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Autocratic Despair: The Podcast

Autocratic Despair: The Podcast

Van: Nick Mortensen & Dr. Craig Johnson
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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.

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  • The Bay Area AI Orgy Scene as Scouted by Dr. Craig

    The Bay Area AI Orgy Scene as Scouted by Dr. Craig
    Oct 8 2026
    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 ...
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    53 min
  • An Elite Fraternity of Pants-Knowers

    An Elite Fraternity of Pants-Knowers
    Sep 30 2026
    Netanyahu came to New York, and Nick's number held at six. That's where this week's Autocratic Despair begins: with the Prime Minister of Israel on the floor of the United Nations, dozens of delegations walking out before he opened his mouth, and a comedy podcast from Green Bay, Wisconsin trying to figure out how worried to be about a man who called the people leaving the room moral cowards and then told the ones who stayed that their leaders thank him privately.Dr. Craig Johnson, UC Berkeley lecturer and PhD in Global Fascism Studies, opens at a six as well. He went camping. He is personally more relaxed. The world, he notes, has not let up. His driver this week is a story most Americans missed: Saudi Arabia and the part of the European Union that handles fossil fuel imports from the Arabian Peninsula, and what happens to gas prices when a kingdom decides it has leverage. Nick, a former comedian and manufacturing professional, admits energy markets are not the show's area of expertise, then asks the only question that matters to a guy with three kids and a crossover vehicle: how much further can it go? Craig's answer involves earthquakes, poisoned rivers, and the phrase "not quite enough."Then Netanyahu. Nick's driver walks through the week as the audience proxy who reads the news and can't quite believe it. Donald Trump spoke at the UN too, just not the same day, because he had Xi Jinping and his wife at the White House and, as everyone is saying, nobody has ever been tougher on China. Craig adds the detail that Trump apparently floated selling Xi American weapons. Craig's read: what, you like Vietnam surplus? They already have those.For listeners unfamiliar with the man, Nick does the three lines: Prime Minister of Israel, longest-serving one they've ever had, not well regarded at home. Under indictment for corruption in Israel. Facing an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court abroad. Election in a few weeks. And newly not well regarded in New York, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged to arrest him if he set foot in the city, called him a war criminal, and declared him not welcome. Nick's honest assessment: Mamdani probably lacked the jurisdiction, so it's close to nothing, but it isn't nothing. Netanyahu's response was to cut a promo. A video aimed at the mayor by name. Shame on you, Mr. Mamdani. Then he did it again from the UN podium, working in Mamdani's friendship with streamer Hasan Piker for good measure. Craig notes Netanyahu's party has been running ads in Israel with Mamdani edited in next to prominent figures, which tells you something about who the campaign is actually for. Craig also observes the strangest thing happening on the American right this year: it's splitting on Israel, and neither the right wing of the party nor the center is going to be pleased with any of this ahead of the midterms.The speech itself gets the full treatment. The walkout. The moral cowards line. The claim that attacking Iran was one of the easiest decisions he's ever made. West Bank settler violence dismissed as the work of juvenile delinquents, which prompts Craig to do a real explainer, for new listeners, on what the settler movement is, where it came from, and why it's been part of Israeli political culture since the aftermath of 1967. Craig on the diplomatic corner Israel has backed itself into is one of the best stretches of the episode: not a lecture, an explanation of how a country ends up with its prime minister yelling at an empty room. You'll have to hear it.Then the mic drop. Netanyahu closed by declaring that Israel didn't commit genocide, Israel prevented genocide, and that the finding against him is the greatest lie of the century. Nick's reaction is the emotional center of the episode, played straight and then not: that's a real load off his mind, because this whole thing is a sticky wicket, he hasn't been watching it closely because every time he looks it doesn't look good, the United States is definitely complicit in the sense that we supplied the weapons, and he doesn't want to be seen as antisemitic, of which there's plenty going around without him. So he'll defer to the expert, and Netanyahu says it isn't one. Craig's summary: up is down, war is peace. The show does not resolve the question this week. It names the discomfort of a person of ordinary decency trying to look at something and finding he'd rather not. That's the autocratic despair the title is about, and it's why the number stays at six instead of moving.And then, because this is a show about fascism that is somehow genuinely fun, Nick tells Craig about the pants.He was at the Home Depot on Saturday returning a toilet seat for the second time in six weeks. What he found there, and how close he came, is a story about brand loyalty, pocket architecture, the elite fraternity of men who know a specific Timberland work pant, the correct number of backup pairs to keep in a package at the ready, and the moment a 48-...
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    32 min
  • Jake & Logan Paul Bro Down w/Pete Hegseth

    Jake & Logan Paul Bro Down w/Pete Hegseth
    Sep 23 2026
    Two very online brothers stood behind a podium at the Pentagon last week, and a sitting president accused the opposition party of trying to murder him. Only one of those stories got covered like it mattered, and it was the one with the haircuts.This week on Autocratic Despair, the comedy podcast where Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson stare into the abyss with friends, the despair numbers come in close together and for very different reasons. Craig holds at a six, driven by the AfD's continued run through the German electorate. Nick lands at six and a half, driven entirely by the fact that Jake and Logan Paul were at the Department of Defense in suits.Germany keeps voting, and the center keeps shrinking. Two state elections landed over the weekend. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, in the former East, the AfD took about 38 percent and first place, while the SPD slid to roughly 35 percent. The story is what happened to the Christian Democrats. The CDU got shut out of the state parliament entirely. Craig explains why that should land harder for an American audience than it does: the CDU is modern Germany. It has been the governing pillar of the country since the Second World War, conservative in roughly a Mitt Romney way, comfortable with social welfare spending, and willing to work with the Social Democrats. When that party loses its seats to a party sitting just shy of open fascism, you are not watching a bad night. You are watching a realignment. Craig has a friend in the German foreign ministry who told him this could never happen there, of all places. It happened there.There is some good news in the numbers. In Berlin, Die Linke doubled its vote share, and Craig makes the case for why that matters: the German left has the longest and clearest record of opposing the Nazis, which is precisely why the Nazis came for them first. Nick also stumbles onto a piece of history he had never heard, which is that Berlin's 2021 election was thrown out entirely and rerun in 2023 after a day of long lines, missing ballots, and a marathon closing the streets. Also in the mix: the BSW, a party of wing nuts that cleared five percent in Saxony-Anhalt and did not clear it here, and what a coalition against the AfD would have to look like to hold.Then the Pauls. On September 17, Jake and Logan Paul toured the Pentagon, visited the 9/11 memorial, met Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and addressed uniformed service members from the press briefing room. Nick opens with a correction, since the photos have been read wrong all week: they were not giving a press briefing. They were using the briefing room as a venue. The visit came ahead of National POW/MIA Recognition Day.Nick asks the audience proxy question, which is who the hell are these guys, and Craig takes it seriously, which is the point. The Pauls came up as vloggers in the late Tumblr era, became bona fide celebrities with about a hundred million in combined reach, and have since rebranded as fitness influencers for men and boys, a lane that runs straight into male supremacist and warrior ethos territory. Craig places them on a spectrum somewhere between Mr. Beast and Andrew Tate, with better PR instincts than the Tate brothers and the same underlying contempt. One of them beat Mike Tyson in a fight Craig describes as elder abuse. Nick argues Logan Paul is a legitimately excellent professional wrestler, which is not a compliment so much as a warning: he knows exactly how to be hated on purpose.There is also money in the room. The brothers paid for their own travel and also met Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Jake promoted Justin Sun's crypto tokens without disclosing he was paid. Logan is facing a class action over the CryptoZoo NFT project, which the plaintiffs call a rug pull and which he denies, having offered money back to buyers who drop out of the suit. Craig defines a rug pull for anyone who needs it, and then makes the argument that holds the segment together: being impossible to take seriously is the product. They want you to see the dumb kids at the end of the cul-de-sac. What they are is very good at getting what they want.Somewhere in there the episode detours into why every young service member in those photos has a mustache, and Craig has an actual answer involving Prussian practice and gas mask seals. Comedy ballast, fully earned.New Low, now weekly. The back half is the segment Nick is putting on a schedule from here to the midterms, because the question keeps coming up whether we like it or not. This week's candidate: on Tuesday, September 15, on Truth Social, the president wrote that the assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pennsylvania was a Democrat plot to get him out of the election, that the evidence was missing, altered, corrupted, or gone, and that former FBI Director Christopher Wray should pay a price. The evidence offered was nothing.Nick gives a full Butler primer for anyone who was not paying attention in July 2024: Thomas Matthew ...
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    35 min
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