SPEAKER_01 0:02

The visceral jolt of anger you feel when the car in front of you at a red light has a punisher wearing a Trump wig sticker on the back window. The dazed confusion of always knowing exactly what Kid Rock thinks about the state of the country on any given day, and never once having asked. That is autocratic despair. This is Autocratic Despair, the podcast. My name is Nick Mortensen. I'm a comedian, father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Each week on the Autocratic Despair Podcast, I'm joined by my friend Dr. Craig Johnson, a PhD in global fascism studies, lecturer at the University of California, and author of 2025's most important book, How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism. Dr. Craig, on a scale of 1 to 10, where is your autocratic despair this week?

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Now, considering that one is bad, like you don't even want to be at a one, I think this week I'm at a three. Things have gotten a little better since Victor Orban lost. We're recording this on April 14th, 2026. He was a real big linchpin in the global fascist right-wing universe. And so him losing is a very good piece of news. It's very nice. Although the party that beat him isn't really good, they're just kind of like Romney Republicans. They're conservative. But that's pretty much how fascists usually lose, is that conservatives beat them in the end. So it's good, but it's not wonderful news. I mean, it's good news. It's good news, but I'm not very, very, very happy because he's been replaced by some progressive person that I actually agree with about stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

I thought it was really interesting how many people were following that.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

The people I talked to on Sunday, they were periodically looking at their phone to see, and then it was with my kids, and somebody in the group said, Oh, Orban's conceded, which was a surprise. There was like a little din. And for Green Bay, Wisconsin, at a gymnastics place for a birthday party with other parents, it was an unusual amount of following of the Hungarian presidential election.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

That's an amazing amount of internationalism for any Americans anywhere. That's that's really impressive.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

I think there were two people that sort of follow it the way that I do. Uh, and then the other people were just sort of acting interested in. But I was surprised. I saw that John Oliver did an entire half hour on it uh the week before. A lot of people have been watching it to get an idea about where we're headed. And that election going the way that it did is good. I mean, it's a positive momentum. Yes. My question really is I don't know who Peter Meyergar is. Magyar. The guy that Magyar, the guy who won. I don't know who he is, other than he's the guy that used to be in Fidesz, and he definitely is talking some serious shit about what he's gonna do to that government now that he's been elected.

SPEAKER_00 3:10

Yeah, that's the thing. First of all, the fact that the guy's name is Magyar is really funny. Magyar is is like a word that basically means Hungarian. So it's like if a guy named Johnny American beat Donald Trump in an election, like it's pretty it's pretty incredible. Johnny America would get 30% of the vote. Yeah, Johnny America just gets 30% off the bat. There's no need to to even run at that point. Peter Magyar used to be in Fidish, he is a conservative. Like he's a conservative. He is not in favor of progressive causes. He is anti-queer. He is a sexist anti-immigration guy. He's a conservative. But he is not anti-democratic. He believes in democracy, and that sets him way apart from Orban. He is anti-Putin. The biggest thing that's different between him and Orban is that he is pro-EU and pro-NATO. And so he wants Hungary to stay a democratic country and to stay in the European Union, have free and fair elections that he might lose next time, which Orban kind of didn't, and only conceded because this uh this loss was so fantastically bad. Orban had rigged the election system such that you basically needed a two-thirds majority to beat him, thinking that this would be very unlikely or possibly impossible. That's what Magyar's party got. As a new political party, basically, they've only been around for a couple years. It's good news, but it's not spectacular news.

SPEAKER_01 4:47

Do you think that Magyar might just be the controlled opposition candidate? What would be the equivalent of us going from Trump to who for Magyar?

SPEAKER_00 4:56

Ooh, I don't think the controlled opposition is what's happening here. This would be if if the Trump coalition split, because right, Magyar used to be in Orban's party. He used to be in the Fidesch Party. This would be like if Mitt Romney ran and beat Donald Trump. Not Mitt Romney because Mitt Romney's been around before Trump, but somebody like that. You know, like a governor, like a moderate Republican governor of a Kansas or a or a Utah or a Wyoming. Some like oldie time stodgy conservative, also kind of young and hip. Honestly, it's kind of like if there was a Bill Clinton in the Trump Coalition and he beat Trump. It's something like that.

SPEAKER_01 5:35

We don't talk about Ron DeSantis much anymore. No. How equivalent would Ron DeSantis be in this?

SPEAKER_00 5:40

It's a little like DeSantis, although I think DeSantis really wants to inherit all of that anti-democratic stuff that Donald Trump brings along with him. DeSantis is a pretty close equivalent. He's younger than Trump. He's in the Trump Coalition, but getting pushed out of it. He isn't as openly anti-democratic as Donald Trump is. So yeah, DeSantis is a pretty good equivalent in the United States.

SPEAKER_01 6:04

I feel like I'm gonna give Maggiar too much credit in my head as being this uh progressive champion. But didn't we do that for Navalny too, where Navalny was like a little bit, well, he was great and he was the alternative and we all liked him, and then you found out some of Navalny's beliefs, and you're like, well, I don't know about that.

SPEAKER_00 6:20

That's basically what we're dealing with here. Maggiear is talking a bunch of shit. It's funny, like you said. Feels good to hear him say this stuff. In his victory speech, basically telling Orban appointees, just don't come to work. Just don't show up. Because we're gonna fire you. So just like don't show up next week. Don't bother. That feels good. Him saying that he might want to amend the constitution to prevent all of the kind of shenanigans that Orban did in order to stay in power. That's good. But the fact is that he's a conservative who now is in control of a very, very powerful Hungarian state. I don't know if we can believe him that he's gonna do all the stuff that he claims he's gonna do. He might. He might. But we don't know.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

I hope for the sake of Hungary and I guess for us, because we're kind of looking to them as this leading indicator of what's happening to our country. I I hope it works out pretty nicely. I do have some concern whether they'll now he's been elected, what's the interim between now and when he takes off?

SPEAKER_00 7:19

It's very short. It's very short, or it's not like three months or something like that. It's pretty soon. Not much time to rub them out if that was the plan all along. No, no, no, no. He's probably not gonna get killed or couped in the meantime. Orban tried kind of a coup thing, you know, he did that false flag thing. Did you hear about this? No. Yeah. Orban said that he got secret intelligence from Serbia, which is another Russian client state, about an attack on a pipeline that goes from Russia to Hungary, and he was like, Oh, we're gonna get attacked, probably was gonna blame it on Ukraine or something, and say, like, oh, they're interfering with our elections, maybe we need to shut it down, but nobody bought it. It was pretty clearly BS. It didn't work. But that was his his attempt, it just failed. I think uh it's time to breathe a breath of relief. Oh, yeah. For all my grousing, this is good news. Uh, I'm just finding the clouds and the silver lining. Are you afraid of it a little bit? Like uh Oh, hey, deeply. This is what my therapist and I talk about all the time. What would it even be like to have good news? What would it be like to feel good? I have literally spoken with a new therapist, like trying them out, and I'm like, oh, you know, like blah blah blah, depression, anxiety, etc. And then they say, like, what do you do for a living? And I said, Oh, well, I study global fascism, and they're like, Well, there's your problem. Yeah, you come by it honestly. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 8:39

I have I'm having this feeling about it's a small thing and it's tender, and I'll break it if I like it too much. So I wanna I wanna like hide it under my shirt and just kind of keep it over here. Don't look too hard. Don't touch, don't, don't touch it. Yeah. I'm not ready to let down my guard just yet. Don't let Maggie era into your heart. Not the way I let Navalny. I'll say that. Have you followed the the most recent developments in Prairie Land? Uh no, no, I haven't. I got some pages on it of notes. There's some very interesting developments. I want to tell you a story that starts on the 4th of July in 2025 and isn't isn't over yet. It's a story about eight Americans who are now federal terrorists under the law. Their names are Cameron Arnold, Zachary Evitz, Savannah Batten, Bradford Morrist, Mariselo Rueda, Elizabeth Soto, Inez Soto, and Benjamin Song. I say those names because they're important. On the 4th of July 2025, a group of protesters, including the people I just mentioned, showed up outside an ICE detention center in Alvarado, Texas, uh 30 miles south of Fort Fort Worth. They brought fireworks. It was the 4th of July. Their lawyers would later describe what happened as a late-night noise demonstration in support of the people being held inside the facility. The protest was breaking up. Most people were walking away when one of the protesters, Ben Song, a former Marine Corps reservist, allegedly fired a rifle and wounded a local police officer who had just arrived at the scene. Now, this should have been the story of one person charged with one crime. Instead, the federal government charged nine people with terrorism. On March 13, 2026, a federal jury in Fort Worth convicted eight of them. Song, since he shot the guns, allegedly, was convicted of attempted murder for firing the weapon. The other seven were acquitted of attempted murder. The jury did not believe they had conspired with Song. The jury did not believe they could have foreseen the shooting, and the jury did not believe that they were part of a plan or an ambush. But the same jury convicted all eight of providing material support for terrorism. They each faced up to 15 years in federal prison. Here's what the prosecution argued and what the jury accepted. The seven people who were acquitted of attempted murder were nonetheless guilty of supporting terrorism because they wore black clothing to the protest. Their theory was that by wearing black they made it harder for police to identify the one person who fired the gun, and that was the material support. That was the terrorism, wearing black at night. And the terrorist organization they were convicted of providing material support to was Antifa, which is not an organization. It's got no members, it's got no headquarters, it's got no leader. It is not on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations, and it can't be added to any list of domestic terror organizations because of the First Amendment. It prohibits the government from designated domestic political movements that way. Pam Bondi, the then Attorney General of the United States, announced after this verdict that it was the first time in American history that anyone had ever been successfully prosecuted for material support of Antifa. And then she added, this will not be the last. This week a story broke that may add a new chapter. An independent journalist from an outlet called Unicorn Riot published a report. The journalist's name is Chris Hermit. The report raised the possibility that the jury that delivered the verdict may have been coerced. Defense attorneys have filed a motion for a new trial based on what happened inside the jury room on the day of the verdict. A specific federal judge, I'm going to tell you about in a minute, is expected to rule on this motion in upcoming days. I want to walk you through what's being alleged, who's alleging it, and why the judge who's about to decide is the most important part of the whole story. And I want to tell you up front, I'm going to be careful about what we know versus what's being claimed. Because the last thing I want to do is overstate it. This is an allegation in a pending motion. It's a serious allegation. It is. But it is an allegation. I'm going to tell you exactly what the defense is arguing and exactly what we don't yet know. Here's what's being reported. On March 13th, the day the Prairie Land jury returned its verdict. A woman named Amber Lowry was sitting in the hallway outside the courtroom with her mother. Amber is the sister of Savannah Batten, one of the defendants. She was there to find out what was going to happen to her sister. Shortly after the jury came back from lunch, around one in the afternoon, Amber and everyone else in that hallway heard what she described as a loud uproar coming from the jury room. Several people yelling, sustained. Not a quick flare-up, sustained. About a minute and a half of audible yelling from inside the sealed jury deliberation. Loud enough that strangers in the hall turned to each other and said, What the hell is that? And about an hour later, the jury reached its verdict. When Amber and her mother walked into the courtroom for the reading, she says the atmosphere had changed. The room was packed with police officers and U.S. marshals. It was more hostile than the previous days of the trial. And when the jurors were seated, Amber noticed something that she didn't make sense of at the time. Two of the jurors, male jurors, were visibly crying. And then the verdict came down, guilty. Eight people convicted of providing material support for terrorism. Most of them acquitted of the attempted murder, but still convicted of terrorism for having the audacity to wear black clothes to a protest. Amber and her mother walked out of the courthouse to their car. A person who works in the legal profession, who asked to not be named in the Unicorn Riot story, approached them in the parking lot. That person was crying. That person visibly shaking, according to Amber. They told Amber and her mother there had been a fight inside the jury room. That's what the commotion was. One of the defense lawyers had to alert the U.S. Marshals to break it up. Now, a couple days later, a paralegal named Tamara Hutchinson, who had worked Savannah Batten's case, contacted Amber and confirmed it. There had been a fight in the jury room. The story's not a mistake. It was not a rumor. It had happened and it was being discussed by people who were there. On March 27th, two weeks after the verdict, Savannah Batten's attorney, Christopher Tolberg, filed a post-verdict motion for a new trial. In that motion, Tolbert argued that there was, quote, a loud and sustained disturbance emanating from the area of the jury room observed by several people on the day the verdict was reached. He argued, Tolbert now argued that based on information obtained after the verdict, there's reason to believe jurors engage in a heated confrontation inside the jury room. Just as Amherst said the hallway of disappearance. Tolbert is seeking a new trial. At minimum, he's asking for an evidentiary hearing, a proceeding in which the jurors themselves would be examined to determine whether coercion took place. We know that two jurors were visibly crying as their verdict was read. We know an unnamed legal professional and a named paralegal, Tamara Hutchinson, both confirmed a fight in the jury room. We know that the defense attorney has filed a motion based on that information. What we don't know is what actually happened inside the jury room, who said what, who did what. And we don't know whether it meets the legal standard for juror coercion. We don't know because the jurors haven't been examined. The only person who can order the examination is Mark Pittman. Who is Mark Pittman, the judge? Let me tell you about Mark Pittman, because uh this is the part of the story that kind of made me sit upstream. Pittman was appointed to the federal bench by Trump in 2019. He was converted by the Senate on a 54 to 36 votes. So more than a third of the senators said, uh, we don't want him to be a federal judge. Uh before his federal appointment, he was a state judge, then a justice on the Texas Court of Appeals, before he was put there by Greg Abbott, the governor. Founding member and former vice president of the Fort Worth chapter of the Federalist Society. The Federalist Society, for anyone who doesn't know, it's a conservative legal network that's built the pipeline for the Republican judicial appointments over the last 40 years. Every Trump Supreme Court nominee came from the Federalist Society list. Every major conservative legal project runs through it. Being a founding member of your local chapter is not a casual affiliation. Pittman sits in the Northern District of Texas, which is one of the significant federal districts in the country for a very specific reason. The reason is that conservative groups have figured out how to file cases in that district because there's three Trump-appointed judges Matthew Kesmerick, Reed O'Connor, and R. Mark Pittman. They hear 90% of the civil cases there. If you want a conservative ruling, you file in Texas. And you know your case is going to land in front of one of these three men. It's called forum shopping. Pittman's got a list of sweet hits in the judging area. They include striking down the Biden administration's student loan forgiveness program, striking down a Texas law that prevented adults under 21 from carrying handguns outside the home, ruling that federal firearm regulations are unconstitutional. And also he once ruled that laws banning at-home alcohol stills are unconstitutional because Congress doesn't have the power to regulate them. There's a real ruling. He's a hero to moonshiners everywhere. But every other major ruling Pittman has handed down has sort of gone in the same direction. Every single one. Now he's a Federal Society's judge sitting in a district that's Republican litigants specifically choose because they can count on him. And he's the judge deciding whether the Prairie Land defendants get a new trial based on a credible allegation that jurors were coerced into convicting them. Pittman already in this trial, the Unicorn Riot Peace Surfaces, has done some stuff that uh was pretty interesting. Before we even had this jury room fight, Pittman had already done several things that raise questions about whether the defendants got a fair proceeding. One, multiple defense lawyers were sanctioned by Pittman for filing routine pretrial motions. Sanctioning defense attorneys for doing their jobs is not normal. It's a tactic. It's designed to make the defense team afraid to file motions at all. Two, Pittman initially declared that this trial would be held in a courtroom that could only accommodate a few dozen people. No live stream, no overflow space. In a case with enormous public interest, the first time members of Antifa had been charged with providing material support to terrorism. It was after the there was some public pressure that he opened an overflow room in a federal courthouse in Dallas, nearly an hour away from Fort Worth where the trial was being held. You want to hear the proceedings, drive an hour. You want to show up in solidarity, get in line early. That's not a neutral logistical choice. That's a choice to suppress public attention to a trial that the Attorney General had publicly announced was the first of its kind. Here's another thing Mark Pittman did. This one should be studied in law schools for a generation. Towards the end of jury selection in February, when it became clear that the jury being assembled was going to be critical of the Trump administration and its immigration enforcement practices, Pittman declared a mistrial. He stated the reason was a t shirt worn under the blazer of a black defense attorney. The t shirt commemorated the Reverend Jesse Jackson who had died that day. Let that one land. A black defense attorney wore a commemorative t-shirt under her blazer on the day that the most famous living black civil rights leader in America died. And Mark Pittman declared a mistrial. He could have told her to put on a different shirt, but he declared a mistrial. And the next week, a second jury was impounded. For that jury, Pittman personally conducted all of the questions of prospective jurors. He did not allow defense attorneys to ask follow-up questions, which is typically what happens in a jury selection process. Normally, both sides get to probe prospective jurors or bias, they get to strike a set number of them. That's not what happened. Pittman took that away from the defense. Four, Ben Song, the defendant, who's firing the weapon that was grossed by Pittman using self-defense or defensive. Whether it was other argument and trajectory of Song's defense wanted to argue, based on testimony from Lieutenant Gross himself on cross-examination, that Gross may have been pointing his gun at the backs of departing protesters when Song fired. The defense wanted to argue that Song may have been trying to prevent police from shooting unarmed people who were already walking away. And Judge Pittman ruled that this argument could not be presented to the jury. Five, the medical records of Lieutenant Gross, the officer who was shot, they would have been, they would have shown what kind of wound he actually sustained, what the angle on the wound was, whether it was consistent with the trajectory of Song's shots. Those medical records never disclosed at trial. On cross-examine, Gross did acknowledge that the injury may have been caused by a ricochet bullet from a suppressive fire at the ground. In other words, one of the things being prosecuted as attempted murder may have just been a ricochet from a warning shot. Great. The jury never got to see the medical records.

SPEAKER_00 24:10

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 24:10

They might have confirmed that. What do you think the posture is of Mark Pittman toward a defense motion alleging juror coercion? What's the likelihood that Mark Pittman, Federalist Society of Fort Worth founding member, Trump appointee, uh author of rulings sanctioning defense attorneys, declarer of mistrial over t-shirts, blocker of self-defense arguments, grants a new trial in the Trump administration's signature anti-Antifa case. They seem low. Let me step back for a minute here and tell you what I think this story is mostly about. The Prairie Land verdict last month was a moment when the American legal system, operating under a Trump-aligned judge in a Trump-friendly forum, converted wearing black clothes at a protest into a federal terrorist conviction. That was already a stress test for the system. The question now is whether the system can even correct itself when the defense presents credible evidence that the jury was coerced. Because that's a test of the functioning justice system. It's not whether the system ever produces bad verdicts, it does. Every system produces bad verdicts. The test here is whether the system has working mechanisms to review them, reverse them, and do better the next time when bad verdicts happen. The motion for a new trial is one of those mechanisms. The evidentiary hearing that's being requested is one of those mechanisms. The ability to examine jurors after a disturbing allegation just before the verdict was announced is one of those mechanisms. They're self-correction features, and they exist because every legal culture eventually produces rooms full of scared people making decisions under pressure they can't articulate. If Mark Pittman denies this motion without even holding an evidentiary hearing, which he might, if he rules that the allegations are insufficient, that the jurors don't need to be cross-examined, that the verdict stands, then what he's actually doing is telling defense attorneys across the country that the self-correction features are no longer operational. He's telling them that in the northern district of Texas, you don't get a hearing, even when the defense attorney had to call the U.S. Marshals to break up a fight in the jury room. That sends a signal that every other defense attorney in every other case has to factor in. It tells them that there's no fallback. Whatever happens in that jury room is final. And if you lose, you lose permanently. Even if you have credible evidence that the process was somehow corrupted. And the defendants here are not just the people convicted last month. There's 18 more Prairie Land defendants still facing state-level trial. First of those trials starts on Monday, April 20. Every one of those trials will be shaped by what happens in these federal motions. If Pittman grants the hearing, those trials proceed under a clout. The precedent might not hold. State prosecutors might pull back. If Pittman denies the motion for an evidentiary hearing, every state prosecutor in Texas now knows that federal courts will not second guess the first ever Antifa terrorism verdict, no matter what comes out about the process. That's a green light for 18 more prosecutions and probably hundreds more to come. We don't know whether the jury was coerted. That's the whole point of the defense motion, to find out. We don't know what the fight in the jury room was about. We don't know whether any jury was genuinely intimidating into changing their vote, or whether the disturbance was simply the normal collapse of human beings under the pressure of deciding whether to send strangers to prison for 15 years for wearing black clothes. Both of these things are possible. Only an evidentiary hearing could tell us which one it is. What we do know is that there was a disturbance, multiple witnesses heard it, paralegal confirmed there was a fight. We know that two male jurors were visibly crying at the reading of the verdict in a federal defense courtroom packed with marshals. A defense attorney had filed a sworn motion asking the court to investigate. The motion sits on the desk of Mark Pittman, the Federalist Society federal judge who has already sanctioned defense attorneys, blocked defense arguments, suppressed public access to the courtroom, and declared a mistrial over a t-shirt honoring Jesse Jackson on the day Jackson died. I don't know what Pittman is going to do with this motion. Nobody does. Hasn't come out yet. It's possible, possible. It is a genuine possibility that Pittman will grant the evidentiary hearing. Judges sometimes do the right thing even when you don't expect them to. The machinery of American justice sometimes works even for people the regime has already decided to treat as terrorism. To hope for this isn't crazy. It's a reasonable posture in this environment. But the test here is not whether Pittman decides to let an investigation happen. The test is what happens next, regardless of how he rules. Because if he grants the hearing and it reveals serious misconduct, the appeals process needs to actually reverse the convictions of the people that were convicted of aiding terrorism. If Pittman denies the hearing, the Fifth Circuit Court needs to probably reverse them upon repeal. That's the court that's a higher up. And if the Fifth Circuit Court won't reverse it on appeal, the Supreme Court needs to take the kid. And if none of those things happen, then the federal courts have made a decision about what the word terrorism can mean under pressure. This is one motion before one judge in one case in one federal district, but it's a uh in many ways, it's a referendum on whether any of the normal constitutional protections apply when the government decides to call people terrorists for wearing the wrong color. We don't know what's going to happen. But we'll find out together, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 30:10

Obviously, this is laying the groundwork for being able to decide that anybody that you want to be a terrorist is a terrorist. Raising this case there at that time, clearly intentional, as you said. The point of this is it's a means to criminalize any form of dissent. This is the kind of thing that will last long after Donald Trump is gone. Legal decisions and legal precedent are not erased by elections in Congress or the presidency or a state house. Those are things that take decades to go away, often. And so, like, yeah, like the legacy of Trump's appointments, the legacy of stuff that he won back in 2016, like this is us seeing the the echoes of that, the reverberations of that that are gonna last for generations. And it doesn't really matter whether or not we vote them out, you know, the only way that that could be stopped is by Democrats deciding that they're gonna pass a law to look soft on terrorism, which they're probably not gonna do. So we're probably just stuck with this one uh if it ends up going the way that it does.

SPEAKER_01 31:19

Stare into the Abyss with friends, the Autocratic Despair Podcast with Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson. Available wherever you get your podcast.