『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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10月19日まで。※適用条件あり

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.

© 2026 Genuine Article Media 政治・政府 政治学 社会科学
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  • We've Canceled International Election Observers for the Midterms?!

    We've Canceled International Election Observers for the Midterms?!
    2026/10/16
    Dr. Craig Johnson opens this week’s Autocratic Despair at a seven, and he gets there fast. On the morning they recorded, federal agents searched the Washington home of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota as part of an immigration investigation reportedly tied to paperwork her late father filed when she was a child. Craig, a UC Berkeley lecturer with a PhD in Global Fascism Studies, walks new listeners through what denaturalization is, who the United States has historically stripped of citizenship (war criminals, terrorists, Nazis who slipped in after the war), and why it has never once been attempted against a sitting member of Congress. He calls it a new low, and the show agrees. Nick Mortensen, the former comedian from Green Bay who serves as the show’s audience proxy, explains how this summer the State Department convened a symposium on “far-left political terrorism,” and Marco Rubio told foreign officials the left is now counterterrorism’s target, and then the government published a hundred-page report titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism” naming forty-three people and groups as tools of Cuban subversion. Black Lives Matter, CodePink, the Democratic Socialists of America, the mayor of New York, Ben of Ben & Jerry’s, George Floyd, who is dead, and Ilhan Omar. The list came first. The search warrant came later. Craig connects it to the Red Scares of the 1920s and 1950s and to the way a real kernel, foreign influence networks like the one tied to Neville Roy Singham, gets stretched until it covers anyone the administration doesn’t like. They also work out, live, what happens to a House seat when its member is removed. Short version: nobody gets appointed, and the district goes dark.Co-host Nick Mortensen is also at a 7, but for completely different reasons. Nick's driver, which is about an invitation nobody sent. For the first time since 2002, the United States didn’t invite the OSCE, the 57-nation body whose observers have watched every federal election for twenty-four years. The only other countries to shut them out recently are Russia and Belarus, which prompts a lengthy and possibly libelous comparison to Wisconsin’s exclusion from lists of top party schools on the grounds that amateurs and professionals don’t belong on the same list, and Craig’s confession about why he chose Berkeley over Madison: a union, and a couch on fire in the street on his visit day. Nick concedes the honest kernel, which comes from David Becker, one of the most credentialed election experts in the country, who says the observers’ absence will have zero effect on the election’s security. Nick spends a while convinced Becker is having an existential crisis, then looks up his résumé and realizes the crisis is his own. Becker’s right about the ballots. The question is why an administration wouldn’t want an independent report saying the election was clean, and who’s watching instead. The Justice Department says it’ll send a record thousand federal monitors in November, drawn from a gutted Civil Rights Division and volunteers from somewhere in the government. Picture the home team telling the league not to send refs this year, because their assistant coaches have it covered. Nobody’s saying the game’s rigged. Nobody would accept it from the Bears either.The back half of the episode is a tribute, and the show means it. Nick and Craig play an extended clip from the subscriber-only Weekender edition of The Muckrake, hosted by Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman, which Jared generously let them run outside the paywall. The clip is from a Byron Donalds for Governor event in Florida, where a woman takes the microphone and the conversation turns, unexpectedly and sadly, to grandparents’ rights and a grandson she hasn’t seen since August. What Jared does with that moment is the reason it’s here: fifteen different contexts, all of them right, delivered with an insight that makes everyone else in this space look like they’re guessing. Nick says plainly that The Muckrake is the standard this show measures itself against, that it may be unreachable, and that getting seventy percent of the way there would make for a pretty good podcast. Craig takes the clip somewhere new: why the grandparents now voting in American elections are Gen X as much as boomers, why Gen X has voted more conservatively than the generations around it, what mass politics looked like when millions showed up to rallies, and what atomization means for a country where nobody knows what anybody else knows and the only politics that cuts through is grievance. Nick predicts Christopher Rufo has just found his next campaign.It’s an episode about authoritarian drift told by two people who would honestly rather be laughing, and mostly are. A commedia for your particular brand of tragedy, on the subject of fascism, from a Green Bay dad and a Berkeley scholar who keep finding a way to have fun with the end ...
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    47 分
  • The Bay Area AI Orgy Scene as Scouted by Dr. Craig

    The Bay Area AI Orgy Scene as Scouted by Dr. Craig
    2026/10/08
    Dr. Craig Johnson opens this week’s Autocratic Despair at a seven, which on his logarithmic scale is as low as he’s ever been, and the reason is Brazil. The first round of the presidential election put Lula da Silva, the incumbent, at about 45 percent, behind Flavio Bolsonaro, son of the jailed former president Jair Bolsonaro, at 47. Craig explains the two-round system for American listeners, why no candidate in Lula’s position has won a runoff since Brazil’s return to democracy, and what it means when nearly every major country in Latin America is already run by the right. Nick, who has a documented fandom for Don Jr., gets the parallel immediately: a president goes to jail and the country turns to his son. Craig’s answer to “what actually happens if Flavio wins” is the heart of the number: the rollback of environmental, indigenous, queer, racial and gender protections, Jair walking out of prison, and the end of the dream of the left that grew up under the dictatorship. Then he tells you about Lula himself, a man who taught himself to read, lost a finger in a factory press, and spent decades organizing a machinists’ union under military rule, and about the interview that brought Craig to tears: “I was you yesterday. Be me tomorrow.” The comedy will return. Not yet.Nick’s number goes to six and a half, and his driver is a sentence he says carefully: it looks like the regime is soft-launching its next ethnic cleansing. To explain, he introduces two men. The first is Christopher Rufo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the most effective activist on the American right of the last half decade: the man who took “critical race theory” from an academic term to an executive order in three weeks, then did the same to “woke” and “DEI.” Nick gives Rufo his due and then reads the 2021 tweet in which Rufo explained his own method, in public, in advance, and dares anyone to stop him. Craig’s read on what that is, historically, is one of the throws of the week. The second man is Bo French, former Tarrant County Republican chair, ally of the True Texas Project, and now the GOP nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, whom Nick admits he cut from an earlier episode because an accurate description would have strained credulity. He gives you two items from the file and lets you decide whether you’d have believed him. One involves a poll about Jews and Muslims that got Dan Patrick to ask him to resign. The other involves Native Americans and the word “deport.”French’s post about a photo of Indian-American students cheering at a Texas football game is what gave Rufo and his co-host Jonathan Keeperman, who posted for years as “Lomez,” an excuse to release a podcast episode titled “The Indian Question.” Craig, who studies fascism for a living, stops the show when he hears the title: for the non-fascists in the room, that is not a dog whistle, it’s a klaxon. He explains where “the Jewish question” came from in nineteenth-century Europe and what the answer to it was called in 1942. Nick walks through what Rufo and Lomez proposed, including forced deportation of the unassimilated, a complete immigration ban, and an “assimilation hazing” of vulgar racism for the citizens allowed to stay, who must, in Lomez’s words, prove their American-ness. Craig introduces the concept of provisional whiteness, the deal Jewish Americans were historically offered, and explains why it’s now being offered to Indian-Americans with a condition attached. Nick asks the question he’s been building toward: is this a trial balloon for the next phase of ICE? Craig’s answer is unhedged, and then they go somewhere stranger: what this means for J.D. Vance, whose wife is Indian-American, whether Nick Fuentes or Rufo gets to pick the next scapegoat, and why the man who’s the best there’s ever been at this might be gambling on a group too small to rally a country against.Then Craig says the quiet part about his own career. He wishes he studied wigs. A colleague at Berkeley wrote a history dissertation on wig culture, and when you tell people that, they say “huh, neat.” When Craig tells people he studies fascism, they say “what’s going on, help me.” He would like, one day, for his master’s degree to be irrelevant.And then the show turns. During the Packers game, Nick saw three national ad spots for the Texas Senate race, two for Ken Paxton and James Talarico and a third featuring Angela Paxton, Ken’s ex-wife, explaining why you should vote for him, without once saying his name. Nick has questions about the earlier drafts of that script, the negotiation that produced the final one, and what she got out of it, and he answers them in voices. Craig’s reaction is three words involving Hillary Clinton. Then Nick does something you don’t hear on political podcasts: he takes a self-inventory on air. He has been enjoying the True Texas Project’s podcast more than he ...
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    53 分
  • An Elite Fraternity of Pants-Knowers

    An Elite Fraternity of Pants-Knowers
    2026/09/30
    Netanyahu came to New York, and Nick's number held at six. That's where this week's Autocratic Despair begins: with the Prime Minister of Israel on the floor of the United Nations, dozens of delegations walking out before he opened his mouth, and a comedy podcast from Green Bay, Wisconsin trying to figure out how worried to be about a man who called the people leaving the room moral cowards and then told the ones who stayed that their leaders thank him privately.Dr. Craig Johnson, UC Berkeley lecturer and PhD in Global Fascism Studies, opens at a six as well. He went camping. He is personally more relaxed. The world, he notes, has not let up. His driver this week is a story most Americans missed: Saudi Arabia and the part of the European Union that handles fossil fuel imports from the Arabian Peninsula, and what happens to gas prices when a kingdom decides it has leverage. Nick, a former comedian and manufacturing professional, admits energy markets are not the show's area of expertise, then asks the only question that matters to a guy with three kids and a crossover vehicle: how much further can it go? Craig's answer involves earthquakes, poisoned rivers, and the phrase "not quite enough."Then Netanyahu. Nick's driver walks through the week as the audience proxy who reads the news and can't quite believe it. Donald Trump spoke at the UN too, just not the same day, because he had Xi Jinping and his wife at the White House and, as everyone is saying, nobody has ever been tougher on China. Craig adds the detail that Trump apparently floated selling Xi American weapons. Craig's read: what, you like Vietnam surplus? They already have those.For listeners unfamiliar with the man, Nick does the three lines: Prime Minister of Israel, longest-serving one they've ever had, not well regarded at home. Under indictment for corruption in Israel. Facing an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court abroad. Election in a few weeks. And newly not well regarded in New York, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged to arrest him if he set foot in the city, called him a war criminal, and declared him not welcome. Nick's honest assessment: Mamdani probably lacked the jurisdiction, so it's close to nothing, but it isn't nothing. Netanyahu's response was to cut a promo. A video aimed at the mayor by name. Shame on you, Mr. Mamdani. Then he did it again from the UN podium, working in Mamdani's friendship with streamer Hasan Piker for good measure. Craig notes Netanyahu's party has been running ads in Israel with Mamdani edited in next to prominent figures, which tells you something about who the campaign is actually for. Craig also observes the strangest thing happening on the American right this year: it's splitting on Israel, and neither the right wing of the party nor the center is going to be pleased with any of this ahead of the midterms.The speech itself gets the full treatment. The walkout. The moral cowards line. The claim that attacking Iran was one of the easiest decisions he's ever made. West Bank settler violence dismissed as the work of juvenile delinquents, which prompts Craig to do a real explainer, for new listeners, on what the settler movement is, where it came from, and why it's been part of Israeli political culture since the aftermath of 1967. Craig on the diplomatic corner Israel has backed itself into is one of the best stretches of the episode: not a lecture, an explanation of how a country ends up with its prime minister yelling at an empty room. You'll have to hear it.Then the mic drop. Netanyahu closed by declaring that Israel didn't commit genocide, Israel prevented genocide, and that the finding against him is the greatest lie of the century. Nick's reaction is the emotional center of the episode, played straight and then not: that's a real load off his mind, because this whole thing is a sticky wicket, he hasn't been watching it closely because every time he looks it doesn't look good, the United States is definitely complicit in the sense that we supplied the weapons, and he doesn't want to be seen as antisemitic, of which there's plenty going around without him. So he'll defer to the expert, and Netanyahu says it isn't one. Craig's summary: up is down, war is peace. The show does not resolve the question this week. It names the discomfort of a person of ordinary decency trying to look at something and finding he'd rather not. That's the autocratic despair the title is about, and it's why the number stays at six instead of moving.And then, because this is a show about fascism that is somehow genuinely fun, Nick tells Craig about the pants.He was at the Home Depot on Saturday returning a toilet seat for the second time in six weeks. What he found there, and how close he came, is a story about brand loyalty, pocket architecture, the elite fraternity of men who know a specific Timberland work pant, the correct number of backup pairs to keep in a package at the ready, and the moment a 48-...
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    32 分
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