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Autocratic Despair

Autocratic Despair

By: 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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Episodes
  • Dave Troy Sounds Off

    Dave Troy Sounds Off
    May 27 2026
    S-Tier Autocracy Knower Dave Troy sits in for Craig this week while Dr. Craig is on assignment (Turkish Hair Restoration Surgery). Troy is a technology entrepreneur, investigative journalist, and the proprietor of America 2.0 and the Wide Angle column at the Washington Spectator. By Nick's reckoning, he belongs in the top tier of Autocracy Knowers alongside Sarah Kendzior, Timothy Snyder, Jared Yates Sexton, Jeff Sharlet, and our own Dr. Craig Johnson — the small cohort who named what was happening early, kept being right, and have spent the years since doing the unglamorous work of explaining it to anyone willing to listen.Troy comes in at a four or five on the Autocratic Despair scale — not because things are fine, but because, in his read, the MAGA coalition is fracturing, Putin's war in Ukraine is going badly, and the moment we're living through is a global networked phenomenon, not a straightforward strongman play. From there the conversation goes wide. Troy defines what he means by a network and why he calls himself a "network empiricist" — caring less about what political figures say on any given day than about how they cluster, who they amplify, and where their long-term affiliations actually lie. He traces the multigenerational gold-bug network running from the pre-Civil War era through the 1933 business plot, the John Birch Society, the Council for National Policy, and January 6th, and explains why Robert Mercer's intellectual lineage runs straight back to a notorious mid-century racist named Revilo Oliver.Michael Flynn enters as a bridge figure — Russian-adjacent, plugged into the Council for National Policy world, and the man who took over the old anti-communist nonprofit America's Future from Jack Singlaub, installing his own family as the board over what may have been Singlaub's late-life objections. Troy also pulls in the Iran-Contra network — Maxwell, Epstein, John Tower, Bill Barr, Adnan Khashoggi — as one of the recurring node clusters that "just constantly turns up" in his research.Nick gets Troy to talk about how he's used NotebookLM to translate dense source material (including Russian-language Project Russia texts pulled from a Ukrainian cult raid) into accessible podcast form — an information-design move Nick credits Troy with pioneering. There's a frank exchange about Luigi Mangione, who was a friend of Troy's son's at Gilman School in Baltimore; Troy is unsentimental about the lionizing, clear that Mangione belongs in prison, and worried about what the trial will do to American culture if the administration mishandles it.The conversation gets harder from there. Nick brings up the Prairie Land eight — the activists in Texas recently convicted of providing material support to terrorism for a protest outside an ICE detention facility — and the broader pattern of "Antifa as a terrorist group" framing that Troy reads as "really evil and bad," a deliberate semantics game to demonize all opposition. Troy mentions his own situation: legal and physical threats serious enough that he's been spending time in Europe, the same as Antifa author Mark Bray, whose flight to Spain was canceled at the last minute.On protest itself, Troy argues that the current movement has gotten "a little bit lazy in terms of relying on the iconic imagery of protest rather than the underlying machinery of building protest and social change," and that the carefully-planned organizational scaffolding behind events like the Montgomery bus boycott has been flattened into soundbite history. On Graham Platner — "the human embodiment of the phrase 'I suppose,'" per Nick — Troy is blunt: a risky choice, strange affiliations, the kind of nominee the Democratic Party shouldn't be greenlighting if it has its act together.Nick recruits Troy into Talarico Talk and the official Autocratic Despair policy of delusional belief in a James Talarico presidency. Troy is hopeful but disciplined — he warns the campaign against confusing social-media energy for actual turnout, and points to Hungary's recent rejection of Orbán as a possible bellwether: "Two times kind of makes a trend. Three times makes it a really observable trend."When Nick asks about the time horizon for American authoritarianism, Troy gives the line that's likely to define the episode: as long as people would rather go to Costco than go to a civil war, things stay relatively stable. The fault line he's watching runs through the MAGA coalition itself — pure-play libertarianism (Massie) versus maximally-interventionist Trumpism — and the long Moscow fever dream of fusing the anti-war left with the anti-war right, which Troy doesn't think will actually fly with the American public, but expects to be attempted anyway.The episode closes on Camus. Troy is looking forward to the possibility that people figure this out, and offers a piece of guidance that sounds simple until you sit with it: stop waiting for grand coordinated gestures, and start...
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    45 mins
  • The Rizz Minister Has Been Getting it On!

    The Rizz Minister Has Been Getting it On!
    May 21 2026
    This week on the Autocratic Despair podcast — a comedy about fascism, autocracy, and trying to have fun while the country falls apart — Nick opens at a seven on the despair scale after walking through the tailgate scene at Lambeau Field during two sold-out Luke Combs concerts. 80,000 people across two nights at his hometown stadium, and Nick didn't go — not because of the music, but because of what a massive country music crowd in the Midwest represents in 2026. He assumed Combs was a MAGA enthusiast. Turns out he was wrong: Combs describes himself as "heavily moderate," skipped Trump's 2020 Fourth of July concert, apologized for appearing with a Confederate flag, and performed with Tracy Chapman at the Grammys. His own right-wing fans tried to cancel him for saying he's not a racist. Nick sits with the uncomfortable realization that he's now giving a man credit for simply not being a fascist, and that this is where the bar is. He calls it "Schrödinger's fascist" — an artist who stays ambiguous enough that both sides can project whatever they want onto him. The ratchet effect: when declining to endorse authoritarianism qualifies as courage, the autocrats have already won something important.Craig opens at a five — his highest ever — because the President of the United States just created a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded "Anti-Weaponization Fund" by suing the IRS for $10 billion, then withdrawing the suit before the judge could throw it out, and settling with his own Justice Department. The money will compensate allies who claim they were wrongly targeted under the Biden administration — including potentially the 1,600 January 6 defendants Trump already pardoned. Craig points out that this directly violates the 14th Amendment, which prohibits the United States from spending money on anyone who has committed treason against it. The amendment was written for the Confederacy. It applies now. Nick predicts that the slush fund will result in a wave of Cybertruck purchases, fentanyl overdoses, and Ski-Doos — because nothing is funnier or more tragic than when absolute fuck-ups get an extra $30,000 in their bank accounts. It's the commedia of autocracy: the regime rewards its foot soldiers and the foot soldiers immediately blow the money on stupid shit.A Prairieland update: the nine defendants convicted of federal terrorism charges for attending a noise protest outside an ICE detention center called Prairieland in Alvarado, Texas on July 4th, 2025 remain in custody. They brought fireworks because it was the Fourth of July. They wanted the people locked inside a concentration camp to know they hadn't been forgotten. The government charged them with conspiracy to use explosives and material support for terrorism. Judge Pittman denied all post-trial motions. The Johnson County DA's office has 20 terabytes of state-level discovery evidence and has turned over none of it as the one-year anniversary of the arrests approaches. Sentencing is scheduled for June 18. Nick reads the names. We read them because someone should.In Talarico Talk, the Tallywhacker went on a podcast and revealed he has a girlfriend and has had one for four years. She was his Chief of Staff. She left the office before they got together. Nick has concerns about the timeline and the lack of a ring. "You cannot be shoplifting the pooty, James." The conversation widens into an honest assessment of the 2028 Democratic landscape, including Craig's dream ticket of Ocasio-Cortez and Talarico, Nick's blunt counter that America hates women too much to elect AOC, Craig's prediction that the first female president will be a Republican, and Nick's observation that Wisconsin's governor's race — where progressive candidate Francesca Hong's supporters may stay home rather than vote for a moderate if she loses the primary — is a preview of what will happen nationally if AOC runs. It's not fun to acknowledge, but this show has never been about telling you what's fun to hear. It's about telling you what's true.Also this week: the debut of "Dr. Craig Is Fun at Parties," a new segment in which Nick gives Craig an innocuous term and Craig connects it to fascism in under two moves. This week's term: circus peanuts. Craig gets there via "Entrance of the Gladiators" — a fascist march before it was a clown song — and via bread and circuses, the Roman authoritarian crowd-control technique now manifested as $1.776 billion for fascist thugs and MMA fights in the Rose Garden. Nick thought circus peanuts would stump him. Nick was wrong. The autocrat always finds a way into the circus.Craig also provides a primer on Christian nationalism in response to the Rededicate 250 event on the National Mall, where the Speaker of the House led a nine-hour government-sponsored prayer service to "rededicate America to God" — the same weekend the administration created a $1.776 billion loyalty fund named after the founding year. Christianity, patriotism, and the ...
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    49 mins
  • A Whole Potato or a "Hole in a Potato"?

    A Whole Potato or a "Hole in a Potato"?
    May 15 2026

    In which the boys debut a new shorthand for the show's central feeling: the moment you realize there are now so many golden statues of Donald Trump scattered across his Florida golf courses that when someone mentions one, you have to ask which one.

    Nick and Dr. Craig open by sorting through the Don Colossus — a 22-foot gilded statue of Trump in the "fight, fight, fight" assassination-survival pose, dedicated this week by his personal pastor at Trump National Doral while crypto bros funded the whole thing as a promo for their memecoin. The pastor, Mark Burns, swears it's not a golden calf. The Bible has a chapter about exactly this.

    Then to Prairieland, where Judge Pittman has now officially denied the post-verdict motions for acquittal and new trial. The Brady violation argument about the officer drawing his weapon first — denied. The juror coercion motion with a named witness to the "loud and sustained disturbance" in the jury room — denied. Sixteen people are headed to sentencing June 18, eleven days before America's 250th birthday. Two of them, Autumn Hill and Meagan Morris, are trans women about to be sentenced to federal prison under the current administration's Bureau of Prisons policy. The show acknowledges previously deadnaming them and corrects the record going forward.

    Talarico Talk goes full fanboy. The Tallywhacker just got Skibidi-blessed by the GOAT himself — Barack Obama dropped into Austin this week for a taco run that Obama famously doesn't make for Texas Democrats. The boys break down the May 26 Cornyn vs. Paxton runoff and make the counterintuitive case that Paxton is the opponent we want — because if Talarico can survive a six-month gauntlet from the most shameless attorney general in Texas history, including the AI-generated attacks Paxton has already used on his own primary opponents, he's minted. Plus a discourse on Presbyterian minister celibacy that involves a potato.

    The big segment is the Red-Brown Alliance. Nick brings Craig something that's been bothering him for weeks: Democratic congressman Ro Khanna publicly thanking Marjorie Taylor Greene, getting praised by Steve Bannon on Gavin Newsom's podcast, and calling for a populist coalition that includes Tucker Carlson. Craig walks through what populism actually is, why it's a container rather than an ideology, and the historical record on red-brown alliances — every single one of which has ended with the brown shirts purging the reds. Ro Khanna is walking the American left into a bear trap that Steve Bannon set on purpose.

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    52 mins
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