SPEAKER_00 0:02

Everyone loves a jolly, Craig. Nobody likes being seen acquiring a jolly. The reluctance to go whole hog on the 4th of July this year, because doing so means you have to overlook what's happening, and not doing so means that you're giving in to him at some level.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

That horrifying panic you feel when your side embraces a guy with a Nazi tattoo because he writes the letter D next to him on the ballot.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Now 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, 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 rank your autocratic despair this week?

SPEAKER_01 1:15

Ooh, in terms of autocratic despair, I'm still at a three and a half, I would say. Things are bad, but they're not as bad as they could be. My personal despair is a little higher, but you know, that's a Craig brain business question, as opposed to an like a world historical question.

SPEAKER_00 1:32

I'm at about a six. I went shopping this weekend to a couple different big box stores. The America 250 merge is out in force. I saw a whole area of it at two different big box stores this weekend. It makes me feel incredibly uneasy. I'm conflicted. I just can't write my mind the way I want it to read. This is almost like the quintessential example of autocratic despair to me. I'm gonna try to think out loud here. And uh I'm probably gonna bail me out a couple times. Sure. To just talk about what America 250 actually is. July 4th, 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Technically, it's called the semi-quincentenni. Hard to pronounce that. So we're just gonna call it America 250. It's gonna be a splashy celebration. It's been planned since 2016. People don't know this, but Congress set up a bipartisan commission in 2016 to celebrate this. The honorary chairs of it are George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and the official slogan for it is America's Invitation. The idea is that this is a moment for every American to share their story, for every community to mark a milestone, and it's an inclusive civic ritual. That's the official message. Volunteering, school field trips, grandpa's history of arriving in LSI. That's the stuff we're supposed to be celebrating. Yeah. 250 years is a milestone and it doesn't deserve to be celebrated. Are you noticing the 250 anniversary America 250 stuff?

SPEAKER_01 2:52

Living in the Bay Area, you just get 10% of the patriotism display that you would get basically anywhere else in the country. Here, if you see somebody flying an American flag, it means that they're right wing. It cannot mean anything else. Either that they're right wing or that they're an elderly person. That's what it means here. This is a tragedy. I think that I think that celebrating some of the liberatory impulses of the United States is something that we left progressive, or just like people who don't like fascism, that we should be trying to do.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

But it's really hard. We're swimming against the current. This is a gonna be a bigger Fourth of July than usual. And Fourth of July is big around my parts. Yeah. It's one of the rare days that people have off in the middle of the week. There's a lot of cabin people, so there's all kinds of celebrations. I usually don't celebrate. My wife will bring the kids out to see the fireworks. I stay home so I can let my dog hug on someone because she gets scared. No. But people are out in four. It's one of those drunk driving evenings, both on the third of July and the fourth of July, that's actually problematic up here. Yeah. But I do feel an obligation to do something this year. My kids are old enough where they're creating memory. You know, I have this vague recollection of the Statue of Liberty being repaired in 1983. There was the years where there was scaffolding around the Statue of Liberty and they were repairing it. And then on the 4th of July, I was six years old, they dropped some sort of curtain on it. And so there's Statue of Liberty again. She's doing great. It sticks with me 40-some years later. Yeah. I think David Copperfield at some point made it disappear too. Oh, yeah, I remember that. This might have been separate things that I've got like squeezed together in my head. But they probably both involved large curtains. Maybe that was the link. I have weird links like that. I could never tell the difference between Kurt Russell and Patrick Swayze either. Oh, you're right. They do look very similar. I just had the same file open for them in my mind. Slim Goodbody and Richard Simmons, another.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Yeah, I have a friend who thinks that all white male actors exist on a spectrum between Steve Buscemi and Tom Hanks. And she sort of just like refuses to acknowledge that there are more than two white male actors. She's like, well, that one's a Tom Hanks. And it's like, well, that one's a Steve Buscemi. Basically, what she's saying is there are character actors and there are lead actors. Kurt Russell is a Tom Hanks type. He's might he might be smack in the middle. Yeah. He's a leading man, but he's not the like all-American, clean, send him home to mom, nice boy that a young Tom Hanks is.

SPEAKER_00 5:24

No, he's got a little bit of dirt on it. That's right. He's a little scary. Kurt Russell's performance is Jack Burton in the movie Big Trouble in Little China. It goes down in the top five for me because I've seen Big Trouble in Little China a hundred times in my life. Have you ever seen it, Craig? Yes, I have. Yes. I'll never turn it off if it's on TV. It's just uh that solid, that sound of a movie. I don't want to have my negative thoughts about this celebration resonate to my kids in a way that says, I I don't find this country that great. I do find the country that great. That stuff is programmed into me on a cellular level. Never let it be said that I don't love this country. To the contrary, I'm deeply disappointed in this country. The kind of disappointment that you can't have unless you love something. I blame myself for a lot of what's happened to America. I wasn't paying enough attention. I could have done more. I left it in the hands of other people I thought were more qualified. Yeah. This podcast is an attempt to atone for some of that. I don't exactly know what we need to do to shorten the horizon on the American authoritarian era, but I can pretty much tell you it's more than what we have been doing to this point. I've on several occasions in my life been moved to tears at the site of the American flag. I was on mushrooms one time, but you know, even so. What was going through your head? Just the colors? I thought it was the cleanest of flag. I came to this realization that the color combo, the stripe, everything about it was just working for me.

SPEAKER_01 6:54

I have to confess, I have always been on record saying that the US flag is a uniquely ugly flag. Really? I have never liked it. How dare you! I think in comparison to a uh a tricolor, uh just like a three bars of color flag, I think those are all better. Uh, the Japanese flag, of course. Japanese is tight. Probably the cleanest of all flags. Clean as hell. It's just a top-notch flag. But I also love flags that are unabashedly busy and just like wild. The Guatemalan flag has a canon on it. That's great. Yeah. Angola has a machete and an AK. Badass. That's cool. Brazil's flag has a bunch of words on it, which is generally a no-no, but I think it's wonderful. It just like looks kind of goofy. The thing that gets me though, when it comes to patriotic stuff, is I've never been moved by visuals as much as I am by sound. And so like I can absolutely feel it when I listen to like Battle Hymn of the Republic or something like that. Any like Civil War patriotism songs, because that shit is it's about sacrificing yourself for freedom. That's what the songs are about. As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free. That shit rules.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

I love it's hard not to get caught up in that. It's good. Personally, I just I just like the colors, the stars. It just pleases me in an aesthetic sense. I actually feel a sense of moderate outrage when I see people doing things that are against flag coat to the point where I mention it exists to the people who are openly breaking it. And there are many.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

Have you ever been part of a flag burning ceremony?

SPEAKER_00 8:28

Oh, hell no. Wouldn't go near it.

SPEAKER_01 8:30

Oh, no, no, no, no. I mean like the because like that's how you get rid of a flag that is in official use but is like tattered or something. Oh, I got you. You mean like a flag retirement ceremony?

SPEAKER_00 8:40

Yeah. No, I I have noticed that the Hump Depot collects flags for that purpose. I was in one in middle school once. Our band showed up.

SPEAKER_01 8:47

We played the national anthem while the VA burned a flag that they had, like an old one. That's top-level patriotism right there. That is some down home midwestern stuff.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

I made the decision to start flagmogging the day after he was re-elected. It's been a fantastic decision for me. There's two great things about having more gray than color in your hair. You can flagmog anyone you want, and you get to just roll up on groups of youths that are farting around and stand there with your arms crossed until you get their attention. And then when you do get their attention, you can ask them this question. Is that how you guys get your jollies? Oh wow. Everyone loves a jolly, Craig. Nobody likes being seen acquiring a jolly.

SPEAKER_01 9:33

That's true. It's embarrassing. It's embarrassing. You don't want to be seen getting your jollies. Even if that is how I got my jollies, I wouldn't want you to know.

SPEAKER_00 9:43

Even in 2026, there's a lot of shame attached to the jolly. You're one step short of getting off if you got a jolly going. Yeah, you gotta do that alone. Among the adult bits that I do, it might be tied with shutting the lights off while someone is sitting down in a public bathroom. Everyone's got a flashlight in their pocket and the form of their phone, so shutting the bulbs isn't that great of a gig anymore.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

That's true.

SPEAKER_00 10:06

It's still plenty of fun, but you don't get to picture them feeling their way out of the bathroom to find the light switch with their pants down. In this scenario, the darkness makes it impossible for victims to pull their pants up.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

My point is it's still fun. What was I? Flag mocking? Yeah. It's called the weave, folks. I'm a I'm allowed to go as deep as I want as long as I can make it home safely. The listener on home may not know what flag code is. U.S. flag code is a federal etiquette manual for how Americans are supposed to display and care for the flag. It's a real law, there's just no penalty attached if you don't follow it. Functions more like the honor system. A lot of the self-described patriots that I see around town are unknowingly failing. Here's some examples from U.S. flag code. One, the flag should never be used as wearing apparel. Every flag bikini, every Trump U.S. flag cape at a rally, every these colors don't run t-shirt with the actual flag on, those are all violation. The flag is not clothing. You can use the stars and the stripes with bunting for your parade float. If you're trying to do a patriotic dedication, you just can't use the flag in that way. So all your balloons, napkins, paper plates, those flagged solo cups at the Fourth of July barbecue, those are not technically cool. Even the America 250 merch that I saw at the Big Bangster, the celebration itself is kind of a flag code violation, which is a little on the no. Here's another example. The U.S. flag should never have a mark, insignia, letter, word, number, figure, or drawing placed on it. Yeah. Every puniture skull with the flag in it, every thin blue line flag. Any three percenter flag. Those are all desecration under the code. The flag is just the flag. You don't get to add to it. The key to flagmogging someone, and I recommend all of the listeners pull a flagmog at least once this summer, is to be super polite about it. In truth, most people haven't heard of U.S. flag code. It's just a set of recommendations. Most people will take it pretty seriously once you inform them. You gotta do it kindly, otherwise, they won't do it to anyone else. A couple years ago, a friend gently pointed out to me that I was using the word acronym to mean initialism. A mistake I had been making my entire life. Have you ever been on the receiving end of that gentle correction, Dr. Craig?

SPEAKER_01 12:24

Yes, and I remember it to this day.

SPEAKER_00 12:26

Heroin.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

Still hurts. It's painful. See, this is how you can tell that we're both from the Midwest. The things that sit with us for the rest of our lives are like these minor etiquette corrections. Ugh. Ugh.

SPEAKER_00 12:41

Nightmarish. Nothing quite like cold hard proof that I've been overestimating my intelligence my entire life. Just sit in the back of my mind and pop up at random intervals. Let's assume there's at least one listener of the show that hasn't drawn a clear distinction between the two. They're basically the same thing. Both are made from the first letters of a phrase, but with an acronym, you say it as a word, like NASA. Not the individual letters N-A-S-A, NASA. With an initialism, you say each letter. FBI, you don't say Phoebe. The rule is if you pronounce it as a word, it's an acronym. If you spell it out letter by letter, it's an initialism. Many people use the word acronym when they really mean initialism. Now that you've been turned on to this secret knowledge of the universe, you're gonna see it happening all the time. It is pretty satisfying to point that out to other people. The kinder that you are when you're flagmogging them, it's more of a power move. No matter how they're acting, they're gonna be like a little ashamed of themselves for running afoul of some rule that they don't know because it's disrespectful to the flag. Everybody listening to this podcast should be flagmogging motherfuckers this summer. It's something that you can do to just feel better about yourself and make uh MAG enthusiasts feel worse at the same time. So it's like a double win. We don't have much going for us right now, but we can flagmog people. You gotta believe in your heart that they're breaking the flag code only because of their ignorance that flag code exists. And that's usually the correct assumption. I remember I got pissed off a few years back when a guy that usually has an appeal to heaven flag outside of his house temporarily put an upside-down U.S. flag in the days and weeks surrounding Trump being convicted of 34 criminal counts. Oh my God. Come on. Seemed a little overdramatic.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the point of that was like back before there were telecommunications, so that you could, as like a fortification, say, we are in extreme peril. We are about to be killed. That's the purpose of this. The town has a plague. Do not enter.

SPEAKER_00 14:42

Like it's that kind of thing. Trump having his reputation damaged uh doesn't quite rise to the level of an upside-down flag. I wrote a postcard to that guy about what flag code is, and and I included my name, address, and phone number on it in case he felt insulted and wanted to tell me to eat shit. Which he did by a text, but within a few days he had changed his flag. So hey, everybody's got a process. Shaming works. Shaming works. I know that most people just don't have any idea what U.S. flag cuts is. I always try to let them know that these are merely recommendation and best practices. They're not laws, but I love doing it. I won't do it to bikers. Yeah, that's probably too far. They tend to know and not care. I purchased a new flag last summer and dropped it off at a house that I drove by every day where the flag had gone to shit. I put a little note about flag code saying that it says that when a flag is no longer a fitting emblem of display, if it's frayed, tattered, faded, it should be disposed of properly, and that the local Home Depot is a place that you can bring a tattered flag for disposal free of charge. If you're not flagmogging people, you gotta give it a try. If it works out that we go full autocratic entrenchment, it's a great way to sow seeds of doubt about mega enthusiasts' commitment to the regime. Puts people on their heels. Yeah, that's true. Well, if it swings back, it's gonna set a good tone going forward as to who the adults that get to make the decisions are. That's true. It's an opportunity to produce a brand of cattiness so subtle that they'll look like fools if they take you to task over it. You're gonna need a few reps to dial that in. It might be all we get. Yeah. It's not nothing. It's a fantastic hedge against a future where nothing really changed. Stake our claim on it now so you don't have to concede it later on. MAG enthusiasts are bad at being patriots. They deserve the politest possible rebuke you're capable of because at the end of the day, they're Americans, we're Americans. At least you can shove it in their fat faces how much better you are at being an American than they are. Oh, you love the USA? Name three of their albums. Do you even know? Name three states. It's a great way to get a jolly. You got people so distracted and discombobulated that they're defending their love for the United States. Notice you're grabbing a jolly. It's the perfect prime. When you flag mic somebody, you're doing them a solid. They're better off. No. On some level, we do owe it to them as Americans to challenge them to be better Americans. When it comes to the America 250 celebration, you're not seeing much of it, huh?

SPEAKER_01 17:12

Not really. I'm sure that there's gonna be fireworks in the city and like fireworks in Oakland and whatever, but that's just kind of not how it works here. I'm gonna be visiting the Midwest eventually, and I guess I assume it'll be different, but I don't know. I have it fully associated with Trump because I know that he's gonna That's sort of where I'm at too, is that it's like, well, yeah, okay, like I don't really want that, which again, as you said, is a real tragedy because it means that they've taken over major symbols that could or should be symbols of belonging or even hope in the US, and they're just not.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

It really is one of the hardest things to avoid withdrawing. If you're engaging it, you risk being seen as endorsing Trump. Yeah. Or feel like you're participating in something that he's decided, somehow supporting the regime.

SPEAKER_01 17:56

This is one of the things that that authoritarian leaders, that dictators, that other sort of strong men do is that they associate themselves with patriotism. And this makes it difficult to oppose them because then you get to be seen as unpatriotic, and it also associates in the mind of a whole generation of people support for the country with support for the leader. There are examples of this all throughout history: leaders and dictators requiring people to wear emblems with their faces on them, on their bodies, or display it in their business, or like putting up portraits of people in places. In Trump's case, what he's trying to do is precisely this. He's trying to say, I am the American president. He's always wanted his face on a bill. He wants his face on money. He's talked repeatedly about getting his face as a fifth face on Mount Rushmore, like some sort of evil mastermind dictator. That's Lex Luthor shit. That's crazy. And of course, then there's the one that he has done, which is to put his face on new passports issued in the United States, which is horrifying. That's like North Korea stuff. It's just wild. Trying to make sure that symbols and emblems of the United States are primarily associated with the deer leader. It's off. I don't know what's going to happen to those symbols after Trump is out of office. Eventually he will pass away. When that happens, what's going to happen to all of this iconography? Like, is the GOP gonna keep going in that direction or are they going to abandon it?

SPEAKER_00 19:25

They're gonna abandon it, I think, and then uh all of the uh artifacts of it are gonna become collector's items. That's very possible. Hopefully sooner than later, there's gonna be this sort of tour of uh probably combination gun show, MAGA enthusiast show. Yeah. You go to the local bowling alley on Sunday, and they got a bunch of people exhibiting it. It's the most sad thing that you've been to in a while.

SPEAKER_01 19:55

Right next to the guy with a case full of equal numbers of swastikas and knives.

SPEAKER_00 20:01

The passport one is like a particularly dickhead move. I I tend to think that the majority of the passport holders in the United States are uh very anti-MAGA.

SPEAKER_01 20:12

I would assume that that is the case, considering that passport holders skew higher income, and that is not the base of MAGA.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

I've been thinking about getting a passport as another source of identification in case I need to beat a hasty retreat to another country. For some reason, the prospect of having Trump on it kind of makes it feel a little bit more exclusive. Because as I understand it, the picture's only gonna be on 10,000 of them. Yes. Somehow my brain's got this, ooh, limited edition. Now's the time. It's weird. I hate the man, but the prospect of having him on my passport only enhances my desire to get the passport. I mean, it's a historical time capsule in some ways. In my mind, it's like, ooh, this is gonna appreciate in value. I hate that that sales tactic works on me.

SPEAKER_01 20:58

Putting his face and name on a passport is disgusting and evil. The most evil and disgusting thing that they're doing about passports is making it such that trans folks can't have their gender on their passport and requiring them to use whatever gender was listed on their birth certificate, which makes it hard or uncomfortable or extremely dangerous for lots of trans people to get identification and potentially leave the country. It's a nightmare. That's nightmare stuff.

SPEAKER_00 21:27

As it stands right now, if you're a transgendered individual born with male sex organs identifying as a female, you can have your passport set your sex to female.

SPEAKER_01 21:39

It used to be the case that you were able to do something like this, that you would be able to choose the gender or sex that's listed on your passport. Trump has issued an executive order saying that you're no longer able to do that. Exactly how that enforcement is gonna work, we don't exactly know. That's the main one. They're all gonna need to get new passports now, right? I mean, that's the idea, right? Prevent trans people from having passports or leaving the country. In some cases, that might be their only legal ID federally if they don't have a real ID. This is something that the ACLU and a bunch of other human rights organizations in the US are fighting against. And if it ultimately goes to the Supreme Court, they'll probably side with Trump on this. It's awful.

SPEAKER_00 22:16

I knew that, I guess. But when I hear the MAG enthusiast argument against transgendered individuals always goes back to high school sports, and I just sort of I'm just like, I'm not gonna listen anymore. You're dumb shit. There's no there's no transgender people playing high school sports. I mean, there are.

SPEAKER_01 22:33

Even if one were to believe that it were a problem, which it is not, it would be the tiniest problem ever. And again, it's not a problem. Kids play sports. They're trying to connect the question, which is about dehumanizing people, to something local that people care about, which is, you know, the local football team. And it seems to be working. It's a disgustingly awful thing to do to young people and to older trans folks too.

SPEAKER_00 23:00

The hardest thing about this America 250 merch to me is seeing pictures of items that are being sold with what says America 250, and then beneath it it says 1776-2026. Obviously, it's the 250 years, you know, represents the 250 years you've been a country, but it reads like an epitaph. Yeah, it does. You're right. And Joe, alas, it's it's over at the end of the year, people. So it's like a gravestone. Here lies.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

It's later than you think.

SPEAKER_00 23:41

We want to talk to you this week about Prairie Land. Uh, if you don't know what Prairie Land is, Prairie Land is named for the Prairie Land Ice Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, about one hour southwest of Fort Worth. It has a facility that holds roughly about 700 immigration detainees. On July 4th, 2025, almost a year ago, eleven protesters showed up to have a noise demonstration, which is a fairly common protest tactic where you make loud sounds to express solidarity with people that are in detention who can't see or speak to the outside world. They brought fireworks. It was the 4th of July. At least one or two of them brought firearms, which is legal in Texas. It's an open carry state. At the protests, one person spray painted a guard shack with an anti-ICE slogan. Somebody pulled down a security camera, so they called the police. When Alvarado police officer Thomas Gross arrived at the scene, things turned. Pretty quickly, protests started breaking up. And as it was breaking up, he drew his weapon and pointing it at someone running away. One of the protesters, Benjamin Sung, fired an AR-15-style rifle in the officer's direction, allegedly. Officer Gross was allegedly hit just below the neck, suffered minor injuries, and was released from the hospital the same night. He's fully recovered. In the weeks that followed, the FBI and the Texas state law enforcement raided activist homes across North Texas. Ultimately, they arrested 19 people. Eleven of them participated in the protests, but 19 people got arrested. Four of them were nowhere near the some of them were charged with transporting boxes of the left-wing zine. The defendants became known at the time as the Prairie Land 19. September 2025, Trump signed an executive order designating Antifa, which is an ideology, not an organization, as a domestic terrorist group. Let that land for you. Trump signed an executive order, designated the ideology Antifa, which is not an organization, as a domestic terrorist group. Shortly after the first charges in the Prairie Land case were filed. The DOJ described the defendants as members of a North Texas Antifa cell, an entity for which the government has produced no evidence beyond the fact that the defendants knew each other and shared political views. Seven of the defendants pled guilty in November 2025. They didn't want to go to trial, but nine went to trial in early 2026. The first trial attempt ended in a mistrial just after they selected the jury, when it became clear that the members of the jury had a decided uh anti-Trump immigration stance. The judge, Mark Pittman, declared a mistrial over one of the defense attorneys' t-shirts. She had a blazer on, a t-shirt underneath that the t-shirt featured Jesse Jackson, who had just died earlier that day. Once he saw that t-shirt, he decided it was a mistrial. They were going to have to seat a new jury. And they did. During the jury selection process, Judge Pittman froze the defense out from asking questions. He did all of the question asking. He essentially sat this jury up to convict. The retrial began on February 23rd. Three weeks later, all nine were convicted. One was convicted of attempted murder, Benson. Eight were convicted of providing material support to terrorists, rioting and explosives charges. The explosives being the fireworks that they brought to the protest. Benson, the alleged shooter, was additionally convicted of attempted murder. Sentencing of all of these people is set for June 18th, 2026. They all faced between 10 and 60 years in federal prison for setting off fireworks at a protest. I'm going to read the names. It's important to have the names read. Cameron Arnold, Zachary Ebbett, Savannah Batten, Bradford Morris, Mariselo Rueto, Elizabeth Soto, Inez Soto, and Ben Sun. I just want to make sure that we're talking about these people on a weekly basis so their names are not forgotten. This is Marcelo Rueda. This week we learned her lawyers filed a post-verdic motion under federal rules of criminal procedure, Rule 29, a judgment for acquittal, and rule 33, a new trial. It's a bold argument in a federal trial. Let me break down what they're pointing to. The core legal claim that they're making is that no rational juror could have found each element of the charges guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That is the constitutional floor for any criminal conviction. Convictions, the motion arguments, must be based on evidence of conduct, not evidence of ideology. That would be thought crime. You have to actually commit a crime, not just have a political ideology. This is a foundational principle of American criminal law. And it's one the Fifth Circuit, which covers the Northern District of Texas, where this trial happened, has repeatedly emphasized. The Fifth Circuit will be in charge of the appeal until they're filed. This specific complaint from Rueda's lawyers call generalized alleged ideology, historical materials, literature, and an expert whose testimony flamed Antifa as a dangerous movement. Kyle Scheidler. He's from the Center for Security Policy, which is a right-wing think tape. He was the prosecution's star witness on what Antifa is and what it does. Rueta's argument is that Scheidler was brought in to convict the defendants on what they believed rather than what they did. And that the trial was, in their words, saturated with evidence designed to evoke fear, political bias, and guilt by association. It was. Daniel Sanchez Estrada, his subplot is the cleanest illustration of why all this matters. He wasn't actually at the protest. He was convicted for moving a box of anarchist literature and zines from one defendant's home to another. Estrada's lawyers argue the materials were literatural and expressive concept that was not evidence of any crime. First Amendment protected speech. His lawyers are also contending that no link of the materials found in Sanchez's home, vehicle, or box was ever established to any co-defendant's case. Sanchez Estrada is looking at 40 years from moving books. There's currently some question about how this judgment was arrived at. There's a juror misconduct angle. This is the part that's triggering some of these new file motions. The defense alleges that there's credible evidence that the jury's deliberative process was disrupted by misconduct and possible coercion. There was a dust-up in the jury room about an hour before the verdict was read. When the jurors entered the room to render the verdict, two members of the jury were crying. The defense's lawyers are asking Judge Mark Pittman to hold an evidentiary hearing and examine jurors to determine the extent and impact of the behind closed doors kerfuffle prior to the verdict. They haven't laid out specifics publicly, but the motion says that the conduct creates a reasonable probability that the verdict was effective. The odds are stacked against these. Mark Pittman is very clearly a right-wing shill of a judge. He's a reliable conservative. They brought the case in his district for a reason. He's a founder and a VP of the Federalist Society of Fort Worth. He's a conservative ideolog. And his conduct was sus. We fined the three defense attorneys$500 in January for filing what he called frivolous motions. And all they were doing was asking for evidence about whether the North Texas Antifa cell actually existed. Pittman also granted the prosecution's motion to prevent the defense from arguing self-defense, even though the officer on the stand admitted that he drew his weapon first. They were going to attempt to say that Ben Song shot his gun as a warning shot, defense of others. Pittman also moved the trial to a smaller courtroom with limited public access. And he put the overflow access on closed circuit television in a courtroom an hour away. It was highly irregular. This is a big deal case. That was weird. The realistic outcome here is that Pittman will almost certainly deny the motion. The real action will begin on appeal at the Fifth Circuit. They have to be sentenced before the appeal can be laid out. Ruete's lawyers are essentially building that appellate record right now. If the conventions aren't overturned, there are three things that are going to live forever in case law that'll no doubt be used going forward. One, consumer fireworks can be charged as explosive in a federal terrorism prosecution. Two, moving boxes of books between your friends' apartments can be charged as material support to terrorism. Three, that an ideology, not a group with members and leaders, but a political belief can be the basis of a federal terror charge. That's a biggie. That's a precedent they want to use again and again. The protesters showed up to make noise so people in detention would know that they weren't alone. Federal government turned that into the first successful Antifa terrorism prosecution in American history. The sentencing for these crimes is 11 days before the 250th birthday of America. We should all be watching. Do you have any thoughts on this, Craig? We've talked about it before, but it's important that we talk about it frequently.

SPEAKER_01 32:14

The main takeaway is that this is the foundation for how a government can stop any and all dissent against it. They have criminalized an idea, as you said, the idea that fascism should be opposed. The United States government has officially said that is terrorism. This is one of the reasons that many organizations in the United States, many big organizations in the United States, have been reluctant to oppose Trump and his second term because they're worried about getting sued. And some of them are being sued. Like even though they stepped back their activities, protesters are being more careful because they're worried about blowback. Um people are worried about showing up to events. This is one of the reasons that the No Kings rally is branded in the way that it is. They don't talk about fascism because they know that they might get attacked legally or physically by the police for doing something like that. Once it becomes illegal to oppose an ideology, that means that that ideology is something that the government supports. Saying that Antifa is terrorism is the United States government saying fascism is protected. Fascism is protected speech in the United States. Opposing fascism is not. That could get you put in jail for the rest of your adult life. I know that people are used to hearing about people at these protests or thinking about them as being radicals or thinking about them as being weirdos or something. These are people who showed up at a concentration camp to try to tell the people in the concentration camp that people outside wanted them to be free. That's what they were doing. They were doing the right thing. They were doing the right thing. The alleged shooting, that's not something that I support or think would be a politically strategic decision. If that occurred, then it's something that I strategically oppose. A noise demonstration, that's bog standard stuff. We've been doing that since the 60s. And setting off fireworks on the 4th of July, I mean, like if you go to West Oakland, I mean they're doing that now, and it's May.

SPEAKER_00 34:22

Yeah, it's a little ticky-tack. Yeah. I hate that they're doing such ticky-tack stuff. It's embarrassing. It gives you a good sense of how unjust it all is. They're aren't even questionable. They're framing them in a way that makes them way more than questionable. I got a question for you. In my area, we're starting to see some organized democratic socialist activity. One group put out a candidate recommendation for the spring elections. Our local chapter of the Democratic Socialist is borrowing some aesthetics pretty heavily from Antifa, the red and black combination of colors. At some point, the whole democratic socialist movement is going to be smeared as being Antifa if it hasn't been already.

SPEAKER_01 35:01

Yeah. I think that that's very likely. At some point, anybody who openly opposes fascism that the government actually wants to stop or do something about, they might go after you for that reason. There are sitting politicians who are in office in places that are members of the DSA. These include Zoran Mamdani, they include Alexandro Casu-Cortez, they include a couple other members of the U.S. Congress, members of city governments, members of state governments. It's entirely possible that they could be gone after for that reason and accused of terrorism. Worse and weirder things have happened. I'm not like doom mongering here. I'm not saying, oh, this worst possible outcome is what's going to happen. No, I'm saying you need to think about this as a calculation. Donald Trump is up there just like talking about stuff he wants to do. But there are people who are thinking strategically behind all of this. The sub-under secretary of whatever. This is a guy who's just doing calculus with politics, basically. And the calculus question that is before them is this is this opposition dangerous enough that we need to stop it? Currently, the answer is no. There is not an opposition movement to Donald Trump that is actually threatening the power of the state. There's no rebellion. I think that while Democrats are polling very well, the Republicans are also being very serious about, well, we're just gonna like gerrymander and steal the election. And I think that they might get away with it, at least in the House. And if the Democrats take the Senate, then okay, well, fine. They still have the House, they can still gum up the works, whatever. So, is it threatening enough? That's one of the questions. Who would stop us? Is the other part of the question when it comes to this extra legal business. You can say as much as you want that the activities of the Trump administration or the court decidings of the Supreme Court or decisions like this in Texas are illegal or unconstitutional. But the question you have to ask yourselves is who will stop them? Gerrymandering in Louisiana, while there is currently an election happening, that's illegal. But who's gonna stop them? Who would stop them?

SPEAKER_00 37:04

We found out that the main Democratic Senate primary this week is all but decided. Before this, there seemed to be a heated battle between a first-time politician named Graham Plattner and an 80-year-old that had been the governor of the state, who was obviously the preferred candidate. The younger candidate, his name is Graham Plattner. And boy, he's this character that seems to be saying all the right things from a populist standpoint. He's very much a democratic socialist, but there's some red flags that are possibly unforgivable. I would say that these specifically are black flags. Whatever else you should know about Graham Plattner, you should know that he did have a Nazi tattoo up until early this year when he got called out on it. He said he didn't know it was a Nazi tattoo.

SPEAKER_01 37:49

The specific tattoo that he has or had, because he claims to have had it removed, is a Totenkopf, a death's head, which is a specific type of skull and crossbone symbol. Now, when you think skull and crossbones, you think the big X with the crossbones in a cross and a cartoony skull on a Lego pirate set. That's not what a Totenkopf is. A Totenkopf is a grisly symbol of a specific branch of the Nazi Party, specifically the SS, the Schutzstaffel, which was originally the bodyguard for Adolf Hitler, but then transformed into the party's main paramilitary organization. The SS was at the front line of the Nazis' invasion of Eastern Europe. Members of the SS killed personally as individual persons, tens of thousands of Jewish people, Slavic people, Roma people, etc. The SS is the evilest part of one of the evilest organizations in the history of the whole planet. The Totenkopf is their symbol. The symbol on their hat that's like a big skull, that's the Totenkopf. And that is what this guy had tattooed on his body. Not like small and somewhere. He had it big. It was big. It was a huge tattoo.

SPEAKER_00 39:02

I have tattoos and none of mine are that big. A 22-year-old Graham Platner was dumb enough to put that on his body. Or he cared about it enough. Or he just thought it was a badass tattoo. We're not really getting any straight information out of him that seems plausible of why he had this tattoo.

SPEAKER_01 39:18

Yeah, his claim was when he was a service member and he was in Croatia and they were on shore leave. They were drunk and walked into a tattoo shop and just pointed at a symbol that they had available to be tattooed. Now, that a tattoo shop in Croatia would give some drunk Americans a tug and cuff, that doesn't boggle the mind. There's no stretch of the imagination needed for that. I believe it. That a self-avowed history buff would live his entire life from 22 to middle age, regularly, you know, like taking off his shirt in order to go to the pool or something, in order to have sex with people, or at the doctor's office, or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 40:00

Graham Platner is in his 40s and he has a double hoop earring set up in his left ear. He wears a chain wallet.

SPEAKER_01 40:08

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 40:09

He's a boat guy. That's true. I know guys like that. They don't miss many opportunities to go shirtless. They always smell like Dracard Noir, too.

SPEAKER_01 40:20

One of his supposed bona fides is that he's a clam farmer or fisherman, right? So he's probably popping off his shirt all the time.

SPEAKER_00 40:26

When you're a clam fisherman, you're always wearing a big cable net turtleneck. The morning it's so cold. But at some point during the day, you gotta change out of that Hemingway sweater.

SPEAKER_01 40:35

Exactly. You gotta take it off. And you're like diving in to the Chesapeake or whatever. I know that they're not in the Chesapeake, but you know, like that kind of thing. So his claim is A, he didn't know what it was. I don't believe it. Two, that at no point in the rest of his life did anybody say, isn't that a Nazi symbol? Nobody said this. Again, he got this when he was in the service. At no point while he was in the military, was he shirtless in front of other people. That certainly happened a lot. And that nobody else was like, hey, isn't that a Nazi symbol? Nobody said this. And that at no point in the rest of his life did he ever like watch Indiana Jones and be like, huh, hmm, I wonder where that's from.

SPEAKER_00 41:21

It's just clearly a lie. Yeah. It's so clearly a lie. You know, you know what he could have said that might have got him off the hook in my mind? He could have said, no, this is some straight bones begrade Paul Peralta stuff from the late 80s, early 90s. And then I would be like, eh, you know, it could be, could be.

SPEAKER_01 41:37

There were alt fashions in the 80s that did incorporate Nazi symbolism. I think that that's wrong, but they they did do it. But that's not what he's saying. And like, if this man's story was I was young and dumb, and I got a Nazi tattoo. And then as soon as I learned it was a Nazi tattoo, I had it removed.

SPEAKER_00 42:00

He didn't get it removed, Craig. That's the thing. He didn't, he got it painted over. Yeah. I feel like that there's nothing this guy could do right for me. No. So maybe I'm just harshly judging him. In this case, there's a real difference between finding out you got a Nazi tattoo and ridding that from your body, then being like, I'm just gonna cover it up. I'm just gonna get a different tattoo that that covers this one up. That one that feels like you're not really performing contrition the way that you need to. If you want people to let you off the hook for having a Nazi tattoo, it's more like a so what?

SPEAKER_01 42:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:33

Oh, if you don't like it, I guess I can cover it up.

SPEAKER_01 42:35

Exactly. Because his first reaction to when this hit the public awareness wasn't, oh my God, oh no, I'm at the tattoo parlor now. Open up. It's 9 a.m. I gotta get in. That wasn't his reaction. His reaction was, eh, it's not a big deal. I didn't know about it. I was young and dumb. It's not really a big, you know, like whatever. Like it's not really a big deal. And what I'm apparently supposed to do, according to the Democratic Party and according to like a lot of op-ed brighter people, is to forgive and forget and live and let live. Okay, I study the right wing. I deal with and engage with a lot of people who are former members of far-right movements. These people are called foremers. They're people who used to be neo-Nazis, they used to be skinheads, they used to be whatevers. They have realized the error of their ways and they've gone back and they do restorative work and they dedicate their lives to this. Many of them can't ever get a job anymore because they were fucking Nazis. Many of them have extensive criminal records. Again, because they were Nazis. These people are not demanding that they be forgiven. They're saying I did something horrible and I have to spend the rest of my life trying to make amends. That's laudable, I think. It doesn't excuse or erase the harms that they did, but it's something that you can respect. What I can't respect is somebody's. Saying it's not a big deal. Also, I should be in the United States Senate. Fuck off.

SPEAKER_00 44:07

It's dumb. I've spent a lot of time with Grand Platner trying to get there. Yeah. Because I know that he's going to win the Democratic nomination for Maine. Yes. There's a movement behind him because of the populist things that he says that finds him to be authentic and is willing to forgive him for this tattoo. I am personally averse to somebody. You just tell me that somebody ever had a Nazi tattoo. I might let him work for a state senator. Yeah. But I would certainly never consider him to be a candidate that I would want to vote for. People are going to vote for Grant Plattner. Grant Plattner is likely going to make it into the U.S. Senate. Yeah. And the movement behind him is going to carry him beyond that. I don't understand how we got to a place in this country where we're going to cut a guy some slack on a Nazi tattoo, no matter what else he says. But apparently we are. We don't got another guy. I go out of my way to be fair to this guy, and I will say that other than the Nazi tattoo and a bunch of Reddit posts, and obviously he's a meathead, and clearly he was a coke dealer when he was a bartender in Washington, D.C., but nobody's going to talk about that. He's 41 years old. He could have put all its stuff behind him, really gotten into helping the poor get a fairer shake. Yeah. I'm trying to get there for this guy because the people that are going to put him into office are my compatriots. I don't consider myself a Democrat. They just happen to get all the votes that I give. Well, if there was a better alternative, I would quickly vote for them. But it just doesn't seem to be one. Yes. To see these people, these same people, cutting this guy some slack because he's feeding them the exact stuff that they want to hear, it's mind-blowing.

SPEAKER_02 45:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:51

I feel lost. Because I thought everybody felt the same way I did about guys that had Nazi tattoos, at least the people in the Democratic Party. The people that are not cutting anybody's slack on anything.

SPEAKER_01 46:02

I really don't get it. I just really don't understand it. Yeah, he's saying populist progressive stuff. He might believe those things. He belongs in the movement. Sure. He can be a staffer. He could be a lead canvasser. Should he be the candidate? No. He had a Nazi tattoo. That's a disqualification. The Democratic Party is simultaneously saying a man with an actual Nazi tattoo, that is okay. A student who questions the activities of the state of Israel right now, a government that is deeply unpopular in Israel and is very possibly going to lose Israeli elections, that's beyond the pale. You can't do that. That's anti-Semitic. However, a guy who has who has a Nazi symbol permanently affixed to his one human body and has for 20 years, it boggles the mind. I don't understand it.

SPEAKER_00 47:04

I don't get it. Hypothetical correct. Say Graham Platner catches this podcast, hears us talking about the difference between having the tattoo removed and having it covered up, finds it to be kind of a reasonable thing, says, you know what, I didn't think about it like that. But now that you mention it, I should get the area where the tattoo was cleaned of all tattoos. I should clean slate it there. I think that I at least owe it to people that are doubting me to do that. Like I just want to show them an act of good faith. Could you get there for him? Do you think? Not as a cynic candidate, no.

SPEAKER_01 47:35

Somebody with precisely this trajectory in life. If I knew him and he was like, yeah, I fucked up, and now I'm trying to work with other people. I'm volunteering at this and I'm doing this and I'm working at that, and like I'm lending my work, my labor, my time to help lift up the voices and power of people who I have hurt. I could get there in that capacity, but that doesn't mean that you get to be the leader.

SPEAKER_00 48:01

It just doesn't. Have you availed yourself to his bullshit? Have you taken the made the mental exercise of divorcing Graham Plattiner at 41 Senate candidate from guy who had a tattoo and just evaluated him based on his line of bullshit? Because he's got a perfect line of bullshit.

SPEAKER_01 48:18

It's true. His policy platform is very good. He's saying all the right things. This is what I don't get is like simultaneously, as this Graham Plattiner stuff is happening, we have sitting Senator John Fetterman in Pennsylvania openly saying stuff like, Yeah, the progressivism left me like a mental illness and considering becoming a Republican.

SPEAKER_00 48:42

How are people not thinking about this? There is a link between Fetterman and Platner, not just in how they're coding. The guy who recruited Plattner to run for this office and his first campaign manager, now he works for Zoran Mundami, was the guy who was the campaign manager for John Fetterman. I did not know that. That's nightmare information. His name is Joe Calvello, Fetterman's spokesperson through his 2022 campaign and one of the first persons to resign from Fetterman's state office. He's a top Plattner aide at one point. He's the one that helped recruit Plattner and launched the video for his campaign. He left Plattner's campaign earlier this year to run communications for the Mam Downey administration. There's a lineage there, there's a shared political operative ecosystem. It's interesting. Because Plattner is going to more than likely be a United States senator. I'm a weirdo because I think that a lot of the population was psyoped into going for Trump. Possible. Cambridge Analytica identified people that were vulnerable to the messaging. I've looked it up, and there's some pretty interesting stuff about that. They do a psychographic sort on all the people that are online to see what kind of messaging you're receptive to. Yes. And the first sort, top of the heap, is are you egalitarian-leaning or authoritarian leaning? All the mega enthusiasts tended to lean towards authoritarianism. We've seen the pipeline that they've been brought down. I think a lot of us think that they didn't do anything with the people that sorted egalitarian. To me, the people that sorted egalitarian have been pushed in some direction that allows them to be okay with a guy that used to have a Nazi tattoo, uh being their senator because he's saying all the stuff that they want to hear. They're so hard up for that information. I mean, it's authoritarian despair.

SPEAKER_01 50:23

It's a resignation. This is the best we can do. This is the best we can do. This is the best we got.

SPEAKER_00 50:28

Once Plattner becomes the nationally known figure, the Democratic Party, liberals in general, will have to relinquish their moral upper hand. Yeah. I don't know if people quite understand that yet, but that's a pretty big thing to give up for some guy with no history of being a senator or even that good of a guy.

SPEAKER_01 50:45

It's going to mean that in the next 10 years, at the very least, one person in the United States Congress is just going to be like, I'm a fascist. That's where the next generation of Republican leadership is going. Now that we have accepted this guy as a Democrat, how are we possibly going to stop this? How can we possibly stand up against it? The Secretary of Defense already has Nazi kind of tattoos. It's a waking nightmare from which we will never emerge until our death. Maybe I should round up my authoritarian despair. Maybe I was wrong at the start of the episode. Maybe I should round it up to a four.

unknown 51:20

Dr.

SPEAKER_00 51:20

Craig, big week for our guy, James Talarico. Huge week. He went down to Paul Quinn College, the oldest historically black college or university in Texas Saturday, and he gave his first ever commencement. He defeated a black woman candidate in the primary and making a move on her vote, trying to appeal to them. During that campaign, the Jasmine Crockett side, the Colin Albert side, they tried to dirty him up a little bit on some racist stuff, but he played it off pretty well. The accusation I thought were kind of bad faith, but it's politics, and at least his sparring partners are doing all the same stuff his opponent's going to do at some point. Yeah. Tal Riga went down to this graduating class and did a speech, the thesis of which was that their disillusionment was a superpower. He looked Gen Z dead in the face and said that their nihilism is based. That's an Avengers level line read. Beyond that, he had some deep-cut references in his speech. He quoted Howard Thurman, who's a theologian that I had to look up. Yeah. Thurman was the spiritual architect behind the nonviolent civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. carried Thurman's book, Jesus and the Disinherited with him. Thurman's core argument of the book was that Jesus was himself a member of an oppressed minority living under authoritarian rule. And that Jesus' teachings were specifically about how to survive that condition with your humanity intact. The same thing that we're doing with this podcast. While he was there, he even spit out some bell hooks. I had a previous awareness of, but only because she's one of those authors that made sure her pen name was always lowercase. And I just think that's a super badass touch. It is. It's very cool. She had a 2010s glow-up where some of her uh books from the early 2000s were put onto TikTok and people got into it. He referenced Langs and Hughes, too, but that's just table stakes.

SPEAKER_01 53:04

Yeah, you would put in Langs and Hughes for sure.

SPEAKER_00 53:06

You gotta have a Langston Hughes or a James Baldwin, preferably both. Tallywackers out there bibliography maxing at a graduation salmon. He stuck the landing. The Rizminister has officially entered his manifesting stage. I suspect that this won't be the last time he comes at the Zoomers with the whole your disillusionment is your superpower. Yeah. It's a smooth line. It is. He may even believe it. It's reasonable. That generation's got plenty of disillusionment. And if they can use it for something, fantastic. I think that that's going to be key to him connecting with that generation. We watch the rise of James Tal Rico. He's not won his sentence seat yet, Dr. Craig, but the vibes are unsustainable.

SPEAKER_01 53:44

He's doing an excellent job. He's making news, he's saying the right things. He doesn't have a Nazi symbol tattooed directly on his one human body.

SPEAKER_00 53:52

He is like the Mario to Graham Platner's Wario.

SPEAKER_01 53:57

Yeah, he is. Absolutely. He's just like a nice little guy. Oh God, then who's Waluigi? It's that guy who's running in Florida. Oh, James Fishback? It's James Fishback. It's James Fishback. Absolutely the Waluigi in this scenario.

SPEAKER_00 54:16

Stare into the abyss with friends, the Autocratic Despair podcast with Nick Mortenson and Dr. Craig Johnson. And don't forget Dr. Craig's other podcast, 15 Minutes of Fashion. Available wherever you get your podcast.