SPEAKER_01 0:00

The weird feeling of glee that arrived when you discovered FBI director Cash Patel has some pretty bad substance abuse issues. The desperate need to believe in some vague promise of a better future where this is all in the rearview mirror. That is autocratic despair. This is Autocratic Despair, the podcast. I'm Nick Mortensen, a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Each week on the Autocratic Despair Podcast, I stare into the abyss with my friend, Dr. Craig Johnson, PhD in global fascism, lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of 2025's most important book, How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism. Dr. Craig, on a scale of one to ten, with half-point scales now, where would you say your autocratic despair is this week?

SPEAKER_00 1:01

I think early on in this podcast, we hadn't calibrated ourselves well. I think that I should be at a three, and a three is bad. Whereas 10 is Hitler is currently the Chancellor of Germany. I think that I'm at a three on an objective level. On a personal level, probably a five, not feeling good. But when looked at objectively, we're probably at a three.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

I do a monthly meeting called the Autocratic Despair Dialogues in Green Bay. I don't advertise them too much. I just put an ad up on Facebook, an event. I kind of gauge how bad things are going by how many people show up. Yesterday was the 20th of April Monday night. I only had one person show up. There was other stuff going on yesterday, obviously. Yeah. I think mine this week is close to five. And it's mostly because of this cash patel thing. There's an article in The Atlantic this week about him being sort of a drunk pillhead. I don't want unfortunate things to happen to him. I'm just happy to know that one of these people has some maladjustment to being a fascist.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

I totally get what you're saying. I don't have any sympathy or empathy for these people. I like earnestly hate them. And I think that you, the listener, should too. These are people who had the choice to do anything with their lives and decided not just that they wanted to support Donald Trump, but that they wanted to work for him. And not just that they wanted to work for him because they were already the assistant to the sub-under-secretary of state or whatever. They wanted to be important people in the Maggie universe. You see this stuff when you look at Patel's face, you see it when you look at Marco Rubio's face. There's like a sadness, there's like a sickness there of knowing what they've done and not being able to stop and knowing that there's no way out, they're trapped. As a human person, I see that, and I am angry that it no longer inspires sympathy from me because of how I feel about them. I feel like that's another thing that they've done to me. I see their suffering, but I I'm eating this up because I hate you and you did this to me, you know?

SPEAKER_01 2:58

There's some autocratic despair right there. Mine doesn't come from a place where I hate them and want to see them suffer. I do hate them. I do want to see them suffer. Yeah. I just think that the fact that you're taking drugs or an excessive amount of alcohol really humanizes you. That there's some part of your soul that's dying and you kind of understand it, and you're turning to these maladaptive techniques. To give you a little background of what we're talking about, in case you're not familiar with it, in mid-April, there was an article in the Atlantic magazine that appeared. It was entitled Cash Patel's Erratic Behavior Could Cost Him His Jobs. It's written by Sarah Fitzpatrick. And the article alleges there's a lot of drinking. The Patel was conspicuously inebriated on multiple occasions that people were willing to talk about. And officials say he's known for obvious intoxication at private clubs in both Washington and in Las Vegas. Patel does live in Las Vegas part of the week. Some of these incidents have forced his staff to change early morning meetings or later on in the day as he recovered. He's hung over quite a bit. Justice Department, White House officials described instances in which aides and security personnel had trouble waking him. His security detail once needed to request breaching equipment to reach him behind locked doors. Let that image sit for a second. The FBI's director's security detail had to prepare to breach a door to get to their own boss. In my mind, it's a battering ramp. Yeah, I think that that's what that has to mean, as opposed to lock pick. He's the director of the FBI. Any door that he is behind. You can't really pick it unless you're one of the real expert. Probably. This is not a regular hotel door or something. That's like a level of drunk. We all saw him in the locker room of the USA hockey team chugging a beer. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:45

And he did look like a guy that could party. This is the thing about how these men perform their masculinity. It is intentionally self-destructive. There's a clear comparison here between this kind of behavior and clavicular, who also was in the news last week for an overdose. This is precisely where that road ends. If your masculinity depends on you being able to endure putting poison in your body, that's where it leads. It's like a weird humanizing thing to see somebody hit, at least what could be a rock bottom, in such a public way, having hit their wagon to fascism, they have no way out. They can't say, I need help. Because needing help is, in their words, gay. As if there were something wrong with needing help or being gay. To them, there is.

SPEAKER_01 5:33

When they're saying something's gay, what they mean is it's feminine in quality. Any potential exposure of vulnerability to other people is weakness to them.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Exactly, yes. This is why they even say, like being married or having a girlfriend is gay. Or any relationship to femininity at all is gay.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

It's a strange one. It's not a great way to go through life. If you're a young man deciding how to go through life, don't do that. Take any other approach.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

Literally, almost any other thing that you can think is better than this. We just gave some kids a blank check to do some. You could do a bunch of other heinous, terrible stuff that would be less heinous and would still be worthy of rebuke. Almost anything else would be better than a lot of this stuff.

SPEAKER_01 6:20

To circle back around to this article on Cash Patel, there was some erratic behavior reported in it that I kind of thought was humorous. April 10th, a couple weeks back, Patel was locked out of an internal FBI system. That led him to be convinced that he'd been fired by the White House. He had a real strong freakout in front of at least 10 people. That checks out. They have fired people in the same embarrassing way before. Yes. In a situation like that, a full Trump motherfucking would be in order. It's nice to know that there's one in the horizon for cash patel. Turned out it was just a routine technical problem. This again humanizes Cash Patel to me. He has these pent-up resentments in his system, and somehow he thought he was fired, and the moment had to come crushing down on him for however long he thought he was fired, that he had compromised his entire moral universe for this one figure, and the payoff was getting fired by the most impersonal means. Yes. Humanizes him to me in a weird way.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

Unfortunately it does, yeah. It tells you he believes that Hidden getting fired is a likely or very real possibility, or that he thinks little of himself and believes that it could happen at any time. You know, he's just afraid all the time. Which makes sense given what we've just learned about his substance abuse. That generally stems from an experience of low self-esteem and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

In my mind, he's the low man on the totem pole in the Trump cabinet. I'm sure that you've seen what the pharmacist for the White House was requisitioning during the Trump 45 administration. Yes. If you're turning to alcohol to deal with your anxiety and you're in the Trump cabinet, you're missing out on an array of Benzos.

SPEAKER_00 8:22

They have the whole pharmacopia and then some available to them. Fascists love drugs. Fascists love drugs. Fascists do love drugs. All the fascists take so many drugs. All the Nazis were on amphetamines all the time, continuously. That book Buzzed does a really good job of explaining that.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

Exactly. It was called Pervitin. Yeah. Which is a fun name.

SPEAKER_00 8:44

Spectacular.

SPEAKER_01 8:45

They gave it to everybody, including the everybody in the army, which explained their entire Blitzkrieg philosophy on the war.

SPEAKER_00 8:53

Yes. They're all high all the time. All the time. And again, yeah, you know, like this is in keeping with their obsession with power and literally speed.

SPEAKER_01 9:04

At one point, Hitler and the Nazis did try to do away with the scourge of Pervitin uh in society, and they stopped allowing it. They stopped giving it to the army. There's all these letters home from infantrymen asking their girlfriend or their parents to send amphetamines to the front line. Oh no. It's sad. Today's army parents do buy Kevlar vests. I remember hearing that. They do. Back in the day, they were going to get some Vexadrin or whatever you could get.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

It's true that you could get more stuff back in the 30s and 40s.

SPEAKER_01 9:54

Craig, there's an update on Prairie Land. If you listen to this show the last couple weeks, we've talked about Prairie Land. We talked about that. We're talking about a case at the Prairie Land Detention Center where eight people were found to have been providing material comfort for terrorism because they wore black to a protest. If you want to hear the whole story about it, check last week's show. It's up on the Apple feed at episode four. I do want to read off the names of the people that are behind bars. Cameron Arnold, Zachary Ebbett, Savannah Batten, Bradford Morris, Marisela Rueda, Elizabeth Soto, Inez Soto, and Ben Song. Still in federal custody. I just want to have their names read. I want it to go on the transcript. Dr. Craig and I are not forgetting about these people. The Prairie Land situation hasn't really made the news the way it should. There's reasons for that, and they're not good. There is a new development. Last week we talked about how one of the defense lawyers filed a motion to examine the jury because there are credible allegations of jury coercion in this case. The motion is sitting before the judge of the case right now. He might do the right thing. Last week we explained the judge, his name is Mark Pittman. Seems unlikely that he'll rule in favor of examining the jury on this. It seems like he's a ringer in a manner of speaking. The latest is that Ben Song's dad, Ben Song is the guy who fired the shot that wounded a police officer. Who is alleged to have done so? Alleged to have done so, yes. Ben's father, Taeem Song, who's also his lawyer, filed a motion on behalf of his son this week that argues the prosecution never disclosed Lieutenant Thomas Gross, the one that was shot, drew his weapon prior to there being any gunshots fired that night. The information did come out on trial when Gross was cross-examined. Taeem Song, the lawyer, argues that this is a Brady violation, a violation of his son's due process rights. You'll remember that Song's defense was prepared to argue that Ben Song fired in self-defense or in defense of another before it was blocked by Pittman. Pittman wouldn't allow them to argue that in court. The defense angle would have been much harder to block had Pittman known about this information coming out during the discovery process. If the prosecution knew Lieutenant Gross drew his weapon before Song fired and didn't disclose that, it would be a Brady violation. A Brady violation is when the defense withholds evidence that could help the defense at trial. Those are usually taken pretty seriously by an appellate court, even if they're reluctant to overturn anything else. It's in front of Judge Mark Pittman and hasn't been decided upon yet. It stands in limbo, I suppose, while we're waiting for decision. If there are no alterations, the sentencing for the people that were convicted of providing material comfort to terrorism are scheduled for June 18th of this year. That date will hold if he denies the motions. The clock's running. Yesterday a state trial began for a guy named Dario Sanchez, who's charged with hindering the prosecution of terrorism because he removed someone from a signal chat prior to turning his phone over upon arrest. That's the latest information that we have on Prairie Line. I just want to bring it up. I just think it's important that there's at least one podcast talking about this case.

SPEAKER_00 13:07

Yeah, there isn't enough attention to this one because this might sound like inside baseball, this legal case questions of who's getting charged with what and stuff. That's not what this is. This is establishing a legal precedent for the criminalization of dissent that will outlive the Trump administration. Whenever the Trump administration ends, whether or not J.D. Vance becomes the president after that in 2028, these legal precedents will still be there. And they will be usable by anybody who is around. Democrat, Republican, etc. That is the problem and also the promise of how the American judicial system worked. Once the Republicans had taken over the government in the 80s and 90s, they still had to deal with decades from the 40s up until the 70s of pretty liberal legal cases in the United States system. Now that they have taken over the judicial system, which is one of the biggest successes of the first Trump administration, they are reaping the benefits. And this means essentially whether or not Trump is still in office in 2028, if he tries to just stage a coup or something like that, even if the Democrats win and they win both parts of the United States Congress, these legal cases will still be there, the precedent will still be there, the Supreme Court will still be the Republicans, many of these regional courts will still be the Republicans, and the precedent will be that if you are in the same chat group as somebody who is accused of terrorism, you are also a terrorist.

SPEAKER_01 14:36

And let's not forget what they are allowed to do to people that are accused of terrorism in the United States. They're allowed to detain them indefinitely without charging them. And indefinitely means indefinitely. It means for the rest of your life. And they don't have to tell anybody that they have detained you either. So literally, if they think that you're a terrorist, they can disappear you. Yes. And we're heading in a direction where they can call any quasi-Antifa black bloc type protester a terrorist.

SPEAKER_00 15:06

Yeah. It's pretty nightmarish, but that's where we're at.

SPEAKER_01 15:09

Dress accordingly. I don't think I'm wearing much black to a protest anytime soon. If you're thinking about going to a protest. You gotta be careful. Sincerely. Oh boy, oh boy. My daughter's not a teenager yet, but if she's a teenager going to one of these protests with her friends and they're very passionate about the subject, very strident about the subject, and there's some trouble that they get into, it could easily turn into a parent's worst nightmare. We're unhealthily close to this scenario. It's really just a matter of putting it into play at this point. They have all of the structure set up, and it's just gonna be some unlucky person that is charged with this, probably a young person, but I'm sure they'll make the person a little bit less than sympathetic with their prior record so it becomes easier for the public to swallow what they're doing. We're heading down a bad road. Once again, it's time for Tal Rico talk, the segment of the Autocratic Despair podcast that people come back again and again for. Throughout our time incubating this podcast, we have done the service of allowing James Tal Rico to make a name for himself on a national level through our podcast. Patrick Craig and I we don't necessarily support Tal Rico's politics or think he'd be a good politician. We think it's important in this era of autocratic despair to blindly and delusionally believe in someone, in a better tomorrow, a better future. And we have decided to put all of our emotion and heart into the idea that America has a Talarico-shaped whole. Only James Talarico can fill it. That's why we do this segment. Yeah. I'm just trying to explain it off the top of my head in a way that makes sense. And I don't think I've quite pulled it off yet. You know, I do, I know. Trying to convince somebody in the general public that what we're doing here is is just a forceful rejection of cynicism. I'm gonna try to take a stab at it, and maybe this, maybe this.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

Okay, yeah, please do. The point of this isn't to say, even specifically, that it's gotta be Talerico. Although it should be, because that's what Nick and I have decided on, and we're gonna be proselytizing in that direction. The point of this is more like you gotta believe in something. Literally, we're saying that there is power to faith and hope. Remember those feelings that you got when you heard about Barack Obama, and it seemed like he might be able to win. I heard about those things. I was in college, I have significantly more leftist and radical politics than Barack Obama did. I had no delusions about what kind of president he was going to be. And he turned out to be precisely the kind of president that I thought he was going to be, a moderately progressive, moderate Democrat. But his victory in 2008 was a galvanizing injection of the belief that things could get better at all for millions of people, not just in the United States but around the world.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

And that's how we see Tal Rico.

SPEAKER_00 18:34

That's the kind of energy that we're talking about, right? Hope in a literal, basic sense. I don't know about you, but I really feel like I could use some of that. The belief that things could get better in a substantial way, right? It's hard.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

We're asking our audience, the desparables, as I like to call them. We're asking you guys to come along on this journey where we get in on Talo Rico early. Get in on it with us. Yeah. Right now, you can buy futures in his presidential prospects in 28 on those prediction markets. Cheap. Yeah. Extremely cheap. Pennies on the dollar. We don't have any sponsorship system with these. The way that these prediction markets work is you're essentially buying the percent that it's likely that something will happen. If something's likely to happen, you pay 99 cents per share. Comes true, you get 1%. If something's unlikely to happen, you can buy it at three cents and it'll pay off at a dollar. The way to make money in these prediction markets is not to bet on extreme long shots to win, it's to look at the odds of something unlikely becoming slightly more likely. Yes. So you can get in on Tao Rico now at five cents a share, and then six or eight months from now, when it's up to 15 cents a share, you sell, you've tripled your money. That's how a prediction market works. I'm not saying get involved. No. I'm currently not involved with any sort of prediction market. I used to be when I was a kid, I followed this one called News Futures. It was in USADay.com. You know, I played the game every day. I did poorly in it. I did come to understand how the game is played. I'm not terribly interested in continuing to play it. And it's not because it's not exciting, it's because it's really exciting. Yeah. I don't want to become addicted to that in the same way. I spent a lot of time looking at cryptocurrency prices in the mid-2010s. Pretty much check in on my Schwab account every day except for the weekends now. Yeah. It's just something to become obsessed of. If that's your cup of tea, get in on Tal Rico early. We'd love, we'd love for you to make a bunch of money.

SPEAKER_00 20:40

You know that experience you get when you're a fan of a band or an actor, and then they get famous, and you get to lord it over other people later and say that they're a late comer. You get that deep sense of smug satisfaction about being right the whole time. That's the dream. Exactly. Remember that feeling? I loved that feeling when I was a teenager. You can have that again. But with the politician this time.

SPEAKER_01 21:03

Like that's good stuff, and we've been totally deprived of that in the Trump area because all the existential implications. There's not really any totally called this shit, bro, when there's concentration camps. Even if you did totally call that shit, it just isn't an appropriate tone to strike. What with the concentration camps? Yeah. You could be mad at him if he sells out. There's a couple different levels here. Yes. Wouldn't it be nice to feel a little morally superior to people for no particular good reason? Yes. If Tal Rico's second album is for the suits, if he starts forgetting about the congregation, which is what I imagine his devoted fan base might call themselves, then he's dead to us.

SPEAKER_00 21:46

I liked him before I was cool, and I stopped liking him before he stopped being cool.

SPEAKER_01 21:51

If he hires a Rick Rubin to produce his third album, we'll probably get drawn right back in to Tal Rico.

SPEAKER_00 21:56

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, he could have a return. He could have a comeback for sure. Of course, this is all dependent on him actually winning this Senate seat. If he loses, then he's probably gonna be out of the national limelight. But if he wins, there's every chance that he could ride this at least contesting the nomination, possibly being chosen as a vice president. Oh, he's gonna win in Texas, Dr.

SPEAKER_01 22:21

Craig. I'll tell you exactly why. This week all of the political contribution reports for March rolled forward. And the Tally Whacker just dropped a$27 million quarter. Oh my god.$27 million in three months. The largest quarter one fundraising number any Senate candidate has ever posted in any state in the history of the country during an election year. He might win then. 27 million. Damn. Jimmy Milktoast, he's out there casually setting all-time records like it's no problem. He's fundraising maxing at a level literally never before been seen. It's one of the rare times you're gonna hear nobody's ever seen anything like this before.

SPEAKER_00 23:08

You can't literally say he's the greatest of all time. He is literally the greatest of all time.

SPEAKER_01 23:15

This is such a great investment in Tal Rico. I mean, get on board, people. Yeah, you're listening to this show. Come on, come on down, step on by. There's room. So 540,000 individual donors. That's really good. Almost every Texas county, and they got 254 counties in Texas. It's a big fucking state. Has a donor. The Riz Minister is speedrunning the entire Texas political establishment. The establishment cannot figure out how to pause the game. This is an unprecedented level of aura. The Sigma energy of James Tal Rico is off the charts. America's youth pastor just collection plate mogged every other Senate candidate in the history of this country. Collection moged is really bad, but it's very good. One of the aspects of the Tal Rico talk segment on this show is that I have to talk about him in the most brain rot young guy way. That was the decision we made on the first episode that we began incubating this podcast. We were talking about clavicular.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:17

Dr. Craig and I got really into the language that young men are using to talk with each other. I gotta talk about him in full bro.

SPEAKER_00 24:26

I have to say though, that as somebody who works on a college campus, I must tell you that you are not using the word brah enough. Believe it or not, that's a frequent complaint in my outside life as well.

SPEAKER_01 24:35

That's a hard one. You're also not saying low-key enough. I know, I know. I'm a 48-year-old man. I have to maintain some semblance of dignity. I owe the word dude everything. I can't just bring brah into the conversation. That's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've done so much duding in my life. I refer to my father as dude. I don't call him dad. I say when I see him, I say, hey dude. That's that's it's a level.

SPEAKER_00 25:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:04

That's that's definitely it. Craig, you're not a father yet? Yeah. If you don't pick what your kids are calling you, they might end up calling you dude at some point in their lives. Hey. My father never never laid it down the way that I have to my kids. I'm papa in my house. I demand that my children call me papa. It's a great call from the beginning. That's pretty good. Very happy to be a papa.

SPEAKER_00 25:27

I've always said to friends who have children that as an uncle, my first inclination for all children is to only ever call them kid. Hey kid. And that's it.

SPEAKER_01 25:41

Whoa, whoa. Hey, I'm not telling you how to live your life, Dr. Craig, but if you're not availing yourself to the full cornucopia of child nicknames, that's just some weak tit uncling. You know, that's okay. We're all being put to shame by Herman Bailey, who had two nephews make it to the NFL named Champ Bailey and Boss Bailey, respectively. That's Apex uncle, as far as I'm concerned. Unlikely to be Tom, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try, Craig. You can throw a chief in there once in a while.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

The stereotype of millennial dads is that they call everybody Bud and Buddy.

SPEAKER_01 26:18

I can see that. I don't have that. I call my kids big dogs sometimes. Come on over here, Big Dog. Let your papa talk to you for a bit.

SPEAKER_00 26:24

That's really good. I'm sure they like that. That sounds good.

SPEAKER_01 26:27

They love being called the big dog. That's what I'm saying. I'm sure I I bet as a child I would love that. You're too young to remember. There was a basketball player named Glenn Big Dog Robinson in the early 90s that was drafted first overall by the Milwaukee Bucks. The Milwaukee Bucks never did anything with Glenn Robinson and his team. And Glenn Robinson never did anything but average 26.9 points per game. Every single game that he played for eight years. And then he just went away. They had every opportunity to do something, the Bucks. They had Ray Allen on the team at the same time. Oh, wow. It just didn't happen. I'm over it. Giannis got me over it. You know who Giannis is, right? I do know who Giannis is. My brother follows basketball. They won the championship. All right, where were we? I have to edit that out, Craig. It's really a digression from the$27 million. I'm going to run back to it.$27 million. That's how much Talon Rico raised in the last quarter, according to filence. That's January through March of this year. It's the most money a United States Senate candidate has raised in the first quarter of elections. Ever. Of all time, in Texas. A Democrat in Texas breaking the record for fundraising. This is a state that hasn't elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994. The last two Democratic Senate candidates were Better O'Rourke and Colin Alred. Both raised extreme amounts of money and enthusiasm and still lost. O'Rourke in 2018 raised 6.7 million in the same timeframe. Alred raised 9.5 million in 2024. The Tallywacker just tripled up on those guys. That's wild. In comparison, there's a couple Senate races throughout the countries. The Democrats have a real chance to win. John Ossoff in Georgia, he's raised$14 million. Roy Cooper in North Carolina,$13.8 million in the same time. Our guy. He's got it. He might have it. He doesn't have all$27 million cash on hand right now. He had to spend a lot of it to win in the primary. He doesn't even know who his opponent is yet because there's two Republicans vying to be the candidate that runs against him. Neither one of those guys has anywhere close to the money that Tal Rico has. And both of them are going to be spending most of that money on ads against each other. Yeah. Whoever wins is going to be tapped out. And meanwhile, the Riz Minister has got multiple millions and 540,000 people he can call for more. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, yeah, no, no. Not including us two. I'm not making a goddamn donation to James Tal Rico. I'm doing so much right now. Of those 540,000 people, how many would you say that we are responsible for?

SPEAKER_00 29:18

Optimistically, a tenth of one person. I have a question about Talarico that I don't know if you have the answer to. Can he speak Spanish? Can he speak Spanish?

SPEAKER_01 29:28

Of course he can speak Spanish. I don't know. But of course. What politician in Texas doesn't speak Spanish? Except for a Republican that doesn't like Mexican.

SPEAKER_00 29:43

That's true. Alright, I'm gonna make some keyboard noises right now. Can can Taler Rico speak Spanish? I don't like this level of doubt that you have. You can just learn to say the sounds, whether or not you speak it. However, he can probably just learn Spanish. If you're an English speaker, you can just learn Spanish. It's one of the easiest languages to learn from English. And I highly recommend it to anybody who is an English speaker who doesn't speak Spanish yet. It's something that you can definitely do, and it would be a good thing to do, especially if you are a left progressive or even a center type person, who I assume most of the people listening to this show are.

SPEAKER_01 30:41

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