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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.

© 2026 Genuine Article Media Political Science Politics & Government Social Sciences
Episodes
  • The Most Spatially Aware Man in France

    The Most Spatially Aware Man in France
    Oct 23 2026
    France is on fire, and the most thoughtful Frenchman alive has thoughts.Dr. Craig Johnson, UC Berkeley lecturer and PhD in Global Fascism Studies, opens at a seven. The days are getting shorter, the ennui is setting in (second week running for that word, a show record), and the thing driving his number is France’s slide into a youth uprising that the far right is, in his view, perfectly positioned to exploit.For listeners who haven’t been following it, and most Americans haven’t, Nick and Craig lay out the story from the start. In mid-September, French high school students began blockading their own schools over teacher shortages, crumbling buildings and classrooms that don’t work. University students joined on October 1. Within a week it was teachers, parents and the trade unions, nationwide, and the grievances widened from schools to everything: the cost of living, fuel prices, wages, pensions. The Yellow Vests, the movement that shut France down over gas prices in 2018, came back to join the kids. The weekend before taping, around half a million people were in the streets. In Limoges, the nineteenth-century City Hall, a building that survived both world wars, was set on fire and its roof collapsed. In Paris, protesters pulled apart the base of the statue of Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic. There were eighteen hundred arrests in a single weekend, and the hardest number in the story is this one: by early October, French authorities reported more than five thousand arrests, the large majority of them minors, and Human Rights Watch has documented teenagers seriously injured by police munitions. The show treats that part with the seriousness it deserves.Is it a psyop? Craig says no. He reads it as an earnest expression of the same thing happening to young people everywhere: an economy that has stopped working for them, aging populations, rising costs, falling wages, and a political system that seems to offer no way out. He places it alongside youth uprisings in Nepal and elsewhere, and explains, for American listeners, what the French word for suburbs actually means. The banlieues aren’t white-picket-fence neighborhoods. They’re dense high-rise communities on the commuter lines into Paris and Lyon, home to many of France’s non-white citizens and residents, chronically underinvested in and treated as a labor pool. He connects it to the French right’s long project of defining France as white and secular, and to the strange history in which the same right once insisted Algeria was simply France.His worry is about what comes next. Youth explosions historically go one of two ways: they coalesce around a transformative demand, or they fizzle into disorder that becomes the justification for a right-wing crackdown. Without organization, leadership or concrete demands, Craig fears this one is headed for the second, with France’s presidential and legislative elections ahead and the National Rally waiting. He reaches for a Dead Kennedys lyric to make the point, which leads to the revelation that Nick, a child of the Thrasher-magazine era, thought all of that music sucked.Nick’s contribution is to consult the most thoughtful Frenchman alive: Victor Wembanyama. For the non-basketball fans, Nick explains who Wemby is: twenty-two, from the suburbs of Paris, seven-foot-four, the number one pick in the 2023 draft, Rookie of the Year, an Olympic silver medalist, and the man who took the San Antonio Spurs to the NBA Finals this year. Nick’s case for trusting him starts with how he moves. A seven-footer who handles the ball like a guard and blocks shots from impossible angles has to know where every single thing in the room is at all times, which makes him, in Nick’s estimation, the most spatially aware person in France and possibly the world. Then there’s the crying. When Wemby wept on the court after big playoff wins, critics, including his own mentor Kevin Garnett, said he was too emotional. Wemby’s answer to a French reporter is one Nick calls a better read on masculinity than the entire manosphere has produced in a decade: it’s a fear of judgment, social codes, and he refuses to carry the burden of hiding his emotions. He also turns down sports-betting money, which in today’s NBA is almost unheard of.So what does the most aware man in France say? That these are systemic inequalities, so deep-rooted that he’s glad young people are speaking up, that he hears them and supports them, and that he got out of that system only by luck. Nick is careful to note he said it before the fires and the mass arrests, and that supporting the kids isn’t endorsing what happened in Limoges. And Craig agrees with Wemby’s diagnosis, if not his optimism.Nick holds at six and a half, and his driver is a story the show decided to defend when nobody else would: Katie Zacharia, Trump’s White House press secretary for exactly five days. Announced on a federal holiday, first briefing on Tuesday, ...
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    31 mins
  • We've Canceled International Election Observers for the Midterms?!

    We've Canceled International Election Observers for the Midterms?!
    Oct 16 2026
    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 mins
  • The Bay Area AI Orgy Scene as Scouted by Dr. Craig

    The Bay Area AI Orgy Scene as Scouted by Dr. Craig
    Oct 8 2026
    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 mins
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