SPEAKER_02 0:00

Would people rather have a Civil War or continue to go to Costco? I feel like Costco is gonna win that every time for the most part.

SPEAKER_03 0:06

Sam's might not win it, but Costco for sure.

SPEAKER_02 0:09

Yeah, people love Costco. I don't want to go to the Civil War, I just want to get some chickens and some potato chips.

SPEAKER_03 0:17

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, 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 is on assignment this week. He sends his regards. Sitting in for Craig today is Dave Troy. Dave runs the independent news website America 2.0, writes the wide angle column for the Washington Spectator, hosts a podcast entitled Dave Troy Presents, which just began its fourth season last week. Dave is, in the formal taxonomy that I've just made up, a top-tier autocracy knower. For those new to the rankings, the top tier currently includes Dave, Sarah Kenzior, Timothy Schneider, Jared Yates Sexton, Jeff Charlotte, and her own Dr. Craig Johnson. These are the people that saw the shape of this thing early on, named it correctly, and have been doing the work of explaining it to the rest of us ever since. Dave Troy from America 2.0. Where would you rate your level of autocratic despair this week?

SPEAKER_02 1:34

Probably around four or five, like not that high. And that's not because I'm particularly optimistic about where things are going exactly. I just kind of think that the opposition right now does not have like a kind of a clear pathway forward in a lot of ways. The MAGA coalition is splitting. Putin's war in Ukraine is not going that well. The Chinese are sort of not that happy with the Russians, even though they're still in a relationship, you know. So part of the autocratic despair problem is that when you start to feel a lot of autocratic despair, it tends to make it worse. So I try to keep a level head about it and not get too hopeless. That said, I think that there are a lot of challenges. We are losing democratic governance and constitutional governance, suffering attacks on our institutions constantly. There's a lot of reasons to be deeply concerned. Chief among them for me is that I just don't think that people understand the complexity of what's going on and the nature of the changes that are trying to be pushed forward. I don't think it's just kind of like the straight up authoritarian autocratic playbook either. What we're dealing with is something much more networked. And when you have dealt with people like Hitler and Mussolini and other fascist leaders in the past, what you've tended to have is kind of these localized networks that, you know, yeah, they collaborate with each other some, but it's really about consolidation of power within a nation state. That isn't quite what's happening right now. We're dealing with a global network of folks that have fundamental issues with the way that the world has been set up since World War II, and they are hoping to take control of the planet and usher in something quite different. So I think there's a certain bravery of imagination that challenges some of the narratives around what's happening right now. But it's not just straight up strongmen, although that's definitely an element. It's also this other thing. If we can have a little bit of imagination about how to counter that, we might be able to get past it. I think it's it's really complicated. And, you know, again, I I am deeply concerned, but I remain hopeful that A, the bad guys aren't as smart as they think they are, and B, the good guys might start to figure out what to do about it.

SPEAKER_03 3:44

You've occupied your time for the last 10, 15 years as a network researcher. I first became aware of you because I think you were the first guy to ever use the Twitter API.

SPEAKER_02 3:53

I was, yeah, back in the day, 2007.

SPEAKER_03 3:56

When you talk about researching networks, what do you mean when you say a network?

SPEAKER_02 3:59

I think people sort of intuitively understand that there are such things as networks in society. So people that affiliate with each other and work together, you might think of CPAC or the Council for National Policy or the DNC or Communist Party or anything like that. It's a network. Are anti-vax moms a network? Anytime people coalesce around a project or a worldview or a goal, they tend to form affiliations and associations and they tend to amplify each other's work and stuff like that. So what I started doing almost 20 years ago now was studying networks and how they form in contemporary society and then what worldviews uh those networks carry and kind of like what their agenda is, what their goals are. And I kind of was approaching it from a sociological perspective. My overall thinking 20 years ago was that if we could understand all of these cliques and clusters better, that we would be able to build a better society by helping to bridge gaps between cliques and figure out, you know, what extremists are doing and how to counter that and that sort of thing. What I found over the last 20 years is that it's exactly that kind of clustering and clicking that information warfare is built on. When you talk about anti-vaccine moms, there's a great deal of misinformation and disinformation that gets injected into those networks. And a lot of the people participating are participating in good faith, but some of them aren't. And it's very difficult to sort out who's doing what. The main thing is rather than listen to what people are saying, start to study how they're advancing their interests together. When you start to do that, it actually gives you a different signal set than what people are actually saying sometimes. I call myself a network empiricist. I really don't care that much what somebody says on a day-to-day basis because I just assume that in the case of information warfare, what somebody says is designed to generate an effect. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're believe what they're saying or anything else because so many people are paid to say certain things on a certain day. You can't really take what they say seriously. So if you look instead at empirical uh observation of how they connect with people and whose messages they're amplifying and who they trust and stuff like that, then you can develop a clearer picture of why people are doing the things that they're doing and start to look at like their longitudinal movement over time. So you can go back historically. I've studied all of these networks going back a hundred years or more in some cases, sometimes more than that, to understand kind of like where they came from, where the networks are going in the future. And you become kind of a social astronomer, if you will, studying the movements of networks in the stuff in the sky. I find it a completely different discipline than what most political observers do or what most pundits do. Pundits are concerned about the horse race and the back and forth of what's said on a day-to-day basis and how much money people raised and who you know got three points down on the primary. I'm looking at where people cluster together and what their goals are long term.

SPEAKER_03 6:53

You study all these networks. Have you found that there's certain people that keep coming through as members of disparate networks? Are there characters? Are there groups that keep coming up again and again?

SPEAKER_02 7:04

Honestly, there's like a thousand people in a United States that if you were to like sort of ship them off to a desert island and never hear from them again, the world would probably get a lot better. And people can have their own private ideas about who those people might be. But my point is that there are a small number of people that have a disproportionate impact on reality, if we want to be honest about it. And so I do notice that there are networks of people that keep reoccurring. You know, there's one network that I trace going back even into like this pre-Civil War time is gold bugs. People that are obsessed with the idea of hierarchical money and property tend to have an indelible network that moves through time. And that takes you straight from the Civil War to the business plot in 1933, to the National Association of Manufacturers, to the John Birch Society, to the Council of National Policy, to January 6th. That seems important to me. The fact that there's this one network of people, and now, granted, it's not the same individuals always because people die. You are talking about multi-generational legacies, you're talking about people who clustered with people, you know. So, for example, the guy who uh was Robert Mercer's PhD thesis advisor was a notorious John Bercher racist named Revelo Oliver. He was connected in with the National Association of Manufacturers. There's this continuity line that runs through. It's not just on the right either. I mean, there's left networks, people like the Institute for Policy Studies. What you start to realize too is that these are the networks that the intelligence agencies in every country fight over. They do have their own mass that comes with them and agency. The Institute for Policy Studies was courted by the KGB because they carried their worldview. Likewise, the Council for National Policy had a disproportionate number of connections to right-leaning CIA people. It's this constant back and forth between these networks that are fighting over the nature and future of reality ultimately.

SPEAKER_03 9:06

Robert Mercer is, of course, owner and proprietor of Cambridge Analytica.

SPEAKER_02 9:10

Well, he was the one of the funders, along with his daughter Rebecca.

SPEAKER_03 9:13

Steve Bannon's sugar daddy for quite some time.

SPEAKER_02 9:15

He was Steve Bannon's chief patron for several years, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 9:18

Michael Flynn, where does he come in?

SPEAKER_02 9:20

Well, he's an interesting character. He's he's kind of a strange bridge character in that he's got all of these Russian affiliations and you know was present at that RT dinner with Jill Stein and you know the rest of that crew back in 2015. He's also deeply tied in with the Council for National Policy Network and the Schlafley Network. So his present uh organization is something called America's Future, which is a nonprofit that's actually an old anti-communist outfit that got started in the late 40s, founded in part by Jack Singlaub, who was a general, extremely right wing, and uh actually got withdrawn from Korea by Jimmy Carter in 1977 or eight. Flynn got to know Singlaub quite well and took over America's Future. Right before Singlaub died, he put out a press release saying that he wasn't comfortable with the direction that America's future was being taken by Flynn, who installed his family as board of directors. Uh, there's a woman named Tracy Diaz who went by Tracy Beans and she was promoting all kinds of QAnon propaganda back in 2019-2020 time frame. But it's unclear that Singlaub was actually happy with Flynn taking this thing over, uh, and maybe started to sense some of the same concerns that like I've had and others have had about Flynn's affiliations with Russia. It's not always neat and pretty either. You know, there's these kinds of morphings that happen over time. And Singlaub was in very much with the Council for National Policy people. The other network that shows up again and again is all of the Iran Contra characters. That's like the network around Maxwell and Epstein and John Tower and Bill Barr and Adnan Khashoggi. That network is everywhere. It just constantly turns up. Once you start studying this stuff from kind of a network perspective, there's about a thousand people that are material to the whole thing, and the rest are sort of long tail. But there are major actors that keep turning up.

SPEAKER_03 11:10

You've done great work in helping me to understand the overall just all to the problem. I have about six people that I consider to be the top tier. It's you, Sarah Kenzior, Timothy Snyder, Jeff Charlotte. The best autocracy knowers of our time. You've been explaining this to people for years. It's such a complicated thing that I don't think many of us have a grasp on it. How about you? You're at the top of the chain. What level of grasp do you think that you have?

SPEAKER_02 11:38

Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's always more to be learning and understanding with this. You just can't ever assume that you understand it and that you're done. In fact, I've been attempting a book on this set of topics for the last four years or so. Every time that I get part way down the road, I'm like, oh wow, that's an interesting new level of understanding that I didn't fully grasp. I've kind of, I won't say resigned myself to writing the book, but I'm doing it on Robert Carrow time. You know, I will do it when I understand it well enough to say something meaningful and original. I'm not interested in turning out like a mass market book just to make a few bucks or go on the speaking tour or whatever. I really think it's important to get this right, and I don't think that it's been well covered. Most of the people that try to get at aspects of this space end up writing polemic texts that advance one agenda or the other, and I think it's important to look at it as a whole picture. And the other thing is that you want to write something that's historically a hundred percent backed up with primary sources and is not speculation, but is in fact history. And there's a lot of this stuff that you don't have primary sources for, perhaps yet, or maybe ever. I've done something like 1,500 FBI FOIA requests over the last three years to try to get as much raw, provable information as possible. I'm still waiting on stuff I probably should have had four years ago and still don't. We all need to be students of this. One of the biggest things people can do is turn off CNN and Fox News and stuff like that. The frames that they put out are just so freaking simplistic and shallow. I can't even really listen to like NPR anymore, at least not about political coverage, because they just don't understand the long-term arc of where this is going.

SPEAKER_03 13:15

Do you think that they don't know it or they cannot explain it in a way that doesn't make them seem far off the deep end?

SPEAKER_02 13:22

There's this political frame we are operating in where, you know, in the United States we have two political parties. One has this point of view, and the other one has that point of view, and then we have laws that dictate how they interact and the redistricting and all of that. And that all matters. You can't not pay attention to that, but at the same time, there's this whole other layer of reality that is being shaped by people that are cultural figures. Steve Bannon has been saying for the last 10-15 years culture is upstream of politics. Stole that from the Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci. That is 100% correct. Culture is upstream from politics. You can completely screw with politics by messing with culture. What do we think this whole woke mind virus thing is? What do we think about buying social networks and changing the rules on how those work? What do we think about changing norms and fashion and music and art? And that's why, you know, intelligence agencies were always screwing with fashion, music, and art. From my perspective, it's just kind of naive. And I don't think you have to be like conspiratorially muddied. You just kind of have to understand how people work, that culture is always going to define political outcomes. Effectively, they're working at lower levels of the stack. What people don't understand is that there is this long-term conflict over the nature of money and currency that animates probably like half to two-thirds of this discussion. It's just not something that people can really find a way to talk about. The problem that I see is that when you're listening to CNN and stuff, which I do occasionally, usually like in a hotel room, I'll, you know, maybe turn it on to see what's going on. I don't listen to it regularly. I listen to C-SPAN radio, actually. That gives you two things. First, primary source coverage of what's actually being said in Congress, which is valuable. And then also you get primary source coverage of voters calling in to express their opinions. You hear all kinds of regurgitated stuff that you know is coming from Russian propaganda or Chinese propaganda or from weird, you know, domestic sources. Now you can get a real sense of what people are thinking. And so that's kind of how I stay grounded is to not pay that much attention to like, you know, secondary sources, to really seek out primary sources wherever I possibly can.

SPEAKER_03 15:28

What do you think the last 10 years, the descent into American authoritarianism, what do you think it's taken from you?

SPEAKER_02 15:36

I was planning to not do this. I had other things I would have preferred to have been doing. I'm a technology entrepreneur by background. I had a successful, have a successful small tech company and have been pursuing various projects in parallel to this work. The amount of attention and time that I've been able to provide my business uh and other personal uh interests has been greatly limited because I've been dealing with this. My grandfather landed at Normandy on June 6, 1944. It was not his idea. He did not, you know, be like it was not like I think what I'll do is go to France and spend some time. He was asked to go do that, and it was his duty to do it, and he did it. Rewarding but also incredibly traumatizing experience for him. Thankfully, he lived through it. I feel the same way. My family has a belief in service. When I saw that my country was at risk, I felt like the best thing to do was to try to figure out how to serve it in some way that made sense. And so my initial foray into this was to take some of my original research that I had been doing back 2007-2008 time frame and start to apply those techniques to addressing bad actors and foreign influence and stuff like that. And, you know, when you start making an impact there and you start connecting with others and you've got ways to contribute, that tends to snowball. I've spent a lot of time working with various government agencies and with journalists. Started out trying to contribute research to journalists wherever I could, because I did not at that time, you know, have a journalistic voice that I was comfortable exercising for a variety of reasons. What I found was that these legacy news outlets is that they've got a lot of a lot of stuff on their plate. They don't necessarily have the editorial buy-in to go explore emergent information warfare. Although sometimes they did. And I mean, I did work with some journalists at multiple outlets, the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, various places that, you know, got it and did move forward with stuff. But what I found was that I really needed to put out my own stuff in order to really make a continued impact. And again, that's a lot to do with people getting laid off, buyouts uh of corporate media outlets by these very networks that we're fighting. So you kind of have to be independent if you really want to make an impact against those networks. I'm not gonna lie, it's very difficult. Constantly you're trying to figure out how to balance risk versus impact. At the end of the day, we live in a very litigious society, and lawfare is how people are keeping each other in check right now and fighting people that are trying to expose what's going on. So I'm meticulous to a fault. I try to be extremely careful in terms of how I frame things and the subjects and the timing and everything else. Always be an irritant to the bad guys, but never be in their top ten enemies list because that's when you start to have distractions and problems. It's a little bit strategic to stay under the radar, too.

SPEAKER_03 18:28

In February last year, there were a couple of these memos out about the neoreactionary movement. Yes, yeah. Not that difficult to read, but it would have required a lot of work to go and seek them out and really learn them. You took a couple of these papers and used the notebook LM to create an artificial podcast.

SPEAKER_02 18:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 18:50

I've never seen anybody do that before. So as far as I'm concerned, you pioneered that. What do you think the advantages of that are? I think that there are many. That's information I don't know that I would have taken in had it not been made easier by what you did. Last season on your podcast, you actually did a whole episode on Project Russia. Right. The one researcher in the United States that had written a paper on it.

SPEAKER_02 19:11

I'd become a mega enthusiast at some point. Yeah. You used I used Notebook LM. That was actually really challenging because first off, I just want to say that my overall feelings about AI are very mixed. I think you know, a lot of the ownership of these tools is not necessarily responsible and doesn't necessarily have people's best interests at heart. And also I think they have crazy ideas about AI and Doomerism, and 90% of that stuff is overblown. And my overall feeling on like dangers of AI is you know, if you don't like it, turn it off. Let me first explain what Project Russia is. Sure. It was a series of books that came out starting around 2005. There were like three or four books. They basically talk about how Russia is going to take down the West and why Western democracy is decadent and evil and not ever gonna work. These books were distributed in Russia widely, particularly to like influencers and people in government and you know, sort of basically people in in the good graces of the Kremlin and um uh tried to, you know, sort of create a cultural war. This is why I talk about you know culture being important against the West. I found out about this series of books because they turned up in a raid in Ukraine and this cult that you know is trying to you know demoralize people in Ukraine. So I got a copy of these books, but they're all in Russian. I do not speak Russian, I do not pretend to speak Russian. I asked some people that I know who do speak Russian, you know, hey, can you help me translate some of these? And I did get some assistance with translating some of them. But what I found was that just like, well, I could take and throw these books into Notebook LM in their original Russian language, and Notebook LM was able to interpret the texts well enough to at least pull out key themes. I wouldn't rely on that to, you know, get specific wording correct or to understand idiom or things along those lines. But when, you know, the basic gist is that democracy sucks and that voters are children, the West is decadent because of homosexuals, you can pick that up. Basically, what I did was I ran it through Notebook LM multiple times and had it in each pass kind of focus on different aspects of the text that I thought were important. And it took about a month actually to get enough material strung together in a way that made sense to put together an episode, but it was a way to do it and you know make that make that material much more accessible. And I, you know, some people felt like it was bad to use AI, but the overwhelming majority of the people said what you said, which was that it was a useful tool. When those memos came out, you know, I just cranked those into notebook LM and you know had it generate kind of a easy podcast summary because there was some urgency. This was when Doge was rolling out, and you know, it really wasn't clear what was happening with the administration and how far they might go and how quickly. I felt like it was more important that people get quick access to that kind of information than to find a guest and talk about it and yada yada. And of course the documents are there and they're not that long, as you say, they're pretty accessible. It was just a convenience. And I it's you know, besides that, I use I use AI to do research on things sometimes and to help organize information, stuff like that. But in terms of like writing, no, I will not use AI for that because it sucks. It just is not good at writing. Every once in a while I'll be like, give me a give me a summary of something, you know, written down, and you read it and it's just gobbledygook. It's just the worst kind of writing. I pride myself on being kind of a craftsman when it comes to writing, and um I try to write clear, concise prose that people can understand.

SPEAKER_03 22:42

What is your AI of choice?

SPEAKER_02 22:44

I've been tending to use Claude Code quite a bit, as well as you know, Google, Notebook LM, things like that. I Gemini's good for a few things. I don't tend to use Chat GPT that much these days. Um Claude Code, I have some tools that I've set up to have a bunch of functions that are helpful to me. So for instance, there's now a server that you can use to look a stuff up in CourtListener, which is a big database of federal court cases. Other tools you can use to pull 990s for nonprofit organizations. So I'll use it to do like an initial research pass on stuff using public data sources.

SPEAKER_03 23:21

One of your sons graduated in the same class from a private school as Luigi Mangioni. Is that right?

SPEAKER_02 23:27

Yeah, that's correct. I noticed that when that news was going around that they were saying that the shooter was from Baltimore and you know, went to school somewhere, you know, a private school. I'm like, oh that's weird, you know, and then it just kept getting closer and closer. You know, he graduated in 2016, graduate of Gilman School in Baltimore, and I realized that he was a friend of my son's. I really was just like, wow, you know, and so then I realized that it, you know, I had seen the kid speak at the at the high school graduation because he was the paledictorian. So I went and found a video of the high school graduation and was like, holy hell. And I do think it's really interesting and sad that that generation is dealing with these kinds of issues. Uh Luigi Mangioni was really smart, really nice, motivated kid with a lot of interest in the world. He effectively ended up getting radicalized somehow. We still don't really know how. I there was some business about a book club that involved reading uh Ted Kaczynski, which maybe shouldn't be your first book club book.

SPEAKER_03 24:28

Not the first one. Maybe later on.

SPEAKER_02 24:30

It's worth reading. If you're 27 years old and like, you know, you're in an impressionable state, that might be something that should be handled with some caution. But at any rate, he read that and then apparently went into some kind of spiral where you know he started getting more and more extreme in his thinking, and it's just a terrible tragedy. Frankly, the people that are lionizing him, I really don't have a lot of sympathy for that. I mean, you know, he went and killed a man in cold blood for not good reasons, effectively doing something extremely antisocial. We can't just be like tongue in cheek, wink wink, nudge, nudge about this. You can't go around killing people. Can you be upset about the healthcare system? Yeah. Should you regulate it differently? Yeah. Should we have universal health care? Yeah. You know, all that stuff.

SPEAKER_03 25:14

But we live in a society as this case moves forward eventually to trial. I see a big cleaving of our culture.

SPEAKER_02 25:22

Yeah, I mean, it could be very damaging. Hopefully, he will not get like the death penalty or something, because that will just be extremely divisive and totally unnecessary and inhumane. He should definitely serve serve some time in prison. You know, he's not guiltless. I think he should be treated with reasonable discipline, but also a s a certain amount of humanity and uh uh you know forgiveness. You know, he needs to be in jail for a long time. If that outcome happens, I think most people will see that as reasonable. If this administration and Department of Justice, which of course right now is being led by Trump's personal attorney, does something that is designed to provoke outrage, uh, that could have a different outcome. I hope it doesn't come to that. We'll be watching to see.

SPEAKER_03 26:08

We've watched over the course of the last week a major advancement in the authoritarian agenda with the Voting Rights Act being stripped away and this slush fund that's been created. There hasn't been any protesting in the streets. The protests, for the most part, have been put together by a group. Right. Have they had this effect on contextualizing the transgressions of the Trump administration? Right. If something happens and there's not a immediate protest about it, but there's a protest 14 days later and it's about hands off our stuff.

SPEAKER_02 26:43

It's a really difficult problem because I think people are frustrated, they're exhausted, they want to make a difference. The thing I hear from people all the time is, well, what can we do? And I'm like, well, I don't know what you can do because I don't know who you are. You know, if you run a company, there's things you can do if you're in that role. If you are a community organizer, there's other things you can do. If you're a mother, you just said there are things you can do. It's really just dependent on people's roles in terms of like how they can contribute and they need to think hard about what they can do in their roles that's best use to their time. Beyond that, I also think that the 1960s laid out a kind of a blueprint that has been turned into a cliche and taken without a lot of critical thought. I was just editing a blurb today for a TED talk that we recorded at an event a few months ago, um, talking about the case of uh Rosa Parks and how history tells us that she was a tired black woman who refused to give up her seat in the back of a bus and then she didn't, and then it changed everything. The fact is that that particular action was fed by years of careful planning and protest and organizational work. That history is erased from uh the the sort of soundbitey, you know, iconic imagery that we associate with the civil rights movement. And that's not at all to detract from Rosa Parks uh and and that story, but there is a bigger story. If we dig deeper into history, into how change really happens, we find that it takes really hard work. It takes investment of networked organization over time, and it doesn't just, you know, happen because somebody showed up on someday and went to the march on Washington or something. There's all of this mycelial network that lives underneath that. I think that we have become a little bit lazy in terms of relying on the iconic imagery of protest rather than the underlying machinery of building protest and social change. I don't pretend to be, you know, some great social change organizer, but I've I've done my part in different ways and over the years, and I feel like that uh I at least have some idea of how that kind of stuff happens. And so I think, you know, part of the problem too is that, you know, we've been having these little mini kind of no kings type things that have let people blow off a little bit of steam. They don't really amount to much of anything, no offense to anybody participating. I mean, they're fine. I've been to some. They haven't really moved the needle in a way that I I think people would like to see happen. And when you talk about the slush fund, yeah, it's outrageous. But you know, are people gonna do something specific about it? Like what? We don't even know how to characterize what that thing is. It's not a congressional appropriation, it's some sort of weird phantom funds that like the DOJ invented out of thin air. What even is that? How do you protest that? What what is the reason to protest that? What is the exact language? What do we want instead? Like what like it's just so out of left field, it's like getting knocked in the head with a baseball or something. You just have no idea how to react because it's just so bizarre. I think people need to focus more on building the social change and the political networking that is going to lead to real outcomes rather than just sort of the imagery and the iconic aspects of protest, which, you know, again, fine. Don't let the signified become the replacement for the signifier. You know, you see what I mean? We've swapped out the image for the thing itself. That's a dangerous mistake.

SPEAKER_03 30:17

What do you make of Grand Platter?

SPEAKER_02 30:18

I haven't studied him in a great deal of detail, but he certainly seems like a risky choice. Let's put it that way. He's got all these strange kind of affiliations, and he's got all these quotes that are following him around about hookers in Thailand and Mexico or whatever. Seems like a dumb idea to make him your nominee. If it was me, I just wouldn't do it. But he is now, and so they're kind of gotta live with him. Susan Collins is not one of my favorite people, but on the other hand, I don't think she's maybe as uh imbalanced as he is in terms of like, you know, uh his his uh overall vibe. My concern with somebody like Platner, even if he's like a good Democrat, like at first, I would worry that he would kind of turn into John Fetterman type character. He just doesn't seem reliable to me. I have not studied his network, so I don't know who's funding him, I don't know where he came from, I don't know who his best buddies are. And if I were to write something about him, that would be the first thing I would figure out. This is like where the Democratic Party needs to figure out what its deal is in terms of having a direction to go in that makes sense and not bringing in just anybody into the fold because he strikes me as a risky character.

SPEAKER_03 31:22

Have you been following the Prairie Land situation?

SPEAKER_02 31:26

From my perspective, this whole like Antifa is a terrorist group thing is just so freaking ludicrous because it isn't really an organized group in any way. I think anybody that opposes fascism is an anti-fascist and is as a result Antifa. But the whole thing is a language semantics game that these folks have made up in order to demonize anybody that opposes them, and it's really evil and bad. Mark Bray uh was a professor, is a professor at Rutgers, wrote the book on Antifa stuff, and he was finding that he was coming under threat. Now, he's not some kind of advocate of violence or anything like that. He just wrote a book about the history of anti Antifa as an antifascist movement. He's an academic and has given some lectures on it, but that's about the extent of it. I believe it was in October or so, was trying to leave to go to Spain because his family was being threatened. He had his plane ticket canceled at the last minute, right before he was getting ready to take off. He's been living in Europe for the last several months, and I've been in Europe some myself dealing with uh stuff that's being directed at me.

SPEAKER_03 32:28

You've had threats directed your way?

SPEAKER_02 32:30

Legal and yeah, physical threats over the years. Yeah. How seriously do you take them? It depends on the context. Um, you know, different things at different times. I've had things I have to report to law enforcement, legal things that uh are annoying. Manage to keep it at a dull roar, no real issues, but it weighs on you because you know you know that there's people watching.

SPEAKER_03 32:51

There's one thing that we do in this podcast, Dr. Craig and I, we have decided to forcefully push back against the cynicism of the Trump era by choosing to delusionally believe in a better future where James Tallerico is the president of the United States. Do you want in on this, Dave? Yeah, yeah. We can get you in early on the Talerico train.

SPEAKER_02 33:13

This race in Texas is um a real bellwether on multiple levels. The first is today we will find out if they reject Ken Paxton, who is a complete lunatic, has done all manner of things that are ethically shady if not illegal. The prospect of Ken Paxton being a senator is insane. I hope James Talarico has a shot at becoming a senator too. Obviously, he's very well grounded, and I think a lot of Texans are really fed up with where things have been. And Texas, you know, as it densifies in its urban areas, just tends to be turning more blue. Texas? Really? We're gonna do this in Texas? I hope so. You know, we'll see how it goes. I mean, I I think Beto of Rourke showed that there was at least a baseline level of support for someone kind of in that vein a few years ago, and I'm just hopeful that people are getting clear information on where to apply resources in order to properly direct turnout for that race, because that's really the danger. You think you're doing really well, and then it turns out that you're not, because there's a there's a real problem with progressive politics in particular, where stuff that seems inevitable on social media ends up completely falling flat in real life electoral politics. The only cure for that is block out all the stuff coming from social media and pay attention to the real dynamics of how to run a race and dealing with turnout and dealing with you know advertising and directing door knocking and all the kind of normal stuff you have to do. And I think it's easy in this a day and age to kind of take the the hopium overdose that comes from social channels and just pump it right into your veins and oh feeling good, we're gonna win this. And then it turns out no, you're not because you didn't properly read the situation. My only advice for the Talarico campaign is just like be super freaking hard-nosed about the reality of things and and know how to run the race down to the micro block of like what you're doing where. Do that, and you probably got a shot. And that would be great. One of the things that's been nice to see, and I'm I'm still kind of, you know, I'm I'm a bit of a skeptic when it comes to positive developments because you never really know until stuff proves itself out. But you know, this business in Hungary where Orban got voted out, they've got this new guy who granted was from the same party, but he's actively dismantling a lot of stuff. It looks like he's moving things in the right direction. So if that election was real, which you know, I would give it a 60-40 chance is pretty real, that's a real bellwether that like things are changing, and it is possible to throw off these infections. If that's the case in Texas as well, two times kind of makes a trend. Three times makes it a really observable trend. Maybe we're on the start of something, and if so, that would be fantastic.

SPEAKER_03 35:56

What do you see as the time horizon on American authoritarianism being dismantled?

SPEAKER_02 36:02

Well, somebody was talking to me about that. I I have, you know, a lot of people that contact me. What do I think about this? What do I think about that? Are we gonna have elections, this kind of stuff? There's lots of reasons to be concerned. I mean, we might not have elections because weird things that happen right at the election time. Uh fortunately, we have a distributed enough system where it's fairly resilient and sort of hard to intervene. But you know, you've got the Save Act and other things going on where they're trying to intervene at the federal level. I guess my feeling is kind of like back into this. Let's assume that we were gonna have total fascism and constitutional collapse by, say, like 2028. It's getting close. Like you'd have to you'd have to get from where we are to there without too much interruptions. Are we gonna have rioting in the street because people are starving and you know there's like a civil war where people are shooting at each other next year or the year after? Probably not, because right now things for all their craziness, we're still doing our thing and people still have jobs. The unemployment rate's not that bad, inflation isn't great, but it's not that bad. People are going to Costco every weekend. My thing is, would people rather have a civil war or continue to go to Costco? I feel like Costco is gonna win that every time for the most part.

SPEAKER_03 37:13

Sam's might not win it, but Costco for sure.

SPEAKER_02 37:15

Yeah, people love Costco. I don't want to go to the Civil War, I just want to get some chickens and some potato chips. As long as Costco is sort of like the default choice, things will be relatively stable until then. If it's no longer possible to go to Costco, and or if you go and there's nothing there, that would be bad, and people would start to, you know, question the premise here. We've got 2026 midterms. That's an opportunity to turn the ship around. If we manage not to turn the ship around meaningfully then, we've got 2028 to try again with presidential and senate and things like that. If that doesn't work, then we've got 2030 to try some things maybe again. I don't think that the bad guys are all that coordinated or all that clever. They may be sufficiently coordinated and sufficiently clever, but they're not like maximally coordinated and maximally clever. There's a good chance that they screw this up. They have internal infighting. They're basically blowing up the MAGA coalition right now. That whole rift with Massey and everything, that is going to become the fault line through which all this runs. And it's basically pure play libertarianism versus MAGA Trumpism. And those are not the same thing at all because pure play libertarianism is non-interventionist, and Trump has been maximally interventionist. That's where the fault line is right now in the Republican Party. So if Democrats can exploit that fault line, what they're going to try to do is to rebuild a new coalition that spans left and right, basically take the anti-war left with the anti-war right, make some kind of fusion dish out of that with like Thomas Massey and Rokana and some of the squad and you know, whatever else they can throw in the mix. I don't know that America has a taste for fusion cuisine when it comes to that particular mix. I think you could pull off the mega coalition, which was conservatives and Christian fundamentalists and you know, some of the libertarians, fiscal hawks, and whatever else. But this mix, I don't know that people are into it.

SPEAKER_03 39:04

This would be like a tenuous dynamic where one group is definitely going to stab the other in the back at first opportunity.

SPEAKER_02 39:11

I don't see them getting their shit together. The thing is, is that this architecture of like the anti-war left meeting the anti-war right is basically like the long-term fever dream that Moscow has had for the United States. Think about the anti-war movement in the 60s. That was entirely driven by the KGB. Granted, there were a lot of good faith participants that believed in it, and that's how they got it in the mix, was that they got drawn into the networks. But the KGB was funding and fueling those networks and those protests in a big way. And so for 50, 60 years, they have basically been trying to get the anti-left, anti-war left together with the anti-war right, the libertarians, and you know, have this numbaya where they take over American government and we don't go to war anymore. Well, newsflash, you know, it's kind of in the American DNA to do war stuff. And we also have a huge amount of you know, industrial base that's predicated on doing war stuff. It's not gonna just go away because you manage to get Thomas Massey to be friends with Rokana. That is not a hypothesis. So I think that there's a lot of wishful thinking in the idea that you can blow up the MAGA coalition and like replace it with something cool and progressive. I don't see that really working, but that doesn't mean they're not gonna try. And that's kind of been my point all along here with this, is that just because it's stupid doesn't mean that's not what they're trying to do, and that there could be a lot of damage and weird side effects that come with the attempt. My thing to Democrats is you really need to just understand that that's what's being tried here. What people really want right now is some kind of a indication that there's a plan to avoid authoritarian rule and constitutional collapse. If you can make a convincing argument that Democrats can deliver that, people will vote for them in droves. You will easily have 60, 70% of the population that is happy to have somebody carry that message and to actually deliver on that promise.

SPEAKER_03 41:03

What are you looking forward to?

SPEAKER_02 41:05

There is uh, you know, a reason to believe that people, you know, are gonna figure this out, that like, you know, there's a way to move past this. You know, I think that that's likely to happen in some ways. I mean, not to say it's the likeliest scenario, because I think, you know, other things are likely too, but uh, I think it's not less likely that we figure this out uh than uh than other outcomes. Um so I I'm optimistic that you know we can do that. Um, you know, personally, I've been kind of just trying to maximize my optionality by like, you know, spending time in the US, spending time in Europe, building networks of contacts all over the world. It's easy to get hung up on the idea that you have to make big grand gestures and we all have to coordinate together, or the planet's gonna cook off with climate change or whatever, and we've got to, you know, really solve this once and for all, and yada yada. But that gets you into this kind of feeling that like if we don't succeed at that, we're screwed. And it's kind of like, well, the only way that we can really succeed at any of this is to be decent to each other on a day-to-day basis. I think of Albert Camus and the plague. And sure, it would be great to wave a wand and like make the plague go away overnight. You know, in the meantime, why don't you just try not sucking, ease people's pain, and to be an asset to your community, work with others, you know, each day that you put in the bank, have it mean something. Everybody tries to do that at scale. I feel like things might work out.

SPEAKER_03 42:31

A sincere thank you to Dave Troy for sitting in with us this week on the Autocratic Despair Podcast. You can find more information on Dave's website, America2.new. And check out his podcast, Dave Troy Presents, which just started its fourth season. 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 to find it, available wherever you get your podcast.