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