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Autocratic Despair

Autocratic Despair

By: 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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Episodes
  • Oops! All Talarico Talk

    Oops! All Talarico Talk
    Jun 11 2026

    We had a whole episode planned. A Delaney Hall follow-up with court receipts. A cold open about a flesh-eating parasite crawling north through Texas. A thing about active clubs. And then, on Monday, James Talarico opened his mouth on a podcast — and broke our format in half.

    So this week is exactly what it says on the box. No filler. All Talarico. The way they used to do it before they ruined the cereal.

    The Number. Dr. Craig comes in at a 4.5 — and reminds us his scale is logarithmic, so that's worse than it sounds. The despair has a specific source this week, and by the end he's describing it as "a full-on nineteenth-century, God-is-dead sadness, deep in an existential hole where James Talarico used to be." We'll let that be the cold open.

    Talarico Talk (all of it). For weeks this has been the show's load-bearing bit: we delusionally, willfully, knowingly believe in James Talarico as a totem of a better future — a vessel we admitted we were setting up to fail. This week, he failed. Asked on Dan Cogdell's podcast about the "pro-surgery-for-minors" attack — a softball, a chance to plant a flag — Talarico instead said, "Just to correct you, I oppose gender reassignment surgeries for minors." No "but." No fight. Just concession.

    We get into why that one sentence landed like it did — against a record where this is the man who stood on the Texas House floor and called trans kids "perfect, beautiful, sacred," called this care "life-saving," and voted against the ban. This isn't a fuzzy record getting cleaned up. It's a man setting down a signature, theological conviction to make a campaign problem go away.

    Craig gets genuinely angry — which, if you know Craig, is news. We walk through what "gender reassignment surgery for minors" actually means (surgery is the rarest sliver of trans care for young people; most of it is social transition, and for some, puberty blockers — ordinary medicine), why the phrasing is a rhetorical trap designed to make you collapse all of it into one scary word, and why conceding the smallest, most-defenseless group is the oldest, most cynical move in the Democratic playbook. Nick takes a beat to address the men listening who don't want to think about this at all — and offers three questions that settle it from first principles. Craig brings the Gavin Newsom parallel, the consultant-class critique, and a Mr. Rogers history lesson about what courage-at-a-cost actually looks like.

    Where we land: trans Americans are about two and a half times more likely to be victims of violence than the rest of us. That's the number every other opinion has to answer to. Talarico is still, unequivocally, a thousand times better than Ken Paxton — Craig would hold his nose and vote for him — but the part where we got to believe without flinching? He took that himself, in one sentence, to a friendly room. The totem's got a crack in it. We're not going to paint over it, because painting over it is the whole disease.

    Dr. Craig Is Fun at Parties: Orange Soda. A palate cleanser, and a one-step connection most people don't see coming. How a wartime Coca-Cola executive in Nazi Germany, cut off from the syrup, invented the orange soda still in your fridge. Yes — that one. (Bring it up at a party. Watch the room.)

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    54 mins
  • The World Doesn't Stop...But it Should

    The World Doesn't Stop...But it Should
    Jun 4 2026
    DR. Craig returns from the wilderness this week — literally. After a week in the desert painting rocks, running trails, and pointedly not looking at his phone, he comes back with a thesis: the internet is brain poison. Short-form content in particular, he argues, is engineered to dumb you down, and the only real antidote is long-form — books, podcasts, actual journalism, the kind of thing that lets you slow down and think. (He spent part of his detox trying to explain fascism in the voice of Cookie Monster, which he offers as evidence for the prosecution, not the defense.)The Autocratic Despair Numbers come in low-ish: Craig's at a 3, buoyed by the news that Trump's roughly $1.7 billion slush fund likely won't survive the Republican Congress — a sign, he argues, that the openly fascist wing of the coalition isn't yet powerful enough to scare the rest of the party into funding it. Nick's at a 5, for reasons that are less political than personal: the Mortensen family's fourteen-year-old dog is reaching the end, and the week has been spent living under that shadow. It's a frank, unguarded stretch of tape about grief, the strangeness of the world refusing to stop when your heart is breaking, and how a baseline of authoritarian dread makes ordinary loss harder to carry.That last thread becomes the episode's connective tissue. Nick walks through the research on cortisol — the stress hormone that sharpens you in the short term and corrodes you over the long haul — and the two of them sit with an uncomfortable question: how much dumber, how much more prone to catastrophizing, are people like them and their listeners for carrying this stress every single day? Craig, a self-described professional catastrophizer and certified news junkie, cops to it directly. The show, he suggests, exists partly to let people stare into the abyss in a bite-sized package, with friends, so they don't have to do it alone all day.Along the way: a digression on fascist aesthetics — how the movement traded the military parades of the 1920s for the reality-TV and pro-wrestling spectacle of today (see: the Kid Rock and RFK Jr. sauna-and-stationary-bike image that broke everyone's brain) — and a genuinely great historical tangent from Craig on how basketball was once stereotyped as a "Jewish sport" in the early 20th century, complete with the anti-Semitic framing of the pre-shot-clock game as "crafty" and "shifty." There's also a World Cup preview that doubles as a referendum on Craig's two core political positions: he hates fascism, and he hates cars.The main segment — Delaney Hall. Nick widens the show's ongoing Prairieland coverage to the wave of hunger and labor strikes now happening in ICE facilities across at least four states, anchored by Delaney Hall in Newark. He opens on the number that frames everything: 29 people have died in ICE custody this fiscal year, a record, with the death rate the highest in the 22 years a JAMA study has tracked it — described by the doctors who wrote it as a warning signal from a system under "extraordinary and deliberate strain." From there: how the strike began (families rallying outside, detainees calling out by phone and bullhorn, roughly 300 of 900 announcing a coordinated strike), the conditions driving it (moldy and worm-infested food, no air conditioning, scalding showers, medical neglect), and the government's contradictory posture of insisting no strike exists while transferring out its leaders.The segment's sharpest argument is about the labor strike. Delaney Hall is run by the GEO Group, a for-profit contractor, and detainees do the cooking, cleaning, and maintenance for as little as a dollar a day. Nick reads the Thirteenth Amendment closely: slavery is abolished "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" — but the overwhelming majority of ICE detainees, by the government's own numbers, have no conviction at all. The constitutional exception doesn't apply to them. The accurate word, he argues, is slavery. He also notes that GEO Group and CoreCivic stock are both trading roughly 45% higher since the 2024 election.Then the response to all of it: on Memorial Day, Gov. Mikie Sherrill was refused entry, state health inspectors were blocked from most of the building, and as the governor left, federal agents moved on protesters with batons and pepper spray, parked an armored BearCat with a mounted gun trained on the crowd, and tear-gassed Sen. Andy Kim while he was trying to broker peace. When a governor, state inspectors, and a sitting U.S. senator can't get inside, Nick asks, what's being hidden?The episode's heaviest exchange follows. Asked directly whether the government is trying to kill the people inside, Craig declines the easy answer. This isn't an intentional murder factory yet, he says — it's "indifferent, wanton death," a system that knows it will produce deaths and has decided the cost is acceptable. But he reminds ...
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    46 mins
  • Dave Troy Sounds Off

    Dave Troy Sounds Off
    May 27 2026
    S-Tier Autocracy Knower Dave Troy sits in for Craig this week while Dr. Craig is on assignment (Turkish Hair Restoration Surgery). Troy is a technology entrepreneur, investigative journalist, and the proprietor of America 2.0 and the Wide Angle column at the Washington Spectator. By Nick's reckoning, he belongs in the top tier of Autocracy Knowers alongside Sarah Kendzior, Timothy Snyder, Jared Yates Sexton, Jeff Sharlet, and our own Dr. Craig Johnson — the small cohort who named what was happening early, kept being right, and have spent the years since doing the unglamorous work of explaining it to anyone willing to listen.Troy comes in at a four or five on the Autocratic Despair scale — not because things are fine, but because, in his read, the MAGA coalition is fracturing, Putin's war in Ukraine is going badly, and the moment we're living through is a global networked phenomenon, not a straightforward strongman play. From there the conversation goes wide. Troy defines what he means by a network and why he calls himself a "network empiricist" — caring less about what political figures say on any given day than about how they cluster, who they amplify, and where their long-term affiliations actually lie. He traces the multigenerational gold-bug network running from the pre-Civil War era through the 1933 business plot, the John Birch Society, the Council for National Policy, and January 6th, and explains why Robert Mercer's intellectual lineage runs straight back to a notorious mid-century racist named Revilo Oliver.Michael Flynn enters as a bridge figure — Russian-adjacent, plugged into the Council for National Policy world, and the man who took over the old anti-communist nonprofit America's Future from Jack Singlaub, installing his own family as the board over what may have been Singlaub's late-life objections. Troy also pulls in the Iran-Contra network — Maxwell, Epstein, John Tower, Bill Barr, Adnan Khashoggi — as one of the recurring node clusters that "just constantly turns up" in his research.Nick gets Troy to talk about how he's used NotebookLM to translate dense source material (including Russian-language Project Russia texts pulled from a Ukrainian cult raid) into accessible podcast form — an information-design move Nick credits Troy with pioneering. There's a frank exchange about Luigi Mangione, who was a friend of Troy's son's at Gilman School in Baltimore; Troy is unsentimental about the lionizing, clear that Mangione belongs in prison, and worried about what the trial will do to American culture if the administration mishandles it.The conversation gets harder from there. Nick brings up the Prairie Land eight — the activists in Texas recently convicted of providing material support to terrorism for a protest outside an ICE detention facility — and the broader pattern of "Antifa as a terrorist group" framing that Troy reads as "really evil and bad," a deliberate semantics game to demonize all opposition. Troy mentions his own situation: legal and physical threats serious enough that he's been spending time in Europe, the same as Antifa author Mark Bray, whose flight to Spain was canceled at the last minute.On protest itself, Troy argues that the current movement has gotten "a little bit lazy in terms of relying on the iconic imagery of protest rather than the underlying machinery of building protest and social change," and that the carefully-planned organizational scaffolding behind events like the Montgomery bus boycott has been flattened into soundbite history. On Graham Platner — "the human embodiment of the phrase 'I suppose,'" per Nick — Troy is blunt: a risky choice, strange affiliations, the kind of nominee the Democratic Party shouldn't be greenlighting if it has its act together.Nick recruits Troy into Talarico Talk and the official Autocratic Despair policy of delusional belief in a James Talarico presidency. Troy is hopeful but disciplined — he warns the campaign against confusing social-media energy for actual turnout, and points to Hungary's recent rejection of Orbán as a possible bellwether: "Two times kind of makes a trend. Three times makes it a really observable trend."When Nick asks about the time horizon for American authoritarianism, Troy gives the line that's likely to define the episode: as long as people would rather go to Costco than go to a civil war, things stay relatively stable. The fault line he's watching runs through the MAGA coalition itself — pure-play libertarianism (Massie) versus maximally-interventionist Trumpism — and the long Moscow fever dream of fusing the anti-war left with the anti-war right, which Troy doesn't think will actually fly with the American public, but expects to be attempted anyway.The episode closes on Camus. Troy is looking forward to the possibility that people figure this out, and offers a piece of guidance that sounds simple until you sit with it: stop waiting for grand coordinated gestures, and start...
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    45 mins
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