Autocratic Despair: The Podcast
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.
The Most Spatially Aware Man in France
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...
Grandparents' Rights According to Jared Yates Sexton & Nick Hauselman of The Muckrake podcast
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 ag...
The Bay Area AI Orgy Scene as Scouted by Dr. Craig
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 righ...
An Elite Fraternity of Pants-Knowers
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...
What Really Happened in Butler, Pennsylvania?
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...
Agent Fetterman & No Kings: Controlled Opposition?
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 sch...
The True Texas Project is Our AfD & It's Taken Over Fort Worth
Both hosts at 7.5. Craig's highest number in 9 months of the show.
Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson both come in at seven and a half this week. That number matters. In nine months of this show, Dr. Craig — whose scale is logarithmic, meaning a four is much worse than a three — has never gone higher. A seven and a half from Craig is not a mood. It is a professional assessment from a man with a PhD in fascism studies who does not use words carelessly.
They earn it.
Two episodes ago, the show...
Laura Loomer is Trump's Rasputin
Every court gets one eventually. The unvetted outsider who holds no office, runs nothing, answers to nobody, is despised by the entire palace — and has the emperor's ear anyway. Russia got Rasputin. America got Laura Loomer, and this week she finally crossed the blood-brain barrier for Nick Mortensen, who has spent years scrupulously refusing to discuss her. That refusal ends now, and Dr. Craig Johnson — UC Berkeley lecturer, PhD in fascism studies — is on hand to explain why the comparison isn't a joke.
First, the numbers. Craig comes in at a six, a...
Germany's AfD: A Glimpse Into Our Future
Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson arrive at the same number this week — a six apiece — but the sixes are doing different jobs. Craig's is about Canada. The United States has restarted a tariff fight with its most serious long-term ally in both trade and foreign policy, Mark Carney is trying to be the adult in a room that no longer rewards adults, and Craig's read is that the whole thing exists because the Iran situation is going badly and Donald Trump wants different headlines. If jettisoning Canada were the only dumb thing this administration had done, Craig says, it w...
Tucker Carlson is not Kidding
Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson open the week split. Craig comes back from a weekend in the wilderness at a four personally, then looks at the rest of the planet and lands on a six — the Middle East, Trump's fraying relationships with allies, the Brazilian election, and a summer of literal fire. Nick is at a seven, and for once he skips the frivolous reason. He has something he wants to say instead.
Since the start of this year, Black people have been found hanging from trees in public places across the country. Nick walks the au...
Trump's Hair Was a Longtime Subscriber to the Wrestling Observer Newsletter
This week opens not with despair but with vanity — specifically, the sudden and much-discussed fullness of the President's hair. Somewhere around the Vegas speech, Trump's hairline staged a comeback that the internet spent a full week arguing about, and the White House declined to confirm, deny, or otherwise dignify. Nick's read is that we have now reached the stage of the republic where the toupee gets a press inquiry. And if it is a wig — still officially unproven, a hairpiece expert on record saying she doesn't think so — the truly confounding part is that the wig appears to be of his...
Sluggish Schizophrenia = Trump Derangement Syndrome?
We open, as always, by taking our own temperature. Dr. Craig lands on a five and immediately gets talked up to a six, because he started rubbing his eyes thirty seconds in and Nick knows a bamboozle when he sees one. What's eating Craig isn't even a single event — it's the seesaw of fake ceasefires and fake treaties around Iran, and more than that, the way the American and British press keep credulously reporting each new claim as if the last one hadn't just collapsed. He calls it about the clearest example of captured media he's ever watched. Nick co...
Curtis Yarvin & Mike Gallagher Run Into Dr. Craig & Nick
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.
He...
Hunter Biden & Nick Fuentes Walk Into a Hotel Room
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 l...
Gruff Leftist Sweetheart Jared Yates Sexton
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 co...
Beefin' With The Bulwark
This week on Autocratic Despair, the comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism, Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig run a leaner three-segment episode — and it opens on the hardest one, because it's the one that hurt. Graham Platner. If you'd tuned out: Platner was the Marine combat veteran and Maine oyster farmer who came from nowhere on a viral launch video, ran as an unapologetic populist on Medicare for all and a real social safety net, and won the Maine Democratic Senate primary with more votes than any Democrat in the state's history. He was going to be the one wh...
Been Living Off Wealth
This week on Autocratic Despair, the comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism, Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig open on a rare thing in 2026: a piece of good news, delivered with a knife in it. The Supreme Court handed down its decision on birthright citizenship, and the ruling went the right way — the Fourteenth Amendment holds, and anyone born in the United States is still a citizen of the United States. But the vote was six to three, and only two of the conservative justices, Chief Justice Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett, joined it. Craig sets his despair number accordingly an...
America. Do Something About It.
This week on Autocratic Despair, the comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism, Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig open on the strangest sales pitch in the country: Dana White, the UFC boss, in a Chevrolet ad, informing America that the correct response to anyone who has a problem with us is "tough shit." Nick can't let it go — the way a manufactured kind of cruelty keeps getting sold back to us as national character, as the thing we're supposed to recognize as ourselves. It's the perfect on-ramp to a show about how an autocracy teaches a country to enjoy its ow...
Higher & Wider.
Craig's back from the desert and stuck at a four — buoyed by the World Cup, dragged down by the "National State Fair" spectacle. Nick's at a seven, and it's one man's fault.
We open on Elon Musk, who in a single week became the world's first trillionaire — SpaceX went public June 12th — and put his hand in a pogrom. We try to make "a trillion dollars" mean something (spoiler: if he gave each of his fourteen kids a million dollars a day, he could've started in 1830 and still be writing checks today), and then turn to Belfast, where...
Oops! All Talarico Talk
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 s...
The World Doesn't Stop...But it Should
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.)
Th...
Dave Troy Sounds Off
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 wi...
The Rizz Minister Has Been Getting it On!
This week on the Autocratic Despair podcast — a comedy about fascism, autocracy, and trying to have fun while the country falls apart — Nick opens at a seven on the despair scale after walking through the tailgate scene at Lambeau Field during two sold-out Luke Combs concerts. 80,000 people across two nights at his hometown stadium, and Nick didn't go — not because of the music, but because of what a massive country music crowd in the Midwest represents in 2026. He assumed Combs was a MAGA enthusiast. Turns out he was wrong: Combs describes himself as "heavily moderate," skipped Trump's 2020 Fourth of July c...
A Whole Potato or a "Hole in a Potato"?
In which the boys debut a new shorthand for the show's central feeling: the moment you realize there are now so many golden statues of Donald Trump scattered across his Florida golf courses that when someone mentions one, you have to ask which one.
Nick and Dr. Craig open by sorting through the Don Colossus — a 22-foot gilded statue of Trump in the "fight, fight, fight" assassination-survival pose, dedicated this week by his personal pastor at Trump National Doral while crypto bros funded the whole thing as a promo for their memecoin. The pastor, Mark Bu...
Is That How You Get Your Jollies?
Episode 1 of Autocratic Despair opens with co-hosts Nick and Dr. Craig Johnson defining the show's central concept through two visceral scenarios: the reluctance to celebrate the Fourth of July without seeming to endorse the regime, and the panic of watching your own party embrace a candidate with a Nazi tattoo. From there, Nick is at a 6 on the despair scale, driven by an unsettling encounter with America 250 merchandise at his local big box store. He explains what the Semiquincentennial actually is and how Trump's colonization of the celebration has made even patriotic engagement feel like collaboration.
This...
Preview: Dr. Craig is Fun at Parties
This week on the Autocratic Despair podcast, Nick and Dr. Craig take an unusually nuanced look at Cole Allen — the 31-year-old Caltech-educated tutor from Torrance, California who charged a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents' Dinner on April 25 armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and several knives in an attempt to assassinate President Trump and senior administration officials. Allen sent his family a manifesto minutes before the attack. His brother called police. Nobody died.
The manifesto is not what you'd expect. It's organized, self-aware, and structured around a series of anticipated objections with numbered rebuttals — including a th...
Preview: Uncle Energy + All Aboard the Talarico Train
This week on another preview episode of the Autocratic Despair podcast, Nick and Dr. Craig start with a confession: they both enjoyed the Atlantic's report on FBI Director Kash Patel's alleged drinking problem a little too much. And they want to talk about why that enjoyment felt so good and so rotten at the same time.
The Atlantic published a bombshell investigation alleging that Patel — the man running the agency that just convicted eight Americans of terrorism for wearing black clothes — has been drinking to the point of obvious intoxication, missing mornings, going unreachable behind locked doors, and...
Preview: The Prairieland Railroading Happening Right Now
The Autocratic Despair Podcast launches in May. Until then, enjoy this practice episode.Â
This week on Autocratic Despair, Nick and Dr. Craig open with something they haven't been able to do very often on this show: celebrate.
On April 12, Viktor Orbán — the international model for how to dismantle a democracy from inside one — conceded defeat in Hungary's parliamentary election after sixteen years in power. PĂ©ter Magyar's Tisza party won in a landslide, taking 138 of 199 seats on 53.6% of the vote, giving Magyar the two-thirds supermajority needed to amend Hungary's constitution.Â
The celebration is temper...
Preview: Has Seth Rollins Gone Fashwave?
When the weight of watching democracy erode gets to be too much, where do you go? In this episode, Nick and Dr. Craig Johnson explore the surprisingly serious topic of retreating into childhood comforts as a coping mechanism for Autocratic Despair — and why that instinct might be healthier than it sounds.
Then things get strange in the best possible way. Nick makes the case that WWE superstar Seth Rollins has become an unlikely avatar of the "Fashwave" aesthetic — the eerie intersection of authoritarian visual language and ironic pop culture — and Dr. Craig is forced to reckon with what t...
Preview: Danhausen as the New Guy Fawkes?
In this preview episode of the Autocratic Despair podcast, host Nick Mortensen introduces Dr. Craig to Danhausen — a magical fun character from the WWE who is about to sweep the nation. Danhausen paints his face black and white, looks like a cartoon vampire, adds the suffix "-hausen" to everything he touches, and delivers his catchphrase "very nice, very evil" with the energy of a goth Mister Rogers. Nick's kids are obsessed. Dr. Craig is hearing all of this for the first time.
Nick explains that he took his kids to the recent No Kings rally with their fa...
Autocratic Despair Trailer
A 3 minute preview of our podcast - The Autocratic Despair Podcast - with Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson that takes an excerpt from a podcast where we have a discussion about why we never got into Billy Bragg.
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Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.
