『Autocratic Despair: The Podcast』のカバーアート

Autocratic Despair: The Podcast

Autocratic Despair: The Podcast

著者： 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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  • Germany's AfD: A Glimpse Into Our Future

    Germany's AfD: A Glimpse Into Our Future
    2026/08/26
    Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson arrive at the same number this week — a six apiece — but the sixes are doing different jobs. Craig's is about Canada. The United States has restarted a tariff fight with its most serious long-term ally in both trade and foreign policy, Mark Carney is trying to be the adult in a room that no longer rewards adults, and Craig's read is that the whole thing exists because the Iran situation is going badly and Donald Trump wants different headlines. If jettisoning Canada were the only dumb thing this administration had done, Craig says, it would be world-historic. Instead it's somewhere around number forty-five on the list.Before Nick gives his number, the show takes a detour it did not plan and absolutely needed: Natalie Harp. The White House aide's devotion to Trump — the jogging alongside the motorcade, the sleeping arrangements at Mar-a-Lago, the sheer relentlessness of it — starts as disbelief and turns into one of the sharpest bits of analysis in the episode, because Craig recognizes the shape of it. This is what Versailles was for. You make the powerful live worse than they'd live at home, in tents in the courtyard of the king's castle, because proximity is power and the king wants everyone to remember it. The swamp Trump promised to drain turns out to run on exactly this logic: to have influence with this man, you must be physically in front of his eyeballs. Karoline Leavitt and Steven Cheung come up. So do the shoes. And Craig's all-time favorite version of the handshake power move makes an appearance — Barack Obama, Raúl Castro, a limp wrist held aloft in Havana, and the most VEEP moment in modern diplomatic history.Then Nick's six, and he earns it the hard way. He doesn't like wrestling with the idea that there are no good guys left in American politics. He knows it implicitly; he refuses to accept it, because accepting it feels insurmountable and he has kids. So he keeps a list instead — the stories that broke through his resistance. March 4, 2024, when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that states couldn't remove Trump from the ballot, despite conservative judges like Michael Luttig arguing the Fourteenth Amendment means what it says. The day the January 6 defendants got their pardons, including people convicted of seditious conspiracy who had staged an armed quick-reaction force across the Potomac, awaiting orders. Prairieland. Each one stretched his math — his conviction that this is a twenty-five-to-thirty-year problem the rest of us can shrink to fifteen or eighteen if we make a real effort, an effort this show considers itself the beginning of. Craig's addendum is the episode's quiet thesis: people say the arc of history bends toward justice, but we have to do the bending.And then the newest entry on the list, the one that got Nick anxious on a Sunday. Maggie Haberman and the New York Times reported that Hakeem Jeffries — House Democratic leader, presumptive Speaker if Democrats take the midterms, a man third from the presidency if you're counting chairs — held an off-the-books meeting with Jared Kushner at a mutual friend's place in Manhattan. Housing, immigration, cost of living. No press, no readout, no announcement.The show does what it does best: it stops being outraged long enough to explain. Who is Jared Kushner? A real estate heir whose father, Charles Kushner, went to federal prison in a witness-tampering case so baroque that Craig can only respond in Godfather quotes — a case that made Chris Christie's career, ended in a Trump pardon, and somehow terminates in an ambassadorship to France. Whose Harvard admission arrived after a $2.5 million family pledge, per reporter Daniel Golden. Who bought 666 Fifth Avenue for a record $1.8 billion the year before the crash and was rescued by a firm whose major investors include the Qatar Investment Authority. Whose post-White House fund took two billion dollars from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth over the objection of that fund's own screening panel. Nick is precise about what he's claiming: not where the man's heart is — where his money is. And it's in a set of monarchies that don't hold elections. There's also the detail Jodi Kantor reported in 2017, the one that reads like a Chekhov's gun: Benjamin Netanyahu was close enough to the family that teenage Jared gave up his bedroom for him and slept in the basement. Sarah Kendzior has called Kushner a weather marker — you'll know anyone is serious about transnational corruption the day he's even on the radar. He never is. Ivanka, Josh, the whole apparatus: untouched.Then Jeffries — Brooklyn, corporate lawyer, Pelosi's successor, the first Black man to lead a party in Congress, a politician so rehearsed he makes Jon Ossoff sound off the cuff, a man who talks like he's counting syllables on his fingers. Which matters, because a man with no unscripted moments does not have a secret meeting that leaks by accident. Nick flags the ...
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    35 分
  • Tucker Carlson is not Kidding

    Tucker Carlson is not Kidding
    2026/08/20
    Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson open the week split. Craig comes back from a weekend in the wilderness at a four personally, then looks at the rest of the planet and lands on a six — the Middle East, Trump's fraying relationships with allies, the Brazilian election, and a summer of literal fire. Nick is at a seven, and for once he skips the frivolous reason. He has something he wants to say instead.Since the start of this year, Black people have been found hanging from trees in public places across the country. Nick walks the audience through the cases, and the pattern he finds is worse than the one people expect, because it is quieter and it refuses to resolve.August 3, Jackson, Mississippi. A street called Road of Remembrance, a mostly Black neighborhood. Neighbors find a woman's body behind a vacant house. It takes days to identify her: Tasia Fortune, 29 years old, mother of four. Her aunt describes her as strong-minded and big-hearted. Her mother says she was at peace the last time they spoke and does not believe her daughter took her own life. Police will not say whether they suspect foul play. They will not release the incident report. A Jackson city councilman has asked federal prosecutors to step in. Months later, the honest summary is that nobody outside the investigation knows what happened to Tasia Fortune, and the not-knowing is the whole story.Nick refuses the easy version. He will not tell you these are all lynchings, because when you go case by case it gets complicated and sad. Demartravion "Trey" Reed, the Delta State University student found last fall, is the case that complicates it — his family had real questions and deserved answers, and the reporting also includes a detail the viral posts leave out. A year on, the family says the lawyer who promised an independent investigation stopped returning calls. What they have is a hole where an answer should be.That hole is the argument. There is a process meant to establish whether there was foul play, and in the American South in 2026 that process keeps failing. Juliana Umba Nzita, 16, was found in a Charlotte churchyard in May. The medical examiner ruled within three days. No autopsy. Her phone was never recovered. Police never interviewed the man who found her. A Charlotte Observer investigation surfaced all of it. Then Raleigh, where police actually did the work — pulled city and business cameras, held a press conference, showed video, produced witnesses — and the community did not believe a word of it.Nick's point lands there, and it is the reason he is at a seven. You can call that paranoia, or you can ask the harder question: why don't they believe it? The answer is every other case. The three-day rulings. The autopsies nobody performed. The phones nobody found. The promises nobody kept. And four hundred years before that, when the law called it anything but a lynching. You don't get to burn that trust on the cases that demanded it and then spend it back on the one where you finally did your job.Craig picks it up from the scholarship. Plausible deniability was never a bug in the lynching regime, it was the design. Everyone knew who did it and everyone knew nothing would happen. That posture requires different machinery now, but where police are friendly or complicit, the name still applies. And he names the second problem, which is that we have arrived at a country where evidence itself has stopped functioning — departments were burying angles and hiding tape in the eighties and nineties, and now anyone can type a sentence into a computer and produce footage. Craig closes on the part that gets lost: a suicide is a social failure on its own terms. Inadequate care, inadequate attention, sustained economic pressure. However these deaths are ultimately classified, the United States has failed these people systematically and on purpose.Then the show turns, because it has to, and because that turn is what this podcast does. Part two of the Tucker Carlson manifesto.Last week Nick and Craig walked all ten points of Carlson's ninety-eight-minute stream and ran out of runway. This week they recap the full ten — fair, sovereign, productive, beautiful, healthy, honest, optimistic, wise, decent, united — with Craig's analysis attached to each. Sovereign is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with better lighting. Beautiful is a dog whistle that could be summarized as one word, New York. Healthy is the old fascist habit of treating the body as a moral document, traceable back to the founding of the Boy Scouts. Honest is an anti-corruption appeal, and Craig's line for it is the money line: anti-corruption is the socialism of fools. United is as close to the fourteen words as you can get without saying them.Nick is furious that almost nobody in the podcast space clocked it. Muckrake got close. Most of the rest made fun of it. Craig is angrier: it is a monumental failure of political imagination to believe this can be ridiculed ...
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    1 時間 3 分
  • Trump's Hair Was a Longtime Subscriber to the Wrestling Observer Newsletter

    Trump's Hair Was a Longtime Subscriber to the Wrestling Observer Newsletter
    2026/08/13
    This week opens not with despair but with vanity — specifically, the sudden and much-discussed fullness of the President's hair. Somewhere around the Vegas speech, Trump's hairline staged a comeback that the internet spent a full week arguing about, and the White House declined to confirm, deny, or otherwise dignify. Nick's read is that we have now reached the stage of the republic where the toupee gets a press inquiry. And if it is a wig — still officially unproven, a hairpiece expert on record saying she doesn't think so — the truly confounding part is that the wig appears to be of his own hairstyle. The man had access to any hair he wanted, the full glory of the toupee, every option on the table, and he used the most powerful hairpiece money can buy to painstakingly recreate the exact hair he was already losing. He had the genie and wished for the same lamp. Nick, for the record, is rooting for the wig — a President with a wig collection has a weapon, a way to bury any bad headline by simply appearing in a new one, and honestly, given the alternative topics on the table this week, he would rather talk about a crew cut ("he's getting serious about Iran") than reckon with anything in the Epstein file.Which is where the Wrestling Observer Newsletter comes in, because Nick's actual plan for the day It All Ends is not to dance in the street. It's to check Reddit — the pro wrestling parody board r/SCJerk, where the running gag is that every famous person who dies "was a longtime subscriber to the Wrestling Observer Newsletter," a loving send-up of wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer's habit of shoehorning that detail into his obituaries. Shinzo Abe was a longtime subscriber. Every dead celebrity is, whether or not they could have plausibly known the newsletter existed. With Trump, of course, it would actually be believable — the man hosted WrestleManias and put Linda McMahon in the Cabinet. Nick's plan for the aftermath is to be conspicuously, obnoxiously circumspect: no celebrating, just a slow drip of passive-aggressive midwestern grace aimed directly at grieving MAGA, reposting every gloating tweet with a wounded "we have to do better, our fellow Americans are hurting right now." A bit laid on so thick that anyone who gets it knows it's a bit, and no one else can prove a thing.Despair numbers: Craig comes in measured, Nick a little higher, and the number is mostly an on-ramp to the thing that eats the rest of the episode — Tucker Carlson.Because Carlson has a manifesto, and it is a lot. In June he broke publicly with the Republican Party; he can't stomach a war with Iran waged, as he sees it, at Israel's behest, and he's taken to calling the two parties a uniparty state posing as a democracy. Then, in the first week of August, he laid out ten things America should be in a ninety-minute livestream — careful to insist it was not a party launch (no paperwork, no fundraising, technically true) and to frame the ten points as merely the goals of whatever comes next. Nick reads them to Craig one at a time, single words with Carlson's own explanations attached, and asks Craig to supply the historical analysis. What follows is Craig getting progressively, genuinely angrier as the list unspools.The ten: fair (equal laws, no special treatment for the Epstein class — which Craig clocks as the old fascist law-and-order appeal, the rule of law where they make the rules). Sovereign (freedom from foreign influence, "specifically nations like Israel," plus a swipe at banks and debt — which Craig names flatly as antisemitism, the claim that America is secretly controlled by an international conspiracy). Productive (an economy of tangible goods and American farmland over finance and surveillance — Craig hears the blood-and-soil fantasy, the productive native people versus the parasitic financial class, and calls it what it echoes: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the old-time religion of fascism). Beautiful (classical architecture, clean streets, an aggressive rejection of brutalism — a dog whistle stacked on a broken-windows racism about "unsafe" cities). Healthy (physical vigor, non-toxic food, and "absolute sobriety" — which sends Craig into the early-twentieth-century fitness-and-manliness movements that seeded a lot of right-wing organizing, plus a generational shot at the SSRI-and-Xanax crowd). Nick notes, for the record, that his own end-game plan involves becoming pleasantly addicted to benzodiazepines, and these people are now threatening even that.It keeps going. Honest (dismantle the classification system — a bone tossed to the 9/11 and UFO and birther truthers, and, as Craig notes, "anti-corruption is the socialism of fools"). Optimistic (pro-natalism, children at the center of the culture — which Craig hears as straightforwardly eugenic, a new race for a new age, and anti-woman to its core). Wise (education in "immutable truths" and "unchanging human nature" — potentially a ...
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    35 分
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