They won't let you down. Connect with us today! Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.

Two very online brothers stood behind a podium at the Pentagon last week, and a sitting president accused the opposition party of trying to murder him. Only one of those stories got covered like it mattered, and it was the one with the haircuts. This week on Autocratic Despair, the comedy podcast where Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson stare into the abyss with friends, the despair numbers come in close together and for very different reasons. Craig holds at a six, driven by the AfD's continued run through the German electorate. Nick lands at six and a half, driven entirely by the fact that Jake and Logan Paul were at the Department of Defense in suits. Germany keeps voting, and the center keeps shrinking. Two state elections landed over the weekend. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, in the former East, the AfD took about 38 percent and first place, while the SPD slid to roughly 35 percent. The story is what happened to the Christian Democrats. The CDU got shut out of the state parliament entirely. Craig explains why that should land harder for an American audience than it does: the CDU is modern Germany. It has been the governing pillar of the country since the Second World War, conservative in roughly a Mitt Romney way, comfortable with social welfare spending, and willing to work with the Social Democrats. When that party loses its seats to a party sitting just shy of open fascism, you are not watching a bad night. You are watching a realignment. Craig has a friend in the German foreign ministry who told him this could never happen there, of all places. It happened there. There is some good news in the numbers. In Berlin, Die Linke doubled its vote share, and Craig makes the case for why that matters: the German left has the longest and clearest record of opposing the Nazis, which is precisely why the Nazis came for them first. Nick also stumbles onto a piece of history he had never heard, which is that Berlin's 2021 election was thrown out entirely and rerun in 2023 after a day of long lines, missing ballots, and a marathon closing the streets. Also in the mix: the BSW, a party of wing nuts that cleared five percent in Saxony-Anhalt and did not clear it here, and what a coalition against the AfD would have to look like to hold. Then the Pauls. On September 17, Jake and Logan Paul toured the Pentagon, visited the 9/11 memorial, met Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and addressed uniformed service members from the press briefing room. Nick opens with a correction, since the photos have been read wrong all week: they were not giving a press briefing. They were using the briefing room as a venue. The visit came ahead of National POW/MIA Recognition Day. Nick asks the audience proxy question, which is who the hell are these guys, and Craig takes it seriously, which is the point. The Pauls came up as vloggers in the late Tumblr era, became bona fide celebrities with about a hundred million in combined reach, and have since rebranded as fitness influencers for men and boys, a lane that runs straight into male supremacist and warrior ethos territory. Craig places them on a spectrum somewhere between Mr. Beast and Andrew Tate, with better PR instincts than the Tate brothers and the same underlying contempt. One of them beat Mike Tyson in a fight Craig describes as elder abuse. Nick argues Logan Paul is a legitimately excellent professional wrestler, which is not a compliment so much as a warning: he knows exactly how to be hated on purpose. There is also money in the room. The brothers paid for their own travel and also met Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Jake promoted Justin Sun's crypto tokens without disclosing he was paid. Logan is facing a class action over the CryptoZoo NFT project, which the plaintiffs call a rug pull and which he denies, having offered money back to buyers who drop out of the suit. Craig defines a rug pull for anyone who needs it, and then makes the argument that holds the segment together: being impossible to take seriously is the product. They want you to see the dumb kids at the end of the cul-de-sac. What they are is very good at getting what they want. Somewhere in there the episode detours into why every young service member in those photos has a mustache, and Craig has an actual answer involving Prussian practice and gas mask seals. Comedy ballast, fully earned. New Low, now weekly. The back half is the segment Nick is putting on a schedule from here to the midterms, because the question keeps coming up whether we like it or not. This week's candidate: on Tuesday, September 15, on Truth Social, the president wrote that the assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pennsylvania was a Democrat plot to get him out of the election, that the evidence was missing, altered, corrupted, or gone, and that former FBI Director Christopher Wray should pay a price. The evidence offered was nothing. Nick gives a full Butler primer for anyone who was not paying attention in July 2024: Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, on a rooftop with a line of sight to the stage; Trump hit in the ear; Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old husband, father, and former volunteer fire chief, killed; David Dutch and James Copenhaver critically wounded; Crooks killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper; Director Kimberly Cheatle resigning ten days later. He also steelmans the anger, because the security failure was real. Then the turn. Craig walks through who gets blamed after political violence and why evidence rarely changes it, from the reaction to Charlie Kirk's assassination back through the late 1960s and the Years of Lead in Italy. Nick lays out the part he cannot get past: James Comey was indicted in April over a photo of seashells reading 86 47, while Jack Posobiec posted 86 46 about Joe Biden in 2022 and was never charged. So seashells get you indicted, but an accusation of attempted murder against an entire party produces no arrests at all. Craig's answer covers the loyalty test, the purge, the Night of the Long Knives, and what an authoritarian does when public support slips. Also discussed: what Trump's own FBI leadership, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, concluded about whether Crooks acted alone; what Attorney General Todd Blanche would and would not say; what Senator Chuck Grassley's newly released files actually show, including the Bob Dole alias and the anonymous donor who paid for the cremation; whether any of it survives contact with a conspiracy theory; and the one president in American history Craig can name whose opposition really did try to kill him, which turns out to be Abraham Lincoln and turns out not to be comforting. Coming next week: Jack Posobiec, the book Unhumans, and the endorsement it just picked up. Connect with us today! Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.

Nick  and Dr. Craig come down from the ledge this week. Both hosts drop to a five, back from the 7.5 they each posted last episode — the highest Dr. Craig had ever offered in nine months of the show, a number that on his logarithmic scale represented a professional assessment, not a mood. This week, the mood lightened. The assessment didn't. What lowered the number is stranger than what raised it. Nick is at a five because, he explains, Agent John Fetterman has finally reached the inner circle of Trump's regime, just as planned. A little ahead of schedule, actually. Have no fear, Dr. Craig. America's finest patriot was entrusted with a sweet speaking slot on Night One of the Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas — a three-night event at the American Airlines Center that the hosts describe as "something to do in Dallas, Texas in the heat of September that isn't watching professional football." It was the first midterm convention either party has held in fifty years, staged while the NFL season kicked off on the same nights, and Nick was not watching. He is not that kind of a sicko. Before Agent Fetterman, though, there's the matter of whether America hit a sneaky new low. Trump floated a five-thousand-dollar dividend to every American who votes Republican in the midterms — announced live, at the convention, as though the economy entitled him to hand out checks from a government that has no mechanism for doing it. Speaker Mike Johnson's initial reaction was the closest thing to pushback anyone managed: "I would assume, yes, he'd need Congress to act, and that's a creative idea." Craig hears that and translates: "That's the political equivalent of hey, good job, champ. Nice try." Within a day Johnson was carrying the water, once the talking points arrived. Nick frames the whole stretch as Trump's Game Show Host period — the era where the president of the United States started offering the public cash prizes for loyalty, and the only debate was whether it qualified as a new low or a continuation of the $1.776 billion slush fund that came before it. The convention itself is a showcase of what Craig calls the humiliation ritual. Trump's speech in support of Ken Paxton, the Texas Senate candidate, was less an endorsement than a public hazing — Trump repeatedly told the crowd Paxton was the greatest attorney general in history while also letting them know he didn't like how Paxton looked or how Paxton talked. Craig explains the mechanic: this is medieval court politics, the prostration before the king, the demonstration that the underling will accept anything the king says and smile. George Washington refused the title "Your Excellency" and asked to be called Mr. President. Trump loves the opposite — the bigger the humiliation, the more loyalty it proves. On Night Two, Ted Cruz delivered a speech naming three Democrats — Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, and James Talarico — and after each name, an attendee audible on the broadcast shouted "he should be shot." Three times, three names, same voice. Cruz did not react, did not stop, did not acknowledge it. A spokeswoman declined to say whether he'd heard it. Later, Cruz posted the clip himself with the shouts still audible and framed the speech as a warning about rising political extremism. Two of the three targets are Muslim, and the speech fell on the eve of the September 11 anniversary and the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk's assassination. Which brings the show to Fetterman, and to the rhetorical device Nick designed to let both hosts say everything they need to say about a complicated figure. Agent Fetterman — the conceit that John Fetterman is a deep-cover operative who has spent years building the most convincing disguise in American political history so that he could infiltrate the far right and save the republic from within. The hoodie. The basketball shorts. The stroke. The Mar-a-Lago visits. The Jesse Watters appearances. All cover. The fact that he went on national television and called socialism an anti-American way of life — at a Republican convention — is merely evidence of his commitment to the mission. The fact that his own Pennsylvania delegation is calling him a disgrace and organizing a 2028 primary challenge is exactly what would happen if the disguise were working. Nick doesn't believe it. He wishes he did. Because the alternative is that John Fetterman is simply a man who figured out that validating the other side costs him nothing he cares about keeping — as long as he holds the pro-choice credential, he can walk into any room in MAGA world and walk out a Democrat. And there's a word for that: controlled opposition. Craig defines the term through its history — from the origins of parliamentary opposition in Britain, through Russia's managed democracy and Surkov's playpen parties, to the central diagnostic that Nick has been turning over for months: the question isn't whether it IS controlled opposition; the question is what would be different if it were. What would be different about Fetterman? He'd hold a credential the base couldn't argue with. He'd validate the other side on everything that actually moves. He'd be reliably present at their events and reliably absent from his own committee work. Which is what he's doing. Craig extends the analysis to Talarico, the show's fraught former franchise subject — now the Democratic Senate nominee against the humiliated Paxton — and the Clinton-era triangulation strategy that Craig argues has produced thirty years of the Democratic agenda moving nowhere. Not only is it wrong, he says. It also won't work. Nick pulls them both back from the edge: calling the whole Democratic Party controlled opposition is a nihilism accelerant, and that nihilism is the optimal outcome for the regime. He's not making that accusation. What he is saying is that controlled opposition as a concept needs to be in the public vocabulary, because you cannot diagnose a disease you don't have a name for. He can find exactly one figure in the political-media landscape willing to use the phrase — Sarah Kendzior — and he suspects the reason nobody else goes there is not that it's wrong but that it's too expensive to consider. People would rather believe in a broken party than an empty one. There is also a theory about the professional wrestler Danhausen being a psyop to normalize Peter Thiel's physical presence in American public life. It is ridiculous. Nick finds it a little bit plausible. Craig does not dismiss it as firmly as one might hope. The show closes on the No Kings rallies — the October 27 event, the arc from four million to eight million marchers, and the honest conversation about what branded protest has opened and what it has nerfed. Nick is going. He's telling you to go. He's also telling you to paint your face, leave your phone in the car, and never follow a hippie to a second location. And he's asking, as the leaves turn, whether anyone has noticed that eight million people in the streets produced the last two years of Trump's presidency, and whether maybe it's time to try something different while also showing up for the thing that's scheduled. Comedy, commedia, fascism, autocracy, and a functioning sense of fun about the end of the republic. The abyss is better with friends. Names in this episode: Nick Mortensen, Dr. Craig Johnson, John Fetterman, Donald Trump, Mike Johnson, Ken Paxton, Ted Cruz, James Talarico, Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, Dave McCormick, Tim Scott, Dr. Oz, Conor Lamb, Charlie Kirk, Aaron Rupar, Sarah Kendzior, Peter Thiel, Danhausen, Vladislav Surkov, Vladimir Putin, Jasmine Crockett, Kaitlan Collins, Malcolm Kenyatta, Chris Deluzio, Brendan Boyle, Bernie Sanders, AOC, Lincoln Perry, Byron Donalds, Joe Rogan, Kristen Welker. Connect with us today! Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.

Both hosts at 7.5. Craig's highest number in 9 months of the show. Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson both come in at seven and a half this week. That number matters. In nine months of this show, Dr. Craig — whose scale is logarithmic, meaning a four is much worse than a three — has never gone higher. A seven and a half from Craig is not a mood. It is a professional assessment from a man with a PhD in fascism studies who does not use words carelessly. They earn it. Two episodes ago, the show previewed an election in a German state called Saxony-Anhalt. They were careful — every number was dated, every projection hedged with "as of taping." This week, the results are in, and the results are worse than the polls suggested. The AfD — the Alternative for Germany, a party founded in 2013 by economics professors angry about the euro and now classified by Germany's own domestic intelligence service as right-wing extremist — took 43.9 percent of the vote. They more than doubled their 2021 result of 20.8 percent. They won 39 seats in an 83-seat parliament, falling three short of an outright majority. The Christian Democrats, the center-right party that governed Saxony-Anhalt for a generation with 37 percent just five years ago, collapsed to 17.2 and lost 25 seats in a single night. Craig walks the audience through what the numbers mean. Three seats short sounds like a loss. It is not a loss. To keep the AfD from governing, every other party in the parliament — the CDU, the SPD, the Greens, the Left, and a brand-new populist party called BSW — must agree to form a coalition together. Five parties that agree on almost nothing except that the sixth one cannot be allowed to govern. And on election night, BSW's lead candidate said his party has "overlaps" with AfD positions and that it would be "completely undemocratic" to exclude the largest party from government entirely. The AfD's 39 seats plus BSW's 5 equals 44. That is a majority. The smallest party in the room just offered to open the door for the biggest one. The man who won is Ulrich Siegmund. He is thirty-five years old. And in November of 2023, he sat in a villa outside Potsdam — the lake town outside Berlin where Truman and Stalin divided postwar Europe, and a short drive from the villa on the Wannsee where the Nazis planned the logistics of the Final Solution — at a secret meeting where far-right figures discussed a plan they called remigration: the mass removal of asylum seekers, residents, and German citizens with migration backgrounds deemed unassimilated. Investigative journalists at Correctiv exposed the meeting in January of 2024. More than a million Germans marched in response, in hundreds of cities, carrying signs that read "Never again is now" and "We are the firewall." A million people in the street bought thirty months. The man from the villa just won his election. Nick lays the growth curve on the table: the party that became the Nazi Party started with fifty-five members and a numbering trick — membership cards beginning at 501 so the room looked ten times bigger than it was. Thirteen years later, that party governed Germany. The AfD was founded in 2013. Thirteen years later, it holds 44 percent of Saxony-Anhalt and leads the national polls. And in two weeks, on September 20, two more German states vote — Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the AfD has doubled from 16.7 to 36 in the polls, and Berlin, the capital, the multicultural city everyone assumed was immune, where the AfD has gone from 9 percent to 18. Same pattern, every state: the far right doubles and the center-right halves. Then Nick pivots — and the pivot is the episode. Because the word remigration did not stay in Germany. It is on a conference flyer. In Fort Worth, Texas. Published by an organization called the True Texas Project. The show introduces the audience to Tarrant County — not the rural Texas they imagine when they hear "north Texas," but the county where the Dallas Cowboys play, home to Fort Worth, a city of a million people bigger than San Francisco, in the fourth-largest metro in America. A county that was 75 percent white twenty years ago and is now 42 percent white, majority-minority, median age thirty-five. The last big urban county in Texas that Republicans still control. The county where Biden won by 1,800 votes in 2020 and Trump won by 42,000 in 2024. And the county where, on September 1, a five-person commissioners court voted three to two along party lines to cut 92 Election Day polling places — a thirty percent reduction — while also eliminating voting sites at the University of Texas at Arlington and two community college campuses, over the objections of the NAACP, the ACLU of Texas, and more than a hundred speakers who showed up to say no. The room chanted "shame" after the vote. Commissioner Roderick Miles called it a modern-day poll tax. Commissioner Alisa Simmons, who is running against the county judge in November, said to his face: this is not about cost, this is about power, this is campaigning from the dais. The True Texas Project was founded in 2009 as the NE Tarrant Tea Party by Julie McCarty. After the El Paso Walmart massacre of 2019 — twenty-three people murdered by a gunman with a Great Replacement manifesto — McCarty wrote publicly that she did not condone the actions but certainly understood where they came from. Her husband Fred wrote that you cannot demographically replace a once proud, strong people without getting blowback. Later that year, the group rebranded. The new name reflects, per their own website, an expanded vision and reach. Both of those things are true, in that order. The organization now has fifteen chapters across Texas, funded through a PAC that in 2022 received over ninety-two percent of its money from Defend Texas Liberty — a PAC funded almost entirely by West Texas oil billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, the same PAC whose president hosted Nick Fuentes for seven hours at its offices in October 2023. After that story broke, the PAC renamed itself the Texas Freedom Fund for the Advancement of Justice. Same wallet. New paint. That wallet also funds Bo French, the former Tarrant County GOP chair now running for the Railroad Commission, who spoke at a True Texas Project event and called for deporting a hundred million people at CPAC. And Leigh Wambsganss, the Patriot Mobile executive who built the Southlake school board takeover and co-founded her PAC with Tim O'Hare — the same O'Hare who now presides as county judge over the commissioners court that just cut the polling places. One money trail. One ecosystem. One county where the tightest Senate race in Texas since 1988 — Ken Paxton against James Talarico — will be decided in November with 92 fewer doors. Comedy, commedia, autocracy, fascism, and a functioning sense of fun about the end of the republic — a show about authoritarianism that somehow stays worth listening to. The abyss is better with friends. Names in this episode: Nick Mortensen, Dr. Craig Johnson, Ulrich Siegmund, Alice Weidel, Martin Sellner, Alexander Gauland, Björn Höcke, Elon Musk, Adolf Hitler, Julie McCarty, Fred McCarty, Tim O'Hare, Matt Krause, Manny Ramirez, Alisa Simmons, Roderick Miles Jr., Tim Dunn, Farris Wilks, Jonathan Stickland, Ken Paxton, James Talarico, Catherine Godby Connect with us today! Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.

Every court gets one eventually. The unvetted outsider who holds no office, runs nothing, answers to nobody, is despised by the entire palace — and has the emperor's ear anyway. Russia got Rasputin. America got Laura Loomer, and this week she finally crossed the blood-brain barrier for Nick Mortensen, who has spent years scrupulously refusing to discuss her. That refusal ends now, and Dr. Craig Johnson — UC Berkeley lecturer, PhD in fascism studies — is on hand to explain why the comparison isn't a joke. First, the numbers. Craig comes in at a six, and his is the structural one: the federal fight over mail-in ballots went through a full whiplash cycle this week, with the Supreme Court clearing a procedural path for the administration's Postal Service rule, a district judge lifting her block, two dozen states immediately suing over the final rule itself, and the courts fighting about it again within days. Craig's read cuts through the litigation: nobody is ending mail voting. They only need to make it harder enough, in enough places, for enough people — and the House stays where it is. He reaches back to Dred Scott for precedent on federal overreach in a rightward direction, and tells a Soviet joke about a midnight mob and the young men in suits chasing after them, asking which way the people went so they can lead them there. Nick names the moment: a new low. Not the fun kind, where somebody embarrasses themselves on the White House lawn. The structural kind, where a branch of government signals it will hand over whatever gets asked for. Nick's six is the woman herself. He explains, honestly, why he's avoided her — partly to deny her even a growing platform, and partly because he didn't know how to talk about her without walking into misogyny. That second problem gets real treatment, including the story of how Nick very nearly minored in feminist history in college and the department chair whose discouragement he was certain was secretly a Willy Wonka test. It was not a test. There was no prize. What follows on tape is a genuine tightrope act, performed with full awareness of the tightrope. The résumé: born 1993, Project Veritas alum, coiner of her own verb, self-described proud Islamophobe, banned in her day from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, PayPal, Venmo, Uber, and — most impressively — Lyft. She chained herself to Twitter's headquarters. She ran for Congress twice. And in this administration she has become something no title could contain: the woman who walked out of a single Oval Office meeting having gotten National Security Council staffers and the director of the NSA fired. Trump, asked about it: she's a very strong person. Then this past week. Loomer posted a video naming five Black women — Angie Nixon, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Cori Bush, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — and attached to them a slur so squalid that Nick reads it exactly once. In the same thread, she wrote that she knew it would be called racist. She posted anyway. Nixon — Florida's brand-new Democratic Senate nominee, fresh off a primary upset — answered with the reply of the year, involving Queen Latifah, a certain dog food video, and a closing instruction: when referring to me, it's Representative Angie Nixon. However, you can call me Senator. Loomer's escalation from there lands, in Craig's professional estimation, somewhere between the nineteenth century and a mimeographed neo-Nazi zine. It's the kind of racist, Nick observes, that makes racists quit — do I sound like that? Even Marjorie Taylor Greene denounced her — a thousand percent, calling this Trump's new MAGA and wanting nothing to do with it. Which brings the show to the history: we get into the feud that Loomer has had with Marjorie Taylor Greene, and we should all appreciate Nick's restraint in not characterizing it as a "beef." There is a documented prior chapter between these two women that you will simply have to hear to believe, and Nick walks through it on the narrowest tightrope of the episode. Craig's live reaction is its own review. The analysis is where the title gets earned. Everything on Loomer's résumé is designed to be ridiculous, and the ridiculousness is the mechanism: the White House can use what she says and disown who she is in the same breath. She absorbs the damage — she's a sin eater for them — so nobody with a title has to say the thing. She wasn't invited to Pam Bondi's Epstein binder photo op alongside Jack Posobiec, Libs of TikTok, Liz Wheeler, and DC Draino; every one of the binder kids was a punchline by July, and the woman who didn't get invited outranked the room she wasn't in. Her two million followers aren't the point. Her audience is the enforcer class — she doesn't persuade the public, she audits the staff, and the NSC firings were a loyalty audit delivered by a woman with no job. Craig lands the historical comparison: Rasputin — unvetted, running nothing, hated by the whole palace except the emperor, cultivating strangeness as part of the persona. Nick adds Barbara Walter's term for figures who build a brand on division as a country slides toward conflict: ethnic entrepreneurs. And then the tell — Loomer's July about-face on Ukraine after interviewing Zelenskyy in a Kyiv bomb shelter, admitting she'd been bamboozled by Russian propaganda, with Trump amplifying the clip approvingly. Craig closes on the bleakest sentence of the night: one of the dividing lines in the new Republican coalition is going to be whether you're openly antisemitic — and there are living voters who remember the last time that was ordinary American politics. Along the way, a somber marker: it has been nearly a year since Charlie Kirk was assassinated, and Craig — who was teaching in a classroom when it happened — gives an unplanned, remarkable stretch on what he feared that day, why the killer's identity denied the movement the martyr it wanted, and how the absence of Kirk, who would have turned 35 just in time for 2028, is quietly reshaping two elections. The back half belongs to the WNBA, having the best season in its thirty-year history — record ratings, sold-out expansion teams in Toronto and Portland, a landmark players' contract — and to the manufactured campaign to turn the league into a culture-war front. The full primer: the Breonna Taylor season, the league that wore Vote Warnock shirts against its own owner Kelly Loeffler and flipped a Senate seat the day before January 6th, Brittney Griner's ten months in Russian custody, the racialized discourse that arrived with Caitlin Clark. Then the six-week manufacture: a buried Sophie Cunningham quote, OutKick and Clay Travis attacking the league from both directions in the same month, fifty demonstrators and a guy in a frog suit, and Enes Kanter Freedom — a genuine Turkish dissident who knows exactly what it means to be hunted for who he is — taking a baseline seat at Natasha Cloud's game to target her for who she is. The number that ends the argument: transgender women who have played in the WNBA in thirty seasons — zero. The closest the league has come is Layshia Clarendon, nonbinary, beloved for twelve years. It's a debate about nobody, aimed at the somebodies on the floor, and Craig traces the protection myth beneath it all the way back to Birth of a Nation. Natasha Cloud gets the last word, in a letter to trans kids who were never in the building: you belong, you're loved, you're seen. This is the commedia for your particular tragedy — comedy about fascism, autocracy, and the authoritarian playbook that somehow stays fun to listen to. The abyss is better with friends. Names in this episode: Nick Mortensen, Dr. Craig Johnson, Laura Loomer, Angie Nixon, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Cori Bush, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump, JD Vance, Pam Bondi, Jack Posobiec, Liz Wheeler, Elon Musk, Kamala Harris, Lindsey Graham, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Vladimir Putin, Queen Latifah, Ashley Moody, Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, Charlie Kirk, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Barbara Walter, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sophie Cunningham, Caitlin Clark, Clay Travis, Enes Kanter Freedom, Royce White, Natasha Cloud, Brittney Griner, Kelly Loeffler, Raphael Warnock, Breonna Taylor, Layshia Clarendon, Olivia Miles, Natisha Hiedeman, Paige Bueckers, Jason Williams, Colin Kaepernick, Billie Eilish, James Cameron, Rasputin. Connect with us today! Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.

Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson arrive at the same number this week — a six apiece — but the sixes are doing different jobs. Craig's is about Canada. The United States has restarted a tariff fight with its most serious long-term ally in both trade and foreign policy, Mark Carney is trying to be the adult in a room that no longer rewards adults, and Craig's read is that the whole thing exists because the Iran situation is going badly and Donald Trump wants different headlines. If jettisoning Canada were the only dumb thing this administration had done, Craig says, it would be world-historic. Instead it's somewhere around number forty-five on the list. Before Nick gives his number, the show takes a detour it did not plan and absolutely needed: Natalie Harp. The White House aide's devotion to Trump — the jogging alongside the motorcade, the sleeping arrangements at Mar-a-Lago, the sheer relentlessness of it — starts as disbelief and turns into one of the sharpest bits of analysis in the episode, because Craig recognizes the shape of it. This is what Versailles was for. You make the powerful live worse than they'd live at home, in tents in the courtyard of the king's castle, because proximity is power and the king wants everyone to remember it. The swamp Trump promised to drain turns out to run on exactly this logic: to have influence with this man, you must be physically in front of his eyeballs. Karoline Leavitt and Steven Cheung come up. So do the shoes. And Craig's all-time favorite version of the handshake power move makes an appearance — Barack Obama, Raúl Castro, a limp wrist held aloft in Havana, and the most VEEP moment in modern diplomatic history. Then Nick's six, and he earns it the hard way. He doesn't like wrestling with the idea that there are no good guys left in American politics. He knows it implicitly; he refuses to accept it, because accepting it feels insurmountable and he has kids. So he keeps a list instead — the stories that broke through his resistance. March 4, 2024, when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that states couldn't remove Trump from the ballot, despite conservative judges like Michael Luttig arguing the Fourteenth Amendment means what it says. The day the January 6 defendants got their pardons, including people convicted of seditious conspiracy who had staged an armed quick-reaction force across the Potomac, awaiting orders. Prairieland. Each one stretched his math — his conviction that this is a twenty-five-to-thirty-year problem the rest of us can shrink to fifteen or eighteen if we make a real effort, an effort this show considers itself the beginning of. Craig's addendum is the episode's quiet thesis: people say the arc of history bends toward justice, but we have to do the bending. And then the newest entry on the list, the one that got Nick anxious on a Sunday. Maggie Haberman and the New York Times reported that Hakeem Jeffries — House Democratic leader, presumptive Speaker if Democrats take the midterms, a man third from the presidency if you're counting chairs — held an off-the-books meeting with Jared Kushner at a mutual friend's place in Manhattan. Housing, immigration, cost of living. No press, no readout, no announcement. The show does what it does best: it stops being outraged long enough to explain. Who is Jared Kushner? A real estate heir whose father, Charles Kushner, went to federal prison in a witness-tampering case so baroque that Craig can only respond in Godfather quotes — a case that made Chris Christie's career, ended in a Trump pardon, and somehow terminates in an ambassadorship to France. Whose Harvard admission arrived after a $2.5 million family pledge, per reporter Daniel Golden. Who bought 666 Fifth Avenue for a record $1.8 billion the year before the crash and was rescued by a firm whose major investors include the Qatar Investment Authority. Whose post-White House fund took two billion dollars from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth over the objection of that fund's own screening panel. Nick is precise about what he's claiming: not where the man's heart is — where his money is. And it's in a set of monarchies that don't hold elections. There's also the detail Jodi Kantor reported in 2017, the one that reads like a Chekhov's gun: Benjamin Netanyahu was close enough to the family that teenage Jared gave up his bedroom for him and slept in the basement. Sarah Kendzior has called Kushner a weather marker — you'll know anyone is serious about transnational corruption the day he's even on the radar. He never is. Ivanka, Josh, the whole apparatus: untouched. Then Jeffries — Brooklyn, corporate lawyer, Pelosi's successor, the first Black man to lead a party in Congress, a politician so rehearsed he makes Jon Ossoff sound off the cuff, a man who talks like he's counting syllables on his fingers. Which matters, because a man with no unscripted moments does not have a secret meeting that leaks by accident. Nick flags the speculation as speculation and then commits: somebody wanted this out, both men had a motive, and neither motive is you. The show gives the honest counterargument its full weight — these two worked together on the First Step Act, and real people came home from prison because of it — before landing on why this is different: negotiating on leverage you don't have yet makes your opponent stronger, and nary a Democrat of note, Chuck Schumer included, seems to have a single question. Even Nick's beloved hip-hop bond with Jeffries — Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, a Tribe Called Quest after Phife Dawg, Sir Mix-A-Lot's place in the American canon — can't soften it. Craig, professional cynic, floats the darker readings, including a return to Mitt Romney politics that neither ascendant wing of either party would permit. The back half crosses the Atlantic. On September 6, the German state of Saxony-Anhalt votes, and the AfD — a party founded in 2013 by economics professors mad about the euro, now led by Alice Weidel and classified by Germany's own domestic intelligence service as right-wing extremist — is polling at forty percent. Their lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, is on the cover of Der Spiegel as the most dangerous man in Germany, no question mark, though Nick notes the name itself is doing villain work Danhausen would respect. Craig explains the Brandmauer, the firewall agreement that has kept German fascism from power for eighty years and is visibly slipping; the east-west divide that any Midwesterner will recognize in their bones; and the word remigration — a euphemism invented because the AfD cannot say deportation, since deportation was already the euphemism, the word the Nazis used when the truth was murder. A euphemism for a euphemism. Jeff Sharlet's line hangs over all of it: the first lie of authoritarianism is its inevitability. Next week: the True Texas Project in Tarrant County — which Nick argues is exactly the AfD, and it's happening in Texas. This is the commedia for your particular tragedy: a comedy podcast about surviving American autocracy that stares directly at fascism and the authoritarian playbook and still, against all odds, remains fun to listen to. We have to try, after all. Names in this episode: Nick Mortensen, Dr. Craig Johnson, Mark Carney, Donald Trump, Natalie Harp, Karoline Leavitt, Steven Cheung, Barack Obama, Raúl Castro, Fidel Castro, Michael Luttig, Hakeem Jeffries, Jared Kushner, Maggie Haberman, Charles Kushner, Chris Christie, Daniel Golden, Ivanka Trump, Josh Kushner, Benjamin Netanyahu, Jodi Kantor, Sarah Kendzior, Nancy Pelosi, Jon Ossoff, Chuck Schumer, Mohammed bin Salman, Peter Thiel, Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Phife Dawg, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Mitt Romney, Alice Weidel, Ulrich Siegmund, Giorgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen, Jeff Sharlet, Danhausen. Connect with us today! Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.

Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson open the week split. Craig comes back from a weekend in the wilderness at a four personally, then looks at the rest of the planet and lands on a six — the Middle East, Trump's fraying relationships with allies, the Brazilian election, and a summer of literal fire. Nick is at a seven, and for once he skips the frivolous reason. He has something he wants to say instead. Since the start of this year, Black people have been found hanging from trees in public places across the country. Nick walks the audience through the cases, and the pattern he finds is worse than the one people expect, because it is quieter and it refuses to resolve. August 3, Jackson, Mississippi. A street called Road of Remembrance, a mostly Black neighborhood. Neighbors find a woman's body behind a vacant house. It takes days to identify her: Tasia Fortune, 29 years old, mother of four. Her aunt describes her as strong-minded and big-hearted. Her mother says she was at peace the last time they spoke and does not believe her daughter took her own life. Police will not say whether they suspect foul play. They will not release the incident report. A Jackson city councilman has asked federal prosecutors to step in. Months later, the honest summary is that nobody outside the investigation knows what happened to Tasia Fortune, and the not-knowing is the whole story. Nick refuses the easy version. He will not tell you these are all lynchings, because when you go case by case it gets complicated and sad. Demartravion "Trey" Reed, the Delta State University student found last fall, is the case that complicates it — his family had real questions and deserved answers, and the reporting also includes a detail the viral posts leave out. A year on, the family says the lawyer who promised an independent investigation stopped returning calls. What they have is a hole where an answer should be. That hole is the argument. There is a process meant to establish whether there was foul play, and in the American South in 2026 that process keeps failing. Juliana Umba Nzita, 16, was found in a Charlotte churchyard in May. The medical examiner ruled within three days. No autopsy. Her phone was never recovered. Police never interviewed the man who found her. A Charlotte Observer investigation surfaced all of it. Then Raleigh, where police actually did the work — pulled city and business cameras, held a press conference, showed video, produced witnesses — and the community did not believe a word of it. Nick's point lands there, and it is the reason he is at a seven. You can call that paranoia, or you can ask the harder question: why don't they believe it? The answer is every other case. The three-day rulings. The autopsies nobody performed. The phones nobody found. The promises nobody kept. And four hundred years before that, when the law called it anything but a lynching. You don't get to burn that trust on the cases that demanded it and then spend it back on the one where you finally did your job. Craig picks it up from the scholarship. Plausible deniability was never a bug in the lynching regime, it was the design. Everyone knew who did it and everyone knew nothing would happen. That posture requires different machinery now, but where police are friendly or complicit, the name still applies. And he names the second problem, which is that we have arrived at a country where evidence itself has stopped functioning — departments were burying angles and hiding tape in the eighties and nineties, and now anyone can type a sentence into a computer and produce footage. Craig closes on the part that gets lost: a suicide is a social failure on its own terms. Inadequate care, inadequate attention, sustained economic pressure. However these deaths are ultimately classified, the United States has failed these people systematically and on purpose. Then the show turns, because it has to, and because that turn is what this podcast does. Part two of the Tucker Carlson manifesto. Last week Nick and Craig walked all ten points of Carlson's ninety-eight-minute stream and ran out of runway. This week they recap the full ten — fair, sovereign, productive, beautiful, healthy, honest, optimistic, wise, decent, united — with Craig's analysis attached to each. Sovereign is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with better lighting. Beautiful is a dog whistle that could be summarized as one word, New York. Healthy is the old fascist habit of treating the body as a moral document, traceable back to the founding of the Boy Scouts. Honest is an anti-corruption appeal, and Craig's line for it is the money line: anti-corruption is the socialism of fools. United is as close to the fourteen words as you can get without saying them. Nick is furious that almost nobody in the podcast space clocked it. Muckrake got close. Most of the rest made fun of it. Craig is angrier: it is a monumental failure of political imagination to believe this can be ridiculed away, and the goofiness is not a flaw in the product, it is the product. From there the show does the thing it does best — it stops arguing and starts explaining. Who is this guy. Tucker Carlson, born 1969, abandoned by his mother at six, raised from ten as an heir to the Swanson frozen food fortune, sixty-thousand-dollar boarding school, a BA in history, rejected by the CIA, and told by his father to try journalism because they'll take anybody. That father is Dick Carlson, who ran Voice of America — the United States government's actual overseas propaganda broadcaster — then served as an ambassador, then ran the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and late in life ran a PR firm that took a quarter of a million dollars as a registered foreign agent for Viktor Orbán's Hungary, part of which involved booking a Hungarian official onto his son's show. Tucker Carlson did not learn propaganda from a book. Then the coalition. Joe Kent brings credibility — Green Beret, CIA paramilitary, briefly director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and also documented payments to a Proud Boy and an Oath Keeper endorsement. Thomas Massie brings principle and martyrdom, an MIT engineer and serial lone no vote who got flattened in the most expensive House primary in American history. Marjorie Taylor Greene brings reach, and Nick's read on her is the scariest thing on the beat: she didn't get more reasonable, the window moved to her. Craig calls it possibly the most correct and terrifying sentence ever said on the show. And then Nick opens his own toolbox — the sales seminars, the neurolinguistic programming, the multilevel marketing downline, the foot in the door — to show you the mechanism. Carlson doesn't open with the ugly part. He opens with a small true thing you can't refuse. Then he stacks the yeses. Nick Fuentes is standing at the end of the hallway for anyone who runs out of reasonable steps. Craig's close: Carlson has identified a real disease and is selling you poison. Comedy, commedia, and a functioning sense of fun about the end of the republic. Names in this episode: Nick Mortensen, Dr. Craig Johnson, Tasia Fortune, Christy Spivey, Demartravion "Trey" Reed, Juliana Umba Nzita, Emmett Till, Kenneth Stokes, Tucker Carlson, Dick Carlson, Buckley Carlson, Joe Kent, Shannon Kent, Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nick Fuentes, Charlie Kirk, Ro Khanna, Donald Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Liz Cheney, Bernie Sanders, Viktor Orbán, Father Charles Coughlin, Gregor Strasser, Jared Yates Sexton, Robert Cialdini, Tony Robbins, Jim Rohn, Chet Holmes, Brian Tracy, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Aaron Rodgers. Connect with us today! Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.

This week opens not with despair but with vanity — specifically, the sudden and much-discussed fullness of the President's hair. Somewhere around the Vegas speech, Trump's hairline staged a comeback that the internet spent a full week arguing about, and the White House declined to confirm, deny, or otherwise dignify. Nick's read is that we have now reached the stage of the republic where the toupee gets a press inquiry. And if it is a wig — still officially unproven, a hairpiece expert on record saying she doesn't think so — the truly confounding part is that the wig appears to be of his own hairstyle. The man had access to any hair he wanted, the full glory of the toupee, every option on the table, and he used the most powerful hairpiece money can buy to painstakingly recreate the exact hair he was already losing. He had the genie and wished for the same lamp. Nick, for the record, is rooting for the wig — a President with a wig collection has a weapon, a way to bury any bad headline by simply appearing in a new one, and honestly, given the alternative topics on the table this week, he would rather talk about a crew cut ("he's getting serious about Iran") than reckon with anything in the Epstein file. Which is where the Wrestling Observer Newsletter comes in, because Nick's actual plan for the day It All Ends is not to dance in the street. It's to check Reddit — the pro wrestling parody board r/SCJerk, where the running gag is that every famous person who dies "was a longtime subscriber to the Wrestling Observer Newsletter," a loving send-up of wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer's habit of shoehorning that detail into his obituaries. Shinzo Abe was a longtime subscriber. Every dead celebrity is, whether or not they could have plausibly known the newsletter existed. With Trump, of course, it would actually be believable — the man hosted WrestleManias and put Linda McMahon in the Cabinet. Nick's plan for the aftermath is to be conspicuously, obnoxiously circumspect: no celebrating, just a slow drip of passive-aggressive midwestern grace aimed directly at grieving MAGA, reposting every gloating tweet with a wounded "we have to do better, our fellow Americans are hurting right now." A bit laid on so thick that anyone who gets it knows it's a bit, and no one else can prove a thing. Despair numbers: Craig comes in measured, Nick a little higher, and the number is mostly an on-ramp to the thing that eats the rest of the episode — Tucker Carlson. Because Carlson has a manifesto, and it is a lot. In June he broke publicly with the Republican Party; he can't stomach a war with Iran waged, as he sees it, at Israel's behest, and he's taken to calling the two parties a uniparty state posing as a democracy. Then, in the first week of August, he laid out ten things America should be in a ninety-minute livestream — careful to insist it was not a party launch (no paperwork, no fundraising, technically true) and to frame the ten points as merely the goals of whatever comes next. Nick reads them to Craig one at a time, single words with Carlson's own explanations attached, and asks Craig to supply the historical analysis. What follows is Craig getting progressively, genuinely angrier as the list unspools. The ten: fair (equal laws, no special treatment for the Epstein class — which Craig clocks as the old fascist law-and-order appeal, the rule of law where they make the rules). Sovereign (freedom from foreign influence, "specifically nations like Israel," plus a swipe at banks and debt — which Craig names flatly as antisemitism, the claim that America is secretly controlled by an international conspiracy). Productive (an economy of tangible goods and American farmland over finance and surveillance — Craig hears the blood-and-soil fantasy, the productive native people versus the parasitic financial class, and calls it what it echoes: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the old-time religion of fascism). Beautiful (classical architecture, clean streets, an aggressive rejection of brutalism — a dog whistle stacked on a broken-windows racism about "unsafe" cities). Healthy (physical vigor, non-toxic food, and "absolute sobriety" — which sends Craig into the early-twentieth-century fitness-and-manliness movements that seeded a lot of right-wing organizing, plus a generational shot at the SSRI-and-Xanax crowd). Nick notes, for the record, that his own end-game plan involves becoming pleasantly addicted to benzodiazepines, and these people are now threatening even that. It keeps going. Honest (dismantle the classification system — a bone tossed to the 9/11 and UFO and birther truthers, and, as Craig notes, "anti-corruption is the socialism of fools"). Optimistic (pro-natalism, children at the center of the culture — which Craig hears as straightforwardly eugenic, a new race for a new age, and anti-woman to its core). Wise (education in "immutable truths" and "unchanging human nature" — potentially a viable anti-AI message, which is the dangerous part, bolted to an anti-trans traditionalism that points straight back at what the Nazis destroyed in Weimar Germany, then the best place in the world to be queer). Decent (wars of self-defense only — a direct echo of the original, pro-Nazi America First isolationists). And united (halt mass immigration, English-only, "a common national identity" — which Craig identifies as about as close to the fourteen words as Carlson can get without saying them). And that's the trap. Most of it, on the surface, sounds good. Nick admits it plainly: if John Ossoff had released this list, he'd be running through a wall. Fair, honest, wise, healthy — who's against those? That's the whole design. As Craig puts it, this is Carlson triangulating, red-brown politics — leftist-sounding talking points laid right alongside actual Nazi-platform material, everybody gets a fair deal and a healthy life and a beautiful city, and then, quietly, at the end: but not everybody. Only the ones who belong. They get through all ten and the analysis is just beginning — the usury "third rail" wink to the antisemites, the Building 7 slip, the "genetic heritage" tell under optimism — when they hit two hours and agree this is too big and too serious to rush. So they're holding the rest for next week: the mechanism underneath the manifesto, the coalition assembling around it, and where this particular fusion dish has been simmering since a certain episode about a potato. To be continued. Connect with us today! Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.

We open, as always, by taking our own temperature. Dr. Craig lands on a five and immediately gets talked up to a six, because he started rubbing his eyes thirty seconds in and Nick knows a bamboozle when he sees one. What's eating Craig isn't even a single event — it's the seesaw of fake ceasefires and fake treaties around Iran, and more than that, the way the American and British press keep credulously reporting each new claim as if the last one hadn't just collapsed. He calls it about the clearest example of captured media he's ever watched. Nick comes in at a seven, up from six, because this particular morning delivered a new low: Todd Blanche was confirmed as Attorney General. And the Blanche story is the perfect cold open for this episode, because it's a small, funny, infuriating preview of the show's whole theme — paperwork used to launder intent. Remember the $1.776 billion slush fund Trump was building to reward January 6th defendants? A few weeks back the administration threw everyone a bone and said they'd stop pursuing it until Blanche was confirmed. We all took the win, because we're desperate for anything shaped like one. Turns out they didn't drop it — we just wanted to believe they had. Two Republicans who'd recently lost their primaries, John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, held out on Blanche over exactly this. And the resolution is almost too on-the-nose: on Sunday they worked out a deal where Blanche pinky-promises, in ink, on hard stock paper — no PDF signature for old Todd Blanche — that he won't pursue the fund. It isn't legally binding. Trump didn't sign it. It's a prop. Now those two senators have a piece of paper to wave on their next TV hit so they can say they tried. A signature on a meaningless document, mistaken for a safeguard. Hold that image, because the whole episode is about it. From there we head home to Wisconsin, where things are about to get funky. Francesca Hong, a Madison state representative and committed Democratic Socialist, is on the verge of becoming the Democratic nominee for governor. Nick voted for her by absentee — honestly, as a protest vote, expecting her to pull maybe thirty percent and drag the eventual winner leftward. Instead every candidate with any juice has dropped out. Mandela Barnes, the strongest contender, folded last week. She was polling at 44 percent before he left. The primary's August 11th, so nothing's final, and her likely opponent, congressman Tom Tiffany, is running commercials that basically accuse her of witchcraft. It's the AOC question made local: what happens when the socialist isn't a spoiler anymore, but the frontrunner. The Hong surge also gives Craig a chance to draw a distinction he cares about — the difference between the democratic-socialist left doing the slow, unglamorous work of actually winning elections, and the online left that mostly performs politics for an audience. Which is how we get to Hasan Piker, and Craig is not a fan. He lays out why the biggest streamer on the left leaves him cold — the gap between the size of the platform and what it's actually building, the reach without the organizing, the influence that stays influence and never turns into power the way a Hong campaign is trying to. It's an honest bit of intra-left friction, delivered by the guy on the show most entitled to make the call. Then we close on the most ambitious single segment we've done: sluggish schizophrenia. In the 1960s, the most powerful psychiatrist in the Soviet Union, Andrei Snezhnevsky, invented a mental illness — because the KGB asked him to, and you didn't tell the KGB no. The genius of it was that you didn't need any symptoms to be diagnosed. Snezhnevsky defined the disease as slowly progressive, so the symptoms would simply show up later. And the symptoms he did name were things like an exceptional interest in philosophy, religion, and art; a struggle for the truth; and something he called reform delusion — the desire to improve the world. In a perfect society, wanting things to be better was, by definition, a sign you were sick. There was no sane reason to oppose the best country on earth, so opposition itself became the diagnosis. Thousands of dissidents were moved not to prisons but to psychiatric hospitals, to be cured, for an indeterminate length of time, of their need for justice. We tell it through the people it happened to. Natalia Gorbanevskaya, a poet, was one of a handful who demonstrated in Red Square in 1968 against the invasion of Czechoslovakia — one of the bravest public acts of the era. She was a new mother; she brought her infant son to the protest in his pram. Precisely because she was a new mother, the state didn't want the ugliness of a prison sentence, so it had her declared of unsound mind instead. And here's the line that says everything: they let her finish breastfeeding and weaning her baby before they committed her. Don't ever say the Soviet Union was a cruel place. Vladimir Bukovsky, the dissident who smuggled 150 pages documenting all of this out of the country and is the reason the West found out, was personally diagnosed by Snezhnevsky and spent years in and out of hospitals and camps. The whistleblower gets no better treatment than the poet. Then Nick asks Craig the question the whole segment is built toward — could it happen here? — and Craig gives the best answer of the episode. He complicates it honestly: the US is more porous, harder to seal into a closed information loop, with a longer tradition of certain free-speech protections. But then the pivot. In the 1960s, the United States did run an oppressive psychiatric apparatus — aimed not at political dissidents but at gender dissidents. Women were institutionalized wildly disproportionately, lobotomized, given shock therapy. And the American version of sluggish schizophrenia, Craig argues, won't be a political diagnosis at all. It'll be the re-medicalizing of queerness and transness — reclassifying identities as disorders, which is what they were classified as for most of the twentieth century, and which the right is now openly pushing to reverse. It's a way to remove people from public life that looks like compassion instead of imprisonment. Which raises the question: who decides what counts as a disorder? There's a book, the DSM, and the crucial thing about it is that it isn't handed down from on high. It's written, argued over, and voted on by committees of people with their own prejudices and agendas. Homosexuality was in it as a diagnosable illness until a committee voted to start removing it in the early 1970s — and it wasn't fully gone until 1987. The line between who a person is and what's wrong with them is drawn by whoever holds the pen. And right now there are people reaching for that pen: a psychiatrist named Carole Lieberman, building a mild-moderate-severe classification for Trump Derangement Syndrome and walking it toward the APA, reportedly with interest from RFK Jr. at Health and Human Services. It sounds like a joke. The broadcasters pushing it say so themselves — "we joke about it, but it's actually really scientific" — right before musing about filling empty shopping malls with the woke-mind-virus infected, "instead of insane asylums," and agreeing they "need to be in some sort of a hospital." Diagnosis to institutionalization in two sentences, out loud, in 2026. The reasons you give for opposing Trump don't count; the disagreement itself is the symptom. Which is Snezhnevsky, word for word. We call it autocratic despair. Connect with us today! Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.

This week is about a question neither of us expected to spend an episode on: what do you actually do when you find yourself sharing a room with someone who's helping build the thing you're terrified of? Not online. Not in the abstract. In your coffee shop. At your gym. Three feet away, ordering a drink. The despair numbers set the tone — Craig's mellow, a four, which on his logarithmic scale is still plenty bad but for him counts as "stay the course." I came in higher, and hauling a genuine moral conundrum behind me. Here's mine. My gym is my sanctuary. I found it after fleeing a Planet Fitness with a lifted truck out front flying PRO ICE flags and, for a while, a sticker of Biden bound and gagged on the tailgate. The new place is expensive and was nearly empty when I joined, so I did what I do — I learned everyone's first name. I became, unofficially, the mayor of the gym. It got me through last winter without the seasonal depression that usually flattens me. It's where my dad got his health back. It's the best version of me. And a few weeks ago Mike Gallagher walked in. If you're not from Wisconsin: Gallagher was our congressman. Green Bay guy, actually from here, like me. Marine, intelligence officer, Georgetown PhD, chaired the big China committee. And on paper one of the reasonable ones — one of three Republicans who voted against impeaching Mayorkas, held up his own resignation to vote for aid to Ukraine, left Congress rather than become a MAGA bomb-thrower. So why did my stomach drop? Because of what he did next: he became the Head of Defense at Palantir, and he's still there. Palantir — the data company woven through ICE, the firm behind ImmigrationOS, the system that fuses your tax records, Social Security data, DMV files, passport, and license-plate history into one profile and runs the pipeline its own documents describe as "identification to removal." Peter Thiel's company. JD Vance's sugar daddy's company. Gallagher isn't some engineer who wandered in; his whole value is the revolving door — China-committee chairman one year, selling the government surveillance software the next. He is the human shape of the revolving door, and he's smart enough to know exactly what he built. So I did something. I stopped what I was doing, looked at him until he looked back, and asked, "How's Palantir?" He asked if I was skeptical about Palantir. I said, "Just you, Mike. Just you." And then, reaching for something like grace, "I'm sure you did your best." And I have to be honest with you, because that's the deal on this show: it felt good. Not rage — disappointment, that a guy from my exact corner of the world looked at the whole machine and took a job pointing it at people. I needed him to know I see him clearly, and I did it in three words, and it felt good, and I'm a little ashamed of how good it felt. Which leaves me with a real problem, because he's a member, not a day-pass guy, so I'll see him again and again in the one place I go to not feel like this. And my brain keeps offering me a flattering story: I'm magnetic when I want to be, I'm the mayor, I get along with MAGA guys all the time — so maybe the noble move is to befriend Mike, and be the friendly voice in his ear if he's ever back in a position to do harm. But the story springs a leak. The MAGA guys I befriend mostly got sold something; Gallagher has the whole picture and chose it anyway. So does the grace I extend to the confused guy even apply to a man who isn't confused? And worse — 98% of my gym has no idea who he is. If the mayor is seen being chummy with Mike, I'm not influencing Mike. I'm telling the whole room Mike's a good dude. I'd be laundering him. For free. Which is the exact move I spent a whole episode nailing Hunter Biden for. Then Craig told me his version of the same story, and it's the heart of the episode. He walked into his regular coffee shop and stopped like a Looney Tunes character skidding on a rug, because sitting in the window was Curtis Yarvin. For the uninitiated, Yarvin is arguably the intellectual father of today's alt-right — the blogger formerly known as Mencius Moldbug, who spent the 2010s arguing that democracy is a mistake and the country should be run like a corporation by a CEO-king. He's the man who introduced JD Vance to Peter Thiel. He gets clean write-ups in the New York Times. He is, in Craig's estimation, the closest thing this intellectual circle has to an out-and-out fascist. And there he was, reading a book, three feet away. So Craig faced my exact question in his own sanctuary, and what he did is the thing I keep turning over. He didn't ignore it, and he didn't make a scene. He said his piece — the icy, dignified version — and then he asked the barista, a young Latino worker, whether he knew who that was. The worker didn't. Craig told him. And the worker's response is the whole show: "You're telling me that guy's a racist? He never talks to me. He just says what he wants and leaves." There it is. The philosopher-king of the new right, the man with the whole civilizational theory about hierarchy and human worth — and he can't be bothered to be a person to the kid making his coffee. Craig's parting shot, which might be the truest thing said all episode: I'd have liked to ask what kind of tipper Curtis Yarvin is. I assume a bad one. Two men, two sanctuaries, two fascists sharing the space, two small doses of social friction — and the same ache afterward, because neither of us knows if it did a thing. And that turns out to be the actual subject: we have mechanisms to hold elected officials accountable. We can vote them out, protest them, show up at the town hall. We have no mechanism at all for the private citizens who build the machinery of unfreedom — the Palantir executive, the CEO-king blogger. You cannot vote out the Head of Defense at Palantir. Nobody can. So the cold look, the "just you, Mike," the question about the tip — that social friction may be the only lever an ordinary person has left. Which raises the question Craig and I couldn't answer: is that a legitimate form of accountability, or is it just a tantrum? And the scariest one, the one I sat with: the "measured, reasonable, stay-in-the-room, signal-your-limits" posture I keep reaching for is Gallagher's own theory of himself. It's the exact story he tells about staying inside the machine. So is my instinct wisdom, or am I just trying on the collaborator's comfort so I can feel principled and go back to being everybody's friend? We don't resolve it. It's an honest conundrum, and the honest ending is that there's no clean room anywhere — no place this stuff doesn't eventually walk into, scan its membership card, and get on the machine next to you. We close, as always, with Dr. Craig Is Fun at Parties, and this week the wholesome object is Homer's Odyssey — which Craig unspools into a story about a man punished, across ten years and an ocean, for the weird and arguably bad things he did, a hero who cannot outrun his own record no matter how far he sails. Which, sitting next to everything else this week, lands differently than it used to. Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism — the commedia for your particular brand of tragedy. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism. Connect with us today! Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.

This week's episode opens with an unusual reading on the despair scale: Dr. Craig is mellow, down to four, buoyed — improbably — by the conclusion of the World Cup & whatever fleeting sense of global togetherness a tournament can still produce. Nick walked into his office at a solid eight & then something pulled him down to a five. Not good news. Just something so perfect, so stupid, so pure that it functioned as medicine. Steve Scalise went on CNBC in the morning — full suit, two flags behind him, entirely put together — to sell the SAVE Act's voter ID provision. And he looked into the camera and said, "For God's sakes, you can't get pasta at the Olive Garden without a picture ID." What follows is the show at its best: a genuinely delighted deconstruction of why that sentence exists. The striking thing isn't that Scalise said something dumb. It's that after all these years, the movement pushing mandatory voter ID has never developed a decent analogy for it. There's no go-to line, no talking point they all reach for. They just let people improv, and the improv has become a competition — each guy taking the same setup and trying to top the last guy with a dumber comparison. Nick's diagnosis: it's their version of The Aristocrats. Same premise every time, and the whole game is how grotesque you can make the ending. It doubles as an object lesson in how bad the sales pitch for this stuff actually is. Then the episode's main event, structured as a deliberate act of inoculation. Before the takes roll in, Nick hands the audience a lens. Hunter Biden and Nick Fuentes sat down together in a Philadelphia hotel room for a filmed interview brokered by Andrew Callaghan of Channel 5. It airs at the end of the month. And the only thing anybody's reporting is the tease: they nearly came to blows, and Callaghan had to physically get between them. That's the story hitting every aggregator, TMZ-style, and it is — Nick argues — precisely the wrong thing to be looking at. So the segment draws all three men correctly. Hunter as the ne'er-do-well son who's spent a decade as the media's punching bag and is now, unmistakably, monetizing his own notoriety — back on Twitter after ten years, on Gavin Newsom's podcast, shilling crypto, cultivating a f**k-up's credibility that gets a charming man chance after chance. Callaghan as the All Gas No Brakes gonzo star whose career detonated in 2023 over multiple sexual misconduct allegations, and who has rebranded as a Serious Interviewer whose comeback pitch is that the mainstream media wants us divided and he'll talk to anyone — which makes rehabilitating America's leading Nazi his return vehicle. And Dr. Craig draws Fuentes, which is a service to anyone who's only seen him described as a "far-right podcaster." Craig's version: the most successful openly fascist influencer in the United States, period. A hyper-conservative Catholic, a racist, a misogynist, an apologist for slavery, running a show designed to look like a late-night program while what he's actually doing is talking to your son about fascism. Craig's advice is unambiguous and repeated: never, ever talk to this man. He's genuinely skilled at making any conversation his own, and you will not get one over on him. Fuentes isn't talking to liberals. He's talking to young men already inside the right-wing world, and his problem is that Trump is the ceiling — the respectable, president-shaped container for all their anger, and as far as most of them are willing to go. So the move is to discredit the ceiling. Convince a disillusioned kid that Trump was soft, captured, a traitor to the real believers, and that kid's disappointment doesn't send him leftward. It sends him hunting for something more hardcore — and Fuentes has spent a year positioning himself as the only guy who told the truth. It's a permission structure: handholds that make an unthinkable position feel like common sense, one deniable step at a time. Craig extends it with the part that makes it work — the 18-to-25 cohort whose entire political consciousness has been Trump, watching the problems get worse, who can conclude either that Trump was stymied by a shadowy conspiracy or that Trump betrayed them. Both roads lead to Fuentes. He gets them coming and going. Which brings the segment back to the hotel room and the actual transaction. Fuentes is radioactive, and a permission structure only works if the man running it looks legitimate — so he needs proximity to normalcy, and the most normalcy-conferring object you could seat across from him is a president's son. Remember: Fuentes reached out. He went shopping for legitimacy and Channel 5 sold it to him. Hunter's buying edgy relevance; Callaghan's buying his way back into the game. And the near-fistfight is the wrapper that gets the whole thing into your feed. The proof is in the marketing: Channel 5's own spokesperson promised audiences will be "shocked" by Fuentes's "evolving and changing views," and more shocked still by where the three find common ground. That's not a press release. That's a trailer for a redemption arc, running before a single frame has aired. Then Dr. Craig Is Fun at Parties, where the object this week is the wave — the thing you do at a ballgame — and Craig delivers a twofer. First, the wave as mass spectacle: the Nazis' obsession with enormous stadiums, with Nuremberg, with Riefenstahl and Triumph of the Will, with art that can only be experienced as a mass action where you are one interchangeable part of something huge. Second, and better: the German film Die Welle — The Wave — in which a punk-rock history teacher, stuck teaching autocracy instead of the anarchy unit he wanted, lets his bored students experience a movement instead of reading about one. It starts with standing when he enters. Then a salute. The kids invent a gesture that looks like a wave. And what begins as belonging — structure for the struggling, a place for the bullied — ends the way these things end. It's a story about how ordinary people, through completely ordinary daily life, find themselves inside a fascist movement. The episode closes on the piece of paper you were never meant to notice. NSPM-7 — National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 — has one of those dead bureaucratic names engineered to make your eyes slide off it, and it is currently the most important document in the country. Nick builds it from scratch: a presidential memorandum skips Congress entirely. No debate, no vote, no friction. One man, one signature, at a desk. That's the container. And what Trump put in it, on September 25th, 2025, is a directive that takes the entire counterterrorism apparatus built after 9/11 to point outward at foreign enemies — and turns it around to face Americans. The indicators it lists for identifying a potential domestic terrorist include anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, anti-Americanism, and hostility to "traditional views on family, religion, and morality." Those aren't crimes. Those are opinions. Stephen Miller said the goal out loud: disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, prosecute. And the legal center of it is hollow — there is no law permitting a president to designate Americans as domestic terrorists, because Congress deliberately never created one. They're using a power that doesn't exist. If you've been listening, you've already met this memo without knowing its name: Prairieland, where a noise demonstration produced fifty-year sentences and thirty years for a man who wasn't there; Minnesota, where the indictment's evidence included a sweatshirt, a bullhorn, and a devil emoji. Craig places it in his own scholarly wheelhouse — the Southern Cone dictatorships of the 1960s and 70s, which built exactly this framework to create a social category called subversive. Marxists, but also students. Feminists, but also women who wanted contraceptive pills. Gay people, but also people who wanted divorce law. And the crucial thing about regimes that do this: they aren't breaking the law. They've changed it. Then the escalation. Over one week in July, Rubio convened sixty-five nations for the "Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism," unveiled a new designation — Far-Left Terrorism — and announced a visa policy targeting "economic sabotage including against public and private property," language broad enough to cover a broken window or a boycott. Watch the ladder: at Prairieland they needed a gunshot. In Minnesota, a blockade. Now, official State Department policy reaches choosing not to buy something. The pretext keeps getting cheaper. Four days later came a hundred-page State Department report naming forty-three living Americans — mayors, a sitting congresswoman, the host of Democracy Now, the Ben of Ben & Jerry's — and tying them to Cuban influence. And the whole tower rests on the murder of Charlie Kirk as proof of an organized left-wing terror network. In a Utah courtroom this month, that theory collapsed: no cell, no network, no foreign nexus. One young man, acting alone. A man was murdered, and that matters — but Charlie Kirk wasn't assassinated by a transnational conspiracy financed by an ice cream magnate, and forty-three Americans are on a government list because of it. There are no armed leftist movements seeking state power. There are, however, armed right-wing movements all over the planet — and in this country, they're allied with the state. Connect with us today! Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.

Dr. Craig is out this week. Turkish hair surgery. Sitting in for him is Jared Yates Sexton, and he's been staring into this particular abyss a lot longer than I have. On June 14th, 2016, Jared was a creative writing professor who went to a Trump rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, and started live-tweeting what he saw. Not the speech — the room. The people. What was actually happening in there. It went off like a bomb and it ended his old life. He walked in a fiction writer and walked out a political correspondent, because he saw the man for what he was back when the rest of us still saw a buffoonish reality TV grifter running for president to juice his own brand. He's the author of The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Making, about how this country builds its boys and what it costs them. American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World But Failed Its People, about the myths we tell ourselves and who those myths were built to serve. And The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis, which traces a straight line from the Great Fire of Rome to QAnon and which — reading it now — predicted damn near everything that's happened since. He co-hosts the Muckrake Podcast and writes a Substack called Dispatches From A Collapsing State, which tells you everything you need to know about where his head's at. On my personal S-tier of autocracy-knowers, he's on it. He might be at the top of it. We start somewhere I didn't plan for: two guys comparing notes on the jobs that were killing them. Jared explains why he left academia — "you can't keep doing the shit that hurts you" — and I explain why I started this show, which is that my entire goal is to replace "Trump Derangement Syndrome" with "autocratic despair" and everything else is secondary. He says it's accurate. We get into how Dr. Craig got f****d by academic publishing, why a book about keeping your son out of fascism should not be printed in twelve-point type with citations, and why a podcast with no commercials has a pace a podcast with commercials can never have. He hears we started a beef with The Bulwark last week and responds with three words I'm going to have printed on a shirt. Then the number. Jared rates his autocratic despair an eight and a three, simultaneously — the first guest to break the format — and explains why: he thinks the destabilization we're heading into is the same thing that opens the window for actual change. We get into the rumor that Trump is about to declare Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock illegitimate senators, why that's a genuinely bad signal about whether we'll have free and fair midterms, and why picking that particular fight is a mistake that only makes both men more famous. And we land on the greatest gift these people give us: they cannot shut up. They telegraph everything they're going to do and count on nobody paying attention. We talk about Graham Platner and the damage done to the gruff leftist sweetheart community — a title Jared claims for himself about four seconds after I say it, and then uses forty minutes later to take apart JD Vance. He explains who actually recruited Platner, why they went looking for what he calls a noble savage, and why they never bothered to vet him, because vetting was never the point. That opens into a real education on deeper politics: what happens when a regular person tries to run for Congress, why the local party in a deep red district would rather lose by forty points than let an outsider try something new, and why Jared walked away from his own 2016 run the moment he saw how the machine actually works. I pitch him my platform — insider trading, announced in real time on a billboard network — and he's more generous about it than it deserves. We cover his enduring legacy as a meme: the 2017 Don Jr. tweet, what it's like to be tagged in the same joke every single day of your life for a decade, and the genuinely unsettling business of getting slotted into other people's conspiracy theories. The CIA-asset years. The double-agent schemes. The people who showed up at his house and had to be handled by police. Then the part I've wanted for a long time. Jared grew up as what he calls the prototype of what became Christian nationalism. He describes his grandmother's house — a crucifix in every room — and a literal, furnished Satan. Not a metaphor. An entity that could appear as a human being, and you were expected to grab that cross off the wall and be ready. He explains what it does to a person to be raised on nothing but the Book of Revelation, why constant spiritual warfare trains you to reach for a strongman, and how the divine agent framework — Cyrus, King David — lets a believer look at a man's sins and see proof instead of disqualification. And I finally get my answer to the thing that's bugged me for years: how do people with such a well-articulated vision of the Antichrist look right at Donald Trump and whiff? He also admits the programming never fully clears. There's a part of his brain that noticed the head wound. He tells me what this work has taken from him, and it's the most honest answer anyone has given on this show: that it has probably shortened his life. Four books in six years, because he believed if he just articulated it correctly, enough people would hear. And he explains where his pattern recognition actually comes from, which is not graduate school — it's an abusive house, and learning to read danger in the sound of a door opening. We do JD Vance, his personal rival since before either of them mattered, the bizarro to his Superman, a butcher boy who betrayed everyone he ever knew to climb. Jared explains exactly why MSNBC welcomed him into its bosom, why the hick whisperer was such a comfortable story for liberal media, and why the theory that Vance can't win is a cope. We get his thoughts on James Talarico, and they are not warm. We do my favorite question — favorite B or C tier MAGA celebrity — and his answer is inspired and involves aliens. He explains why that ecosystem isn't benign at all, and how watching its most unhinged corners gives you an eighteen-month preview of Fox News. He tells me how he'd handle a Jubilee, and it's a masterclass: don't argue the content, find the emotion underneath it, ask them to tell you more about the reptilians. I ask him whether I should own a gun, having never wanted one, and he gives an answer more careful and more human than I was ready for. Then I ask if there's a moment coming when he'd change that answer — and he gives what might be the best thing anyone has said on this program, a reframe built out of the same instinct that taught him not to make dad angry. We finish on Prairieland, on the organizing work he's doing right now, on the book proposal he's tinkering with, on why he runs every day and hates it, and on what he's looking forward to: the World Cup final, the British Open, a quiet room with a book, and his honest belief that if we win this thing, what's waiting on the other side is a better life for everybody. Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast that stares directly at fascism and, against all odds, stays fun — the commedia for your particular brand of tragedy. Connect with us today! Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.