Autocratic Despair
Stare into the abyss of the United States' descent into Authoritarianism with a truly funny comedian from Green Bay, WI and a very serious PHD in Global Fascism Studies from Cal-Berkeley.
Very Funny. Very Serious.
Autocratic Despair
The World Doesn't Stop...But it Should
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DR. Craig returns from the wilderness this week — literally. After a week in the desert painting rocks, running trails, and pointedly not looking at his phone, he comes back with a thesis: the internet is brain poison. Short-form content in particular, he argues, is engineered to dumb you down, and the only real antidote is long-form — books, podcasts, actual journalism, the kind of thing that lets you slow down and think. (He spent part of his detox trying to explain fascism in the voice of Cookie Monster, which he offers as evidence for the prosecution, not the defense.)
The Autocratic Despair Numbers come in low-ish: Craig's at a 3, buoyed by the news that Trump's roughly $1.7 billion slush fund likely won't survive the Republican Congress — a sign, he argues, that the openly fascist wing of the coalition isn't yet powerful enough to scare the rest of the party into funding it. Nick's at a 5, for reasons that are less political than personal: the Mortensen family's fourteen-year-old dog is reaching the end, and the week has been spent living under that shadow. It's a frank, unguarded stretch of tape about grief, the strangeness of the world refusing to stop when your heart is breaking, and how a baseline of authoritarian dread makes ordinary loss harder to carry.
That last thread becomes the episode's connective tissue. Nick walks through the research on cortisol — the stress hormone that sharpens you in the short term and corrodes you over the long haul — and the two of them sit with an uncomfortable question: how much dumber, how much more prone to catastrophizing, are people like them and their listeners for carrying this stress every single day? Craig, a self-described professional catastrophizer and certified news junkie, cops to it directly. The show, he suggests, exists partly to let people stare into the abyss in a bite-sized package, with friends, so they don't have to do it alone all day.
Along the way: a digression on fascist aesthetics — how the movement traded the military parades of the 1920s for the reality-TV and pro-wrestling spectacle of today (see: the Kid Rock and RFK Jr. sauna-and-stationary-bike image that broke everyone's brain) — and a genuinely great historical tangent from Craig on how basketball was once stereotyped as a "Jewish sport" in the early 20th century, complete with the anti-Semitic framing of the pre-shot-clock game as "crafty" and "shifty." There's also a World Cup preview that doubles as a referendum on Craig's two core political positions: he hates fascism, and he hates cars.
The main segment — Delaney Hall. Nick widens the show's ongoing Prairieland coverage to the wave of hunger and labor strikes now happening in ICE facilities across at least four states, anchored by Delaney Hall in Newark. He opens on the number that frames everything: 29 people have died in ICE custody this fiscal year, a record, with the death rate the highest in the 22 years a JAMA study has tracked it — described by the doctors who wrote it as a warning signal from a system under "extraordinary and deliberate strain." From there: how the strike began (families rallying outside, detainees calling out by phone and bullhorn, roughly 300 of 900 announcing a coordinated strike), the conditions driving it (moldy and worm-infested food, no air conditioning, scalding showers, medical neglect), and the government's contradictory posture of insisting no strike exists while transferring out its leaders.
The segment's sharpest argument is about the labor strike. Delaney Hall is run by the GEO Group, a for-profit contractor, and detainees do the cooking, cleaning, and maintenance for as little as a dollar a day. Nick reads the Thirteenth Amendment closely: slavery is abolished "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" — but the overwhelming majority of ICE detainees, by the government's own numbers, have no conviction at all. The constitutional exception doesn't apply to them. The accurate word, he argues, is slavery. He also notes that GEO Group and CoreCivic stock are both trading roughly 45% higher since the 2024 election.
Then the response to all of it: on Memorial Day, Gov. Mikie Sherrill was refused entry, state health inspectors were blocked from most of the building, and as the governor left, federal agents moved on protesters with batons and pepper spray, parked an armored BearCat with a mounted gun trained on the crowd, and tear-gassed Sen. Andy Kim while he was trying to broker peace. When a governor, state inspectors, and a sitting U.S. senator can't get inside, Nick asks, what's being hidden?
The episode's heaviest exchange follows. Asked directly whether the government is trying to kill the people inside, Craig declines the easy answer. This isn't an intentional murder factory yet, he says — it's "indifferent, wanton death," a system that knows it will produce deaths and has decided the cost is acceptable. But he reminds listeners that concentration camps are how mass-murder campaigns begin, and that genocide, as defined in the international treaties the U.S. helped author, does not require mass death — it requires the elimination of a people, by removing them from their homes, taking their children, breaking their ability to form families. Mass death is only its most extreme form. The two close on what a fascist actually is, with Craig's working definition landing on the part that separates fascism from everything else: the belief that violence and cruelty are good — that might makes right, and that hurting people is a feature, not a bug.
Dr. Craig Is Fun at Parties lightens the load: Nick feeds Craig the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile and asks him to connect it to creeping authoritarianism. Craig resists the easy German-immigrant-Oscar-Mayer route and instead lands on fascism's twin obsessions — phallic symbolism and a love of fast, powerful machines — to explain why a car shaped like a hot dog is, on some level, deeply on theme.
Talarico Talk closes things out. The Texas Senate race has launched in full, and the show frames it as a proxy battle between good and evil: James Talarico, the Rizz Minister, against Ken Paxton, freshly out of the GOP runoff and described here in unsparing terms. The opening Republican attack, Nick notes, is that Talarico isn't masculine enough — a fog of "low-T," "Tofu Talarico," and Stephen Miller falsely claiming the cisgender Talarico is "transitioning." But buried in the fog was one falsifiable claim: a Florida congressional candidate sneered that Talarico couldn't name an obscure wide receiver from the 2000s. Nick takes that personally, and mounts a vigorous, statistically detailed defense of Talarico's fantasy-football bona fides — Pierre Garçon and Austin Collie, Josh Gordon, the eternal Allen Hurns / Allen Robinson confusion — on the theory that a man who manages Type 1 diabetes is the most prepared guy at any draft. The segment ends on the genuine signal underneath the bit: Talarico drew 4,000 people to Plano, in Paxton's backyard, running explicitly as a break-with-the-party Democrat with a notably empathetic read on why Texans voted Trump in 2024.
Charlie Kirk is hitting little baby hooks, setting back picks, crashing the boards. I could win with that guy. We'd need a shifty point guard. I could win with Charlie Kirk as the third best guy on a pickup team. I know I could. This is Autocratic Despair, the podcast. I'm Nick Mortensen, a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Each week on the Autocratic Despair Podcast, I stare into the abyss with my friend, Dr. Craig Johnson, PhD in global fascism, lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of 2025's most important book, How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism. Where would you say your autocratic despair level is this week?
SPEAKER_00Regular listeners will know that I am a certified news junkie. I am reading the news, I'm listening to the news basically 24-7. But the last week or so I took a break. I went out into the desert like Christ and was tempted by Satan. In this case, looking at rocks is mostly what I was doing, trying to paint rocks with my friend who is a painter. I was really bad at painting rocks, but I was good at turning off my phone. Being online too much is actually brain poison. It's really terrible for you and your ability to understand the world. I think that this is especially the case for short form stuff, like your TikTok, your YouTube, all that stuff.
SPEAKER_01Did you say your ticks talk? That's exactly what I said.
SPEAKER_00I stand by it.
SPEAKER_01Like I ordered two Whoppers Jr.
SPEAKER_00Exactly, yes.
SPEAKER_01I know it's the right syntax, but like Quit looking at all your ticks tox, kids.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I don't want any of that. Short form ideas are bad. They're bad. They're bad for you, they're bad for the people who make them. They are intentionally dumbed down. We're adults. Read a book, listen to a podcast. You should be watching 60 Minutes if you want to actually understand the fucking world, and they're destroying 60 minutes. So you gotta actually listen to long-form journalistic conversation like this show, or you need to be actually reading articles. Blue Sky is not gonna help you understand the world. It's maybe useful as a conversation, a way to experience a short take that then leads you into something actually useful. It's not gonna help you understand the world. It's just not.
SPEAKER_01If you want to understand the world, then you've got to do homework.
SPEAKER_00Oh, absolutely, 100%.
SPEAKER_01Tough sell, Dr.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, this is my feeling. The internet is brain poison.
SPEAKER_01I have a mental picture of you as the sun goes down talking fascism to a group of cats.
SPEAKER_00Did you take some mescaline while you were out there at least? No, no, no, no. I was I was I was stone cold sober. I was high on life, man. I was up with the sun, I was going on little trail runs, and I brought a kettlebell. I was just living my best life. Honestly, it was really great. Did you have a moment where you're like, I'm not coming back? This is me now. Oh, yes. Very much so. Very much so. I was like, I can't do this anymore. This is awful. But then I was like, well, okay, but like, I actually can't stay up in these mountains forever.
SPEAKER_01Once more into the void. But just once. Just once. This is the last time, Void. Just once more, please, God. I want to go back. Take me back. Where would you say your autocratic despair level is this week?
SPEAKER_00Kinda better, I guess. I think I'm back at a three now that probably Trump's $1.7 billion slush fund for fascists is not gonna make it through the Republican Congress. That's really good news. That's very good news. It means that the fascist part of his coalition is not sufficiently powerful enough to make the other Republicans afraid enough to pass it, which is great. The alternative, of course, is that they were able to do something like that. And that then hundreds of actual fascist paramilitaries had millions of dollars. So if that's not going to happen, that's good. It's good news.
SPEAKER_01The big news of the week was that for the 250th anniversary, Trump is having a United States State Fair, where he had all of the state fair acts that you could imagine. And uh presumably a lot of games where you could get a screen printed mirror of a Deaf Leopard album, because that's what you need to have a fair.
SPEAKER_00That is what you need to have a fair, absolutely. You need an ACDC cover band.
SPEAKER_01Some of the hottest acts in all of the recording industry. Brett Michaels from Poison, Young MC, that guy's still alive. Millie, vanilly without vanilli. He's long dead. C Music Factory, also long dead. The guy that was rapping in one of the uh videos that we all know, Freedom Williams, he's still coming. You want the party started right, don't you? Yeah, can't do it quickly anymore, but he can still start a party right. You gotta manage your expectations. It's been 35 years. Not Kid Rock, which was a surprise. That is a surprise. I don't know what's going on there. I hope they haven't had a falling out.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, a friendship for the ages, you know.
SPEAKER_01Remember when we saw Kid Rock wearing jeans in a sauna with RFK Jr. doing push-ups, riding a stationary bike a couple weeks back?
SPEAKER_00Oh my god. That's one of those images that it's like, is this an SL bit? Fascism historically has thrived on imagery and aesthetics. After World War I, when the first wave of fascism rose, those aesthetics were mostly military aesthetics. You know, people were marching in uniforms and they had military-style parades and they did military drills and stuff, and fascists still do that. But today their aesthetics are more like professional wrestling. They're more like reality TV, the aesthetics that really capture people's minds today. And this isn't new news to anybody, right? You know, we're all very familiar with this from Donald Trump and his own reality TV career, but that image in particular is just like it's arrestingly weird. And that's what it's supposed to be, right? It's supposed to capture your attention.
SPEAKER_01Anytime I see guys lifting weights or playing basketball in jeans, I'm thrown off. Did you fail to bring shorts? Or are you a jeans-based basketball player? Because you got to be really good to play in jeans.
SPEAKER_00When Obama played basketball, he was wearing athletic pants because he knew he was gonna be playing basketball. Because he's good at basketball, because he's tall. I've seen him play.
SPEAKER_01He's not that good at basketball. I mean, he's fine, you know. Um as long as he's the fifth guy on your team. Uh you know, there's some one of the interesting things about uh this whole fascist takeover is that you you sort of become aware of how good certain people are at basketball. Like one time I ran into a on YouTube, I I watched a something Charlie Kirk had said, and then in the next, you know, the next up videos, there was uh Charlie Kirk high school basketball highlights. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I watched it. You know what? I never liked Charlie Kirk, but I did have to give him a little bit of credit for playing a pretty good game of basketball. Hey, he was the third best guy on his basketball team in high school. From the left side of the hoop, he was putting it up with his left hand. That's a basketball player.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01A guy that just shoots hoops once in a while can't shoot with his left hand. That's true. Charlie Kirk is hitting little baby hooks, setting back picks, crashing the boards. I could win with that guy. We'd need a shifty point guard. I could win with Charlie Kirk as the third best guy on a pickup team.
SPEAKER_00I know I could. You remember in 2015, 2016, there were videos going around of Bernie Sanders playing basketball. Yeah. He can land some threes. Maybe not currently, because it's 10 years later. He was an elderly man then and he was doing great. He was putting it up weird style, like a set shot.
SPEAKER_01Back when basketball uniforms had belts, that's how they used to shoot.
SPEAKER_00Yep. This is uh this is an interesting historical tidbit and fact. Are you aware that when Bernie Sanders was a kid, basketball was stereotypically a Jewish sport? Really? This is something that goes back to different racial demographics in urban areas in the United States back in the early 20th century. So, like, you know, in the early 20th century, black people stereotypically, of course, this is stereotypes, this isn't just like truth about people or anything like that, but stereotypically and also like on a statistical level, most black people lived in rural areas. And basketball is, of course, an urban sport. And I just mean that literally, not as a euphemism. I mean like it's a sport for kids who live in small places where they don't have a lot of space.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's where all the basketball courts are.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. There isn't a lot of space, so you can put up a hoop in a street or like in somebody's driveway or in an alley or whatever, right? That's the advantages of basketball. And which population in the United States did overwhelmingly live in cities? Well, it's Jewish people. Additionally, in the early 20th century, there were no rules in basketball about how long you could hold the ball, like how long a possession could be. A lot of the game was about running down the clock, getting ahead, and just like running around the court and getting out of people's way. This was considered to be a stereotypically Jewish way of playing the game. There are sports journalists from back then who would talk about it this way. Those people who are like sly or crafty or shifty or stealthy or something like that, right? And they're talking about anti-Semitic stereotypes, quite literally. That was what basketball was, how people thought about it. It's racist in exactly the same way when people talk about athleticism or jumping or like whatever in current basketball in exactly the same ways that those are stereotypically thought of as being things that black people are disproportionately better at, in exactly that same way. They thought about basketball as being a Jewish sport. This rant is a shout-out to my brother, who is as big of a sports nerd as I am of a history nerd, maybe just a little bit less.
SPEAKER_01I've always thought of the shot clock as inherently anti-Semitic.
SPEAKER_00So for listeners who maybe aren't aware, I have a, you know, I have a PhD in history. Specifically, what my PhD is in is in Latin American history, but I study global fascism. I focused primarily on Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Spain, and Portugal, but all these organizations touch the US, they touch Germany, they touch the UK. And in my spare time, I focus extremely much on US right-wing and stuff. Anyway, what this means is that as the World Cup approaches, I'm emerging from my four-year cicada hibernation as a sports fan. I'm contractually obligated, as somebody who studies Latin America, to follow the World Cup. I am not gonna be an Argentine fan until that's my option, basically. I have picked a different team. I am following Curaçao, the tiny Caribbean island that is just off the coast of Venezuela, the smallest country to qualify. They got 150,000 people. Um, this is like if Bridgeport, Connecticut qualified for the World Cup.
SPEAKER_01It's crazy. Trump will ruin the World Cup somehow, despite the fact that they gave him the Peace Prize, the FIFA Peace Prize, not that long ago. Presumably it was to get on his good side so he wouldn't screw up the World Cup, but he has to, right?
SPEAKER_00Oh my god. Yes, he's already kind of ruined it. We've gotten reports from hotel chains in the US that bookings are way lower than they thought they would be. There are still tickets for some of these matches, which is crazy because usually when a country is hosting the World Cup, it's 10 to 20 million additional human beings show up because it's the single biggest sporting event in the history of the planet. It's the biggest and most important sport that has ever been played on this planet. Way more people watch it than watch anything else. More people play it than play anything else. It is the actually global sport. Trump has already ruined it. Trump is also clearly gonna like be upset when Team USA doesn't win and like Team USA. Uh Team USA wins the Women's World Cup. Male Team USA is usually a sort of B-tier team. So I expect Trump to be like, eh, you know, fuck them when they when they get eliminated. The nature of the United States is already screwing up the World Cup. The World Cup final is at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, a stadium that has absolutely no public transit access. That's just stupid. That's just dumb. I don't know. My politics can be boiled down to two things. Uh I hate fascism and cars. Uh those are the those are my two political positions. Basically, everything else that I believe flows from those things.
SPEAKER_01You hate fascism and you hate cars, not you hate fascism and then cars, right? That's right. Yes, yes, yes. Uh I hate fascism and I also hate cars. Craig wrenching on some old 1960s, talking about how much he hates fascism.
SPEAKER_00That would make me a lot more electable, but no, instead, um, you know how some men will like crane their necks for like a classic car? Uh I do that for 1960s road bikes. I'll be like, oh damn. Whoa, look at that.
SPEAKER_01You're a European, Craig. I was just gonna say it. I know you're raised in the United States, but you're a European at heart. It's true, yes. Yeah, no. I'm just not corn fed enough. I admire you for not affecting an accent. Uh I've seen people, I've seen admirers of European people pull that before. So you've attenuated your back, you're low. Did you pick a number for the for the scale? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a three. I'm at a three. Three out of ten. I'm about five myself this week. It's been a dark couple of days around Casa de Mortensen here in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Something I've known that was gonna happen for a couple months now. Uh our 14-year-old dog has lost his ability to move on his own. This has happened before in the Mortensen house. My wife decided that she was gonna do it differently than we've done before. We've done it by bringing the dog to the vet. There's a concierge service for that around here, where a woman comes to your house and administers the shot and leaves with your deceased dog. She was booked 10 days out. Wow. My wife made that call last Wednesday for something that's happening Friday. So we're just living the last 10 days with our dog, and it is an unbearable amount of stress. I can't look him in the eye. I'm just petting him and hoping that Friday doesn't come, but I know it will. And I know it's time. This one's hitting me harder than any of them have previously. Most everybody's lost a dog.
SPEAKER_00You've had dogs? I had one when I was a kid, and uh we um we gave it away.
SPEAKER_01Wonderful creatures. This dog 14 has been around since we started the family. In fact, my origin story is that in 2011, I was living in downtown Madison as a comedian, and there was a fire, and I lost everything I had, and I slept over at my girlfriend's house that night, and I knocked her up. So we moved back to Green Bay, we lost that pregnancy. We weren't sure we were gonna make it. There's moments in life that a puppy is tailor-made for. So as we were slipping into darkness, my wife asked if getting a puppy would be worth doing. And I was like, Yeah, hell yeah, let's get a puppy. So this dog has seen us through the building of our family, significant chunk of our life. Yeah, I've dealt with this before, twice. My wife had a great dog when we moved in together, and we inherited another dog for the final stretch of his life when her father passed on. Both of those dogs have crossed over. But this one is just hitting me hard. I don't think about it when I'm busy, but any idle moment I go right back to ruminating. I don't know why that is. Is it is it because my kids are finally old enough where they're gonna understand this? Maybe. But I think that I just have this baseline level of despair and anger, and this is on top of that, and it stinks.
SPEAKER_00I want to say again, I'm sorry, I'm sorry about this this thing that's happening to your family, and it makes sense that it would be affecting you particularly hard given what this part of your family means, and like, you know, how it might represent a big part of your family's trajectory and history.
SPEAKER_01It's so fucking weird to sit and pet him for 10 minutes at a time, feel the feelings, and then stand up and go about your day. Gotta go to work, gotta go do this, knowing that he's not gonna be here Friday afternoon. It just seems strange that the world doesn't stop when your heart is breaking. It's how it's always been, but it still seems strange, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_00No, of course. If nothing else, one of the things that we should be pushing for together as a society is a world where people have the time and space and ability to actually deal with this kind of stuff as opposed to having to rush off and get other stuff done.
SPEAKER_01So I'm of the mind that having a baseline level of autocratic despair makes anything that you run into 20 or 30 percent worse. I wonder how much more as a as a people we are, our type, people like us, people that would listen to the show, are more susceptible.
SPEAKER_00I mean, I think it affects me very much so, you know, when I have a professional setback and the world's on fire and democracy is gone. I'm a professional catastrophizer, I'm very familiar with this. When we started recording, I was talking about being out in the desert for a week and like not following the news. I felt smarter. Like I could think about things and consider things and slow down. You know, I was like, I'm gonna read the fucking New Yorker, take time and consider big questions, as opposed to the endless continuous stream of minutiae bad news that I consume. This show, my other show, 15 minutes of fascism. The point of them is that people can experience this stuff in like a bite-sized package with some helpful voices. We stare into the abyss so you don't have to stare into the abyss with some friends. That does mean that we're staring in. I'm a certified news junkie, as I've said before. I know Nick, you are too. It's hurting us in a literal sense. It's painful reading about this all day, uh thinking about it all the time. This is why uh both you and I really appreciate any feedback that we get from listeners, from viewers, from anybody. Uh because in order for it to feel useful, we have to know that it's being used, that people are actually uh consuming it and that it's helping people. And so every time that we see that that's the case, you know, it's really important.
SPEAKER_01In the fiscal year of 2026 so far, that's since October 1st, 2025, 29 people have died in ICE custody. Let that sit for a second because it's a easy number to hear and kind of move on. Twenty-nine people have died. It's not a projection, it's not a worst case, that's not somebody's estimate, that's already recorded. This is the most deaths in more than two decades, and the fiscal year isn't even over. This isn't information that's coming from an activist group. This was in the journal from the American Medical Association, the most boring and credible source that you can possibly imagine. They found that the death rate in immigration detention this year is the highest that it's been in the 22 years that they've been tracking it. Higher than the COVID spike. The doctors that wrote the thing were very diplomatic. They called these deaths a warning signal from a detention system placed under extraordinary and deliberate strain. A warning signal from a detention system placed under extraordinary and deliberate strain. It's gonna continue. It's more than likely gonna get worse. We've been covering Prairie Land here every week. The folks in Texas facing federal terrorism charges for a noise protest outside a detention center on the 4th of July last year. There's sentencing dates coming up. This week I want to widen the lens because the people inside of these places in Delaney Hall and New Jersey have started fighting back. The only way that they can, and they're doing it while dying at a record rate, and nobody seems to be connecting those facts. Here's what's happening. Right now, detainees in ICE facilities in at least four states are on a coordinated hunger and labor strike. The one that you're gonna hear about on the news is Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey. There's other facilities in other places, but there's currently not a lot of protesting going on outside. Delaney Hall has an exterior protest happening in addition to the strike. The Delaney Hall strike started Friday, May 22nd. The way it started tells you something. Families of the detained held a rally outside of the building. The people inside, the detainees locked in, were able to call out by phone and speak to the crowd through a bullhorn. And right there through the walls, roughly 300 detainees announced they were going on strike together. Think about the logistics of organizing a strike from inside the building. You're not allowed to leave. It takes A lot of nerve. 300 people out of a population of around 900. One third of people went on strike. Uh hunger and labor strike. They're refusing to eat. Ice says there's no strike happening, which is fascinating because they spent a week after the strike was announced transferring the leaders of the strike to other facilities. You can't really have ringleaders for a thing that's not occurring. What are the conditions that would make a person who has nothing and no power decide that their only move is refusing food? The people at Delaney Hall are complaining about the food in addition to the circumstances. They're not trying to get a salad bar. They're not saying that there's no vegetarian option. The detainees say the food is moldy and worm infested. They've stated that there's no air conditioning. They're describing showers that run so hot that people have been burned, leaving blisters. And they describe this level of medical neglect. People who are sick are simply not being treated. People who need medication are not getting it. And at the end of May, they sent another letter out. There was a line that struck me. They said about the facility quote, it fails to meet the basic conditions necessary to protect our health and our lives. Twenty-nine people have died in ICE custody this year, and at least one of the facilities fails to meet the basic conditions necessary to protect health and lives of the people being detained. There's a body count. At a certain point, the medical neglect stops being a customer service issue and starts being a means to an end. At Delaney Hall, it's not just a hunger strike. There's also a labor strike. People locked inside are the ones doing the work. The facility is run by a private, for-profit, publicly traded company called the GEO Group. Government contractor, they put in the low bid to have private prisons. They're doing these detention facilities as well. They've got the detainees cooking food, cleaning the building, doing the maintenance for as little as a dollar a day, sometimes nothing. Somebody's gonna say that's just how prisons work. Inmates have jobs, but it's unconstitutional. If you read the Constitution, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, except for one exception. It says slavery is abolished except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. Duly convicted, that's an important aspect. You can make a convicted prisoner work against the will. That's a carve out. But these are immigration detainees. The overwhelming majority of them, by the government's own numbers, nearly three-quarters, have no criminal convictions at all. They haven't been convicted of anything. They're being held. The constitutional exception that would make it okay for them to do forced labor does not apply to them. Let's use the accurate word. A for-profit company decided it was cheaper to hire fewer real employees and shift essential work on to people with no ability to say no. Who are paid functionally nothing. That's not a work problem. That's slavery. And it's performed by people who haven't been convicted. So it's not legal labor that the GEO group would otherwise have to pay for. And they'd probably be paying Americans for the job. If that's going to gin up your outrage, please use it. Paying people would make GEO group less profitable for shareholders. It's a private prisons company. Core Civic is another. Both of their stocks are trading 45% higher since Trump was re-elected in 2024. The response to all this, there's been daily protests. People are out there each day. On Memorial Day last week, the Democratic governor in New Jersey, Mikey Sherrill, went to Delaney Hall and asked to go inside. She was refused. The state's own health inspectors tried to inspect the buildings. They were let into a tiny sliver of it, and they were blocked from the rest. Eventually, Governor Sherrill left, and federal ICE agents went after the protesters almost immediately. Batons, pepper spray balls. They parked an armored vehicle, a bear cat nearby. One of the agents pointed a mounted gun at the crowd. They hit Andy Kim, a sitting United States Senator from New Jersey with tear gas. Well, he was literally trying to negotiate between the agents and the protesters. He was trying to make peace. The governor can't get in, state health inspectors can't get in, a U.S. senator's getting gassed. Let me ask the obvious question: what's going on inside the building that they don't want people tasked with the oversight of these facilities to see? This is where we kind of come back to Prairie Land because what we're watching is a vice. It's closing from both directions. On the outside, peaceful protests are met with tear gas, armored vehicles. The protests are growing daily, but curfews are being implemented, and we're already seeing the response uh be a little bit over the top. You and I both know that as it stands, there's plenty of pretext for taking these protesters off of the street, claiming that they're Antifa, and just eliminating them from the chessboard altogether. As this continues to grow, if it grows any bigger, I think that we'll see that.
SPEAKER_00We have to expect that some of that will happen.
SPEAKER_01Do you think that they're trying to kill them inside?
SPEAKER_00Or do you think that they just don't care about keeping them alive? It's an important question. I don't think that we are at intentional murder factory systems right now. I think that we are at indifferent wanton death. I think that we are at the point where they they know that this system is going to result in death, but that they're not intentionally trying to kill people. I think that we're at the point where they say, okay, well, it's cheaper to do it this way, some people will die. We know that nobody cares about that. Unless we kill too many people, presumably. They've done some calculation. However, it is not hyperbolic to remind people that the beginning of a mass murder campaign is concentration camps, and that is what the United States is doing right now. That is the beginning, concentrating people, pushing them into places where their bodies are controlled and where information about them is controlled. I also have to remind everybody that the definition of genocide in uh international treaties regarding genocide, of which the United States is a signatory and one of the original authors, does not call for mass death as the basis of the definition. It's about the elimination of a people. And that can be by removing them from their homes, preventing them from speaking their language, preventing them from reproducing, taking their children away. Mass death is only the most extreme form of genocide recognized uh by international law.
SPEAKER_01Most people, I think, think of genocide as a mass death.
SPEAKER_00Mass death is only the final option to use the Nazi euphemism for it, right? The quote unquote final solution. Most genocides that have happened are instead these more unfortunately everyday ones, moving people from the places that they're from, taking their families away, taking their ability to form a family away, separating men and women, taking children. This is why, you know, for example, so-called Indian schools are genocidal, because they take children away from their communities, force them to speak different languages, force them to acculturate it to white culture, for example. I think that people who study fascism, people who talk about fascism, I think that we did a disservice by calling previous forms of oppressive right-wing government in the United States fascist. I think that hyperbolically calling W. Bush a fascist was very unhelpful because now it feels like we're crying Wolf. The Wolf is actually here this time. We've invited him back into our home for the second time. We did it two years ago.
SPEAKER_01On the off chance that there's somebody listening to this that's never heard the word fascist before or never had it defined for them before. I think we all know what a fascist is in our hearts. What are the telltale signs of being a fascist?
SPEAKER_00This is a tough one. It's something that academics argue about all the time for the purposes of what we're doing right now. Fascist is a right winger. They're more right wing than conservatives are. They are not okay with the status quo. They want to build a radical new world. They're usually racist, almost all the time, but not every single time. They are always nationalists, and it's just that nations are usually defined by race. Some of them aren't. Some of them are defined by other things, like religion. They're almost always sexist. They are almost always homophobic. They, and this is the big one, the thing that really differentiates fascism from every single other political ideology. Fascists think that violence is good. They like killing and hurting people. They like being in physical danger. They think that it's good for you to be in physical danger. Remember, fascism emerged originally from the trenches of World War I. People thought that they had been, you know, reforged in the crucible of war. That made hard, powerful men who were capable of governing the world in the 20th century in a way that other men had not been. That is what fascism is. They don't play by the rules, they don't believe in the rules. They think that might makes right, period, and that that is good. They don't say that, like, oh no, like this is unfortunate the world that we live in. They say, yeah, being powerful is right. That is how you know that somebody deserves to be in charge, that they are violent, that they hurt, that they kill. This is why fascists like men who are sexually or physically abusive. This is why they like that, because it's a display of cruelty and power and violence. And so wanting the prison system to be cruel or deadly or oppressive, yeah, that's fascism. The fact that they like that, that that's a selling point for them. It's not just that they're saying this happens to be cheaper or this happens to be more efficient. No, no, no, no, no. The cruelty is the point.
SPEAKER_01Keep your eye on Delaney Hall in New Jersey. This might be really the last time that the United States has to do any protesting. We might have passed that time. This might be the time after the last time. I think that the protesters, if it grows bigger, they're gonna get targeted. Probably. Next up on the show, we have an award-winning segment that we call Dr. Craig is Fun at Parties. It's where I take a seemingly benign, innocuous term or thought. I feed it to Dr. Craig, and he tells me how it relates to our descent into authoritarianism. This week I think I have a really good one. The other day I noticed around my town the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile. It's a giant car shaped like a hot dog. Oscar Meyer drives it around the nation promoting their hot dogs. Most of us have seen it. Have you seen it, Dr. Craig? Yes, I have seen it. Yeah. How does this relate to our descent into authoritarianism? Ooh, that's a very good question.
SPEAKER_00Okay. The clearest, easiest connection would be just to be like, okay, well, Oscar Meyer, the human guy, was a German immigrant to Chicago. I lived in Chicago for college, and so that's a local business. He was the sausage king of Chicago at one point. He was the sausage king of Chicago, quite literally, yes. And so, you know, just saying, like, well, he's German and Hitler's German, and there we go, but that's too easy. I don't really think it's that satisfying. Let's try something else. This is a harder one for sure. Let's try this one. The Eskemeyer Wiener Mobile is an enormous, comical, phallic symbol. It is also literally a car. It is a car that is a penis. Fascists are obsessed with both penises and cars. They are extremely phallocentric. They like virile men and powerful men. They're all excited about all these Greek symbols and Greek men and Olympians. There was a chain of tweets from a bunch of fascists very recently, including Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes, saying men are more beautiful than women. This is why women must wear makeup. Now, none of this is disparaging people who are attracted to men. I hope that if any fascist is gay, that they recognize and understand that the fascists are going to turn on them soon. Fascists have this like complicated relationship with male homosexuality. Additionally, fascists love cars. Fascists love fast things, they love power and speed. Fascists have been obsessed with that since the very beginning. Back in the 10s and the 20s, fascists loved cars, they loved airplanes because they were engineering marvels, they were powerful, they loved race cars. Now, the Wiener Mobile is not a race car. It is a weird food truck that happens to be shaped like a hot dog. I think that that's the connection that I can draw right now.
SPEAKER_01I'm feeling a little weird that I'm so delighted by the Oskarmeyer Wiener Mobile. I thought that was coming from a more innocent place.
SPEAKER_00I mean, I think I think that I don't think that we should let them take our our joy away. You know, it's a car that's shaped like a hot dog, and if you like hot dogs, then like, you know, fine.
SPEAKER_01I may have to do some real self-reflection later on tonight. Oh my god. That was Dr. Craig's Fun at Parties, a segment you can only hear on Autocratic Despair the Podcast. To finish off Autocratic Despair, the podcast, this week, we've got Talarico Talk, the load-bearing segment of our show that posits the notion that America has a Taler Rico-shaped whole, whether we know it or not. Absolutely. In the last two weeks, there's been a noticeable uptick in downloads from Austin, Texas. That could be nothing. It could be the ghost of Leslie Cochrane, R.I.P. In the absence of contravening information, I'm choosing to believe that it's the new crop of summer interns at the Tal Rico for Texas Senate campaign headquarters. They're trying to get a feel for what the word on the street is about their candidate. In my imagination, they've taken to calling him the Riz Minister around the office, just as we have. If that's the case, I can speak for Dr. Craig when I say, welcome. Reach out, say hello. Could be a real differentiator for you around the Talarico HQ offices to be the intern who established the line of communications with Apple Podcasts' number one podcast in the competitive autocratic despair/slash comedy category. Maybe your ticket into taking the fall semester off to work on the campaign full time. The purpose of this segment for Dr. Craig and I is we are in a state of general hopelessness about America. Yeah. We don't logically see a better future. So we've decided that James Tal Rico is a representation of a better future for America. It's a weird thing to do. These are strange times. Sometimes a not great coping mechanism is all you have. Yeah. Strap in because the Texas Senate race has officially gone live, and gang, this is no drill. This is the most high stakes 1v1 in the country right now. In the blue corner, the Riz Minister, our guy. Low key the proxy for good in the eternal battle between good and evil. Over in the red corner, Ken Paxton. A man so cooked, so unfathomably indicted that he is functionally the final boss of evil itself. We've got good versus evil, light versus dark. This is the most important fit check in American democracy. In the opening move from the forces of darkness, they're saying our boy isn't masculine enough. The opening attack is that Tau Rico is insufficiently masculine. Obviously, they had a he's a confirmed bachelor plan all put together, but the Riz Minister ruined it by introducing his lady friend a couple weeks ago. So now they're they're kind of hinging on that he's not masculine enough. Which is a weird comment to make about a dude. Mm-hmm. You gotta go where you can, and there's not a lot on Tal Rico. They've done this before. They did this with Tim Waltz, they said he was kind of fruity. They're hitting Tal Rico with he's low T. He's tofu Tal Rico. Trump keeps saying that he believes in cisgenders. That is what they're trying to say. Yeah. That's like a combination between Tal Rico at one point saying that he was cis-gendered and all of the various XY options you can have for a gender. Stephen Miller, the Joseph Goebbels to Trump's Hitler, used Fox News to claim that the tallywacker is the first U.S. Senate candidate to actively be transitioning into a woman. Shith heel's gonna shithel, I guess. Honestly, I'm surprised that nobody's called him a flamer yet, or a pansy. You know, one of those old tiny slurs. They'll get to it, I'm sure. Yeah. Dan Weldon, a Republican congressional candidate from Florida, said something I find personally deeply offensive when he said that the tallywhacker doesn't come off like a guy that would know the names of obscure NFL wide receivers from the 2000s. Jimmy Milktose is in his mid-30s and running for U.S. Senate. You don't think he was the most prepared dude at his fantasy football draft every year in the mid-2000s? He's a diabetic. Diabetics prepare for everything. They plan that they have to. You don't think a 15-year-old James Talarico is putting all kinds of thought into who he's gonna draft for his team, which I assume was named Naja Davenport's Laundry Day Surprise. Shout out to the dump truck. You are still well regarded in the Green Bay, Wisconsin area. If you don't know what that means, don't look it up. You know that 15-year-old Jimmy Meltost was all but certain that Jabbar Gaffney was gonna have his big breakout season in 2005.
SPEAKER_00We all did. Yeah, I mean, you know, he was he was averaging 15 yards per catch, according to the thing that you told me to say just now.
SPEAKER_01You cannot believe for one second that James Tal Rico to this day doesn't wonder what could have been with Josh Gordon. Gordon led the league in receiving in 2013 despite being suspended for the first two games of the season. And then he never played again because he couldn't figure out how to pass a drug test. You don't think that's on James Tal Rico's mind? Mm-hmm. You don't think James Tal Rico has ever pondered the insane drop-off of Jeremy Macklin? It perplexes him to this day, just as it does the rest of us.
SPEAKER_00Oh, absolutely, 100%. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01It seemed like he came back from his ACL injury fine without missing a step, had one good year for the Kansas City Chiefs, and then he's gone. You don't think James Tal Rico intellectually knows that Placigo Burris and Hakeem Nicks were two different people, but still consolidates them into one composite wide receiver? He's a human man like all the rest of us. James Talrico knows ball. Oh my god. Yes. If knowing obscure mid-2000s wide receivers, the height of masculinity, I think we kind of lost the plot. Even so, Paxton's rolling out these nicknames. Low T Tal Rico, James Talafreco. None of those nicknames have anything on the Tallywacker or the Riz Ministry. They tried to do this with Tim Waltz. This is just a way for them to say that Talarico's gay or gay seeming. I guess he's a neat man in his mid to late 30s that's clean-shaven all the time. So somehow he's less masculine.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's schoolyard business. This is all that they have left, you know. Like so much of what the fascists and the general right wing do today boils down to claims about masculinity and claims about being insufficiently masculine. A, as if their brand of masculinity were the only one, and B as if it were healthy. Neither of those is true. I'd still like Tao Rico to go on a cycle.
SPEAKER_01Just a five-week cycle, HGH probably from one of those clinics, be surprisingly ripped. You wouldn't know, and then you just kind of see him wearing a slim t-shirt with a with a cool watch, and you're like, well, that guy's kind of juiced.
SPEAKER_00A gold chain with a cross on it. I'm thinking about Zuckerberg. That's perfect.
SPEAKER_01That's precisely what we're talking about. Oh, down boy, Tal Rico grows his hair a little bit, double XL t-shirt with a Swede necklace.
SPEAKER_00Teaching college, this is the standard male dress code right now.
SPEAKER_01It's a line of attack that's probably gonna work in Texas. Probably. He's still James Tal Rico. Monday night, June 1st, Tal Rico was in Plano, Texas, which is Ken Paxton's hometown. Ty Rico managed to get 4,000 people to show up in Plano, Texas to see him talk on a Monday night. They filled the broom that he was speaking in. There's even an overflow. That's really good. He's sticking to his guns here. He's running explicitly as a break with the party Democrat. He took heat in his own party for calling on Biden over the southern border, and his framing of Trump voters is notably empathetic. He argues that Texans who voted for Trump in 2024 didn't do it for nicknames, which they hated, doubt it. They wanted lower costs, he said. They wanted the economy fixed, the swamp drain, the forever war has entered, and the Epstein files released. And then he said the administration had failed them on all of those counts. The Epstein files line was a real tell about how he's triangulating towards disaffected Trump voters. The Tallywhack is all business, which is something that we love about him. He seems to take all this nastiness in stride. Like some uh fictitious character that's above it all. He very well may be above it all. I would expect the proxy for good in the battle between good and evil to be above a little bit of name calling.
SPEAKER_00He is running a squeaky clean campaign, contrasting himself to Paxton and Trump in that way. I think that that's the right way for him to be. His brand is youth minister. He is also literally a youth minister, and so like that's what you should do. He's fucking Ned Flanders. And you know who secretly ripped? Ned Flanders.
SPEAKER_01Groundskeeper Willie surprisingly ripped. That's true. Also surprisingly ripped. The more you think about it, the more, the more you realize that he probably would be ripped. Yeah, that one kind of tracks. Yeah. There's more information to come about Tal Rico in the coming weeks. Just know for right now that he's standing on business. Stare into the abyss with friends, the Autocratic Despair podcast with Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson. And don't forget Dr. Craig's other podcast, 15 minutes of fashion, available wherever you get your podcast.
