『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.

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  • 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
  • Jake & Logan Paul Bro Down w/Pete Hegseth

    Jake & Logan Paul Bro Down w/Pete Hegseth
    2026/09/23
    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 ...
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    35 分
  • Agent Fetterman & No Kings: Controlled Opposition?

    Agent Fetterman & No Kings: Controlled Opposition?
    2026/09/16
    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 ...
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    47 分
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