Autocratic Despair copertina

Autocratic Despair

Autocratic Despair

Di: Nick Mortensen & Dr. Craig Johnson
Ascolta gratuitamente

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.

© 2026 Genuine Article Media Politica e governo Scienze politiche Successo personale Sviluppo personale
Episodi
  • The World Doesn't Stop...But it Should

    The World Doesn't Stop...But it Should
    Jun 4 2026
    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 ...
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    46 min
  • Dave Troy Sounds Off

    Dave Troy Sounds Off
    May 27 2026
    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...
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    45 min
  • The Rizz Minister Has Been Getting it On!

    The Rizz Minister Has Been Getting it On!
    May 21 2026
    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 ...
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    49 min
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
Ancora nessuna recensione