Autocratic Despair cover art

Autocratic Despair

Autocratic Despair

By: Nick Mortensen & Dr. Craig Johnson
Listen for free

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 Personal Development Personal Success Political Science Politics & Government
Episodes
  • Beefin' With The Bulwark

    Beefin' With The Bulwark
    Jul 10 2026
    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 who unseated Susan Collins. He was the progressive insurgent's great hope. And this show never trusted it — Nick had been saying so since episode one, pointing at the Nazi tattoo Platner got covered up instead of removed, the earlier allegation his supporters found easy to wave away, the pattern of people repeatedly deciding to give him one more pass.This week the pass ran out. Politico published an on-the-record account from a former girlfriend, Jenny Racicot, alleging that Platner forced himself on her in 2021 over her repeated objections — corroborated, Politico reported, by a later partner, friends, and her own correspondence with a therapist. The Democratic Party's response was near-total and immediate: Schumer, Gillibrand, Warren, the DSCC, and even Ro Khanna — who had stood by Platner through everything else — called for him to go. As of this recording, Platner denies the allegation and has not dropped out.Nick and Craig handle it the way the show insists on handling this material: the accuser is the wronged party, full stop, no litigating her, no qualifying the credibility of a woman who came forward at real personal cost. False allegations of this kind are vanishingly rare, and Craig names the reflex to treat this one as the exception for exactly what it is — the disease, not the diagnosis. He also points out how many women it took, over how long, and how the apologies only arrived now.But the heart of the segment isn't the news. It's a feeling Nick can't shake and doesn't try to hide: this should feel like vindication, and it doesn't. He called this from the beginning. He spent months asking Platner's supporters to name the line the man would have to cross, and watching them refuse to name one. So the "told you so" was right there — and it curdled the instant he reached for it. Because Nick didn't want to be right. He wanted Platner to prove him wrong, to be living proof that a person with an ugly past can change, because if that guy could, the door was open for a lot of people with non-sparkling histories to have a place in the movement. Instead Platner did the one thing that slams that door on everyone behind him. In the episode's most naked moment, Nick admits it: he gave Talarico his heart, and Talarico hurt him a little. He never gave Platner his heart — and Platner may have hurt him worse, because he didn't know the man had the capacity to reach him at all.Craig widens the lens with history, as he does. He connects Platner to the figure of the caudillo — the Latin American strongman archetype embodied by 19th-century Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, a fabulously wealthy landowner who cultivated the image of a knife-fighting, rough-and-tumble everyman. The point that lands hardest: the violence in that persona isn't a flaw in it. It's a feature of it. The authentic-brawler, anti-establishment outsider who's secretly a rich man and secretly cruel is a recognizable type, and Platner was running the American version of it — the veteran, the oysterman, the mustache, the focus-grouped LL Bean of it all. Craig also does the necessary corrective work, refusing to let the discussion blame the popular policies for the flawed men attached to them: single-payer health care and a real safety net are wildly popular and successful everywhere they're tried. The tragedy is that the left keeps attaching those ideas to fragile individual personalities instead of to a durable party — and some of those personalities turn out to be monsters.From there the episode turns to Nick's beef with The Bulwark. The Bulwark, for the uninitiated, is the well-capitalized media outfit built by former Republicans — the Never-Trumpers who carved out their own lane in the resistance and pull a genuinely large audience. Nick hate-listens, and mostly, uncomfortably, agrees with them. But last week they had David French on — the respected lawyer and New York Times columnist — and, asked in passing about Prairieland, French framed it in the exact opposite way this show has: a violent ambush, a jury verdict to be trusted, no sympathy absent compelling evidence of a miscarriage of justice. Nick's problem isn't that French is stupid; it's that for a million listeners, many hearing about Prairieland for the first time, a trusted voice just filed the whole thing under "lock them up and throw away the key" — without doing any ...
    Show More Show Less
    44 mins
  • Been Living Off Wealth

    Been Living Off Wealth
    Jul 2 2026
    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 and lets the arithmetic speak: two people decided the country stays a democracy. That's the margin now.From there Craig does what the show exists for — he makes the thing legible. He walks through why birthright citizenship exists in the first place: it comes out of the Reconstruction amendments, written specifically so the country could never again say the children of enslaved people weren't citizens because their parents had been property. He tells the story of Wong Kim Ark, the man born to Chinese immigrants in San Francisco in 1873 who was denied re-entry to his own country, took it to the Supreme Court, and won — settling the question for well over a century, until this administration decided to reopen it. And he defines the vocabulary the fight travels under: the slur "anchor baby," and the European import "remigration," a word engineered to let people advocate mass expulsion by ethnicity without ever having to say the ugly words underneath it. Nick and Craig land on the part nobody in power wants to sit with — that undocumented immigrants pay billions into a Social Security system they'll likely never draw from, and that the country's wealth has always leaned on labor that isn't free. Craig gives the academic name for it, unfree labor, and the discomfort of the term is the point.Then the anchor. Last week, as Nick and Craig were literally recording, the Prairieland sentences came down, and this week they do it properly — a full accounting for anyone who's never heard the case. The recap is built cold: July 4, 2025, a noise demonstration outside an ICE detention center in Alvarado, Texas, where protesters brought fireworks so the people locked inside would know somebody was out there thinking about them. It went sideways; a police lieutenant was shot and survived; one man, former Marine Benjamin Song, was convicted of firing. And then the government did the thing that turns a local crime story into a national emergency: it charged the whole group as terrorists, on the theory that everyone present was part of a "North Texas Antifa cell" — a cell it never actually proved existed. The jury acquitted everyone but Song of attempted murder, then convicted all of them of providing material support to terrorists, the terrorists being themselves.Nick reads the sentences the way you'd read a receipt, name by name, number by number, so the gap between the punishment and the conduct does the arguing. Benjamin Song, the only person convicted of hurting anyone, got a hundred years when the floor was twenty. Maricela Rueda got seventy. Autumn Hill, Zachary Evetts, Savanna Batten, Meagan Morris, and Elizabeth Soto each got fifty — for standing outside a jail with fireworks. And Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who wasn't even at the protest, got thirty years for moving a box of his wife's zines. Seven more defendants took plea deals and face up to fifteen years each, sentenced alongside Ines Soto; Nick reads their names too — Seth Sikes, Nathan Baumann, Susan Kent, Lynette Sharp, John Thomas among the cooperating pleas, with Joy Gibson and Rebecca Morgan noted as the two who refused to cooperate — because the show reads the names every week, and because rounding sixteen people down to a cleaner number is its own small erasure. Nick won't call them the Prairieland Nine. It was never nine.The thesis arrives in the judge's own words. Chief Judge Reed O'Connor said from the bench that he was handing down the maximum because the state wants to send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology — and Nick flags the wrinkle that O'Connor wasn't even the trial judge. Mark Pittman presided, then handed five defendants to O'Connor days before sentencing, without explanation, a procedural shuffle Nick expects to surface on appeal. Craig names what the case actually establishes in plain text: oppose the country's detention policy and spread information about it, and you can be charged with terrorism and put away for decades — and that tool won't be holstered when this administration ends. Nick and Craig also sit with the strange quiet around the defendants being trans, dead-named in official documents while the fact went otherwise unmentioned, and turn over why the people who usually seize on that chose not to.After the weight, the show breathes. Nick turns to the Freedom 250 national fair on the Mall and the low attendance ...
    Show More Show Less
    45 mins
  • America. Do Something About It.

    America. Do Something About It.
    Jun 25 2026
    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 own meanness.Then the despair numbers. Nick comes in at a 5, and he means it, because he spent the week genuinely happy. It's summer. There's a new puppy at the house. The World Cup is on, which means Messi, who at this stage of his career is doing things that make even a casual fan sit up and ask where he ranks — not just against Maradona, but against the best anyone has ever been at anything. Nick and Craig, the latter rating his despair a 6 on his logarithmic scale, chew on the only sports question that matters: how much better is the best person at a thing than everyone else is at theirs? It's the last fun either of them gets to have for a while, and that's the point. The number was a 5 until the news caught up with it.Because then there's the reflecting pool. Nick confesses, with the self-implication the show runs on, that he spent the week fully indulging in the spectacle of Trump's roughly $14 million Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool turning green in a day, the patriotic paint peeling off the bottom in strips, contractors dumping hydrogen peroxide in by the gallon. He laughed. He sent the pictures. And somewhere in the middle of it he caught himself: the man has concentration camps running, and we threw a party because he botched a pond. The pool did its job. It reflected. It just reflected the wrong direction, away from everything that mattered, and Nick fell for it like everyone else.What it reflected away from is Minnesota. In a segment that sits beside the show's running watch on detention and protest-criminalization, Nick and Craig walk through the indictment the pool helped bury: on June 16, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen announced charges against fifteen people, mostly members of a group called Direct Action Minnesota — DAMN — framed as antifa. Craig explains what antifa actually is, a political tendency rather than an organization, no roster, no season-ending awards banquet, and why the label is so useful precisely because it describes nothing. The tell is Rosen's own answer when a reporter asked whether any federal agent was actually hurt: whether anyone suffered bodily harm, he said, "is not the measure." All of this sits downstream of Operation Metro Surge, the winter immigration crackdown in which federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens — Renee Good, and Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse shot while filming on his phone — and not one agent has been charged. The people facing prison are the ones who drove neighbors home from midnight releases, rebuilt kicked-in doors, and brought groceries to families too afraid to be seen.And then the segment the whole episode is built around. As Nick and Craig were recording, the Prairieland sentences came down in Fort Worth, and they are staggering. Benjamin "Champagne" Song, the former Marine the government called the ringleader, was sentenced to 100 years for the attempted murder of an Alvarado police officer who survived — when the sentencing floor was 20. Maricela Rueda got 70. Autumn Hill, Zachary Evetts, Savanna Batten, Meagan Morris, and Elizabeth Soto each got 50, for rioting, providing material support to terrorists, and using explosives that the defense maintains were Fourth of July fireworks. Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada got 30 years for concealing a box of documents from a grand jury. A ninth defendant, Ines Soto, had her hearing pushed to the following week. Two Trump-appointed judges, Mark Pittman and Reed O'Connor, handed down sentences totaling nearly five centuries for a demonstration where the only person shot lived. Craig names the throughline plainly: this is a legal system announcing that any association with dissent against ICE — from firing a rifle down to moving a box of paperwork — can be tried as terrorism, while the people who actually tried to overthrow an election are walking free.The hosts cope the way the show always does, with gallows humor they openly admit is a coping mechanism, and then they stop, because some of it is not funny, and they say so out loud. That honesty is the engine of the thing. The episode ends where it always ends, with the names, because someone should read them.This is Autocratic Despair: a comedy podcast that stares straight at fascism and somehow stays fun, the commedia for your particular brand of tragedy. Nick is the audience proxy catching up in real time; Craig is the scholar of authoritarianism who connects...
    Show More Show Less
    43 mins
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet