She’s Got Problems
transcript
show notes
Some weeks the news is so dense that Nick and Craig never get past the numbers. This is one of those weeks, and the numbers are plenty.
Dr. Craig Johnson, UC Berkeley lecturer and PhD in Global Fascism Studies, comes in at a 7, driven by Midterm election jitters, and he delivers a Stalin joke that we will not spoil here, except to say that a historian of authoritarian regimes has very specific jokes available to him and he is not afraid to use them.
Nick’s number is driven by the firing of Lieutenant General Brett Sylvia. Sylvia spent thirty-two years in the Army, commanded the 101st Airborne, and holds a Purple Heart and six Bronze Stars, one for valor. For the past eleven months he ran strategy and planning on the Joint Staff, the office writing the long-term plan for the Iran war. Pete Hegseth fired him last week. The Pentagon accuses him of leaking classified information to reporters; he hasn’t been charged, other Pentagon sources dispute the account, and the evidence reached the press before it reached a courtroom. Nick explains the Joint Staff for anyone who’s never had to, asks why a government would try a general in the newspapers, and lingers on the moment the President, asked about Lieutenant General Sylvia, said “she’s got problems.” Four times. Nobody corrected him.
And then, because this is a comedy about the end of the republic and the hosts are both fathers of a certain age, an extended investigation into why kids today will wear sweatpants to absolutely anything, and what that says about all of us. The answer is not fascism. Probably.
A short one, and a fun one, from a show that stares into the abyss of autocracy with friends. The commedia for your particular brand of authoritarian tragedy.
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.
