Skip to content
Sign in
Artwork for Autocratic Despair: The Podcast
ComedyNewsPoliticsEducationSelf-Improvement

Autocratic Despair: The Podcast

Nick Mortensen & Dr. Craig Johnson

Stare into the abyss of the United States' descent into Authoritarianism with a truly funny comedian from Green Bay, WI and a very serious PHD in Global Fascism Studies from Cal-Berkeley.


Very Funny. Very Serious.

Play
Open in
  • 23 episodes
  • weekly
  • Avg 43 min
  • English

Episodes 23

NewestOldestLongest
All20Unplayed20In progress0Played0
Counted on this page — what you have heard stays on this device, so it is not something the list can be paged by.
  • S2 · E18
    September 2 · 45 min

    Laura Loomer is Trump's Rasputin

    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.

    • Transcript
  • S2 · E17
    August 26 · 34 min

    Germany's AfD: A Glimpse Into Our Future

    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.

    • Transcript
  • S2 · E16
    August 20 · 1 hr 2 min

    Tucker Carlson is not Kidding

    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.

    • Transcript
  • S2 · E15
    August 13 · 35 min

    Trump's Hair Was a Longtime Subscriber to the Wrestling Observer Newsletter

    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.

    • Transcript
  • S2 · E14
    August 6 · 44 min

    Sluggish Schizophrenia = Trump Derangement Syndrome?

    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.

    • Transcript
  • S2 · E13
    July 30 · 43 min

    Curtis Yarvin & Mike Gallagher Run Into Dr. Craig & Nick

    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.

    • Transcript
  • S2 · E12
    July 23 · 47 min

    Hunter Biden & Nick Fuentes Walk Into a Hotel Room

    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 fuck-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.

    • Transcript
  • S2 · E11
    July 16 · 48 min

    Gruff Leftist Sweetheart Jared Yates Sexton

    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 fucked 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.

    • Transcript
  • S2 · E10
    July 10 · 44 min

    Beefin' With The Bulwark

    This week on Autocratic Despair, the comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism, Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig run a leaner three-segment episode — and it opens on the hardest one, because it's the one that hurt. Graham Platner. If you'd tuned out: Platner was the Marine combat veteran and Maine oyster farmer who came from nowhere on a viral launch video, ran as an unapologetic populist on Medicare for all and a real social safety net, and won the Maine Democratic Senate primary with more votes than any Democrat in the state's history. He was going to be the one who unseated Susan Collins. He was the progressive insurgent's great hope. And this show never trusted it — Nick had been saying so since episode one, pointing at the Nazi tattoo Platner got covered up instead of removed, the earlier allegation his supporters found easy to wave away, the pattern of people repeatedly deciding to give him one more pass. This week the pass ran out. Politico published an on-the-record account from a former girlfriend, Jenny Racicot, alleging that Platner forced himself on her in 2021 over her repeated objections — corroborated, Politico reported, by a later partner, friends, and her own correspondence with a therapist. The Democratic Party's response was near-total and immediate: Schumer, Gillibrand, Warren, the DSCC, and even Ro Khanna — who had stood by Platner through everything else — called for him to go. As of this recording, Platner denies the allegation and has not dropped out. Nick and Craig handle it the way the show insists on handling this material: the accuser is the wronged party, full stop, no litigating her, no qualifying the credibility of a woman who came forward at real personal cost. False allegations of this kind are vanishingly rare, and Craig names the reflex to treat this one as the exception for exactly what it is — the disease, not the diagnosis. He also points out how many women it took, over how long, and how the apologies only arrived now. But the heart of the segment isn't the news. It's a feeling Nick can't shake and doesn't try to hide: this should feel like vindication, and it doesn't. He called this from the beginning. He spent months asking Platner's supporters to name the line the man would have to cross, and watching them refuse to name one. So the "told you so" was right there — and it curdled the instant he reached for it. Because Nick didn't want to be right. He wanted Platner to prove him wrong, to be living proof that a person with an ugly past can change, because if that guy could, the door was open for a lot of people with non-sparkling histories to have a place in the movement. Instead Platner did the one thing that slams that door on everyone behind him. In the episode's most naked moment, Nick admits it: he gave Talarico his heart, and Talarico hurt him a little. He never gave Platner his heart — and Platner may have hurt him worse, because he didn't know the man had the capacity to reach him at all. Craig widens the lens with history, as he does. He connects Platner to the figure of the caudillo — the Latin American strongman archetype embodied by 19th-century Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, a fabulously wealthy landowner who cultivated the image of a knife-fighting, rough-and-tumble everyman. The point that lands hardest: the violence in that persona isn't a flaw in it. It's a feature of it. The authentic-brawler, anti-establishment outsider who's secretly a rich man and secretly cruel is a recognizable type, and Platner was running the American version of it — the veteran, the oysterman, the mustache, the focus-grouped LL Bean of it all. Craig also does the necessary corrective work, refusing to let the discussion blame the popular policies for the flawed men attached to them: single-payer health care and a real safety net are wildly popular and successful everywhere they're tried. The tragedy is that the left keeps attaching those ideas to fragile individual personalities instead of to a durable party — and some of those personalities turn out to be monsters. From there the episode turns to Nick's beef with The Bulwark. The Bulwark, for the uninitiated, is the well-capitalized media outfit built by former Republicans — the Never-Trumpers who carved out their own lane in the resistance and pull a genuinely large audience. Nick hate-listens, and mostly, uncomfortably, agrees with them. But last week they had David French on — the respected lawyer and New York Times columnist — and, asked in passing about Prairieland, French framed it in the exact opposite way this show has: a violent ambush, a jury verdict to be trusted, no sympathy absent compelling evidence of a miscarriage of justice. Nick's problem isn't that French is stupid; it's that for a million listeners, many hearing about Prairieland for the first time, a trusted voice just filed the whole thing under "lock them up and throw away the key" — without doing any of the homework. Craig supplies the frame: this is what a collaborator does, not someone in the party but someone laying the groundwork, counseling deference to institutions precisely as those institutions are being hollowed out. He reaches for the board game Secret Hitler — where the fascists win because the well-meaning majority keeps handing the government a little more power to root out an enemy — as a way to feel, rather than just understand, how it happens. And Nick, half-joking and fully sincere, declares a beef. The Bulwark is bigger than this show. Beef is on anyway. The episode closes lighter, with Dr. Craig Is Fun at Parties, where Nick hands Craig the wholesome object and Craig finds the darkness in it. This week: Voltron — which sends Craig into Mobile Suit Gundam, one of the first anime to make it out of Japan, a giant-robot saga that turns out to be, more or less, explicitly about fighting Nazis, complete with characters name-checking Adolf Hitler. The lesson, delivered with a grin: go back to the cartoons you loved as a kid. There's always some business in there you didn't notice the first time. It's a comedy podcast that stares directly at fascism and, against all odds, stays fun — the commedia for your particular brand of tragedy. Nick is the audience proxy catching up in real time; Craig is the scholar who connects each week's horror to the long history of how democracies die. 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.

    • Transcript
  • S2 · E9
    July 2 · 45 min

    Been Living Off Wealth

    This week on Autocratic Despair, the comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism, Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig open on a rare thing in 2026: a piece of good news, delivered with a knife in it. The Supreme Court handed down its decision on birthright citizenship, and the ruling went the right way — the Fourteenth Amendment holds, and anyone born in the United States is still a citizen of the United States. But the vote was six to three, and only two of the conservative justices, Chief Justice Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett, joined it. Craig sets his despair number accordingly and lets the arithmetic speak: two people decided the country stays a democracy. That's the margin now. From there Craig does what the show exists for — he makes the thing legible. He walks through why birthright citizenship exists in the first place: it comes out of the Reconstruction amendments, written specifically so the country could never again say the children of enslaved people weren't citizens because their parents had been property. He tells the story of Wong Kim Ark, the man born to Chinese immigrants in San Francisco in 1873 who was denied re-entry to his own country, took it to the Supreme Court, and won — settling the question for well over a century, until this administration decided to reopen it. And he defines the vocabulary the fight travels under: the slur "anchor baby," and the European import "remigration," a word engineered to let people advocate mass expulsion by ethnicity without ever having to say the ugly words underneath it. Nick and Craig land on the part nobody in power wants to sit with — that undocumented immigrants pay billions into a Social Security system they'll likely never draw from, and that the country's wealth has always leaned on labor that isn't free. Craig gives the academic name for it, unfree labor, and the discomfort of the term is the point. Then the anchor. Last week, as Nick and Craig were literally recording, the Prairieland sentences came down, and this week they do it properly — a full accounting for anyone who's never heard the case. The recap is built cold: July 4, 2025, a noise demonstration outside an ICE detention center in Alvarado, Texas, where protesters brought fireworks so the people locked inside would know somebody was out there thinking about them. It went sideways; a police lieutenant was shot and survived; one man, former Marine Benjamin Song, was convicted of firing. And then the government did the thing that turns a local crime story into a national emergency: it charged the whole group as terrorists, on the theory that everyone present was part of a "North Texas Antifa cell" — a cell it never actually proved existed. The jury acquitted everyone but Song of attempted murder, then convicted all of them of providing material support to terrorists, the terrorists being themselves. Nick reads the sentences the way you'd read a receipt, name by name, number by number, so the gap between the punishment and the conduct does the arguing. Benjamin Song, the only person convicted of hurting anyone, got a hundred years when the floor was twenty. Maricela Rueda got seventy. Autumn Hill, Zachary Evetts, Savanna Batten, Meagan Morris, and Elizabeth Soto each got fifty — for standing outside a jail with fireworks. And Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who wasn't even at the protest, got thirty years for moving a box of his wife's zines. Seven more defendants took plea deals and face up to fifteen years each, sentenced alongside Ines Soto; Nick reads their names too — Seth Sikes, Nathan Baumann, Susan Kent, Lynette Sharp, John Thomas among the cooperating pleas, with Joy Gibson and Rebecca Morgan noted as the two who refused to cooperate — because the show reads the names every week, and because rounding sixteen people down to a cleaner number is its own small erasure. Nick won't call them the Prairieland Nine. It was never nine. The thesis arrives in the judge's own words. Chief Judge Reed O'Connor said from the bench that he was handing down the maximum because the state wants to send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology — and Nick flags the wrinkle that O'Connor wasn't even the trial judge. Mark Pittman presided, then handed five defendants to O'Connor days before sentencing, without explanation, a procedural shuffle Nick expects to surface on appeal. Craig names what the case actually establishes in plain text: oppose the country's detention policy and spread information about it, and you can be charged with terrorism and put away for decades — and that tool won't be holstered when this administration ends. Nick and Craig also sit with the strange quiet around the defendants being trans, dead-named in official documents while the fact went otherwise unmentioned, and turn over why the people who usually seize on that chose not to. After the weight, the show breathes. Nick turns to the Freedom 250 national fair on the Mall and the low attendance he only half-managed not to gloat about, and uses it to make a sharper point than the schadenfreude allows: this event began in 2016 as America 250, a nonpartisan celebration with Bush and Obama as ceremonial chairs, and got absorbed into a Trump C-corp that functioned mostly as a vehicle to divert already-budgeted money and extort corporate sponsorships. The fair isn't a failure of competence, Nick argues — it's the corruption worn openly, on purpose, as a flex. That sets up a genuinely joyful deep dive into Forgiato Blow, the MAGA rapper born Kurt Jantz, prep-school kid and Auto Trader heir who named himself after luxury car rims, tattooed Richie Rich on his face, drives a Rolls-Royce with "Trump's Nephew" on the hood, and insists the "Blow" in his name stands for "Been Living Off Wealth" — a man who cosplays self-made while advertising the opposite. Craig gently asks whether Nick likes him a little because of a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God recognition, and Nick, son of an owner who came up around wealthier owners' sons, concedes the fraternity while insisting he's better than every one of them. The segment becomes a real meditation, via Craig, on why blatant corruption is itself an intimidation tactic: if they aren't hiding it, it means they aren't worried, and the message is what are you going to do about it. Trump told the country he could buy politicians because he'd bought them, and it worked. The episode closes on Dr. Craig Is Fun at Parties, where Craig takes on the strange new vocabulary of the internet — unalive, sewer slide, the euphemisms kids use because the platforms won't let them say the real words — and turns a linguistic tic into an argument about who controls the only public squares young people have left, and what it means that those squares are owned by men who showed up for the second inauguration. It's a comedy podcast that stares directly at fascism and, against all odds, stays fun — the commedia for your particular brand of tragedy. Nick is the audience proxy catching up in real time; Craig is the scholar who connects each week's horror to the long history of how democracies die. Together they make the unbearable survivable, one despair rating at a time. 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.

    • Transcript
  • S2 · E8
    June 25 · 43 min

    America. Do Something About It.

    This week on Autocratic Despair, the comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism, Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig open on the strangest sales pitch in the country: Dana White, the UFC boss, in a Chevrolet ad, informing America that the correct response to anyone who has a problem with us is "tough shit." Nick can't let it go — the way a manufactured kind of cruelty keeps getting sold back to us as national character, as the thing we're supposed to recognize as ourselves. It's the perfect on-ramp to a show about how an autocracy teaches a country to enjoy its own meanness. Then the despair numbers. Nick comes in at a 5, and he means it, because he spent the week genuinely happy. It's summer. There's a new puppy at the house. The World Cup is on, which means Messi, who at this stage of his career is doing things that make even a casual fan sit up and ask where he ranks — not just against Maradona, but against the best anyone has ever been at anything. Nick and Craig, the latter rating his despair a 6 on his logarithmic scale, chew on the only sports question that matters: how much better is the best person at a thing than everyone else is at theirs? It's the last fun either of them gets to have for a while, and that's the point. The number was a 5 until the news caught up with it. Because then there's the reflecting pool. Nick confesses, with the self-implication the show runs on, that he spent the week fully indulging in the spectacle of Trump's roughly $14 million Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool turning green in a day, the patriotic paint peeling off the bottom in strips, contractors dumping hydrogen peroxide in by the gallon. He laughed. He sent the pictures. And somewhere in the middle of it he caught himself: the man has concentration camps running, and we threw a party because he botched a pond. The pool did its job. It reflected. It just reflected the wrong direction, away from everything that mattered, and Nick fell for it like everyone else. What it reflected away from is Minnesota. In a segment that sits beside the show's running watch on detention and protest-criminalization, Nick and Craig walk through the indictment the pool helped bury: on June 16, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen announced charges against fifteen people, mostly members of a group called Direct Action Minnesota — DAMN — framed as antifa. Craig explains what antifa actually is, a political tendency rather than an organization, no roster, no season-ending awards banquet, and why the label is so useful precisely because it describes nothing. The tell is Rosen's own answer when a reporter asked whether any federal agent was actually hurt: whether anyone suffered bodily harm, he said, "is not the measure." All of this sits downstream of Operation Metro Surge, the winter immigration crackdown in which federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens — Renee Good, and Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse shot while filming on his phone — and not one agent has been charged. The people facing prison are the ones who drove neighbors home from midnight releases, rebuilt kicked-in doors, and brought groceries to families too afraid to be seen. And then the segment the whole episode is built around. As Nick and Craig were recording, the Prairieland sentences came down in Fort Worth, and they are staggering. Benjamin "Champagne" Song, the former Marine the government called the ringleader, was sentenced to 100 years for the attempted murder of an Alvarado police officer who survived — when the sentencing floor was 20. Maricela Rueda got 70. Autumn Hill, Zachary Evetts, Savanna Batten, Meagan Morris, and Elizabeth Soto each got 50, for rioting, providing material support to terrorists, and using explosives that the defense maintains were Fourth of July fireworks. Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada got 30 years for concealing a box of documents from a grand jury. A ninth defendant, Ines Soto, had her hearing pushed to the following week. Two Trump-appointed judges, Mark Pittman and Reed O'Connor, handed down sentences totaling nearly five centuries for a demonstration where the only person shot lived. Craig names the throughline plainly: this is a legal system announcing that any association with dissent against ICE — from firing a rifle down to moving a box of paperwork — can be tried as terrorism, while the people who actually tried to overthrow an election are walking free. The hosts cope the way the show always does, with gallows humor they openly admit is a coping mechanism, and then they stop, because some of it is not funny, and they say so out loud. That honesty is the engine of the thing. The episode ends where it always ends, with the names, because someone should read them. This is Autocratic Despair: a comedy podcast that stares straight at fascism and somehow stays fun, the commedia for your particular brand of tragedy. Nick is the audience proxy catching up in real time; Craig is the scholar of authoritarianism who connects each week's horror to the long history of how democracies die. Together they make the unbearable survivable, one despair rating at a time. 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.

    • Transcript
  • S2 · E7
    June 18 · 54 min

    Higher & Wider.

    Craig's back from the desert and stuck at a four — buoyed by the World Cup, dragged down by the "National State Fair" spectacle. Nick's at a seven, and it's one man's fault. We open on Elon Musk, who in a single week became the world's first trillionaire — SpaceX went public June 12th — and put his hand in a pogrom. We try to make "a trillion dollars" mean something (spoiler: if he gave each of his fourteen kids a million dollars a day, he could've started in 1830 and still be writing checks today), and then turn to Belfast, where Musk poured his megaphone onto anti-immigrant riots that burned families out of their homes — accounting, by one count, for more than half of all the views on posts about the violence. A Northern Ireland Assembly member called it a race-based pogrom. Musk blamed "social media," which is a hell of a thing to say when you own it. Craig walks through what "pogrom" actually means, the tangled politics of Irish nationalism in the north, and why a man identifying with the literal villain of a cartoon and then saying so out loud is its own kind of tell. Talarico Talk is week two of the heartbreak. Last week the Rizz Minister conceded ground on trans rights to a friendly podcast host; this week we look at what that concession actually bought him — nothing. The right got louder, not quieter; they called him a flip-flopper and a liar; and he never even explained himself. We zoom out to the coordinated, nine-figure machine running the exact same trap on vulnerable Democrats race by race, and then Nick and Craig pick up where they split last week: does watching the concession fail make it more forgivable, because he was trapped — or less, because he sold people out for nothing? Craig holds the line. Nick holds a looser grip. Neither pretends it's simple, and we land on the one thing that might win them back. Dr. Craig Is Fun at Parties: Multivitamins & Wellness. A deep one. Craig traces the through-line from 19th-century industrialization to modern nationalism to the body-purity politics underneath your supplement shelf — and explains why the fastest route to fascist content on your feed runs straight through fitness influencers. Plus: the safest gym influencers, and the long goodbye to a world where the Nazis at least had the decency to wear uniforms. Delaney Hall, Part Two. We pick the thread back up: the strike's now in its third week, dozens of women have joined — one of their demands is the firing of a guard accused of assaulting at least ten of them — and the people inside are being transferred out as punishment for striking. The state of New Jersey is suing GEO Group to get inspectors in the door; a sitting congresswoman called the conditions torture; and the Democratic governor suing the company is also the one who sent in the state police. Then the legal spine: GEO keeps getting taken to court over a dollar-a-day labor program, keeps losing, and just argued to the Supreme Court that being made to stand trial for forced labor was itself an injustice — and lost that too. Eighty-eight percent of the people they're putting to work have never been convicted of anything. Nick explains the commissary. He also explains how he knows what a commissary is. 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.

    • Transcript
  • S2 · E6
    June 11 · 53 min

    Oops! All Talarico Talk

    We had a whole episode planned. A Delaney Hall follow-up with court receipts. A cold open about a flesh-eating parasite crawling north through Texas. A thing about active clubs. And then, on Monday, James Talarico opened his mouth on a podcast — and broke our format in half. So this week is exactly what it says on the box. No filler. All Talarico. The way they used to do it before they ruined the cereal. The Number. Dr. Craig comes in at a 4.5 — and reminds us his scale is logarithmic, so that's worse than it sounds. The despair has a specific source this week, and by the end he's describing it as "a full-on nineteenth-century, God-is-dead sadness, deep in an existential hole where James Talarico used to be." We'll let that be the cold open. Talarico Talk (all of it). For weeks this has been the show's load-bearing bit: we delusionally, willfully, knowingly believe in James Talarico as a totem of a better future — a vessel we admitted we were setting up to fail. This week, he failed. Asked on Dan Cogdell's podcast about the "pro-surgery-for-minors" attack — a softball, a chance to plant a flag — Talarico instead said, "Just to correct you, I oppose gender reassignment surgeries for minors." No "but." No fight. Just concession. We get into why that one sentence landed like it did — against a record where this is the man who stood on the Texas House floor and called trans kids "perfect, beautiful, sacred," called this care "life-saving," and voted against the ban. This isn't a fuzzy record getting cleaned up. It's a man setting down a signature, theological conviction to make a campaign problem go away. Craig gets genuinely angry — which, if you know Craig, is news. We walk through what "gender reassignment surgery for minors" actually means (surgery is the rarest sliver of trans care for young people; most of it is social transition, and for some, puberty blockers — ordinary medicine), why the phrasing is a rhetorical trap designed to make you collapse all of it into one scary word, and why conceding the smallest, most-defenseless group is the oldest, most cynical move in the Democratic playbook. Nick takes a beat to address the men listening who don't want to think about this at all — and offers three questions that settle it from first principles. Craig brings the Gavin Newsom parallel, the consultant-class critique, and a Mr. Rogers history lesson about what courage-at-a-cost actually looks like. Where we land: trans Americans are about two and a half times more likely to be victims of violence than the rest of us. That's the number every other opinion has to answer to. Talarico is still, unequivocally, a thousand times better than Ken Paxton — Craig would hold his nose and vote for him — but the part where we got to believe without flinching? He took that himself, in one sentence, to a friendly room. The totem's got a crack in it. We're not going to paint over it, because painting over it is the whole disease. Dr. Craig Is Fun at Parties: Orange Soda. A palate cleanser, and a one-step connection most people don't see coming. How a wartime Coca-Cola executive in Nazi Germany, cut off from the syrup, invented the orange soda still in your fridge. Yes — that one. (Bring it up at a party. Watch the room.) 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.

    • Transcript
  • S2 · E5
    June 4 · 45 min

    The World Doesn't Stop...But it Should

    DR. Craig returns from the wilderness this week — literally. After a week in the desert painting rocks, running trails, and pointedly not looking at his phone, he comes back with a thesis: the internet is brain poison. Short-form content in particular, he argues, is engineered to dumb you down, and the only real antidote is long-form — books, podcasts, actual journalism, the kind of thing that lets you slow down and think. (He spent part of his detox trying to explain fascism in the voice of Cookie Monster, which he offers as evidence for the prosecution, not the defense.) The Autocratic Despair Numbers come in low-ish: Craig's at a 3, buoyed by the news that Trump's roughly $1.7 billion slush fund likely won't survive the Republican Congress — a sign, he argues, that the openly fascist wing of the coalition isn't yet powerful enough to scare the rest of the party into funding it. Nick's at a 5, for reasons that are less political than personal: the Mortensen family's fourteen-year-old dog is reaching the end, and the week has been spent living under that shadow. It's a frank, unguarded stretch of tape about grief, the strangeness of the world refusing to stop when your heart is breaking, and how a baseline of authoritarian dread makes ordinary loss harder to carry. That last thread becomes the episode's connective tissue. Nick walks through the research on cortisol — the stress hormone that sharpens you in the short term and corrodes you over the long haul — and the two of them sit with an uncomfortable question: how much dumber, how much more prone to catastrophizing, are people like them and their listeners for carrying this stress every single day? Craig, a self-described professional catastrophizer and certified news junkie, cops to it directly. The show, he suggests, exists partly to let people stare into the abyss in a bite-sized package, with friends, so they don't have to do it alone all day. Along the way: a digression on fascist aesthetics — how the movement traded the military parades of the 1920s for the reality-TV and pro-wrestling spectacle of today (see: the Kid Rock and RFK Jr. sauna-and-stationary-bike image that broke everyone's brain) — and a genuinely great historical tangent from Craig on how basketball was once stereotyped as a "Jewish sport" in the early 20th century, complete with the anti-Semitic framing of the pre-shot-clock game as "crafty" and "shifty." There's also a World Cup preview that doubles as a referendum on Craig's two core political positions: he hates fascism, and he hates cars. The main segment — Delaney Hall. Nick widens the show's ongoing Prairieland coverage to the wave of hunger and labor strikes now happening in ICE facilities across at least four states, anchored by Delaney Hall in Newark. He opens on the number that frames everything: 29 people have died in ICE custody this fiscal year, a record, with the death rate the highest in the 22 years a JAMA study has tracked it — described by the doctors who wrote it as a warning signal from a system under "extraordinary and deliberate strain." From there: how the strike began (families rallying outside, detainees calling out by phone and bullhorn, roughly 300 of 900 announcing a coordinated strike), the conditions driving it (moldy and worm-infested food, no air conditioning, scalding showers, medical neglect), and the government's contradictory posture of insisting no strike exists while transferring out its leaders. The segment's sharpest argument is about the labor strike. Delaney Hall is run by the GEO Group, a for-profit contractor, and detainees do the cooking, cleaning, and maintenance for as little as a dollar a day. Nick reads the Thirteenth Amendment closely: slavery is abolished "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" — but the overwhelming majority of ICE detainees, by the government's own numbers, have no conviction at all. The constitutional exception doesn't apply to them. The accurate word, he argues, is slavery. He also notes that GEO Group and CoreCivic stock are both trading roughly 45% higher since the 2024 election. Then the response to all of it: on Memorial Day, Gov. Mikie Sherrill was refused entry, state health inspectors were blocked from most of the building, and as the governor left, federal agents moved on protesters with batons and pepper spray, parked an armored BearCat with a mounted gun trained on the crowd, and tear-gassed Sen. Andy Kim while he was trying to broker peace. When a governor, state inspectors, and a sitting U.S. senator can't get inside, Nick asks, what's being hidden? The episode's heaviest exchange follows. Asked directly whether the government is trying to kill the people inside, Craig declines the easy answer. This isn't an intentional murder factory yet, he says — it's "indifferent, wanton death," a system that knows it will produce deaths and has decided the cost is acceptable. But he reminds listeners that concentration camps are how mass-murder campaigns begin, and that genocide, as defined in the international treaties the U.S. helped author, does not require mass death — it requires the elimination of a people, by removing them from their homes, taking their children, breaking their ability to form families. Mass death is only its most extreme form. The two close on what a fascist actually is, with Craig's working definition landing on the part that separates fascism from everything else: the belief that violence and cruelty are good — that might makes right, and that hurting people is a feature, not a bug. Dr. Craig Is Fun at Parties lightens the load: Nick feeds Craig the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile and asks him to connect it to creeping authoritarianism. Craig resists the easy German-immigrant-Oscar-Mayer route and instead lands on fascism's twin obsessions — phallic symbolism and a love of fast, powerful machines — to explain why a car shaped like a hot dog is, on some level, deeply on theme. Talarico Talk closes things out. The Texas Senate race has launched in full, and the show frames it as a proxy battle between good and evil: James Talarico, the Rizz Minister, against Ken Paxton, freshly out of the GOP runoff and described here in unsparing terms. The opening Republican attack, Nick notes, is that Talarico isn't masculine enough — a fog of "low-T," "Tofu Talarico," and Stephen Miller falsely claiming the cisgender Talarico is "transitioning." But buried in the fog was one falsifiable claim: a Florida congressional candidate sneered that Talarico couldn't name an obscure wide receiver from the 2000s. Nick takes that personally, and mounts a vigorous, statistically detailed defense of Talarico's fantasy-football bona fides — Pierre Garçon and Austin Collie, Josh Gordon, the eternal Allen Hurns / Allen Robinson confusion — on the theory that a man who manages Type 1 diabetes is the most prepared guy at any draft. The segment ends on the genuine signal underneath the bit: Talarico drew 4,000 people to Plano, in Paxton's backyard, running explicitly as a break-with-the-party Democrat with a notably empathetic read on why Texans voted Trump in 2024. 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.

    • Transcript
  • S2 · E4
    May 27 · 44 min

    Dave Troy Sounds Off

    S-Tier Autocracy Knower Dave Troy sits in for Craig this week while Dr. Craig is on assignment (Turkish Hair Restoration Surgery). Troy is a technology entrepreneur, investigative journalist, and the proprietor of America 2.0 and the Wide Angle column at the Washington Spectator. By Nick's reckoning, he belongs in the top tier of Autocracy Knowers alongside Sarah Kendzior, Timothy Snyder, Jared Yates Sexton, Jeff Sharlet, and our own Dr. Craig Johnson — the small cohort who named what was happening early, kept being right, and have spent the years since doing the unglamorous work of explaining it to anyone willing to listen. Troy comes in at a four or five on the Autocratic Despair scale — not because things are fine, but because, in his read, the MAGA coalition is fracturing, Putin's war in Ukraine is going badly, and the moment we're living through is a global networked phenomenon, not a straightforward strongman play. From there the conversation goes wide. Troy defines what he means by a network and why he calls himself a "network empiricist" — caring less about what political figures say on any given day than about how they cluster, who they amplify, and where their long-term affiliations actually lie. He traces the multigenerational gold-bug network running from the pre-Civil War era through the 1933 business plot, the John Birch Society, the Council for National Policy, and January 6th, and explains why Robert Mercer's intellectual lineage runs straight back to a notorious mid-century racist named Revilo Oliver. Michael Flynn enters as a bridge figure — Russian-adjacent, plugged into the Council for National Policy world, and the man who took over the old anti-communist nonprofit America's Future from Jack Singlaub, installing his own family as the board over what may have been Singlaub's late-life objections. Troy also pulls in the Iran-Contra network — Maxwell, Epstein, John Tower, Bill Barr, Adnan Khashoggi — as one of the recurring node clusters that "just constantly turns up" in his research. Nick gets Troy to talk about how he's used NotebookLM to translate dense source material (including Russian-language Project Russia texts pulled from a Ukrainian cult raid) into accessible podcast form — an information-design move Nick credits Troy with pioneering. There's a frank exchange about Luigi Mangione, who was a friend of Troy's son's at Gilman School in Baltimore; Troy is unsentimental about the lionizing, clear that Mangione belongs in prison, and worried about what the trial will do to American culture if the administration mishandles it. The conversation gets harder from there. Nick brings up the Prairie Land eight — the activists in Texas recently convicted of providing material support to terrorism for a protest outside an ICE detention facility — and the broader pattern of "Antifa as a terrorist group" framing that Troy reads as "really evil and bad," a deliberate semantics game to demonize all opposition. Troy mentions his own situation: legal and physical threats serious enough that he's been spending time in Europe, the same as Antifa author Mark Bray, whose flight to Spain was canceled at the last minute. On protest itself, Troy argues that the current movement has gotten "a little bit lazy in terms of relying on the iconic imagery of protest rather than the underlying machinery of building protest and social change," and that the carefully-planned organizational scaffolding behind events like the Montgomery bus boycott has been flattened into soundbite history. On Graham Platner — "the human embodiment of the phrase 'I suppose,'" per Nick — Troy is blunt: a risky choice, strange affiliations, the kind of nominee the Democratic Party shouldn't be greenlighting if it has its act together. Nick recruits Troy into Talarico Talk and the official Autocratic Despair policy of delusional belief in a James Talarico presidency. Troy is hopeful but disciplined — he warns the campaign against confusing social-media energy for actual turnout, and points to Hungary's recent rejection of Orbán as a possible bellwether: "Two times kind of makes a trend. Three times makes it a really observable trend." When Nick asks about the time horizon for American authoritarianism, Troy gives the line that's likely to define the episode: as long as people would rather go to Costco than go to a civil war, things stay relatively stable. The fault line he's watching runs through the MAGA coalition itself — pure-play libertarianism (Massie) versus maximally-interventionist Trumpism — and the long Moscow fever dream of fusing the anti-war left with the anti-war right, which Troy doesn't think will actually fly with the American public, but expects to be attempted anyway. The episode closes on Camus. Troy is looking forward to the possibility that people figure this out, and offers a piece of guidance that sounds simple until you sit with it: stop waiting for grand coordinated gestures, and start being decent to each other on a day-to-day basis. "Why don't you just try not sucking and try to ease people's pain and to be an asset to your community... if you do that, and everybody tries to do that at scale, I feel like things might work out." Find Dave Troy at America 2.0 (america2.news), in his Wide Angle column at the Washington Spectator, and on his podcast Dave Troy Presents. 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.

    • Transcript
  • S2 · E3
    May 21 · 48 min

    The Rizz Minister Has Been Getting it On!

    This week on the Autocratic Despair podcast — a comedy about fascism, autocracy, and trying to have fun while the country falls apart — Nick opens at a seven on the despair scale after walking through the tailgate scene at Lambeau Field during two sold-out Luke Combs concerts. 80,000 people across two nights at his hometown stadium, and Nick didn't go — not because of the music, but because of what a massive country music crowd in the Midwest represents in 2026. He assumed Combs was a MAGA enthusiast. Turns out he was wrong: Combs describes himself as "heavily moderate," skipped Trump's 2020 Fourth of July concert, apologized for appearing with a Confederate flag, and performed with Tracy Chapman at the Grammys. His own right-wing fans tried to cancel him for saying he's not a racist. Nick sits with the uncomfortable realization that he's now giving a man credit for simply not being a fascist, and that this is where the bar is. He calls it "Schrödinger's fascist" — an artist who stays ambiguous enough that both sides can project whatever they want onto him. The ratchet effect: when declining to endorse authoritarianism qualifies as courage, the autocrats have already won something important. Craig opens at a five — his highest ever — because the President of the United States just created a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded "Anti-Weaponization Fund" by suing the IRS for $10 billion, then withdrawing the suit before the judge could throw it out, and settling with his own Justice Department. The money will compensate allies who claim they were wrongly targeted under the Biden administration — including potentially the 1,600 January 6 defendants Trump already pardoned. Craig points out that this directly violates the 14th Amendment, which prohibits the United States from spending money on anyone who has committed treason against it. The amendment was written for the Confederacy. It applies now. Nick predicts that the slush fund will result in a wave of Cybertruck purchases, fentanyl overdoses, and Ski-Doos — because nothing is funnier or more tragic than when absolute fuck-ups get an extra $30,000 in their bank accounts. It's the commedia of autocracy: the regime rewards its foot soldiers and the foot soldiers immediately blow the money on stupid shit. A Prairieland update: the nine defendants convicted of federal terrorism charges for attending a noise protest outside an ICE detention center called Prairieland in Alvarado, Texas on July 4th, 2025 remain in custody. They brought fireworks because it was the Fourth of July. They wanted the people locked inside a concentration camp to know they hadn't been forgotten. The government charged them with conspiracy to use explosives and material support for terrorism. Judge Pittman denied all post-trial motions. The Johnson County DA's office has 20 terabytes of state-level discovery evidence and has turned over none of it as the one-year anniversary of the arrests approaches. Sentencing is scheduled for June 18. Nick reads the names. We read them because someone should. In Talarico Talk, the Tallywhacker went on a podcast and revealed he has a girlfriend and has had one for four years. She was his Chief of Staff. She left the office before they got together. Nick has concerns about the timeline and the lack of a ring. "You cannot be shoplifting the pooty, James." The conversation widens into an honest assessment of the 2028 Democratic landscape, including Craig's dream ticket of Ocasio-Cortez and Talarico, Nick's blunt counter that America hates women too much to elect AOC, Craig's prediction that the first female president will be a Republican, and Nick's observation that Wisconsin's governor's race — where progressive candidate Francesca Hong's supporters may stay home rather than vote for a moderate if she loses the primary — is a preview of what will happen nationally if AOC runs. It's not fun to acknowledge, but this show has never been about telling you what's fun to hear. It's about telling you what's true. Also this week: the debut of "Dr. Craig Is Fun at Parties," a new segment in which Nick gives Craig an innocuous term and Craig connects it to fascism in under two moves. This week's term: circus peanuts. Craig gets there via "Entrance of the Gladiators" — a fascist march before it was a clown song — and via bread and circuses, the Roman authoritarian crowd-control technique now manifested as $1.776 billion for fascist thugs and MMA fights in the Rose Garden. Nick thought circus peanuts would stump him. Nick was wrong. The autocrat always finds a way into the circus. Craig also provides a primer on Christian nationalism in response to the Rededicate 250 event on the National Mall, where the Speaker of the House led a nine-hour government-sponsored prayer service to "rededicate America to God" — the same weekend the administration created a $1.776 billion loyalty fund named after the founding year. Christianity, patriotism, and the flag: all acquired by the same holding company, all stamped with the same logo, all emptied of their original product. The fascism is in the branding now. Names said on this episode: Autumn Hill, Zachary Evetts, Savanna Batten, Megan Morris, Maricela Rueda, Elizabeth Soto, Ines Soto, Benjamin Song, James Talarico, Luke Combs, Tracy Chapman, Bruce Springsteen, Mike Johnson, Pete Hegseth, Francesca Hong, Tom Tiffany, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Autocratic Despair is a weekly comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. New episodes drop every week. 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.

    • Transcript
  • S2 · E2
    May 15 · 52 min

    A Whole Potato or a "Hole in a Potato"?

    In which the boys debut a new shorthand for the show's central feeling: the moment you realize there are now so many golden statues of Donald Trump scattered across his Florida golf courses that when someone mentions one, you have to ask which one. Nick and Dr. Craig open by sorting through the Don Colossus — a 22-foot gilded statue of Trump in the "fight, fight, fight" assassination-survival pose, dedicated this week by his personal pastor at Trump National Doral while crypto bros funded the whole thing as a promo for their memecoin. The pastor, Mark Burns, swears it's not a golden calf. The Bible has a chapter about exactly this. Then to Prairieland, where Judge Pittman has now officially denied the post-verdict motions for acquittal and new trial. The Brady violation argument about the officer drawing his weapon first — denied. The juror coercion motion with a named witness to the "loud and sustained disturbance" in the jury room — denied. Sixteen people are headed to sentencing June 18, eleven days before America's 250th birthday. Two of them, Autumn Hill and Meagan Morris, are trans women about to be sentenced to federal prison under the current administration's Bureau of Prisons policy. The show acknowledges previously deadnaming them and corrects the record going forward. Talarico Talk goes full fanboy. The Tallywhacker just got Skibidi-blessed by the GOAT himself — Barack Obama dropped into Austin this week for a taco run that Obama famously doesn't make for Texas Democrats. The boys break down the May 26 Cornyn vs. Paxton runoff and make the counterintuitive case that Paxton is the opponent we want — because if Talarico can survive a six-month gauntlet from the most shameless attorney general in Texas history, including the AI-generated attacks Paxton has already used on his own primary opponents, he's minted. Plus a discourse on Presbyterian minister celibacy that involves a potato. The big segment is the Red-Brown Alliance. Nick brings Craig something that's been bothering him for weeks: Democratic congressman Ro Khanna publicly thanking Marjorie Taylor Greene, getting praised by Steve Bannon on Gavin Newsom's podcast, and calling for a populist coalition that includes Tucker Carlson. Craig walks through what populism actually is, why it's a container rather than an ideology, and the historical record on red-brown alliances — every single one of which has ended with the brown shirts purging the reds. Ro Khanna is walking the American left into a bear trap that Steve Bannon set on purpose. We aren't trying to defeat this. We're trying to help you survive it. 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.

    • Transcript
  • S2 · E1
    May 7 · 54 min

    Is That How You Get Your Jollies?

    Episode 1 of Autocratic Despair opens with co-hosts Nick and Dr. Craig Johnson defining the show's central concept through two visceral scenarios: the reluctance to celebrate the Fourth of July without seeming to endorse the regime, and the panic of watching your own party embrace a candidate with a Nazi tattoo. From there, Nick is at a 6 on the despair scale, driven by an unsettling encounter with America 250 merchandise at his local big box store. He explains what the Semiquincentennial actually is and how Trump's colonization of the celebration has made even patriotic engagement feel like collaboration. This leads into a centerpiece comedic monologue on flag-mogging: Nick's practice of politely informing self-described patriots that they're violating the U.S. Flag Code. He walks listeners through the actual rules — no flag clothing, no flag advertising, no marks on the flag, no upside-down displays except in dire distress — and makes the case that America 250 merchandise is itself, in its own way, a flag code violation. Craig pushes back gently with a Bay Area perspective on flags, contrasts the U.S. flag's design unfavorably with the Japanese flag, and shares a story about his middle school band playing the national anthem at a VA flag-burning ceremony. The episode then pivots to the Prairieland Detention Center case — a story Nick announces as the show's most-downloaded episode and one he intends to keep beating the drum on. He walks through the July 4, 2025 noise demonstration outside the Alvarado, Texas ICE facility, the nineteen arrests that followed, the September 2025 executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terror group, and the March 2026 federal convictions of all nine defendants who went to trial. He covers the new motion filed by Maricela Rueda's lawyers requesting a judgment of acquittal or new trial — including alleged juror misconduct (two jurors crying after a closed-door argument before the verdict) and Judge Mark Pittman's pattern of consistent pro-prosecution rulings, his Federalist Society ties, and his fining of defense attorneys for so-called frivolous motions. Craig closes the segment with the show's clearest political thesis yet: by criminalizing anti-fascism, the U.S. government has effectively made fascism protected speech. The Prairieland sentencing falls eleven days before America's 250th birthday. The Prairieland thread leads naturally into Graham Plattner, the presumptive Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, whose Totenkopf SS tattoo, suspect cover-up story, and full menu of evasions on the matter form what Nick calls the perfect populist line of bullshit attached to an unforgivable history. Craig provides the historical weight on what the Totenkopf actually represents and lays out why "formers" — people who genuinely leave neo-Nazi movements — don't ask to be made senators. The hosts trace the operative pipeline connecting Plattner to John Fetterman through shared campaign staffer Joe Calvello, and Nick floats a theory that egalitarian-leaning voters identified by Cambridge Analytica-style psychographic sorting may now be getting their own tailored psyop in the form of populist candidates with disqualifying baggage. Craig concludes by upgrading his despair score from 3.5 to 4.5. The episode closes with Talarico Talk, where Nick reports on James Talarico's commencement speech at Paul Quinn College — the oldest HBCU in Texas — in which the Texas state rep told Gen Z that their disillusionment is their superpower and dropped references to Howard Thurman, bell hooks, and Langston Hughes. Nick frames this as the Tallywhacker bibliography-maxing, the Rizz Minister entering his manifesting stage, and positions Talarico as the Mario to Plattner's Wario, with Craig nominating Florida's James Fishback as the Waluigi. 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.

    • Transcript
  • S1 · E6
    April 30 · 40 min

    Preview: Dr. Craig is Fun at Parties

    This week on the Autocratic Despair podcast, Nick and Dr. Craig take an unusually nuanced look at Cole Allen — the 31-year-old Caltech-educated tutor from Torrance, California who charged a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents' Dinner on April 25 armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and several knives in an attempt to assassinate President Trump and senior administration officials. Allen sent his family a manifesto minutes before the attack. His brother called police. Nobody died. The manifesto is not what you'd expect. It's organized, self-aware, and structured around a series of anticipated objections with numbered rebuttals — including a theological argument that turning the other cheek applies only when you yourself are oppressed, not when others are being harmed in your name. Allen chose buckshot over slugs to minimize collateral casualties. He spared Kash Patel by name. He apologized to his parents for lying about having a job interview. He described himself as a "Friendly Federal Assassin." Nick and Craig sit with the discomfort of a manifesto that reads less like the ravings of a madman and more like the term paper of a person who reasoned his way, step by careful step, into something monstrous. Craig provides historical context on who actually commits acts of political violence — and it turns out the profile is not the unhinged loner of popular imagination. The show then draws a Venn diagram that nobody in American media wants to draw: the overlap between the people who voted for Donald Trump and the people who have read The Turner Diaries, the 1978 white supremacist novel by neo-Nazi William Pierce that served as the blueprint for the Oklahoma City bombing and whose "Day of the Rope" — a fictionalized mass lynching of journalists, politicians, and so-called race traitors — was explicitly invoked by rioters who built a gallows outside the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Nick and Craig ask what it means when the same book inspires both the people in power and the people trying to kill the people in power. An update on the Prairieland case: nine Americans — Cameron Arnold, Zachary Evetts, Savanna Batten, Bradford Morris, Maricela Rueda, Elizabeth Soto, Ines Soto, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, and Benjamin Song — were convicted in March of federal terrorism charges after a July 4, 2025 protest outside an ICE detention center in Alvarado, Texas. Seven were acquitted of attempted murder but convicted of providing material support for terrorism based on the prosecution's theory that wearing black clothing constituted support. It was the first federal material support conviction against alleged antifa members in American history. This week: Judge Pittman still has not ruled on the defense motion for a new trial based on allegations of jury coercion. A second motion alleges a Brady violation — that the prosecution failed to disclose the wounded officer drew his weapon before anyone fired. Sentencing is scheduled for June 18. CONTENT WARNING: This episode also contains an extended segment in which Nick lets Dr. Craig cook on a subject near and dear to his academic heart — citation formatting. If you have strong feelings about APA versus MLA style, this segment may cause elevated heart rate, involuntary fist-clenching, or the sudden urge to email your college professors. Nick understands approximately 40% of what Craig is talking about and is visibly trying to keep up. Listener discretion is advised. Names said on this episode: Cole Allen, Cameron Arnold, Zachary Evetts, Savanna Batten, Bradford Morris, Maricela Rueda, Elizabeth Soto, Ines Soto, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, Benjamin Song, James Talarico, Kash Patel, Mark Pittman 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.

    • Transcript
  • S1 · E5
    April 23 · 30 min

    Preview: Uncle Energy + All Aboard the Talarico Train

    This week on another preview episode of the Autocratic Despair podcast, Nick and Dr. Craig start with a confession: they both enjoyed the Atlantic's report on FBI Director Kash Patel's alleged drinking problem a little too much. And they want to talk about why that enjoyment felt so good and so rotten at the same time. The Atlantic published a bombshell investigation alleging that Patel — the man running the agency that just convicted eight Americans of terrorism for wearing black clothes — has been drinking to the point of obvious intoxication, missing mornings, going unreachable behind locked doors, and panicking when his computer froze because he thought he'd been fired. More than two dozen current and former officials spoke to the reporter. Patel has denied everything and filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit. Nick and Craig sit with two reactions. The first is a flicker of hope disguised as schadenfreude: if Patel is drinking like that, maybe some part of him knows what he's doing is wrong. Maybe the substance abuse is the last remaining signal from a conscience that hasn't been fully extinguished — shame metabolizing itself as vodka because it has nowhere else to go. The second reaction is darker: since when do we take pleasure in someone's self-destruction? These are not the people Nick and Craig were three years ago. The show examines how sustained exposure to authoritarian cruelty has quietly recalibrated what its hosts are willing to enjoy, and whether noticing that recalibration is enough to reverse it. A quick update on the Prairieland case: Judge Pittman has still not ruled on the defense motion for a new trial based on allegations of jury coercion. Meanwhile, a second legal thread has emerged — Benjamin Song's attorney has filed a motion arguing a Brady violation, alleging the prosecution failed to disclose that the wounded police officer drew his weapon before anyone fired. That fact only came out during the officer's own testimony at trial. Sentencing is scheduled for June 18. The clock is running. The names still need saying. Then the show goes meta. Nick and Craig talk directly to their preview audience about what they're building, where the show is headed, and why Talarico Talk is the spine of the whole project. The weekly segment in which the hosts foolishly pin their hopes on a very normal yet annoyingly religious politician from Texas isn't a sidebar. It's the thing that keeps the show from collapsing into pure despair. The congregation is forming. The Talarico train is boarding. America has a Talarico-shaped hole. Nick and Craig want you on board — not because Talarico is a savior, but because the exercise of hoping for something specific is itself a form of resistance. The episode closes with Nick offering extended and unsolicited advice on how to be a better uncle. Not necessarily a biological uncle — though that counts. Nick argues that "Unclng arts" are dying in America and that reviving them is one of the few things you can do this week that will make the world measurably better. Step one: avail yourself of the cornucopia of nicknames available for addressing children. These include but are not limited to: kid, big dog, chief, champ, and boss. Nick has opinions about when to deploy each one. He shares them whether you asked or not. Names said on this episode: Kash Patel, Cameron Arnold, Zachary Evetts, Savanna Batten, Bradford Morris, Maricela Rueda, Elizabeth Soto, Ines Soto, Benjamin Song, James Talarico, Herman Bailey, Champ Bailey, Boss Bailey, Glenn "Big Dog" Robinson, Ray Allen, Jon Ossoff, Roy Cooper, Beto O'rourke, Colin Allred, Ken Paxton, John Cornryn. 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.

    • Transcript
Showing 1–20 of 23 episodes