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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.)

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.