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.

  1. 8h ago

    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.

  2. Aug 13

    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.

  3. Aug 6

    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.

  4. Jul 30

    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.

  5. Jul 23

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

  6. Jul 16

    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 f****d by academic publishing, why a book about keeping your son out of fascism should not be printed in twelve-point type with citations, and why a podcast with no commercials has a pace a podcast with commercials can never have. He hears we started a beef with The Bulwark last week and responds with three words I'm going to have printed on a shirt. Then the number. Jared rates his autocratic despair an eight and a three, simultaneously — the first guest to break the format — and explains why: he thinks the destabilization we're heading into is the same thing that opens the window for actual change. We get into the rumor that Trump is about to declare Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock illegitimate senators, why that's a genuinely bad signal about whether we'll have free and fair midterms, and why picking that particular fight is a mistake that only makes both men more famous. And we land on the greatest gift these people give us: they cannot shut up. They telegraph everything they're going to do and count on nobody paying attention. We talk about Graham Platner and the damage done to the gruff leftist sweetheart community — a title Jared claims for himself about four seconds after I say it, and then uses forty minutes later to take apart JD Vance. He explains who actually recruited Platner, why they went looking for what he calls a noble savage, and why they never bothered to vet him, because vetting was never the point. That opens into a real education on deeper politics: what happens when a regular person tries to run for Congress, why the local party in a deep red district would rather lose by forty points than let an outsider try something new, and why Jared walked away from his own 2016 run the moment he saw how the machine actually works. I pitch him my platform — insider trading, announced in real time on a billboard network — and he's more generous about it than it deserves. We cover his enduring legacy as a meme: the 2017 Don Jr. tweet, what it's like to be tagged in the same joke every single day of your life for a decade, and the genuinely unsettling business of getting slotted into other people's conspiracy theories. The CIA-asset years. The double-agent schemes. The people who showed up at his house and had to be handled by police. Then the part I've wanted for a long time. Jared grew up as what he calls the prototype of what became Christian nationalism. He describes his grandmother's house — a crucifix in every room — and a literal, furnished Satan. Not a metaphor. An entity that could appear as a human being, and you were expected to grab that cross off the wall and be ready. He explains what it does to a person to be raised on nothing but the Book of Revelation, why constant spiritual warfare trains you to reach for a strongman, and how the divine agent framework — Cyrus, King David — lets a believer look at a man's sins and see proof instead of disqualification. And I finally get my answer to the thing that's bugged me for years: how do people with such a well-articulated vision of the Antichrist look right at Donald Trump and whiff? He also admits the programming never fully clears. There's a part of his brain that noticed the head wound. He tells me what this work has taken from him, and it's the most honest answer anyone has given on this show: that it has probably shortened his life. Four books in six years, because he believed if he just articulated it correctly, enough people would hear. And he explains where his pattern recognition actually comes from, which is not graduate school — it's an abusive house, and learning to read danger in the sound of a door opening. We do JD Vance, his personal rival since before either of them mattered, the bizarro to his Superman, a butcher boy who betrayed everyone he ever knew to climb. Jared explains exactly why MSNBC welcomed him into its bosom, why the hick whisperer was such a comfortable story for liberal media, and why the theory that Vance can't win is a cope. We get his thoughts on James Talarico, and they are not warm. We do my favorite question — favorite B or C tier MAGA celebrity — and his answer is inspired and involves aliens. He explains why that ecosystem isn't benign at all, and how watching its most unhinged corners gives you an eighteen-month preview of Fox News. He tells me how he'd handle a Jubilee, and it's a masterclass: don't argue the content, find the emotion underneath it, ask them to tell you more about the reptilians. I ask him whether I should own a gun, having never wanted one, and he gives an answer more careful and more human than I was ready for. Then I ask if there's a moment coming when he'd change that answer — and he gives what might be the best thing anyone has said on this program, a reframe built out of the same instinct that taught him not to make dad angry. We finish on Prairieland, on the organizing work he's doing right now, on the book proposal he's tinkering with, on why he runs every day and hates it, and on what he's looking forward to: the World Cup final, the British Open, a quiet room with a book, and his honest belief that if we win this thing, what's waiting on the other side is a better life for everybody. Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast that stares directly at fascism and, against all odds, stays fun — the commedia for your particular brand of tragedy. Connect with us today! Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.

    Gruff Leftist Sweetheart Jared Yates Sexton

  7. Jul 10

    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.

  8. Jul 2

    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.

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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.

Information

  • Creator
    Nick Mortensen & Dr. Craig Johnson
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    22
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Genuine Article Media
  • Show Website
    Autocratic Despair: The Podcast