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Autocratic Despair: The Podcast

Autocratic Despair: The Podcast

Written 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
  • Curtis Yarvin & Mike Gallagher Run Into Dr. Craig & Nick

    Curtis Yarvin & Mike Gallagher Run Into Dr. Craig & Nick
    Jul 30 2026
    This week is about a question neither of us expected to spend an episode on: what do you actually do when you find yourself sharing a room with someone who's helping build the thing you're terrified of? Not online. Not in the abstract. In your coffee shop. At your gym. Three feet away, ordering a drink.The despair numbers set the tone — Craig's mellow, a four, which on his logarithmic scale is still plenty bad but for him counts as "stay the course." I came in higher, and hauling a genuine moral conundrum behind me.Here's mine. My gym is my sanctuary. I found it after fleeing a Planet Fitness with a lifted truck out front flying PRO ICE flags and, for a while, a sticker of Biden bound and gagged on the tailgate. The new place is expensive and was nearly empty when I joined, so I did what I do — I learned everyone's first name. I became, unofficially, the mayor of the gym. It got me through last winter without the seasonal depression that usually flattens me. It's where my dad got his health back. It's the best version of me.And a few weeks ago Mike Gallagher walked in. If you're not from Wisconsin: Gallagher was our congressman. Green Bay guy, actually from here, like me. Marine, intelligence officer, Georgetown PhD, chaired the big China committee. And on paper one of the reasonable ones — one of three Republicans who voted against impeaching Mayorkas, held up his own resignation to vote for aid to Ukraine, left Congress rather than become a MAGA bomb-thrower. So why did my stomach drop? Because of what he did next: he became the Head of Defense at Palantir, and he's still there. Palantir — the data company woven through ICE, the firm behind ImmigrationOS, the system that fuses your tax records, Social Security data, DMV files, passport, and license-plate history into one profile and runs the pipeline its own documents describe as "identification to removal." Peter Thiel's company. JD Vance's sugar daddy's company. Gallagher isn't some engineer who wandered in; his whole value is the revolving door — China-committee chairman one year, selling the government surveillance software the next. He is the human shape of the revolving door, and he's smart enough to know exactly what he built.So I did something. I stopped what I was doing, looked at him until he looked back, and asked, "How's Palantir?" He asked if I was skeptical about Palantir. I said, "Just you, Mike. Just you." And then, reaching for something like grace, "I'm sure you did your best." And I have to be honest with you, because that's the deal on this show: it felt good. Not rage — disappointment, that a guy from my exact corner of the world looked at the whole machine and took a job pointing it at people. I needed him to know I see him clearly, and I did it in three words, and it felt good, and I'm a little ashamed of how good it felt.Which leaves me with a real problem, because he's a member, not a day-pass guy, so I'll see him again and again in the one place I go to not feel like this. And my brain keeps offering me a flattering story: I'm magnetic when I want to be, I'm the mayor, I get along with MAGA guys all the time — so maybe the noble move is to befriend Mike, and be the friendly voice in his ear if he's ever back in a position to do harm. But the story springs a leak. The MAGA guys I befriend mostly got sold something; Gallagher has the whole picture and chose it anyway. So does the grace I extend to the confused guy even apply to a man who isn't confused? And worse — 98% of my gym has no idea who he is. If the mayor is seen being chummy with Mike, I'm not influencing Mike. I'm telling the whole room Mike's a good dude. I'd be laundering him. For free. Which is the exact move I spent a whole episode nailing Hunter Biden for.Then Craig told me his version of the same story, and it's the heart of the episode. He walked into his regular coffee shop and stopped like a Looney Tunes character skidding on a rug, because sitting in the window was Curtis Yarvin. For the uninitiated, Yarvin is arguably the intellectual father of today's alt-right — the blogger formerly known as Mencius Moldbug, who spent the 2010s arguing that democracy is a mistake and the country should be run like a corporation by a CEO-king. He's the man who introduced JD Vance to Peter Thiel. He gets clean write-ups in the New York Times. He is, in Craig's estimation, the closest thing this intellectual circle has to an out-and-out fascist. And there he was, reading a book, three feet away.So Craig faced my exact question in his own sanctuary, and what he did is the thing I keep turning over. He didn't ignore it, and he didn't make a scene. He said his piece — the icy, dignified version — and then he asked the barista, a young Latino worker, whether he knew who that was. The worker didn't. Craig told him. And the worker's response is the whole show: "You're telling me that guy's a racist? He never talks to me. He just says what he wants and ...
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    43 mins
  • Hunter Biden & Nick Fuentes Walk Into a Hotel Room

    Hunter Biden & Nick Fuentes Walk Into a Hotel Room
    Jul 23 2026
    This week's episode opens with an unusual reading on the despair scale: Dr. Craig is mellow, down to four, buoyed — improbably — by the conclusion of the World Cup & whatever fleeting sense of global togetherness a tournament can still produce. Nick walked into his office at a solid eight & then something pulled him down to a five. Not good news. Just something so perfect, so stupid, so pure that it functioned as medicine.Steve Scalise went on CNBC in the morning — full suit, two flags behind him, entirely put together — to sell the SAVE Act's voter ID provision. And he looked into the camera and said, "For God's sakes, you can't get pasta at the Olive Garden without a picture ID."What follows is the show at its best: a genuinely delighted deconstruction of why that sentence exists. The striking thing isn't that Scalise said something dumb. It's that after all these years, the movement pushing mandatory voter ID has never developed a decent analogy for it. There's no go-to line, no talking point they all reach for. They just let people improv, and the improv has become a competition — each guy taking the same setup and trying to top the last guy with a dumber comparison. Nick's diagnosis: it's their version of The Aristocrats. Same premise every time, and the whole game is how grotesque you can make the ending. It doubles as an object lesson in how bad the sales pitch for this stuff actually is.Then the episode's main event, structured as a deliberate act of inoculation. Before the takes roll in, Nick hands the audience a lens.Hunter Biden and Nick Fuentes sat down together in a Philadelphia hotel room for a filmed interview brokered by Andrew Callaghan of Channel 5. It airs at the end of the month. And the only thing anybody's reporting is the tease: they nearly came to blows, and Callaghan had to physically get between them. That's the story hitting every aggregator, TMZ-style, and it is — Nick argues — precisely the wrong thing to be looking at.So the segment draws all three men correctly. Hunter as the ne'er-do-well son who's spent a decade as the media's punching bag and is now, unmistakably, monetizing his own notoriety — back on Twitter after ten years, on Gavin Newsom's podcast, shilling crypto, cultivating a fuck-up's credibility that gets a charming man chance after chance. Callaghan as the All Gas No Brakes gonzo star whose career detonated in 2023 over multiple sexual misconduct allegations, and who has rebranded as a Serious Interviewer whose comeback pitch is that the mainstream media wants us divided and he'll talk to anyone — which makes rehabilitating America's leading Nazi his return vehicle.And Dr. Craig draws Fuentes, which is a service to anyone who's only seen him described as a "far-right podcaster." Craig's version: the most successful openly fascist influencer in the United States, period. A hyper-conservative Catholic, a racist, a misogynist, an apologist for slavery, running a show designed to look like a late-night program while what he's actually doing is talking to your son about fascism. Craig's advice is unambiguous and repeated: never, ever talk to this man. He's genuinely skilled at making any conversation his own, and you will not get one over on him.Fuentes isn't talking to liberals. He's talking to young men already inside the right-wing world, and his problem is that Trump is the ceiling — the respectable, president-shaped container for all their anger, and as far as most of them are willing to go. So the move is to discredit the ceiling. Convince a disillusioned kid that Trump was soft, captured, a traitor to the real believers, and that kid's disappointment doesn't send him leftward. It sends him hunting for something more hardcore — and Fuentes has spent a year positioning himself as the only guy who told the truth. It's a permission structure: handholds that make an unthinkable position feel like common sense, one deniable step at a time. Craig extends it with the part that makes it work — the 18-to-25 cohort whose entire political consciousness has been Trump, watching the problems get worse, who can conclude either that Trump was stymied by a shadowy conspiracy or that Trump betrayed them. Both roads lead to Fuentes. He gets them coming and going.Which brings the segment back to the hotel room and the actual transaction. Fuentes is radioactive, and a permission structure only works if the man running it looks legitimate — so he needs proximity to normalcy, and the most normalcy-conferring object you could seat across from him is a president's son. Remember: Fuentes reached out. He went shopping for legitimacy and Channel 5 sold it to him. Hunter's buying edgy relevance; Callaghan's buying his way back into the game. And the near-fistfight is the wrapper that gets the whole thing into your feed. The proof is in the marketing: Channel 5's own spokesperson promised audiences will be "shocked" by Fuentes's "evolving and changing views," ...
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    48 mins
  • Gruff Leftist Sweetheart Jared Yates Sexton

    Gruff Leftist Sweetheart Jared Yates Sexton
    Jul 16 2026
    Dr. Craig is out this week. Turkish hair surgery. Sitting in for him is Jared Yates Sexton, and he's been staring into this particular abyss a lot longer than I have.On June 14th, 2016, Jared was a creative writing professor who went to a Trump rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, and started live-tweeting what he saw. Not the speech — the room. The people. What was actually happening in there. It went off like a bomb and it ended his old life. He walked in a fiction writer and walked out a political correspondent, because he saw the man for what he was back when the rest of us still saw a buffoonish reality TV grifter running for president to juice his own brand.He's the author of The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Making, about how this country builds its boys and what it costs them. American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World But Failed Its People, about the myths we tell ourselves and who those myths were built to serve. And The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis, which traces a straight line from the Great Fire of Rome to QAnon and which — reading it now — predicted damn near everything that's happened since. He co-hosts the Muckrake Podcast and writes a Substack called Dispatches From A Collapsing State, which tells you everything you need to know about where his head's at. On my personal S-tier of autocracy-knowers, he's on it. He might be at the top of it.We start somewhere I didn't plan for: two guys comparing notes on the jobs that were killing them. Jared explains why he left academia — "you can't keep doing the shit that hurts you" — and I explain why I started this show, which is that my entire goal is to replace "Trump Derangement Syndrome" with "autocratic despair" and everything else is secondary. He says it's accurate. We get into how Dr. Craig got fucked by academic publishing, why a book about keeping your son out of fascism should not be printed in twelve-point type with citations, and why a podcast with no commercials has a pace a podcast with commercials can never have. He hears we started a beef with The Bulwark last week and responds with three words I'm going to have printed on a shirt.Then the number. Jared rates his autocratic despair an eight and a three, simultaneously — the first guest to break the format — and explains why: he thinks the destabilization we're heading into is the same thing that opens the window for actual change. We get into the rumor that Trump is about to declare Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock illegitimate senators, why that's a genuinely bad signal about whether we'll have free and fair midterms, and why picking that particular fight is a mistake that only makes both men more famous. And we land on the greatest gift these people give us: they cannot shut up. They telegraph everything they're going to do and count on nobody paying attention.We talk about Graham Platner and the damage done to the gruff leftist sweetheart community — a title Jared claims for himself about four seconds after I say it, and then uses forty minutes later to take apart JD Vance. He explains who actually recruited Platner, why they went looking for what he calls a noble savage, and why they never bothered to vet him, because vetting was never the point. That opens into a real education on deeper politics: what happens when a regular person tries to run for Congress, why the local party in a deep red district would rather lose by forty points than let an outsider try something new, and why Jared walked away from his own 2016 run the moment he saw how the machine actually works. I pitch him my platform — insider trading, announced in real time on a billboard network — and he's more generous about it than it deserves.We cover his enduring legacy as a meme: the 2017 Don Jr. tweet, what it's like to be tagged in the same joke every single day of your life for a decade, and the genuinely unsettling business of getting slotted into other people's conspiracy theories. The CIA-asset years. The double-agent schemes. The people who showed up at his house and had to be handled by police.Then the part I've wanted for a long time. Jared grew up as what he calls the prototype of what became Christian nationalism. He describes his grandmother's house — a crucifix in every room — and a literal, furnished Satan. Not a metaphor. An entity that could appear as a human being, and you were expected to grab that cross off the wall and be ready. He explains what it does to a person to be raised on nothing but the Book of Revelation, why constant spiritual warfare trains you to reach for a strongman, and how the divine agent framework — Cyrus, King David — lets a believer look at a man's sins and see proof instead of disqualification. And I finally get my answer to the thing that's bugged me for years: how do people with such a well-articulated vision of the Antichrist look right at Donald Trump and ...
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    49 mins
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