Autocratic Despair

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 unapolog...

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...

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...

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" m...

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...

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 let...

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, Ja...

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 o...

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" assassinatio...

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 encounte...

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 official...

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 Autocratic Despair Podcast launches in May.  Until then, enjoy this practice episode.  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 s...

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...

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 o...

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. Connect with us today!