SPEAKER_01 0:06

Oh, also I went to a party and immediately brought up the Nazis because I'm very fun of parties. Now that is Autocratic Despair.

SPEAKER_03 0:15

This is Autocratic Despair with 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, with a 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, where would you rate your autocratic despair this week?

SPEAKER_01 0:58

I think I'm gonna stick with a three. And as a reminder, a three is bad. Donald Trump is not polling well, but you know, this is the horse race time of a presidency. We're deep in the middle of a term. People are looking ahead to the midterms, and so who knows what's gonna be happening. Globally, things are doing okay, you know. Orban lost, that's good, but there's still business happening, still rumbling, still creepy all over the place. So, you know, a three.

SPEAKER_03 1:27

I'm up there at a six. Somebody tried to kill the president again this weekend. Yeah. For anybody that doesn't hasn't been paying attention, doesn't know. Saturday night, somebody tried to kill the president. I was kind of prepared to throw this one away with Ryan Roth, the guy who in September of 2024 was caught hiding outside of one of Trump's golf courses in the shrubbery, holding a weapon. That guy was kind of nuts, sort of a lost soul. And usually when there's these thwarted attempts on a president's life, that's what I reduce the people to. But I managed to read this guy's name is Cole Allen's Manifesto, genuinely disturbing. Not for the reason you might think. It was genuinely disturbing because it was so coherent. I've never seen a manifesto this coherent. Even Luigi Mangioni's doesn't even approach this guy's manifesto. Have you read the Unibomber's Manifesto? Brilliant piece of work. Kinda on board with some of it. I mean, that guy actually had a PhD in stuff, so you know. He wasn't wrong about much. To this day, people are like reading it and putting it on TikTok and it's making more and more sense to people. I am not in favor of the Unibomber, but he had an ethos, to quote the Big Lebowski, right? Yeah, he really did. Oh Kaczynski. That one was easy to dismiss in the moment. And then uh the reason I got into the reason I ever read his manifesto was when I was in college, there was a bathroom that me and two of the other guys that I went to college with out of the way, and people would go there to sit down. There wasn't a lot of traffic. And whenever we would see somebody go in there, we would follow them and then we would shut the light off and run giddily away from the situation. Always a giggle fest when we did that. Eventually we got on the wrong side of the school newspaper. I wrote a manifesto based around the idea that I was gonna continue my reign of terror in this bathroom. That's how I ended up reading it for the first time. I was just trying to crib stuff from it so I could sound more like the unibomber. This is a long time ago. Over the years, some of it has kind of borne out. I'm getting off track already, so this is gonna be a good one. Let me just jog you through it if you haven't heard about the assassination attempt. On Saturday, April 25th, there was the White House Correspondence Dinner at the Hinckley Hilton in D.C. It's not really called the Hinckley Hilton, it's just referred to as the Hinckley Hilton because that's where John Hinckley shot Reagan in 1981. After what happened this past week, I think it should make all the presidents in the future just a little skeptical about stopping by that particular Hilton. Yeah. You know, Hinckley is still alive. Yeah. Didn't he like get out of jail? He's not just out of jail, he's no longer on supervision. He's no longer having to check in with the social worker. He's just a private citizen. Private citizen. Wow. And he's doing great. 70, he's doing great for himself. He cut an album? What? Yeah, he cut an album. That's not a great album. I don't think I got pressed divinal or anything like that. I think it's just SoundCloud. But still, John Hinckley. That's great. He was selling paintings on eBay. Not a great painter, by the way. I think he was just kind of going through the motions. Trying to get that uh despicable man does a painting dollar. Like uh Jack Kavorkian and John Wayne Gacy and George W. Bush. I went full rule of threes with that one. That was full rule of threes, yeah. Basic comedy stuff. The case sound is hilarious. Always go with the rule of threes. The White House correspondence dinner usually uh has some of the most savage comedy at the expense of the president. That's why the president doesn't usually go. Obama went one year and believe it or not, ruined the world by making fun of repeatedly an audience member named Donald J. Trump. At the time, great stuff. But as it turns out, really motivated Trump to take over the world. All in all, a fail. But in the moment, he dropped the mic, and he deserved to drop the mic. Is that good? Trump was gonna speak at this one. I don't know how that was gonna go. A decent number of the people that were usually go to the correspondence dinner were skipping it because Trump was attending, which is a good. Yeah. Some of it was in protest, many just thought it was a little too chummy. It's weird to have a guy like Trump both exist as the president that is working to destroy the country and a sweet get for your event. Yeah. There was probably some danger too. I'm sure there was gonna be some crap for anyone who laughed too hard. This could have been like a real dictator moment for Trump. So much artifice to the event, but a real dictator would use the opportunity to brace everyone there. Probably just a small chance that Trump was gonna take everyone hostage. More than a chance of your usual dinner, but unlikely. A 31-year-old man named Cole Thomas Allen from Torrance, California, was staying at the hotel as a guest. He took a stairwell down ten floors from his hotel room, hit a duffel bag full of guns and knives, sprinted past the magnetometer, tackled, Trump, Melania, Vance, the cabinet, all evacuated, nobody else got hurt. Trump came out a few hours later, still in his tucks, and started talking about the event to justify getting money for his ballroom. I guess you get a freebie when somebody tries to kill you. It didn't seem to make much sense to me. As far as presidential assassination attempts go, this wasn't that close of a call. Cole Allen never was on the same floor as Trump. It's easy for me to say I wasn't the target. What is remarkable about this attempt is discovering who Cole Allen is. Cole Allen doesn't seem all that crazy. But if he is, these are new circumstances from me. No prior criminal record. Graduated from Caltech with a mechanical engineering degree in 2017, earned his master's in computer science in 2025, former NASA intern, does test prep, designs games, had his own game up on Steam, working on another game on Steam. Frequenter of Blue Sky, just like you and I, Dr. Craig. I I never encountered him there. Perhaps you have.

SPEAKER_01 7:12

No, no, no, no. I haven't I haven't encountered him online. Although I know people who have, and they were like, oh yeah, it turns out that I blocked him or something like that. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_03 7:21

Mm-hmm. Probably a little strident. I guess, yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of that's merited in these times. Strident's probably a little bit of a soft sell for a guy who eventually uh tried to assassinate the president.

SPEAKER_01 7:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 7:31

Cole Allen didn't seem exactly like he was suffering from a mental break. It was more like he was the worst zenith of his autocratic despair, just like the rest of us are, to different degrees. I don't know what else is going on in his life. I read through Allen's manifesto and it did a really good job explaining himself. Sort of makes it resonate. It makes it frightening. Before Cole Allen did the attack just a few minutes before, he emailed his family. And it was a funny and lighthearted message where he apologized to his parents for lying to them about traveling to DC on an interview, but said, Yeah, well, I mean you would be doing some interviews as a suspect. Oh my god, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's wild. In it, he described himself as the friendly federal assassin. That does seem a little crazy. The rest of it just seemed pretty rational.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

I mean, this is the problem. As you've identified, one of the issues with what is happening is that it is driving everyday people to do really terrible things. Assassinations are bad. I do not support them at all. Assassinating the president is a bad and dangerous thing to do. I believe that not only is it wrong to kill people, it is also much more likely to cause more disorder and more problems, even if that were this person's motivation.

SPEAKER_03 8:50

You can speak for me and I can speak for you when I say that this show is not a show that would like to see President Trump assassinated. Of course not.

SPEAKER_01 8:58

We'd like to see him impeached. I would like to see him removed from office. That would be my position.

SPEAKER_03 9:03

There's more about Cole Allen that's kind of interesting, worth mentioning here. In his email, he mentioned that he was just trying to get as many Trump administration officials as he could. Not specifically the president, but he did specifically mention that he wouldn't try to kill Cash Patel, which is kind of savvy. If you're about to commit a federal crime, you'd like Cash Patel to be around, to be in charge of your criminal investigation. Plus, Cash knows how to party. Cole Allen really went above and beyond in his manifesto. He mentioned he was using buckshot rather than slugs. Oh my God, that's smart. Wow. He didn't want bystanders to be killed, and the buckshot penetrates the walls less. Cool guy move, if I'm honest. If you're going to cause a bunch of trouble, try to keep the innocent out of it. He had an FAQ section in his manifesto, which is pretty helpful. It kind of demonstrated that he thought long and hard about the pros and cons of what he was planning to do. And he honestly considers both the ethics of assassinating administration officials and the ethics of doing it himself as a half-black, half-white man. Why should he be the one to do it? Because he's not yet been specifically victimized by the regime. He kind of made it seem like it was his responsibility to do it. He goes from explaining why he is doing it to asking the readers why they are not assassinating public officials. It was interesting how it played out. All in all, one of the more delightful manifestos I've read is coherent, organized. There is footnotes, Chicago-style footnotes, Dr. Craig. Oh my goodness. Music to my ears. Your favorite kind of footnoting, my favorite kind.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

Oh, that's that that is very much very much the position of this podcast for sure. I'm deeply opposed to MLA. I tell my students all the time absolutely no MLA allowed. Chicago only. Footnotes only. Endnotes are terrible. I'm very, very, very serious and vitriolic about this.

SPEAKER_03 10:59

Sometimes I talk to Dr. Craig about wrestling and he indulges me.

SPEAKER_02 11:04

So we're gonna have a long conversation about footnotes, and then I will get back to you on the Cole Allen part of it. Let's just let Dr. Craig cook on this for a second.

SPEAKER_03 11:20

This is really a narrow cast discussion about Dr. Craig's position on citations. And it goes in a few different directions. We end up talking about college kids wearing uh pajama pants uh too frequently. And uh appropriately, I think I'm gonna flag it for you right here, and then we'll put it at the end of the podcast because you know footnotes.

SPEAKER_01 11:47

I do want I do have something that I want to say about um about this assempt attempted assassination of Trump. Nick, you have pointed out, and I think it's a it's a it's a really salient thing about this attempted assassin. He does not appear to be somebody who is in desperate need of psychiatric care, which a lot of people who engage in this particular type of political violence are. They have something going on, they have some fixation. You know, for example, John Hinckley with Jodie Foster or something like that, right?

SPEAKER_03 12:18

Talk about barking up the wrong tree, huh?

SPEAKER_01 12:21

Yeah, yeah, exactly. That doesn't seem to be the case with this person. What I thought of immediately when I was reading about this guy was a class that I took in college with a political science professor at the University of Chicago. He had written a book, and the book was called Dying to Win, and this book was a series of interviews and investigations into the lives of people who committed suicide bombings in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and in other times and places around the world where suicide bombing had been used as a tactic by terrorist groups. He did this study before the bulk of the suicide bombing attacks in Iraq, so there might be some changes to the scholarship since then. The thesis of this book was if you look at these people, you interview them before they're gonna go do it, you read their manifestos or watch the DVDs where they give their testimonies and stuff. The stereotype in the United States is that these people are religious fanatics who have been lied to about getting virgins in heaven, right? That's the propaganda that the United States fed us. They're not that? No, they're not. In fact, the vast majority of people who are suicide bombers are educated, middle class, or even potentially elite people. They are uh teachers, they're lawyers, they're civil servants, they are people precisely like this guy who just attempted to assassinate the president. They are motivated by an ideology that is pretty simple, which is that people engage in suicide bombing attacks when they believe that their home is being invaded by a foreign force and that their home is not strong enough to stop it. They just don't feel like uh there's any other alternative, right?

SPEAKER_03 14:08

Like they feel like they have to.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

Yes, exactly. They feel like there's no alternative, and that this is a strategic or tactical decision that they make. It's not something born out of fanaticism or stupidity. It's a choice that relatively educated people make. I remember seeing charts about suicide bombers. Again, this is before the bulk of the suicide bombing campaigns in Iraq, and so these were mostly in Lebanon, uh, some of them were in Iraq in the 80s and 90s when Iraq and Iran were fighting each other. Uh, some of these were in Sri Lanka, uh, because there was a suicide bombing campaign in Sri Lanka when there was a civil war there. There were teachers, there were lawyers, there were clerks, they were small-time business people, engineers, they were the middle class. And those are the people who engage in this kind of violence.

SPEAKER_03 14:53

I had no idea about this. I did not know that this was just the desperate act of a relatively sane person. I thought that was the exclusive province of the self-immolation. Those are usually the some pretty coherent folks that are trying to make a big statement. And it is a big statement. Most of the time, if I'm trying to decide on a position to take on an issue, if you tell me that one one guy set himself on fire while advocating for this position, I'm inclined to take that guy's position. You're gonna have to talk me out of that.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

But that's the thing, is that it's sort of the same impetus. The best that I can do is to give my life for this cause. That's essentially what they're saying. Again, I deeply oppose what this person attempted to do. I do so in the same way that I oppose what suicide bombers do. This is a tactic that is desperate, violent, cruel, but it is something that people do when they believe that they have no other choice.

SPEAKER_03 15:48

Having no other choice, one of the things that goes into that is believing that they cannot change their circumstances. When you get to countries that don't have free and fair elections, it becomes pretty clear to most of the people that they don't have the ability to change their circumstances. That's why it's such a devastating blow to a population. Yes. That kind of dominance on one side makes the violence on the other side happen because they can no longer communicate in a civil political way. Cole Allen's manifesto has a whole logical structure. It makes way for objection, gives rebuttals, it demonstrates a understanding of ballistics with the whole buckshot thing. There's a moral reason. He's got a lot of the same issues as any any of us do. Dr. Craig, myself, probably most of the people listening. Detention camps, children being harmed and traumatized for life, the moral obligation to act rather than be complicit, the frustration that the structures that are supposed to be in place to prevent a tyrant from taking over are failing miserably, or they're facilitating a tyrant taking over. He has this certain exasperation that nobody else seems to be picking up the slack. I think a lot of us have those issues. You know, we arrive at different conclusions. He literally chooses violence, which neither one of us can endorse and will never endorse. You and I are trying to do something with this podcast that was beyond what we were doing before, to get your voice out to a wider group of people, because I believe that is something that I can do to help. For me, it personally means I gotta revive a long dormant aspect of my personality, attempt to make one of the better minds on the subject more accessible. I'm willing to be a comedian again, which up until a few months ago, I found the prospect of that embarrassing. I had outstanding agreements with people in my life that if I ever wanted to get back into comedy, that they would make a firm inquiry on the status of my mental health. I do this with reluctance, but I also know that this is an ability that I have, making jokes and being relatable and marketing to put some good into the world at a moment that desperately needs it. I'm not on this guy's level, but I think that we should all be trying to do a little bit more than we are.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

Yeah. This is a mental health struggle that I have quite a lot. Am I doing enough? That's the real terror from reading a manifesto like this is this person got caught up in that thought to such an unhealthy, terrifying degree that he was willing to throw away not just his life, but quite possibly the lives of many people he loves for it, for nothing. Even if he had succeeded in what he was attempting to do, which was to assassinate the president, his goal to make the United States a more humane place, that would be a failure. There is absolutely no way Donald Trump being killed by an assassin would produce the outcome that this man clearly wants. First of all, killing leaders simply does not change the tone of the organization that they lead. In fact, it usually entrenches it. There are a couple rare occasions when there are changes, when Joseph Stalin died or something like that. But usually, and again, this uh this is actually from the same scholar that I was citing before, when terrorist organizations are killed, when the leader of a terrorist organization is killed, nothing changes.

SPEAKER_03 19:04

That's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 19:05

It doesn't change.

SPEAKER_03 19:06

I think that if Trump were killed, it would just beget more violence. Exactly. A lot of people don't know this, but a good portion of the people that are still on board with Trump have read this book called The Turner Diaries. Yeah. There's a scene in there, which they call the Day of the Rope. Uh would you like to explain what the Day of the Rope is from this book?

SPEAKER_01 19:24

Uh well I don't want to, but I will. Uh so the Turner Diaries is a sort of apocalyptic near future. It was written in the past, but it, you know. So the near future is actually in our past, but whatever. Right? It's an imagining about a near future of the United States. A premise is that there will come a day, the day of the rope, when there will be a major uprising, specifically of white supremacist, anti-government, nationalist types, and that they will overthrow the government and they will hang a bunch of people. That's why it's called the Day of the Rope. Of course, calling it that also evokes hanging people as in lynchings during the Jim Crow era of racism in the South. They're trying to try to connect all of these things together. This is one of the things that makes the Turner Diaries extremely monstrous. The people who read the Turner Diaries, those are fascists, almost to a man. But speaking of Trump supporters who support the Turner Diaries or who have who have read it.

SPEAKER_03 20:20

Here's a question about the Turner Diaries. If you're a fascist, you read it, sure. But to have a graphic depiction of the scenario that's going to happen, the day of the rope. The people that are left on the Trump side, they all know what the day of the rope is. It's like a cleansing bath of violence where they get rid of all the minorities, all the all the people that are good to minorities. It's draining the swamp. If President Trump is assassinated, that's what happens. People start letting you know that they've read the Turner Diaries. That's not just insight about them from Craig and I. That's what they'll do. They'll start telling you. And they'll start telling you in a lot of ways that they've read the Turner Diaries because they've just been looking for permission to make this An increase in the level of partisan political violence is not gonna be good, basically, is the answer.

SPEAKER_01 21:09

You do not want to live through a period of increased partisan political violence. It will hurt you, it will hurt your family, it'll hurt your community. Especially when the other side knows what that day looks like. They have plans. Yeah. They have plans, they have weapons, they have been specifically and intentionally training for this. They're ahead of the game. They have examples. They got stashes of weapons. It's a nightmare scenario. We absolutely don't want that.

SPEAKER_03 21:35

The only chance that we have is that they all wear a uniform, which is gonna help. Really hurts the element of surprise.

SPEAKER_01 21:40

Well, also the fact that they will be fighting against each other in small bands. That might come later.

SPEAKER_03 21:44

But the money quote from Cole Allen's manifesto is I'm a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflects on me, and I am not willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crime. Pretty powerful statement. If Cole Allen is the harbinger of things to come, if he's the canary, the mind is in much worse shape than I thought. Did you ever read that Barbara Walter book, uh, how civil wars start and how to stop them? Ooh, no. No, I did not. Came out in the last couple of years. Pretty interesting book. She basically says that the violence will begin when liberals start buying weapons in mass. The second that that information comes out to the general public, acquisition of weapons by liberals or in liberal areas will give them the permission to strike first. I'm not sure how much I buy that. I mean, might not be wrong. If you wanted this to happen and you had access to Fox News, or you could just tell Fox News that liberals are buying more weapons and they'd run with it. You know what I mean? Yeah, Craig, there is a small Prairie Land update this week. If you don't know what happened in the Prairie Land case, go back into some of our previous episodes. Starting next week, we'll explain it from the beginning to kind of jog you up between last week and this week. I want to read the names of the people that are behind bars right now awaiting sentencing. Cameron Arnold, Zachary Ebbets, Savannah Batten, Bradford Morris, Marisela Ruedo, Elizabeth Soto, Inez Soto, and Ben Song. Still in federal custody, lawyers are still fighting for them. All nine have had their lawyer file for acquittal or a new trial. Those are not appeals. Appeals cannot happen until sentencing occurs, and sentencing doesn't occur until June 18th. As it stands, there are 18 more people from the Prairie Land protest still facing state charges in Texas. Last Monday, the first of those was to go on trial. That has been pushed back to June 22nd, a couple days after the federal sentence of the Prairie Land. Nine. That's the update. The state trials are worth looking at in the upcoming weeks, and we will. I just want to, on this podcast, at least mention the names each week. This is a story that doesn't get nearly as much coverage as it deserves.

SPEAKER_01 24:07

We have to unfortunately remind people that this is the tip of the iceberg. This is the beginning of a certain form of criminalizing dissent in the United States. These processes are long. They don't fit into the typical news cycle, not even certainly not the news cycle of the 1990s and 2000s, and absolutely not the Instagram real TikTok news cycle of today. They take time. But you got to keep paying attention to it because it's not going to go away.

SPEAKER_03 24:33

I don't want to lead the charge on this at all. I hope there's somebody else out there leading the charge on this, and we're just supporting. Ideally, yeah. I don't want to dive too far into it because I'm afraid. They're putting people in prison for having black clothing.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 24:47

Giving material aid and comfort to terrorists. Here we are on this podcast reading off their names, making sure they're not forgotten. I don't know. Is that giving material aid and comfort to terrorists? I don't think it is. We gotta hope not. But we don't know. No, yeah. That's a that's a scary sound. All right, guys, it's Tal Rico talk. There's no right or wrong way to survive this era. Uh, you're gonna need every coping mechanism you've got, healthy and unhealthy. The show is about coming to grips with our overall sense of malaise. That's been the only reasonable reaction to the Trump era in American politics. We're pinning our hopes on a guy, just one guy, it's probably not rational. We're putting Tal Rico on a bit of a pedestal, but that's the point. I want to believe in things that aren't rational. I missed the days when believing in things that weren't rational was uh just a fun thing you could do to find your tribe. I missed that youthful exhilaration. This annoyingly religious politician from Texas is a blank slate. There's nothing wrong with them. The less checking into him we do, it's gonna be better. Yeah, don't look too close. We invite you along on this journey. It's not about Tal Rico, it's about the idea of Tal Rico and the notion that America has a Tal Rico-shaped whole. In new polling today, April 28th, Tal Rico leads John Corn, 44 to 41, and Ken Paxton, 46 to 41, in a Texas public opinion research poll. Both of those are within the margin of error, but it's the first poll showing him ahead of both. He's at 41% favorable, 34% unfavorable. Corn and Paxton are both underwater by double digits. Last week, the Fifth Circuit ruled that Texas can enforce its law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in classrooms. Tal Rico went on CNN and called it a deeply unchristian decision. Then he just went to work. He said his face calls for him to love his Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, agnostic, and atheist neighbor. Dropped this classic line the only thing worse than a tyrant is a tyrant who thinks they're on a mission from God. And that quote got picked up across cable. Yeah. Ended up on the Hannity Show. Very good quote. It's a money quote.

SPEAKER_01 27:06

Yeah, I mean, this guy is running for president, pretty clearly. Uh he is trying to run for president or at least get in the cabinet or something like that. If he wins the Senate race, he's running for president. And he'd be a fool not to.

SPEAKER_03 27:20

2.8 cents on Calci right now. If you want to make some money on this, we have no advertiser agreement with Calci whatsoever. At some point, we could be moving the market on this.

SPEAKER_01 27:34

Have you heard about this leak that the State Department had about its strategic plans regarding European allies of the United States? No, I have not. Dude, hell. Ooh boy. So uh so the State Department had a leak. Somebody leaked a new internal memo that's apparently being floated around. So it's not fully formal, like it's not the fully formal position of the United States State Department, but they're talking about it. And what they're talking about is punishing countries that are in NATO, but which have refused to help the United States fight in Iran. So this is particularly talking about France and the UK, and even especially the UK, which was part of the Iran War, it was part of the Iraq War, it was part of the Gulf War, it was part of the war in Afghanistan, right? A ride or die friend of the United States when it comes to imperialist wars. What the State Department memo is saying is that any country that is in NATO but is not in the Iran war, the United States is going to, quote, reevaluate its support of their imperialist claims. And like, first of all, that's wild. Like, that's crazy. So they're talking about the United Kingdom, uh, they're talking about Spain also, uh, which has blatantly, just like point blank, just said no to the United States using bases or ports and stuff uh for the Iran War. And so Spain has like territorial claims in Africa and other places like that. Like there are there are tiny towns that are on the northern coast of Africa in what would be places like Morocco that are technically part of Spain. Um and that's from that's from like real old right-wing stuff and like old imperialist business. Because a lot of what I research is South America, the stuff about the UK is the stuff that's really interesting to me because specifically what they're talking about are the Falkland Islands, that tiny archipelago off the coast of Argentina, that the Argentine dictatorship and Margaret Thatcher's UK fought a war over in the early 1980s. This was like a big shooting war. Thousands of people died. It was the first time since World War II that there had been a major naval engagement in history. It was in the early 1980s. What the United States is saying is: hey, Argentina, which is currently ruled by an extremely right-wing president, Javier Millet, we might back you to take over these islands in a way that we didn't 50 years ago, when you invaded them and tried to take them over from the United Kingdom. It's wild, it's clear partisan activity. The United States is saying, well, the UK is ruled by a supposedly leftist party, the Labour Party right now, whereas Argentina is ruled by an ally of the United States, currently, right, an ally of the Trump administration, this right-wing libertarian. We're in 20 billion out. Oh, yeah, that's true. Yes, yeah, exactly. Getting aid from the United States. Uh Peter Thiel has been traveling down there. He's a big friend of Elon Musk. He gave Elon Musk that chainsaw that you might have seen Elon Musk wielding around because Javier Millet throws around chainsaws all the time. This is just like wild. If this is what breaks the alliance between the United States and the United Kingdom, every single other thing that Donald Trump has done in terms of wrecking the foreign policy of the United States is peanuts, is n is nothing. The military alliance between the United States and the UK is what made the 20th century. And if it's gone, I have absolutely no idea. I mean, the United Kingdom isn't in the European Union anymore. Are they just alone? That's crazy. Like, woof. Oh my god. Insane. And like trading the UK for Argentina, the world's 19th largest economy. Like what? Not a great trade. No, it's so dumb. It's so stupid. Anyway, that's uh that's what I'm complaining about in my neck of the woods. Oh, also, I went to a party and immediately brought up the Nazis because I'm very fun at parties. I got to the party and people were like, hey, Craig, what do you think about, you know, I don't even remember what they were asking me about. Oh, yeah, they were asking me about like what to do about young people when they stop being fascists. And I was like, well, like, you know, denazification in the Nazi Germany didn't really go that well, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, I did, and and when I was doing it, I was thinking to myself, ah crap. Nick is right. Uh I can't I can't go to a party without talking about fascism. Uh, this is my this is my brand. This is what I'm like.

SPEAKER_03 32:13

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

SPEAKER_01 32:28

I don't want to have to thumb through the document in order to find the notes. In-text citations, terrible. They disrupt your reading. Whereas footnotes are the perfect, perfect bridge between the two. Let's say that you're reading a document and you want to know the source for something, right? Which I often do, or I want to know a little aside that the author has made, the like two seconds that you need to take in order to put your thumb in the book and then switch to the foot end notes section, and it's like, oh, it's not in that end notes section. Wait, which chapter was I in? I'm in chapter five. I need to look at the end notes for chapter five, or or maybe this is one of those books where it's like organized by page and then like, oh wait, I have to go back to the page that I was on to see what page I was on.

SPEAKER_03 33:09

I think that our generation, we were kind of ruined for the end note by the choose your own adventure book. We had just gotten so used to there being a reward for putting your thumb where you are and then flipping to a different page. The disappointment of flipping to a different page. Only to discover that you need to read a different book. Feels like you've been swindled. Here I am thinking I'm setting forth on an adventure. It turns out it's just an assignment.

SPEAKER_01 33:33

No. As opposed to a footnote, you can just glance down and there it is. Plus, and this is the real beauty of it, a footnote makes it seem like there is more to read than there is. And so you get this article right, and it's 40 pages long, and you're like, oh, this is gonna take forever to read. But then it turns out that half of its footnotes, and you're like, oh, well, I actually it was only 30 pages long. That's great. What a great feeling. It's wonderful. I know that it's either a weird little aside that you thought was fun. This is what I do. 85% of footnotes are just information, the source that I got the stuff from. About 15% are fun little tidbits that I thought were too fun to cut, but which were not important enough to put in the main font. You know, like that's not a 12-point font idea. That's a 10-point font idea.

SPEAKER_03 34:24

For the audience, we're talking about Craig's book from 2025 called How to Talk to Your Son About Fashion, which I've read and I have flipped through to learn more about the various sources. For me, it's like you're talking to an entertainer about a role that you connected with. I know before I said I can't speak for Dr. Craig's preference for Chicago style or hatred for MLA, but I could have gathered it.

SPEAKER_01 34:46

Oh, you sure can. I'm on the record about this. I shout out from the rooftops. I also just think that it confuses students. Parenthetical references, they confuse students. They never know how to format them. And honestly, my real problem with MLA is that the only kinds of papers that we ask students to write in high school are English papers. And so that's the only kind of citation that they know. When they come to college, and these are students at Berkeley, they come to college and they call every source a novel. They'll say, like, how do I cite this novel? And I'll be like, That is a newspaper. It is not a novel. They call every source a novel? Yeah. That's a bigger infraction than how they do point of view. Oh, I know. It's bad. It's a serious problem. They'll be like, How do I cite this novel? And I'll say, That is not a novel. It is not fiction. This is a book called The Condor Years, Colonel Augusto Pinochet's Attack on Democracy in South America. This is a nonfiction academic text. This is not a Jane Austen novel. Maybe to them it's like a novel source. It's not the same as another source. Oh, yeah, it's novel. It's just like new and interesting. Yeah. I think that that's related to the etymology of novel.

SPEAKER_03 35:50

I'm not sure. I'm not looking to punch down on the Zoomers, all right? They get enough crap from everyone. I watched all the stuff that happened with millennials. My office was at the time right next to an HR person, and they just love to read about how millennials were taking their parents on job interviews with them. That didn't really happen. No, no. Those are the things that are believable to the previous generation.

SPEAKER_01 36:14

When you were hearing me complaining about people in college, really, this is a complaint about the educational system, which these people did not make. It is people my generation, your generation, Nick, and our parents' generation. That's who made the system that has failed these people. That's the complaint. Not that the kids don't know what to do, it's that nobody taught them. It's not their fault that nobody taught them. They were kids. Now they're adults, they're 18, they come to college and nobody's taught them. That's why they don't know how to do it.

SPEAKER_03 36:42

I think people tried to teach them. The one thing I've noticed about young people is that they grew up having school shooter drills in their school. Yeah. And they all only wear their slippers. So they didn't exactly learn what I assume is the first lesson in a school shooter drill, have shoes that stay on when you go sprinting away from gunshot.

SPEAKER_01 37:02

The pajamas all the time thing, that is definitely my old man yells at cloud. I I don't understand it. They're taking some liberties with pajamas at school.

SPEAKER_03 37:12

You're right. That used to be a special day. It was either in elementary school, you were wearing pajamas at school because your class did a good job. And then middle school and high school, it was it's finals today. I don't have to be there till 9.30. I'm just gonna wear my pajamas. It just doesn't make any sense to me. But whatever. If I see somebody wearing pajama pants past an appropriate hour, they're probably on their way to or coming from filling a prescription. If you had options and that's your pants choice, something's up. You can cut ahead of me in line. You're having a worse day than I am. If you're under 40s, maybe you just got broken up with. If you're 41 to 59, you could have just escaped from somewhere. 60 and over, I'm looking around for your caretaker. And that's why I don't like people wearing them every day. You're taking advantage of my sympathy for people that are wearing pajamas at odd times during the day.

SPEAKER_01 38:05

Something bad happened to you today. Yeah. Again, this is just old man yells at cloud. Sweatpants are still something that you wear when you're depressed or didn't do what you needed to do this morning.

SPEAKER_03 38:17

That's a signal to manage my expectations. Take it easy on Tammy, everybody. You don't want to add to whatever has her making that pants-based decision. It's like a distress signal coming from an entire generation. We hear you kids. We just got some of our own stuff going on right now, and it's some of the worst stuff in a while.

SPEAKER_01 38:37

Let's get back to talking about this assassination attempt.