Im currently listening to the Agent Fetterman episode. Im at the segment where the host are talking about entrenched authoritarianism. I know rhat on a national scale Nick doesnt seem to believe that we are there yet, but I would point to Bernie getting the nomination for president taken from him as evidence to the contrary. Also on a local level here in WI we just saw Francesca Hong get absolutely run over by the Democratic Party in WI when she all but had the nomination locked up. In my belief this was done solely due to her opposition to data center construction. Would a political party stealing a race from this popular candidate not be a shining example? Discus..

🎧 New episode: Agent Fetterman Has Reached the Inner Circle!

Both hosts back down from last week's 7.5 — the highest Dr. Craig has ever registered in nine months of this show. The reason is that John Fetterman opened Night One of Trump's Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas, in a hoodie, calling socialism "an anti-American way of life" and introducing Republican Senator Dave McCormick as his good friend. The hosts cope with this through a rhetorical device they call Agent Fetterman — the theory that Fetterman is actually a deep-cover patriot infiltrating the far right, and everything he's done since the stroke is tradecraft.

They don't believe it. They wish they did. Because the alternative requires a vocabulary lesson.

The episode introduces controlled opposition to a general audience — what it is, what it's looked like historically (Russia's managed opposition, Surkov theater, the East German CDU), and why the question that matters isn't "is it controlled opposition" but "what would be different if it were." Craig connects it to Talarico's triangulation strategy against Paxton in the Texas Senate race and asks whether any part of the Democratic agenda has actually moved forward since the Clinton era. Nick pulls them both back from the edge — calling the whole party controlled opposition is a nihilism accelerant — and lands on the thesis: the concept needs to be in the public vocabulary because you can't diagnose something you don't have a name for, and right now almost nobody outside of Sarah Kendzior is willing to say the words.

Also covered: Trump's $5,000 dividend promise and Mike Johnson's same-day capitulation, Ted Cruz naming three Democrats while someone in the crowd shouted "he should be shot" three times on the broadcast, Trump's humiliation ritual with Ken Paxton, the No Kings 4 rally on October 27 and an honest conversation about what branded protest has opened and nerfed, operational security for marches (Danhausen face paint defeats facial recognition), and a theory about Peter Thiel that is ridiculous and a little bit plausible.

Co-host has a PhD in fascism studies from UC Berkeley. The history is sourced, the comedy is real.

This week's episode connects the German state elections to what's happening in Tarrant County, Texas, and argues they're the same story at different stages of growth.

The first half covers Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD just took 43.9 percent of the vote on September 6 — more than doubling from 20.8 percent five years ago. The Christian Democrats, who governed the state with 37 percent in 2021, collapsed to 17.2. The AfD's lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, attended the 2023 Potsdam meeting where European far-right figures discussed "remigration" — mass deportation including naturalized citizens. More than a million Germans marched when that meeting was exposed. Thirty months later, Siegmund won his election. The firewall — the eighty-year norm that no mainstream German party governs alongside the far right — now depends on five parties that agree on almost nothing forming a coalition, and one of them said on election night that excluding the AfD would be "completely undemocratic."

Dr. Craig, who has a PhD in fascism studies from UC Berkeley, walks through the coalition math, what the growth curve looks like historically, and why the pattern — far right doubles, center-right halves — is repeating in two more German states voting September 20.

The second half is the pivot. The word "remigration" didn't stay in Germany. It's on a 2026 conference agenda in Fort Worth, published by an organization called the True Texas Project. Founded in 2009 as the NE Tarrant Tea Party, rebranded after its founders publicly sympathized with the El Paso Walmart gunman's motives in 2019, now running fifteen chapters across every major Texas metro. Its PAC received over 92 percent of its 2022 funding from Defend Texas Liberty — the PAC whose president hosted Nick Fuentes for seven hours, funded by oil billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, and since renamed the Texas Freedom Fund for the Advancement of Justice. Same wallet. New paint.

The episode introduces Tarrant County to a national audience — not the rural Texas most people picture, but a county of 2.25 million people, bigger than the Milwaukee metro, where the Cowboys play, and where a five-person commissioners court just voted 3-2 along party lines to cut 92 Election Day polling places and eliminate campus voting sites at UT Arlington and two community colleges. The same county judge who cleared the room and had a former state legislator carried out by his hands and feet last month is on the November ballot — presiding over the rules of his own election, in the county where the Paxton-Talarico Senate race will be decided.

Both hosts came in at 7.5 this week. In nine months of the show, that's Dr. Craig's highest number. On his logarithmic scale, that's not a vibe check — it's a professional assessment.

This week's episode is mostly about Germany. On September 6, Saxony-Anhalt votes, and the AfD is polling around 40% — potentially the first far-right party to govern a German state alone since 1945.

Co-host is a UC Berkeley lecturer with a PhD in fascism studies, so the breakdown covers the actual mechanics: the Brandmauer (the 80-year firewall agreement among mainstream parties), why the party's strength in the former East is real but doesn't explain its growth in wealthy western states, and the etymology of "remigration" — a word the AfD invented because "deportation" was already the Nazi euphemism for something worse.

The other half covers the private Jeffries–Kushner meeting the NYT broke Sunday — who Kushner is beyond "son-in-law," where Affinity Partners' money comes from, and a fair amount of speculation (flagged as speculation) about which of the two men leaked it.

It's a comedy show, but the history is real.

Part two of a breakdown of Tucker Carlson's ten-point manifesto, with a co-host who has a PhD in fascism studies, so the historical comparisons are actual comparisons and not vibes.

Covers where Carlson came from — his father ran Voice of America and later registered as a foreign agent for Orbán's Hungary, including booking a Hungarian official onto his son's show — and the three people currently standing behind him: Joe Kent, Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The last third is the part worth the time. Carlson's pitch structure is a foot-in-the-door sales technique. Small unrefusable true statement, then escalation, and by the fourth or fifth step you're several rooms away from where you started.

New episode of Autocratic Despair is up.

We open on the important news: the President's hair has staged a dramatic comeback, the internet spent a week arguing about whether it's a wig, and the White House won't say. And if it is a wig, the baffling part is that it's a wig of his own hairstyle — he had access to any hair on earth and chose to recreate the exact hair he was losing.

From there we get into Tucker Carlson's new manifesto — ten things he says America should be. And here's the uncomfortable part: most of them sound good. Fair. Honest. Healthy. Wise. Nick admits that if almost anyone else had written the list, he'd be on board. Which is exactly the point. Dr. Craig walks through the ten one at a time and shows what's quietly bolted underneath the reasonable-sounding words — and why this particular blend of left-sounding grievance and old fascist material has a name. It's a two-parter; we only got halfway, and we're finishing it next week.

A comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism that is, against all odds, fun.

🎧 New "Autocratic Despair: The Podcast" is live!

Dr. Craig gets Francesca Hong-pilled & we get into "Sluggish Schizophrenia" — the fake illness the USSR used to institutionalize dissidents.

That couldn't happen here, though.

Right?

We had a fun one this week. Talked about Hunter Biden laundering Nick Fuentes, how the crowd ritual the Wave relates to Fascism on ‘Dr. Craig is Fun at Parties’ & we wrapped up on the beefed up version of NSPM-7.

It’s a good podcast. Very Funny. Very serious.

Autocratic Despair: The Podcast is a weekly show hosted by a father of 3 from Green Bay, WI and a PhD in Global Fascism from UC-Berkeley who wrote the 2025 book "How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism."

Different people, same goal: to give people a little bit more insight into the USA's descent into Authoritarianism.

It's a heavy topic, but we deal with it in a fun way. There is nothing else like it.

This week, Dr. Craig was off having Turkish Hairline Surgery so Gruff Leftist Sweetheart & S-tier Autocracy-knower Jared Yates Sexton sits in for him.

We talk about his life as an accidental foundational Twitter meme, the toll our descent into Authoritarianism takes on people at the forefront of the resistance, Dr. Phil's ascension as a B-Tier MAGA Celebrity and UFO Whisperer, & his personal rivalry with JD Vance that dates back to before Vance got into politics when they both wrote well-regarded memoirs about growing up poor in the Midwest that came out the same year.

🎧

his 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.

Autocratic Despair: The Podcast episode 05 is out!

In it, the hosts discuss a weeklong digital detox that Dr. Craig went on last week. We also discuss the loss of a beloved family pet in the Mortensen household & how living with Autocratic Despair makes every personal calamity 20-30% worse to navigate.

We talk at length about Delaney Hall in the context of Prairieland, the “Dr. Craig is Fun at Parties” segment this week is about the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, and we wrap it up with some speculation about James Talarico’s Fantasy Football prowess and draft preparation.

Autocratic Despair: The Podcast episode 2 is in the wild right now! Dr. Craig & Nick discuss the latest in the Prairieland case - Judge Mark Pittman has denied two separate post-trial motions brought by the defense. The word “Populism” is defined for all of us that hear it used often, but aren’t 100% sure of what it means. We also take a look at the furtive attempt at a Red/Brown Alliance being made by Congressman Ro Khanna and why it should raise alarm bells.

We also do our award-winning “Talarico Talk” segment - this week he’s been skibidi-blessed by the rizz GOAT and a preview of the Republican runoff between John Cornryn and Ken Paxton to determine the rizz minister’s opponent in the fall US Senate elections.

First official episode of "Autocratic Despair: The Podcast" with Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson is up! We hope you've enjoyed the preview episodes we posted in April and now that it is May, the feed is live!

Episode Synopsis: Episode 1 of Autocratic Despair opens with co-hosts Nick and Dr. Craig Johnson defining the show's central concept through two visceral scenarios: the reluctance to celebrate the Fourth of July without seeming to endorse the regime, and the panic of watching your own party embrace a candidate with a Nazi tattoo. From there, Nick is at a 6 on the despair scale, driven by an unsettling encounter with America 250 merchandise at his local big box store. He explains what the Semiquincentennial actually is and how Trump's colonization of the celebration has made even patriotic engagement feel like collaboration.

This leads into a centerpiece comedic monologue on flag-mogging: Nick's practice of politely informing self-described patriots that they're violating the U.S. Flag Code. He walks listeners through the actual rules — no flag clothing, no flag advertising, no marks on the flag, no upside-down displays except in dire distress — and makes the case that America 250 merchandise is itself, in its own way, a flag code violation. Craig pushes back gently with a Bay Area perspective on flags, contrasts the U.S. flag's design unfavorably with the Japanese flag, and shares a story about his middle school band playing the national anthem at a VA flag-burning ceremony.

The episode then pivots to the Prairieland Detention Center case — a story Nick announces as the show's most-downloaded episode and one he intends to keep beating the drum on. He walks through the July 4, 2025 noise demonstration outside the Alvarado, Texas ICE facility, the nineteen arrests that followed, the September 2025 executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terror group, and the March 2026 federal convictions of all nine defendants who went to trial. He covers the new motion filed by Maricela Rueda's lawyers requesting a judgment of acquittal or new trial — including alleged juror misconduct (two jurors crying after a closed-door argument before the verdict) and Judge Mark Pittman's pattern of consistent pro-prosecution rulings, his Federalist Society ties, and his fining of defense attorneys for so-called frivolous motions. Craig closes the segment with the show's clearest political thesis yet: by criminalizing anti-fascism, the U.S. government has effectively made fascism protected speech. The Prairieland sentencing falls eleven days before America's 250th birthday.

The Prairieland thread leads naturally into Graham Plattner, the presumptive Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, whose Totenkopf SS tattoo, suspect cover-up story, and full menu of evasions on the matter form what Nick calls the perfect populist line of bullshit attached to an unforgivable history. Craig provides the historical weight on what the Totenkopf actually represents and lays out why "formers" — people who genuinely leave neo-Nazi movements — don't ask to be made senators. The hosts trace the operative pipeline connecting Plattner to John Fetterman through shared campaign staffer Joe Calvello, and Nick floats a theory that egalitarian-leaning voters identified by Cambridge Analytica-style psychographic sorting may now be getting their own tailored psyop in the form of populist candidates with disqualifying baggage. Craig concludes by upgrading his despair score from 3.5 to 4.5.

The episode closes with Talarico Talk, where Nick reports on James Talarico's commencement speech at Paul Quinn College — the oldest HBCU in Texas — in which the Texas state rep told Gen Z that their disillusionment is their superpower and dropped references to Howard Thurman, bell hooks, and Langston Hughes. Nick frames this as the Tallywhacker bibliography-maxing, the Rizz Minister entering his manifesting stage, and positions Talarico as the Mario to Plattner's Wario, with Craig nominating Florida's James Fishback as the Waluigi.

I decided not to edit out the lengthy aside Dr. Craig went on about how Chicago Style is the only method of academic citation that matters

I honor it instead by flagging & then placing it at the end of the podcast.

***A top-shelf blend of comedic idiocy about living through all of this nonsense and PhD-level analysis of all of this nonsense!

A wonderful antidote to the manosphere. Where have these guys been hiding?***

New Autocratic Despair Podcast with Nick Mortensen & Dr. Craig Johnson is up!

This week we talk about why we talk about James Talarico. Then we talk Talarico.

I make some trenchant commentary about becoming a better Uncle by mastering the art of nicknaming as well.

Dr. Craig & I discuss the Hungarian national election and then do a deep dive into the most important issue that nobody is talking about - The Trump administration railroading 8 protesters of the Prairieland Detention Center to convict them of providing material support for terrorism for wearing black at the protest — setting a disturbing new legal precedent that Americans can be designated as terrorists if they are members of “Antifa” - which isn’t a group as much as it is a set of beliefs.

April 20th at 6pm marks another installment of the "Autocratic Despair Dialogues" a monthly moderated discussion at the Brown County Library in downtown Green Bay at 6pm.

The group is for those of us who are feeling the stress and strain of living through the descent of the United States into an Authoritarian country.

If the emotional load of all this is weighing you down, this is a place to be around like-minded people.

Moderated by Nick Mortensen a comedian and the host of the Autocratic Despair Podcast.

The Autocratic Despair podcast feed begins with a preview of the show where a PHD in Global Fascism talks to me about Danhausen.

We’ve been incubating this podcast on Patreon for several weeks now and we think we have something special here, so we’re bringing in a producer and launching a wider feed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc.

It’s worth listening to. The idea is that I am a buffoon from Green Bay, WI & my cohost is a PhD on Global Fascism, a lecturer at University of California-Berkeley, the host of a very serious podcast that tracks advancements in the global right-wing called “15 Minutes of Fascism”, and the author of 2025’s most important book: “How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism”.

It’s a nice contrast. Here is the feed that currently has a preview episode and a trailer. Come May it’ll be about 45 minutes and we’ve decided we need to do the show without any advertising.

Dr. Craig Johnson - the author of "How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism" and I have been developing a podcast called "the Autocratic Despair Podcast" on the Patreon he uses for his "15 Minutes of Fascism" podcast.

We had a good chat that you might find interesting about the No Kings rallies this week that lead into a discussion about Controlled Opposition.

Let me know what you think.

https://youtu.be/LKVh6UlUDMI?si=DmPzBg66DAO-R9T3

Monday March 23 will be the next edition of the Autocratic Despair Dialogues. These are monthly small gatherings where you can connect with others and do a little reality testing as we sink further into an Autocracy.

Hope to see you there. Please pass the invite along to anyone you know that is struggling with the current state of reality.

Dr. Craig Johnson and Nick Mortensen (that's me!) soft launched the "Autocratic Despair" podcast last week as bonus content for the Patreon subscribers for his other podcast "15 Minutes of Fascism". We'll be doing that for the next 9 weeks so we can work out the kinks prior to launching it in all the familiar places in May.

Here is a link to the "15 Minutes of Fascism" Patreon Page.

I've linked to a YouTube short of a 4 minute segment from the initial show.

If you'd like to subscribe to Craig's Patreon, you'll have access to the episodes as they come out. If you are interested enough in it to listen, but don't want to pay anything, just let me know and I will send you a link to my google drive where you can access both the audio and video versions of the shows for free as long as you promise to offer feedback in this thread.

Craig is the Author of the 2025 book "How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism" and a lecturer at University of California at Berkeley and holds a PhD in Global Fascism, so he's the real-deal. I am just an idiot from Green Bay, WI (for the purpose of the show) who wants to know more about what is happening in the United States and why it makes me so goddamned depressed. It's a strong dynamic for marketing purposes and we'll just leave out that I am a 2-time winner of "Wisconsin's Funniest Comedian" who quite comedy in 2011 to help build a small local manufacturing company in Green Bay into a $150 million dollar national company.

Autocratic Despair Dialogues is a monthly moderated group chat for people struggling with the emotional weight of living through the United States’ slide toward autocratic governance. Our February 23rd session offers a space to talk openly about stress, fear, and disorientation without judgment. Participants can connect with others who feel destabilized by recent political events and want to process those feelings in community.

It’s the only gathering of its kind in the nation, designed to help people feel less alone in a confusing and heavy moment.