Autocratic Despair: The Podcast

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.

Autocratic Despair: The Podcast is a society podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 28 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts Autocratic Despair: The Podcast, a society show with 28 episodes published.

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  Episode #22

  An Elite Fraternity of Pants-Knowers

  Sep 30, 202632 minS2

  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-year-old father of three understands what he has become. There is a detour through Japanese selvedge denim and the ethics of not washing it. Craig reveals that he has had the same Tyvek wallet with a picture of the band "Devo" on it for 20 years. If you want to know what pants Milwaukee Tool is selling now, whether they're electric, and whether he bought them, listen. The episode closes on a milestone. It's episode 22, but it's the twentieth Nick and Craig have done together. Craig says it took him a couple of episodes to understand what they could do, that the comedic cooperation keeps getting better, and that the balance between entertainment, education, and politics has found its shape. Nick tells the audience the premise they've never actually explained: he and Craig didn't know each other. Nick was a listener to Craig's other show, 15 Minutes of Fascism, and could hear a man getting depressed in the funniest possible way throughout 2024. He reached out. This is the result. A commedia for the specific tragedy of watching your country drift toward authoritarianism, hosted by a Midwestern dad and a scholar who has, against all odds, hung in there while the dad does things. They're taking listener questions for the twenty-fifth. Send a link to your group chat. They won't let you down. 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.

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  Episode #21

  Jake & Logan Paul Bro Down w/Pete Hegseth

  Sep 23, 202635 minS2

  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 Crooks, 20, on a rooftop with a line of sight to the stage; Trump hit in the ear; Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old husband, father, and former volunteer fire chief, killed; David Dutch and James Copenhaver critically wounded; Crooks killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper; Director Kimberly Cheatle resigning ten days later. He also steelmans the anger, because the security failure was real. Then the turn. Craig walks through who gets blamed after political violence and why evidence rarely changes it, from the reaction to Charlie Kirk's assassination back through the late 1960s and the Years of Lead in Italy. Nick lays out the part he cannot get past: James Comey was indicted in April over a photo of seashells reading 86 47, while Jack Posobiec posted 86 46 about Joe Biden in 2022 and was never charged. So seashells get you indicted, but an accusation of attempted murder against an entire party produces no arrests at all. Craig's answer covers the loyalty test, the purge, the Night of the Long Knives, and what an authoritarian does when public support slips. Also discussed: what Trump's own FBI leadership, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, concluded about whether Crooks acted alone; what Attorney General Todd Blanche would and would not say; what Senator Chuck Grassley's newly released files actually show, including the Bob Dole alias and the anonymous donor who paid for the cremation; whether any of it survives contact with a conspiracy theory; and the one president in American history Craig can name whose opposition really did try to kill him, which turns out to be Abraham Lincoln and turns out not to be comforting. Coming next week: Jack Posobiec, the book Unhumans, and the endorsement it just picked up. 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.

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  Episode #20

  Agent Fetterman & No Kings: Controlled Opposition?

  Sep 16, 202647 minS2

  Nick and Dr. Craig come down from the ledge this week. Both hosts drop to a five, back from the 7.5 they each posted last episode — the highest Dr. Craig had ever offered in nine months of the show, a number that on his logarithmic scale represented a professional assessment, not a mood. This week, the mood lightened. The assessment didn't. What lowered the number is stranger than what raised it. Nick is at a five because, he explains, Agent John Fetterman has finally reached the inner circle of Trump's regime, just as planned. A little ahead of schedule, actually. Have no fear, Dr. Craig. America's finest patriot was entrusted with a sweet speaking slot on Night One of the Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas — a three-night event at the American Airlines Center that the hosts describe as "something to do in Dallas, Texas in the heat of September that isn't watching professional football." It was the first midterm convention either party has held in fifty years, staged while the NFL season kicked off on the same nights, and Nick was not watching. He is not that kind of a sicko. Before Agent Fetterman, though, there's the matter of whether America hit a sneaky new low. Trump floated a five-thousand-dollar dividend to every American who votes Republican in the midterms — announced live, at the convention, as though the economy entitled him to hand out checks from a government that has no mechanism for doing it. Speaker Mike Johnson's initial reaction was the closest thing to pushback anyone managed: "I would assume, yes, he'd need Congress to act, and that's a creative idea." Craig hears that and translates: "That's the political equivalent of hey, good job, champ. Nice try." Within a day Johnson was carrying the water, once the talking points arrived. Nick frames the whole stretch as Trump's Game Show Host period — the era where the president of the United States started offering the public cash prizes for loyalty, and the only debate was whether it qualified as a new low or a continuation of the $1.776 billion slush fund that came before it. The convention itself is a showcase of what Craig calls the humiliation ritual. Trump's speech in support of Ken Paxton, the Texas Senate candidate, was less an endorsement than a public hazing — Trump repeatedly told the crowd Paxton was the greatest attorney general in history while also letting them know he didn't like how Paxton looked or how Paxton talked. Craig explains the mechanic: this is medieval court politics, the prostration before the king, the demonstration that the underling will accept anything the king says and smile. George Washington refused the title "Your Excellency" and asked to be called Mr. President. Trump loves the opposite — the bigger the humiliation, the more loyalty it proves. On Night Two, Ted Cruz delivered a speech naming three Democrats — Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, and James Talarico — and after each name, an attendee audible on the broadcast shouted "he should be shot." Three times, three names, same voice. Cruz did not react, did not stop, did not acknowledge it. A spokeswoman declined to say whether he'd heard it. Later, Cruz posted the clip himself with the shouts still audible and framed the speech as a warning about rising political extremism. Two of the three targets are Muslim, and the speech fell on the eve of the September 11 anniversary and the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk's assassination. Which brings the show to Fetterman, and to the rhetorical device Nick designed to let both hosts say everything they need to say about a complicated figure. Agent Fetterman — the conceit that John Fetterman is a deep-cover operative who has spent years building the most convincing disguise in American political history so that he could infiltrate the far right and save the republic from within. The hoodie. The basketball shorts. The stroke. The Mar-a-Lago visits. The Jesse Watters appearances. All cover. The fact that he went on national television and called socialism an anti-American way of life — at a Republican convention — is merely evidence of his commitment to the mission. The fact that his own Pennsylvania delegation is calling him a disgrace and organizing a 2028 primary challenge is exactly what would happen if the disguise were working. Nick doesn't believe it. He wishes he did. Because the alternative is that John Fetterman is simply a man who figured out that validating the other side costs him nothing he cares about keeping — as long as he holds the pro-choice credential, he can walk into any room in MAGA world and walk out a Democrat. And there's a word for that: controlled opposition. Craig defines the term through its history — from the origins of parliamentary opposition in Britain, through Russia's managed democracy and Surkov's playpen parties, to the central diagnostic that Nick has been turning over for months: the question isn't whether it IS controlled opposition; the question is what would be different if it were. What would be different about Fetterman? He'd hold a credential the base couldn't argue with. He'd validate the other side on everything that actually moves. He'd be reliably present at their events and reliably absent from his own committee work. Which is what he's doing. Craig extends the analysis to Talarico, the show's fraught former franchise subject — now the Democratic Senate nominee against the humiliated Paxton — and the Clinton-era triangulation strategy that Craig argues has produced thirty years of the Democratic agenda moving nowhere. Not only is it wrong, he says. It also won't work. Nick pulls them both back from the edge: calling the whole Democratic Party controlled opposition is a nihilism accelerant, and that nihilism is the optimal outcome for the regime. He's not making that accusation. What he is saying is that controlled opposition as a concept needs to be in the public vocabulary, because you cannot diagnose a disease you don't have a name for. He can find exactly one figure in the political-media landscape willing to use the phrase — Sarah Kendzior — and he suspects the reason nobody else goes there is not that it's wrong but that it's too expensive to consider. People would rather believe in a broken party than an empty one. There is also a theory about the professional wrestler Danhausen being a psyop to normalize Peter Thiel's physical presence in American public life. It is ridiculous. Nick finds it a little bit plausible. Craig does not dismiss it as firmly as one might hope. The show closes on the No Kings rallies — the October 27 event, the arc from four million to eight million marchers, and the honest conversation about what branded protest has opened and what it has nerfed. Nick is going. He's telling you to go. He's also telling you to paint your face, leave your phone in the car, and never follow a hippie to a second location. And he's asking, as the leaves turn, whether anyone has noticed that eight million people in the streets produced the last two years of Trump's presidency, and whether maybe it's time to try something different while also showing up for the thing that's scheduled. Comedy, commedia, fascism, autocracy, and a functioning sense of fun about the end of the republic. The abyss is better with friends. Names in this episode: Nick Mortensen, Dr. Craig Johnson, John Fetterman, Donald Trump, Mike Johnson, Ken Paxton, Ted Cruz, James Talarico, Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, Dave McCormick, Tim Scott, Dr. Oz, Conor Lamb, Charlie Kirk, Aaron Rupar, Sarah Kendzior, Peter Thiel, Danhausen, Vladislav Surkov, Vladimir Putin, Jasmine Crockett, Kaitlan Collins, Malcolm Kenyatta, Chris Deluzio, Brendan Boyle, Bernie Sanders, AOC, Lincoln Perry, Byron Donalds, Joe Rogan, Kristen Welker. 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.

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  Episode #19

  The True Texas Project is Our AfD & It's Taken Over Fort Worth

  Sep 10, 20261h 3mS2

  Both hosts at 7.5. Craig's highest number in 9 months of the show. Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson both come in at seven and a half this week. That number matters. In nine months of this show, Dr. Craig — whose scale is logarithmic, meaning a four is much worse than a three — has never gone higher. A seven and a half from Craig is not a mood. It is a professional assessment from a man with a PhD in fascism studies who does not use words carelessly. They earn it. Two episodes ago, the show previewed an election in a German state called Saxony-Anhalt. They were careful — every number was dated, every projection hedged with "as of taping." This week, the results are in, and the results are worse than the polls suggested. The AfD — the Alternative for Germany, a party founded in 2013 by economics professors angry about the euro and now classified by Germany's own domestic intelligence service as right-wing extremist — took 43.9 percent of the vote. They more than doubled their 2021 result of 20.8 percent. They won 39 seats in an 83-seat parliament, falling three short of an outright majority. The Christian Democrats, the center-right party that governed Saxony-Anhalt for a generation with 37 percent just five years ago, collapsed to 17.2 and lost 25 seats in a single night. Craig walks the audience through what the numbers mean. Three seats short sounds like a loss. It is not a loss. To keep the AfD from governing, every other party in the parliament — the CDU, the SPD, the Greens, the Left, and a brand-new populist party called BSW — must agree to form a coalition together. Five parties that agree on almost nothing except that the sixth one cannot be allowed to govern. And on election night, BSW's lead candidate said his party has "overlaps" with AfD positions and that it would be "completely undemocratic" to exclude the largest party from government entirely. The AfD's 39 seats plus BSW's 5 equals 44. That is a majority. The smallest party in the room just offered to open the door for the biggest one. The man who won is Ulrich Siegmund. He is thirty-five years old. And in November of 2023, he sat in a villa outside Potsdam — the lake town outside Berlin where Truman and Stalin divided postwar Europe, and a short drive from the villa on the Wannsee where the Nazis planned the logistics of the Final Solution — at a secret meeting where far-right figures discussed a plan they called remigration: the mass removal of asylum seekers, residents, and German citizens with migration backgrounds deemed unassimilated. Investigative journalists at Correctiv exposed the meeting in January of 2024. More than a million Germans marched in response, in hundreds of cities, carrying signs that read "Never again is now" and "We are the firewall." A million people in the street bought thirty months. The man from the villa just won his election. Nick lays the growth curve on the table: the party that became the Nazi Party started with fifty-five members and a numbering trick — membership cards beginning at 501 so the room looked ten times bigger than it was. Thirteen years later, that party governed Germany. The AfD was founded in 2013. Thirteen years later, it holds 44 percent of Saxony-Anhalt and leads the national polls. And in two weeks, on September 20, two more German states vote — Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the AfD has doubled from 16.7 to 36 in the polls, and Berlin, the capital, the multicultural city everyone assumed was immune, where the AfD has gone from 9 percent to 18. Same pattern, every state: the far right doubles and the center-right halves. Then Nick pivots — and the pivot is the episode. Because the word remigration did not stay in Germany. It is on a conference flyer. In Fort Worth, Texas. Published by an organization called the True Texas Project. The show introduces the audience to Tarrant County — not the rural Texas they imagine when they hear "north Texas," but the county where the Dallas Cowboys play, home to Fort Worth, a city of a million people bigger than San Francisco, in the fourth-largest metro in America. A county that was 75 percent white twenty years ago and is now 42 percent white, majority-minority, median age thirty-five. The last big urban county in Texas that Republicans still control. The county where Biden won by 1,800 votes in 2020 and Trump won by 42,000 in 2024. And the county where, on September 1, a five-person commissioners court voted three to two along party lines to cut 92 Election Day polling places — a thirty percent reduction — while also eliminating voting sites at the University of Texas at Arlington and two community college campuses, over the objections of the NAACP, the ACLU of Texas, and more than a hundred speakers who showed up to say no. The room chanted "shame" after the vote. Commissioner Roderick Miles called it a modern-day poll tax. Commissioner Alisa Simmons, who is running against the county judge in November, said to his face: this is not about cost, this is about power, this is campaigning from the dais. The True Texas Project was founded in 2009 as the NE Tarrant Tea Party by Julie McCarty. After the El Paso Walmart massacre of 2019 — twenty-three people murdered by a gunman with a Great Replacement manifesto — McCarty wrote publicly that she did not condone the actions but certainly understood where they came from. Her husband Fred wrote that you cannot demographically replace a once proud, strong people without getting blowback. Later that year, the group rebranded. The new name reflects, per their own website, an expanded vision and reach. Both of those things are true, in that order. The organization now has fifteen chapters across Texas, funded through a PAC that in 2022 received over ninety-two percent of its money from Defend Texas Liberty — a PAC funded almost entirely by West Texas oil billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, the same PAC whose president hosted Nick Fuentes for seven hours at its offices in October 2023. After that story broke, the PAC renamed itself the Texas Freedom Fund for the Advancement of Justice. Same wallet. New paint. That wallet also funds Bo French, the former Tarrant County GOP chair now running for the Railroad Commission, who spoke at a True Texas Project event and called for deporting a hundred million people at CPAC. And Leigh Wambsganss, the Patriot Mobile executive who built the Southlake school board takeover and co-founded her PAC with Tim O'Hare — the same O'Hare who now presides as county judge over the commissioners court that just cut the polling places. One money trail. One ecosystem. One county where the tightest Senate race in Texas since 1988 — Ken Paxton against James Talarico — will be decided in November with 92 fewer doors. Comedy, commedia, autocracy, fascism, and a functioning sense of fun about the end of the republic — a show about authoritarianism that somehow stays worth listening to. The abyss is better with friends. Names in this episode: Nick Mortensen, Dr. Craig Johnson, Ulrich Siegmund, Alice Weidel, Martin Sellner, Alexander Gauland, Björn Höcke, Elon Musk, Adolf Hitler, Julie McCarty, Fred McCarty, Tim O'Hare, Matt Krause, Manny Ramirez, Alisa Simmons, Roderick Miles Jr., Tim Dunn, Farris Wilks, Jonathan Stickland, Ken Paxton, James Talarico, Catherine Godby 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.

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  Episode #18

  Laura Loomer is Trump's Rasputin

  Sep 2, 202646 minS2

  Every court gets one eventually. The unvetted outsider who holds no office, runs nothing, answers to nobody, is despised by the entire palace — and has the emperor's ear anyway. Russia got Rasputin. America got Laura Loomer, and this week she finally crossed the blood-brain barrier for Nick Mortensen, who has spent years scrupulously refusing to discuss her. That refusal ends now, and Dr. Craig Johnson — UC Berkeley lecturer, PhD in fascism studies — is on hand to explain why the comparison isn't a joke. First, the numbers. Craig comes in at a six, and his is the structural one: the federal fight over mail-in ballots went through a full whiplash cycle this week, with the Supreme Court clearing a procedural path for the administration's Postal Service rule, a district judge lifting her block, two dozen states immediately suing over the final rule itself, and the courts fighting about it again within days. Craig's read cuts through the litigation: nobody is ending mail voting. They only need to make it harder enough, in enough places, for enough people — and the House stays where it is. He reaches back to Dred Scott for precedent on federal overreach in a rightward direction, and tells a Soviet joke about a midnight mob and the young men in suits chasing after them, asking which way the people went so they can lead them there. Nick names the moment: a new low. Not the fun kind, where somebody embarrasses themselves on the White House lawn. The structural kind, where a branch of government signals it will hand over whatever gets asked for. Nick's six is the woman herself. He explains, honestly, why he's avoided her — partly to deny her even a growing platform, and partly because he didn't know how to talk about her without walking into misogyny. That second problem gets real treatment, including the story of how Nick very nearly minored in feminist history in college and the department chair whose discouragement he was certain was secretly a Willy Wonka test. It was not a test. There was no prize. What follows on tape is a genuine tightrope act, performed with full awareness of the tightrope. The résumé: born 1993, Project Veritas alum, coiner of her own verb, self-described proud Islamophobe, banned in her day from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, PayPal, Venmo, Uber, and — most impressively — Lyft. She chained herself to Twitter's headquarters. She ran for Congress twice. And in this administration she has become something no title could contain: the woman who walked out of a single Oval Office meeting having gotten National Security Council staffers and the director of the NSA fired. Trump, asked about it: she's a very strong person. Then this past week. Loomer posted a video naming five Black women — Angie Nixon, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Cori Bush, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — and attached to them a slur so squalid that Nick reads it exactly once. In the same thread, she wrote that she knew it would be called racist. She posted anyway. Nixon — Florida's brand-new Democratic Senate nominee, fresh off a primary upset — answered with the reply of the year, involving Queen Latifah, a certain dog food video, and a closing instruction: when referring to me, it's Representative Angie Nixon. However, you can call me Senator. Loomer's escalation from there lands, in Craig's professional estimation, somewhere between the nineteenth century and a mimeographed neo-Nazi zine. It's the kind of racist, Nick observes, that makes racists quit — do I sound like that? Even Marjorie Taylor Greene denounced her — a thousand percent, calling this Trump's new MAGA and wanting nothing to do with it. Which brings the show to the history: we get into the feud that Loomer has had with Marjorie Taylor Greene, and we should all appreciate Nick's restraint in not characterizing it as a "beef." There is a documented prior chapter between these two women that you will simply have to hear to believe, and Nick walks through it on the narrowest tightrope of the episode. Craig's live reaction is its own review. The analysis is where the title gets earned. Everything on Loomer's résumé is designed to be ridiculous, and the ridiculousness is the mechanism: the White House can use what she says and disown who she is in the same breath. She absorbs the damage — she's a sin eater for them — so nobody with a title has to say the thing. She wasn't invited to Pam Bondi's Epstein binder photo op alongside Jack Posobiec, Libs of TikTok, Liz Wheeler, and DC Draino; every one of the binder kids was a punchline by July, and the woman who didn't get invited outranked the room she wasn't in. Her two million followers aren't the point. Her audience is the enforcer class — she doesn't persuade the public, she audits the staff, and the NSC firings were a loyalty audit delivered by a woman with no job. Craig lands the historical comparison: Rasputin — unvetted, running nothing, hated by the whole palace except the emperor, cultivating strangeness as part of the persona. Nick adds Barbara Walter's term for figures who build a brand on division as a country slides toward conflict: ethnic entrepreneurs. And then the tell — Loomer's July about-face on Ukraine after interviewing Zelenskyy in a Kyiv bomb shelter, admitting she'd been bamboozled by Russian propaganda, with Trump amplifying the clip approvingly. Craig closes on the bleakest sentence of the night: one of the dividing lines in the new Republican coalition is going to be whether you're openly antisemitic — and there are living voters who remember the last time that was ordinary American politics. Along the way, a somber marker: it has been nearly a year since Charlie Kirk was assassinated, and Craig — who was teaching in a classroom when it happened — gives an unplanned, remarkable stretch on what he feared that day, why the killer's identity denied the movement the martyr it wanted, and how the absence of Kirk, who would have turned 35 just in time for 2028, is quietly reshaping two elections. The back half belongs to the WNBA, having the best season in its thirty-year history — record ratings, sold-out expansion teams in Toronto and Portland, a landmark players' contract — and to the manufactured campaign to turn the league into a culture-war front. The full primer: the Breonna Taylor season, the league that wore Vote Warnock shirts against its own owner Kelly Loeffler and flipped a Senate seat the day before January 6th, Brittney Griner's ten months in Russian custody, the racialized discourse that arrived with Caitlin Clark. Then the six-week manufacture: a buried Sophie Cunningham quote, OutKick and Clay Travis attacking the league from both directions in the same month, fifty demonstrators and a guy in a frog suit, and Enes Kanter Freedom — a genuine Turkish dissident who knows exactly what it means to be hunted for who he is — taking a baseline seat at Natasha Cloud's game to target her for who she is. The number that ends the argument: transgender women who have played in the WNBA in thirty seasons — zero. The closest the league has come is Layshia Clarendon, nonbinary, beloved for twelve years. It's a debate about nobody, aimed at the somebodies on the floor, and Craig traces the protection myth beneath it all the way back to Birth of a Nation. Natasha Cloud gets the last word, in a letter to trans kids who were never in the building: you belong, you're loved, you're seen. This is the commedia for your particular tragedy — comedy about fascism, autocracy, and the authoritarian playbook that somehow stays fun to listen to. The abyss is better with friends. Names in this episode: Nick Mortensen, Dr. Craig Johnson, Laura Loomer, Angie Nixon, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Cori Bush, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump, JD Vance, Pam Bondi, Jack Posobiec, Liz Wheeler, Elon Musk, Kamala Harris, Lindsey Graham, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Vladimir Putin, Queen Latifah, Ashley Moody, Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, Charlie Kirk, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Barbara Walter, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sophie Cunningham, Caitlin Clark, Clay Travis, Enes Kanter Freedom, Royce White, Natasha Cloud, Brittney Griner, Kelly Loeffler, Raphael Warnock, Breonna Taylor, Layshia Clarendon, Olivia Miles, Natisha Hiedeman, Paige Bueckers, Jason Williams, Colin Kaepernick, Billie Eilish, James Cameron, Rasputin. 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.

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