Autocratic Despair

Some weeks the news is so dense that Nick and Craig never get past the numbers. This is one of those weeks, and the numbers are plenty. Dr. Craig Johnson, UC Berkeley lecturer and PhD in Global Fascism Studies, comes in at a 7, driven by Midterm election jitters, and he delivers a Stalin joke that we will not spoil here, except to say that a historian of authoritarian regimes has very specific jok...

Autocratic Despair: The Podcast.  2026 Midterm Elections Preview.  The Funniest one in the space, that's for certain. Connect with us today! 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...

Some weeks the abyss stares back. This week it blinked. Dr. Craig Johnson, the UC Berkeley lecturer with a PhD in Global Fascism Studies, opens this episode of Autocratic Despair at a five, a full reset, the lowest number he’s ever given, and the reason is Brazil. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva beat Flávio Bolsonaro in Sunday’s runoff to win a fourth term as president, becoming, by Craig’s account, the...

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 positione...

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 lis...

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...

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...

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...

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 raise...

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 wi...

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. Cra...

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 thi...

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...

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...

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 p...

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 logarith...

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,...

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 th...

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...