SPEAKER_01 0:02

I'm Nick Mortensen, a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Join me each week as I stare into the abyss with my friend, Dr. Craig Johnson, a PhD in global fascism, a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of 2025's most important book, How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism. Craig, I'm I'm a little upset at wrestling right now.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Is it because the McMahon's are in the pocket of the Trump administration or for some other reason?

SPEAKER_01 0:40

That's one of the things that's down on the list. Folks, if you ever get a chance to talk to a PhD in global fascism, always bring up professional wrestling. It's not a waste of your time. I watch professional wrestling. I, you know, I have for a long time. I've done it more since Trump came into office. One of my coping mechanisms is just to retreat back into my childhood. You know, I'm a I'm a 48-year-old man. I wear a baseball cap every day now. Not not before Trump. Before Trump, I was strictly navy blue quarter zips with uh dress shirts underneath them. Very business casual. But now it's hats and sneakers because I'm trying to deal with my autocratic despair the best way that I can. And they're not all perfect ways. They're just technique. Ironic detachment, dissociation. Later on we'll talk about delusion and self-deception. But to retreat back into your childhood is that's that's sort of what I attribute my my uh interest in professional wrestling. Is it the best coping mechanism? Absolutely not. But it is a coping mechanism. So last night was Monday on WWE last night. Uh one of the one of the top wrestlers, uh Seth Rollins, rolled out a new character, and the presentation looked to be fascism-coated. Oh he came out with an all-black shirt, an all-black tie, all black pants, all black overcoat. The WWE's always been good about pushing envelopes uh and things, and he didn't say anything that was particularly fascist. And the coat itself was more London fog than SS. He would need to have maybe some embellishments on it to sort of sell it. But I have this suspicion that they're sort of dipping their toe uh into the water here to see what the audience tolerates. It's hard to know what this is, but it's gotten me worried because right now the Seth Rollins character is a baby face, a good guy. You know, that's always subject to change with him. The guy that plays Seth Rollins, uh Colby Lopez, uh, he's proven to be quite adept through the years at uh altering his character. For for a long time, he was like this architect and mastermind, and then he was presented as the Monday night messiah, guy with a god complex. The crowd, whether he's a good guy or bad guy, loves him. They sing his theme song, and his theme song has no words. It's just the crowd in unison saying, Oh, oh, oh. And they do it sometimes through for the length of his matches after the music's gone off. He's got the crowd in the palm of his hands. I saw the black shirt, I saw the black tie. I got kind of worried.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

They didn't say anything that was particularly fascist. But I will say that for WrestleMania, he's going up against the most Nazi-coated wrestler in the WWE. Uh, is an Austrian guy uh by the name of Gunther. So you know he's Austrian, but he's presented as German. He's got a Nazi haircut. Uh his theme music is you know Wagner-esque. His graphics are like Roman columns meant to evoke that brutalist architecture.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

Oh, that's totally Nazi coated. 100%. Also, all all the worst Nazis were Austrians, including Hitler.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

Instead of wearing a robe to the match, he wears a long coat. And that one really does look like the the long Hugo Boss overcoats that the Nazis wore. You know, this this Gunther's character, his entire character is based around like his robotic Aryan brutality, his intimidation, elitism. Most of his ring promos uh to the crowd are built around the rhetoric of uh bringing back wrestling into the world of sports entertainment and bringing back prestige to the tainted championship, like evoking this mythical age of before. Oh, for sure. And you know, there's a lot of natural hierarchies. He's the best wrestler because he's from the best place, and contempt for the weak. So it's interesting. So they've there's a potential that like they're not presenting him right now as a bad guy, necessarily. Gunter. They're not it's interesting how they're doing like they're they're just presenting him as like the best wrestler. He's he's been on a streak where he uh retires wrestlers, the wrestlers that are at the tail end of their career, they have a sort of a going-away run of four or five months, and at the end they take on Gunter, and Gunter chokes them out in their last match. All wrestlers leave the ring uh on their backs. That's sort of a carney code. They always have to lose their last match. John Cena, a couple months ago, was retired by Gunter. Put him in a sleeper hold. Mr. America. The Gunther character is kind of a tweener right now. But he hasn't been seen on TV much lately, so he's just sort of dabbled in coming back. And he's more often seen in his street clothes now than his wrestling attire. They're gonna they're kind of going away from that character, but of course he's an Austrian, he has the accent, so there'll always be some part of it. So if in fact they are moving Seth Rollins in a fascist direction, there's no telling whether he's going to be a good guy or a bad guy. That's what's got me concerned.

SPEAKER_00 6:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

The chief content officer in the public face of management within the company is a guy named Paul Lebesgue. And Paul Paul Lebesgue wrestled for 30 years uh under the name Triple H. And his aesthetic was uh prominently featuring Iron Crosses. And you know, his his music was uh written and performed by uh Lemmy from Motorhead, less Nazi, but more badass biker.

SPEAKER_00 6:39

We know there's an over Yeah, that is very concerning.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

Lemmy notably had a rather large collection of Nazi memorabilia, he always insisted publicly that it was a aesthetic interest in military history and not a political endorsement. His bandmates and friends kind of backed him up on that, but the collection was real and substantial. And it's the kind of biographical detail that exists in you know, Gray Zone. Either he was the guy who found the visual language of fascism interesting without endorsing the politics, or he's one of those I'm just into the aesthetic as cover for his politics. You can pick whichever interpretation you want. Yeah, I'd lead towards the latter. The fact that he was the music for the most powerful man in WWE, you know, with that kind of a collection, that that's not nothing.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

Yeah. I mean, especially with the Iron Crosses.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

Last night was the first time we've seen this departure in Rollins' character. Wrestling has always been good at dipping their toes in the water and then responding when crowds have a visceral reaction in one way or the other. Over the years, it's been sort of this leading indicator of what uh mainstream American audiences will tolerate. The writers of the show, they they test the cultural boundaries in front of millions of people. Something doesn't work, they pull it. Something works, they double down. Yeah. You know, they gave us sort of the reality TV before reality TV. They they gave us the anti-hero protagonist in Stone Cold Steve Austin that eventually would become the Sopranos. And not for nothing. It's closely related, the WWE, to Donald Trump. Yeah. They've had a relationship with him for years. The owner of the WWE, or the former owner now on the board of directors, uh, Vince McMahon, his wife is in the cabinet of Trump 47. So he's the she's the uh Secretary of Education. Just something to like keep an eye out for. They're on the road to WrestleMania in a couple weeks, and it seems to be testing this boundary. It's going to be interesting. If this is in fact what they're doing, how they're presenting it. Because there's a slight chance that a black-shirted Colby Lopez saying and doing fascist things might be uh a good guy.

SPEAKER_00 9:00

That'd be pretty terrifying. That'd be a pretty terrifying eventuality. But I could totally see that happening. I mean, fascist aesthetics have been entering the mainstream increasingly for a while, as you've pointed out from wrestling. My mind is called to there's this brand, it's called Boy, just B-O-Y. Years ago, during the first Trump administration, they put out shirts and jackets that that just it was a it was the Nazi black eagle. Like, you know, the Nazi black eagle who's holding in its talons the swastika. That was just their insignia, except that instead of the swastika, it just said the word boy, but with, you know, the circle that the swastika is in was the O from boy. And it's just, I mean, it's just fascist iconography. It's just it's just a fascist symbol that they were using uh to sell t-shirts to 20-year-olds or whatever. Fascist aesthetics are extremely compelling to lots of people. They are about power, uh, they're about violence, they're about masculinity, um, they're about size, they're about speed. Lots of people just like that stuff. I mean, you know, you mentioned in Hugo Boss, it's like true and real. It's all connected to military aesthetic, which is just like a big part of how all fashion works now. Like lots of fashion that we think about as just like regular fashion comes from military fashion. You know, like I wear black boots every day. Those are just like GI boots, essentially. I wear a bomber jacket. Where do you think that came from? All of that stuff is just military aesthetics uh filtered into popular consumption. Thinking about how Nazi speech, Nazi aesthetics, uh, Nazi dress is just like part of how the world works. Yeah. I mean, you know, that's one of those things where like you say that wrestling has its finger on the pulse, and I think that it often does. Talk to me about Fashwave. Fashwave was or is a um, it's an aesthetic movement on the internet, uh, primarily. The organization of it was around like using these kinds of like 80s nostalgia aesthetics, but to talk about returning to an idealized past. A lot of what fascism has always been back in the early 20th century as well as today in the 21st century, is about returning to an idealized version of either your father's generation or your life when you were a child. Uh so it's a lot of 90s nostalgia, a lot of 80s nostalgia today. Fashwave is an example of this. Um, it's an aesthetic movement, primarily on the internet, like I said, uh, which sort of like imagine if you said, hey, ChatGPT, throw together a trailer for a new Back to the Future movie, and it just kind of like spit out a bunch of like neon colors that sort of kind of looked like vomit, but you know, maybe were appropriate to like a Stranger Things or a Back to the Future, or that Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman movie that's set in the 1980s. It's like that, except with the political proclivities of fascism. So it's about power and the family and Christianity and the government and speed and you know, returning to the way that things were always supposed to be. Uh, so that is Fashwave.

SPEAKER_01 12:23

I've noticed it's like glitchy. Like the videos always have this sort of glitchiness to them. There is that aspect of it too.

SPEAKER_00 12:30

You're right. The sort of glitchiness of it is it's supposed to evoke like, you know, like a VHS tape?

SPEAKER_01 12:38

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

Like early taped film. When we switched from tape in the 60s and 70s to other forms of tape that were cheaper in the 80s and 90s, like quality drops massively, but it's massively cheaper and thus much more accessible. Like it's supposed to mimic that quality. Like in exactly the same way that like you go back in time, like you go and you look at like a movie from the 1960s and it's this like incredible crisp quality, but then you look at a TV movie in the 80s and like the quality is awful. Uh that's and it's it's supposed to be mimicking that. Um, because the particular aesthetics that the fascists are interested in are partly these 20s aesthetics, but but a lot of it is the height of the American century, uh, the 1980s, uh, at least as they imagine it.

SPEAKER_01 13:27

Yeah, that was when the Cold War was happening, you know, at its peak. I think I'm too young for it, but it just the generation before me was actually hiding underneath their desks. And they had nuclear bomb drills because there was an ever-present threat of the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc threatening.

SPEAKER_00 13:44

Yeah, and and the fascists yearn for that threat of violence in a very literal way. They believe that the threat of violence is good and that it got does good things for you, that it makes you a harder man, and they think that people are weaker now. And so this is why the fascists are sort of torn about the Iran war or the third Gulf War or whatever it is that we're gonna end up calling it, because they like war, but they are turning against Donald Trump related to the war, because they think that the war was orchestrated by Jewish people. And so they like war, but they don't like this war because they think that it's controlled by some Jewish cabal.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

One of the things that's uh I recently discovered with FASHWave is that a few years back, when everybody was on Twitter, like a good portion of people started putting out their profile pic with uh red eyes, like glowing red eyes, like they had infrared vision. And that's a that's a fashion aesthetic. I thought that was just for Bitcoin or something at the time.

SPEAKER_00 14:49

No, it's it's like it's like an indication of like anger or violence. Uh so some of that aesthetic comes from like it comes from 80s cartoons or from anime, you know, like like the camera sweeps across a character's brow and you get this like glint in their eye, and you know, like, oh, they're about to fuck some shit up, you know. It's that kind of thing. They did it as an as a joke to Joe Biden, but then the Joe Biden campaign sort of like took it on as an ironic sort of take back. Yeah, you know, come at our infrastructure spending bill, like like as if this were the kind of violence that the fascists were were engaged in or worried about. Whereas like Fashwave is more related to, you know, if you've ever seen um uh images of Donald Trump depicted as the god emperor from Warhammer, uh, you know, this like giant ten-foot-tall monster in gleaming golden armor with wings and like giant flowing locks of hair. Incidentally, Warhammer has become my middle-aged man thing. Uh I've I've started to paint little guys.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

Uh that's a level, Craig. That's a level, Doctor.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

Oh, 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm speaking of, you know, the good guys being Nazis, like the good guy, the quote unquote good guys, like the humans, the protagonists in Warhammer, they're just fascists. They have like skulls on them all over the place, and they're genocidal monsters and maniacs. As originally conceived in the 70s in the UK, this was satire. It was supposed to be a satire of empire in the United States. But of course, Americans saw this and were just like, like, cool. Those are big guys and they're gonna kill a bunch of people. That's cool.

SPEAKER_01 16:40

Really reducing it to the lowest common denominator there. Uh let me ask you about these guys that you're painting, Craig, because I think we might have glossed.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

Oh, 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This might be what we're talking about today.

SPEAKER_01 16:51

Are you taking like existing toys, chemically stripping their paint away so you can create because I see these with the Green Bay Packers. Like, there's a guy on the Green Bay Packers Reddit that's that makes statues of various Packers, but he shows you, like, oh, this is a starting lineup Thurman Thomas figure from 1988 that I'm using.

SPEAKER_00 17:10

Is it is that what you're doing? So you can do that. What I am mostly doing is buying off of the internet little 3D printed models that are of fantasy or sci-fi figurines, and then I paint them. It's just a very cathartic, relaxing activity. Uh I listen to a lot of metal when I'm doing it.

SPEAKER_01 17:31

What do you do with them after they're painted? You look at them. Do you have like a diorama somewhere in your uh ostensibly there's a game.

SPEAKER_00 17:38

There's like a board game you can play with them. Uh, but it's a really terrible board game.

SPEAKER_01 17:43

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

Uh so I don't play it. Uh I just like painting the little guys.

SPEAKER_01 17:47

I get it, man. We got this podcast rolling out next month, and you know, you're you're allowed to sort of have like a bookshelf behind you of all your favorite things. And uh I've been I've been itching to buy a Voltron for some years now. I have my old Voltron.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

Oh hey, see, this is what I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_01 18:04

Yeah, I I have my old Voltron. It's not all the pieces are are there. When I'm feeling real depressed, I go on eBay and I type in Voltron or or Die Ruger or Go Lion. I've learned a lot about Voltron over the years. I don't want to bore people with it.

SPEAKER_00 18:20

Oh, hey. Speaking of speaking of Fashwave and nostalgia, and ugly, this is one of those unfortunate situations in which they've got a number on something. I do believe that fundamentally nostalgia is bad. I think that it is a bad regressive feeling, and it is one that I have sometimes, and I think that almost everybody does. Keeping yourself aware of the power that it has over you and how it's directly connected to evil people's nostalgia for bad things, uh, and how people like intentionally, you know, intentionally take this and use it uh to empower bad movements. Um, I think it's something we just have to, we just have to be careful about. I mean, you know, like like Donald Trump's administration, you know, there were those like hype videos about about bombing Iran and stuff. Like those were playing on nostalgia, but not 80s nostalgia necessarily. Most of it was playing on like early 2000s video game nostalgia, because that's the base that they want to be in favor of this war. You know, it's like they were showing images from like Halo and whatever.

SPEAKER_01 19:33

If you've been following the Ukraine-Russian war at all, you've no doubt uh seen a first-person video of a drone killing someone. Yeah. Yes. We don't that's not part of our American visual language just yet, uh, because Americans haven't been killing people with the kind of drones that roll right up to you. You have an awareness that you're about to die, and then you know it shoots you. Well, once that video exists, it'll get out. I have no doubt that the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, will have that produced into 40 or 50 different bite-sized reels. 100%. 100%. That's dark, man. That is dark, dark stuff. Stare into the abyss with friends, the Autocratic Despair podcast with Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson. Available wherever you get your podcast.