SPEAKER_01 0:00

They were gonna cook barbecue against each other, or they were gonna eat barbecue against each other.

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Paxton has challenged Talerico to a barbecue enjoying contest. Which is really wonderful, like as a concept.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

How does one win a barbecue enjoying contest?

SPEAKER_00 0:20

You gotta like measure the drippings on their bibs, I guess. The better the mm-hmm. How wet their shirts get. I don't know. How sweaty they become from eating so much beef. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

This is Autocratic Despair, the podcast. I'm Nick Mortensen, a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Each week on the Autocratic Despair Podcast, I stare into the abyss with my friend, Dr. Craig Johnson, PhD in global fascism, lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of 2025's most important book, How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism. Dr. Craig, on a scale of 1 to 10, where is your autocratic despair this week?

SPEAKER_00 1:11

I think I'm sticking with a four. The World Cup makes me feel better about the planet in general. But the national county fair, or whatever the fuck they're calling it, that one's sort of tough to stomach. I am from actual down home places. I am from the quote heartland. That's where I'm actually from. I have been to many county fairs and had a good time. You know, funnel cake is great. Your local ACDC cover band, fine. I don't understand. I don't understand what we're doing here. And also the response to it's getting to me. Anyway, point is feeling good about the international community coming together, World Cup, feeling bad about this national embarrassment thing. So I'm sticking with a four. Stuck with a four. What about yourself?

SPEAKER_01 2:03

I think I'm bumping it up to seven this week. Oh, whoa. On June 12th, Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire. His company SpaceX went public. Multiple reputable outlets called him the first trillionaire and humanist. Yes. I don't understand what a trillion dollars is. So I want to try to help the audience if they're having the same problem. Make some sense of it. For me, trillion, billion, bajillion, they seem like they're just all the same word with a different cap. I only have like a meager concept of what a trillion is based around the idea that it's a thousand billion. Those are monkey numbers to me. So here's a way inside those numbers that I found useful. Alon Musk has 14 children, 14. Suppose he decided to give each of those 14 kids a million dollars every single day. A million dollars a day, 14 kids, that's 14 million dollars a day out the door. How long do you think it would take him to run out of money? With a trillion dollars? Mm-hmm. With a thousand years? Well, it's almost 200 years. Okay. Still fucking long. It's a long time. It's crazy. If he started doing it in 1830, before the light bulb, he'd be just finishing that project up right now. He wouldn't be alive. It's just such a weird thing. $14 million a day, never stopping. And in 196 years, he'd run out. That's not wealth. That's not rich. That's a private individual holding a quantity of money that doesn't fit inside of a human lifetime, several human lifetimes. Here's the thing that makes my number a seven, instead of this just being an obscene headline. The same week that he crossed the trillion dollar line, the same week, Elon Musk had his hand in a pogrom. I don't think I quite understand the word as well as most people. I just sort of context clue it. What actually is a pogrom?

SPEAKER_00 3:53

Pogrom, pogrom. I don't speak a Slavic language, so I'm not entirely certain on the pronunciation. It is a word that comes to us in English from Eastern European cultures. Specifically, it comes from the practice of Christian communities coming together in order to attack Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, in what historians call the early modern period, which mostly is from the 1500s to about 1800, and then on into the 1800s, basically. You could call the Holocaust the last programme. It is the full manifestation of what that is. In the United States, the equivalent would be a lynching, except rather than it attacking a specific individual, it attacks a community entirely, community as a whole. Community as in a single race. The ones last week were about immigrants in general. There were Ugandans caught in this violence. There were Romanians, as in Romani. I think there were also some people from South Asia. We're talking about the north of England at Belfast, right?

SPEAKER_02 4:56

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:57

There was a stabbing by an immigrant there, and then anti-immigrant mobs spent a couple of nights setting fire to homes and cars, hunting down anyone they thought was an immigrant, and then literally burning immigrant families out of their house. Yes, making people homeless intentionally. From his phone, in Ocean Away, a man with no obvious connection to the events in Belfast made it his business to reshare the agitators repeatedly on his platform, the former Twitter X. He told people to protest repeatedly and loudly. He just poured Accelerant onto this fire. Researchers found that the posts about Belfast pulled in more than 150 million views, and Musk by himself accounted for 55% of them, more than half. What a sad, awful man. A member of the Northern Ireland Assembly called it a race-based pogrom. The first minister said of the Elon Musk of the world, they are sitting right comfy in their homes orchestrating hate. Musk's response was to blame social media. Hell of a thing to say when you own social media. Yeah. He's also personally the single loudest voice on social media. So that's a seven. Not because he got richer, but because he has placed himself beyond the law at this point. Yeah. I don't think he's gone full mask off yet. I think there are still people that don't think that he's a white supremacist. Somehow.

SPEAKER_00 6:20

Somehow there are still people who believe that he's just this weird lost little boy who happens to be the richest human being to have ever lived and also 55.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

He's got this megaphone now that he'll pointed a foreign country to help light a mob. And there's no one, anyone, anywhere with the power to tell him no. That used to be the sort of thing we had our government working on.

SPEAKER_02 6:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:41

We had whole systems to check it, but nobody's enforcing the system on this. There's no people that are going to get elected to take Elon Musk on. Left-wing populists are kind of mentioning that they're against billionaires in general, but none of them seem to have pinpointed Elon Musk, who is the top dog billionaire.

SPEAKER_00 6:59

The other aspect of this is that some of this violence was happening in the north of England or like in the southern parts of Scotland, but this is a lot of it's happening in Belfast, which is the biggest city and capital of Northern Ireland, which is still a part of the United Kingdom as opposed to the Republic of Ireland. This is all happening alongside Irish nationalism and Irish anti-immigrant stuff, and Northern Ireland still being part of the UK, which is anti-immigrant, and the Republic of Ireland being in the European Union, which is at least kind of vaguely pro-immigrant, or at least is more so than the United Kingdom, is it's a complicated, weird mess. These are Irish nationalists in the north of Ireland, so they're not nationalist enough to want to be in Ireland, but they say that they're nationalistic in some capacity. But for the UK, which is a multicultural community, but they just don't want certain cultures in there. It just exposes so transparently the nonsense and evil of all of this. Because it's like, well, these people, they don't actually they're like, okay, well, yeah, we want Ireland for the Irish. They explicitly don't. They want the English and Scottish in there, just not other people who used to be part of the British Empire. It's ridiculous.

SPEAKER_01 8:11

This is a dangerous amount of power, and the only thing that can stop him is probably his death, or a really insightful trip on the ketamine he microdoses. That's always the weirdest thing. These evil Silicon Valley people, they do psychedelics. They should have at some point had an epiphany about how the world should be and what they can do to get it there. And Elon Musk, taker of many hallucinogenic trips, has come up with put a bunch of my genes into the world through artificial insemination and then act as a chaos agent.

SPEAKER_00 8:44

It's amazing. Do you ever watch anime? Sometimes. Have you seen Neon Genesis Evangelion? No, but I'm familiar with what it is. Elon Musk likes and deeply identifies with the man who is clearly the villain of this television program, Ikarigendo, who is like an evil mastermind constantly endangering the life of his son and Ward and all of humanity in the name of building giant fighting robots to fight something that's trying to end humanity, but also probably causing the end of humanity. Also, it's just amazing. They watch, they read a bunch of villains, and they're like, Yeah, okay, cool, awesome, sweet. Yeah, I'll be the bad guy. Absolutely. That's the one that I like. The one who will stop at nothing to achieve his goals. This is not a positive character. This is a bad guy. It's a weird character to identify. It is.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

And then to say it in public. Yeah, to be open about this. Alan's such a weird guy. It's time for Tal Rico talk. Lock in cautiously this week. Last week we were reminded in rather plain English that James Tal Rico, whatever he may be to us, is still a politician trying to win an election. The situation reporters, this the vibes are clinically a mess. Last week, when Tal Rico flinched, we covered it. Tallywacker got asked about trans kids on a podcast, and instead of swinging and hitting, he conceded. Said that he opposes gender reassignment surgeries for money. Yes. No fight, no context. It broke our format in half. Still a gaping wound. We're not delusion maxing today. We're delusion budgeting. We're checking the tank. Yeah. This week's news is about that concession, what it actually bought him. Spoiler, it bought him nothing. Not one thing. I do have one argument that might get you back on the Tal Rico side, Craig. I respect your decision to have jumped off this train, but I think that you'll find this argument compelling. Keep an open mind here. Okay. You ready for it? Yes, please.

SPEAKER_02 10:48

Come on. Come on. Come on.

SPEAKER_01 11:02

You got to.

SPEAKER_02 11:06

Pretty please.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

It's not just please, Craig. I can give you a bag in hands like my kids do to me when they really want something.

SPEAKER_02 11:12

Pretty please.

SPEAKER_00 11:17

Well, there wasn't any sugar in the top, so sorry.

SPEAKER_01 11:20

Damn it.

SPEAKER_00 11:24

When it comes to politics, I am an ideologue and a realist on both. I think that stopping fascism is important. And I acknowledge that we're probably going to have to do things that we disagree with in order to do that. And we're probably going to have to work with people that we disagree with very much in order to do that. I mean, that's what it took last time. In the 20s, 30s, and 40s, we had communists, capitalists, and oldie time monarchists working together to stop fascism. And it's probably going to take something like that. The communists and the monarchists, they hated each other. They wanted to kill each other, and sometimes they did. That was not a natural coalition, but everybody hates the Nazis, or at least one hopes. All evidence currently is pointing to the contrary, right? But the idea is that we can all get together and stop these people. So we're probably going to have to work with people who believe things that we don't. That's probably true. At the same time, I never will and never would advocate for people to vote for a candidate or a politician who doesn't not just respect but value and protect their personhood and their humanity. I don't think that that's a compromise that you should be willing to make, and I don't think it's one that any of us should be willing to make. And that's basically where I land on Talerico. We don't see eye to eye on everything, and I know that we never will, but there is a baseline requirement for me, and it is not just accepting but protecting the humanity of everybody who lives on the earth, not just in the United States, because I am a rootless cosmopolitan citizen of nowhere, I confess. I am a West Coast elite. I do not work in, but I do work at an institution that owns an actual ivory tower. A tower to store their ivory, or is the tower made of ivory? Uh the tower is both originally. So this is um, I, for those of those listeners who are unfamiliar, I work at the University of California Berkeley. I'm teaching classes in the history department. The building I'm talking about is the called the Campanili, which is a fancy Latin Italian word for bell tower. That's what it means. Most UCs, most University of California campuses have one. The UC Berkeley Campanili currently doesn't have any of this stuff, but up until very recently, it contained a large amount of bones. It had a large amount of bones, not ivory per se, so not animal bones or ivory, but human bones. It contained a very large amount of the bones of indigenous people, specifically from California, that were the quote-unquote property of the anthropology department of Berkeley, which more or less invented the discipline of anthropology. So, yes, it is both an ivory tower and an ivory tower. I'm amazed. Are the bo the bones are still there? No, the bones have been the bones have been repatriated and I believe buried and consecrated in keeping with the practices of the peoples from whom they were taken. That's good.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

They're moving in the right direction.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

So it's certainly better than them still being there. Yes. True.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

To catch people up with what happened with Tal Rico last week, Ken Paxton's impeachment lawyer, Dan Codgel's podcast, Tal Rico was asked about the various attacks. Kodgel mentioned that one of the attacks was he's pro-surgery for minors. This softball is a chance for Tal Rico to plant a flag. And he said, quote, I oppose gender reassignment surgeries for minors. That's it. No butt, no explanation. I watched the video. There was a quick cut after he said, I oppose gender reassignment surgery for minors. And there was no other cut in the video. They talked for 15 minutes. Whatever he said after that got cut off. Let me walk you through why it stung. This is a man who stood on the Texas House floor and called trans kids perfect, beautiful, sacred, who voted against a ban on those surgeries in Texas, and he called the care life saving. Dr. Craig is off the train. I'm holding on with a looser grip. If you listen to last week's episode, Dr. Craig does make a very compelling point. I've listened to that twice now, and I actually really respect you for having it, and it was a fantastic clarifier for me. I looked at that concession that Talarika was making as like a well, it's not ideal, but he's trying to throw these guys a bone so they can rationalize voting for a Democrat. I think you're a little bit closer to what should be the truth on this issue. To take this stance, it really is putting trans minors in danger. It puts all trans people in danger.

SPEAKER_00 16:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:12

And I hadn't thought of it like that.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

I think that, like we've been saying, it is true that in order to be fascism and somebody like Ken Paxton is as close as you can get to saying I'm a fascist on national TV in the United States right now. Pretty darn close.

SPEAKER_01 16:30

You made a point about Ken Paxton on your your other show, 15 minutes of fascism, a couple weeks back. You said that if he won, that he would be their presidential nominee.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:41

I hadn't thought of that before.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

Absolutely. I think that either Tallerico or Paxton are gonna be real contenders for the nominees of their party if they win. Paxton is a longtime Trump ally. He's worked with Trump in terms of his attempts to take over the party, his attempts to take over the legal system. On January 6th, he was helping out. Paxton is the real deal. He wants to be a successor to Donald Trump. Being the U.S. senator from Texas, he would be a potential contender for that. Being the vice president, J.D. Vance is the frontrunner, Republican nominee in 2028, but J.D. Vance does not have the juice. J.D. Vance is not charismatic and exciting. Ken Paxton is beloved by the Republican base. What Tallerico is trying to do is to become beloved by other people in the United States, the Democratic base, and also the elusive quote-unquote centrist, which is what he's trying to do with this pivot or concession on trans rights. Again, uh it is true that we will need to work with people that we disagree with very much in order to be able to beat fascism. But this is the thing that is making me no longer excited about Taller Rico. If you are in Texas, you gotta make a tough choice. I don't live in Texas, I don't have to make that choice. When a politician says something like what Tallerico said, that he opposes gender-affirming surgery for minors, what he is saying, the subtext of his words are I am okay with a certain number of trans kids committing suicide. That is what he has said to you. I'm okay if a certain number of trans kids kill themselves. I do not support a politician that that says something like that. I might strategically concede that they are the lesser of two. But like if somebody gets on TV and says, Yeah, I'm okay if certain number of trans kids kill themselves because they can't access the care that they need in order to live. No. No.

SPEAKER_01 18:44

When a politician makes a concession like that, gives up crown, takes the hit, disappoints his own people. The theory is that he buys something for Yeah, it is. He neutralizes an attack, he peels off a few moderates, he gets a quieter news cycle. That's kind of the deal. That's why consultants tell you to do it. Last week, Tallarinko got none of that. No. So Republicans didn't say, oh, good, he's reasonable now. They got louder. Yeah. Paxton's response to the concession was to call him, quote, the most radical Democrat ever to run statewide in Texas history, masquerading as a moderate. Other news outlets were calling him a flip-flopper. The right didn't treat the concession as a moderation, they treat it as a confession. The RNC research and the conservative press ran it as Tal Rico, who loves trans children, is now lying about it because he knows his real views are unpopular. And that's kind of what we think, too. The tallywacker has built quite a little box for himself. To the people who loved his old position, he's a sellout. He lost Dr. Craig, one of the most influential academics in America that also has a podcast with the guy from Green Bay. Yeah. To the people who loved his old position, he's a sellout. To the people he's trying to appease, he's a liar, and proof that the old position that he had was the real one. All Tyree could do was give up ground. Yeah. And they used the surrender as fresh ammunition. He took the wound and he didn't get a bandage. And here's what makes it worse the closer that you look. He didn't bother to explain himself. It was one sentence. I oppose gender reassignment surgeries for minors. The host didn't ask a follow-up. He didn't offer one. As I said before, it was a quick cut right after this, and they moved on to something else in the conversation. We don't know if he thinks it should be law. We don't know if he thinks it's a state thing or a federal thing. We don't know if Tal Rico thinks it's a personal view that he'd never want to legislate the way Joe Biden was personally against abortion but campaigned against the bans. He just left it bare, which means he absorbed the full cost of the flip-flop, the betrayal, the liar headlines. And he never got the cover of an actual coherent position. He paid for the stake and walked out with a napkin. Yeah. That's the opposite of threading a needle. That's getting stuck with the needle. And to zoom out, because this is the part that turns it from a talerico problem into an autocratic despair problem. He's not really an outlier when it comes to saying this kind of stuff about trans children. He's a data point. There's a deliberate coordinated machine running this play on every vulnerable Democrat at once. Fox is going down a list, asking each one whether they support gender surgery for minors and reporting the silence as cowardice. The Media Matters organization counted it, 93 separate Fox segments attacking Tal Rico on this topic over the course of three months. And it's working race by race. It didn't work in South Carolina, where Congresswoman Nancy Mays was running the exact same trap on her opponent, Annie Andrews, who also came out and said she doesn't support gender-affirming care for minors. This isn't one man losing his nerve, it's a harbinger. It's a machine getting an entire political party ready to preemptively hand over the most vulnerable kids in the country, one candidate at a time, one concession at a time. And none of them are getting anything for it either. And that's the despair part. Not that the tally wacker was. Weak, he was, but that the weakness is systemic and it's being engineered on purpose and it's being used against them. Last week we split, I respect it. I'm not there yet myself. This week's news cuts both ways, which is why I want to talk it through instead of pretending it's simple. On one hand, it vindicates you you're right in this. The concession didn't even work. That's what you said last week. You also said that these are the same kind of consultant class who lost with Hillary Clinton, who lost with Molly Harris. And here it is failing in real time. He sold out the kids and didn't even get a quiet toothday out of it. On the other hand, it complicates me because now I can see he's just a man standing in front of a 93-segment nine-figure machine that is designed to make him do exactly this. It's flapping shut on his whole party at the same time. They're setting him up for this. Does watching the concession fail make it more forgivable? Because he he's sort of trapped and the trap is the villain, or does it make it less forgivable? Because he sold him out for nothing and I panicked and got played is somehow worse than I believe it. That's a very good question.

SPEAKER_00 23:08

I think that the fact that I could see the trap coming, you could see the trap coming, that basically any observer who was paying attention to this could see the trap coming, that Media Matters saw the trap coming, and that the guy nevertheless stepped right on the trap and got snapped up in it. It's sort of like, okay, like what are we doing here? Who are you paying these people? What are you paying them for? What are they doing for you? What are you getting out of this? What did you think was going to happen?

SPEAKER_01 23:45

Maybe he thought they were due. They didn't give Hillary Clinton the best advice. They didn't give Kamala Harris the best advice. What are the odds of it happening a third time in a row, right?

SPEAKER_00 23:56

There's a degree of personal sympathy. This is a guy who's trying to do good. He's trapped in an extremely difficult situation that is new to him. He's been on the Texas State legislature. He's been up on the pulpit, but that is literally preaching to the choir, right? Uh now he's on not just the national but the international stage, getting attention from everybody. Yeah, there might be some personal sympathy there. He is not the primary person I'm thinking about here. I'm primarily thinking about trans children in Texas and the rest of the United States who literally need our support so that they don't die. The fact that a person is, as far as I can tell, a very earnest Christian who already shows that he believes that his Christianity requires him and rewards him for caring about these children and for loving them. The fact that he got on TV and said, Yes, I am okay with a certain number of them killing themselves, is like, yeah, his feelings, his experience is not primarily what I'm thinking about.

SPEAKER_01 25:00

Suppose he had a quiet moment of reflection to himself and and came to the an awareness of what he did, how he sold out his own morals for potential gain. If he admitted that, if he came out in public and said, this is what I did, this is what I thought I was gonna get, I shouldn't have done that. I don't feel that way. I don't want to feel that way. I don't want to run as a candidate that has misgivings on the topic. I want to run as a candidate that follows through with his beliefs. Would you be back on the Tal Rico train?

SPEAKER_00 25:34

I think, yeah. If he if he got on TV or wherever, um, you know, put on a TikTok that was like, hey, I did this because this consultant or this staffer told me to do this. And they said that I would get XYZ if I did. And I believe them, and I feel shame about that. I was wrong to have done so, and I'm no longer working with that person. I would be like, okay, cool, you fucked up. You said I fucked up. It would tell me something very important about him, which you know, we can't be surprised to have, quote, learned because, like, we had to have assumed that this was always the case, that this guy's a politician who's trying to win an election and he's going to do some stuff that you disagree with in order to try to get the election won in Texas. I would be like, okay, cool, you fucked up. You acknowledge that you fucked up, and you went against your morals. You said, hey, I went against my morals and I regret it. That would be something that I would respect. I would still keep him at arm's length because he's clearly revealed to you that he is willing to throw certain people under the bus in order to get ahead. Being able to learn from those mistakes and earnestly feeling shame and regret about it, yeah, that would be that would be very compelling. I'm trying to think about the last time that a politician who wasn't President Josiah Bartlett from the West Wing did something like that, where they like got on TV and were like, I made a Faustian bargain. I messed up and I regret it and I feel shame.

SPEAKER_01 27:01

When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail to you. That's an old saying, and it means that we all view reality through the lens of our experience. Dr. Craig Johnson, a host of this show, has spent years learning about global fascism, authoritarianism. He's lectured about autocracy, and he spends time each week keeping the public up to date on authoritarian regimes abroad and throughout history. Not a great idea for a life path, but his mistake is to our benefit. In this segment, I choose a seemingly innocuous object or topic that to most people's minds is benign and has absolutely nothing to do with autocracy. And Dr. Craig tells us why that's exactly wrong. This is Dr. Craig is fun at parties. This week, multivitamins and wellness.

SPEAKER_00 27:49

Ooh, okay. This is a deep well. This is a big one. As the kids on YouTube would say, this is an iceberg. Wellness and fascism iceberg explained. 10 layers, 50 minutes. That would be the thumbnail here. Fitness, the way that we think about it culturally today, like most stuff, comes from the 1800s. In the 1800s, communities, civilizations, countries like the UK, like the United States, like France, like Germany, were industrializing. People were moving to cities. What they did with their bodies was changing a lot. What they ate changed. The freshness of their food decreased because food needed to be imported, food needed to be canned or preserved in order to be able to be transported at an industrial scale. More people were working in factories, although most people were still working in farms, but more people were working in factories. Fewer people were living and working in rural areas. Cities were unhealthy. If you've ever like seen a period drama like a Sherlock Holmes, the city is a place everybody's coughing and it's gross. That's because every single building had an enormous coal fire happening inside of it all the time. People were sick all the time. And so every once in a while there'll be a character who'll be like, I need to go to the country to convalesce. And literally that was, I need to go to a place where the air is breathable. All of which is to say, about 200 years ago, we spent about a hundred years getting less healthy. Everybody was getting cancer and dying, and this was before we knew what cancer was, really. We knew that cancer existed and we called it cancer, but we had no idea what it was or what caused it. Food was worse, it was less healthy, people's bodies were not moving in the ways that they used to move. People weren't sedentary in the way that they are now. Point is, about 200 years ago, we spent about 100 years getting less healthy. And then in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, there was a pushback against this: a push for fitness and wellness and eating right, scientifically getting all the vitamins and minerals and like nutrition that you needed. This coincides with the rise of chemistry, of chemistry as a modern science, which is in the late 19th century. And so we were like analyzing what stuff was in food and like what people needed and what bodies needed and how they worked and all that stuff. We're learning all of that stuff. At the same time, with the same people in the UK, in Germany, in the United States, in France, we have the rise of modern nationalism. People are defining nations by the bodies of the people in those nations. German bodies aren't just good because they speak German. They're good because they're German bodies. The Nazis believed that there was something inherently German about their body, like they were taller and stronger and blonde and all that sort of stuff. And they thought that that had a lot to do with what people ate. And I'm not just talking about like in the sense that a modern fitness influencer would be like blah blah blah seed oils or whatever the fuck. In England, for example, they said wheat is healthier than barley. That's not really true, but whatever, they said this. And that is why we, the English, are superior to the Scots, because the Scots eat barley and oats, whereas we eat wheat and we are better because we are the English. That's what they believe. This whole connection between what you eat and the body's health all comes from the same time and the same people measuring people's craniums to say that you're smarter or that you're gonna be a criminal, and the same people who said blonde-haired, blue-eyed people are superior. It's all from exactly the same stuff. So there's that. If you want to go more contemporary, I cannot think of an easier path on TikTok to getting fascist influencers in your feed. I cannot think of a faster path than starting with fitness wellness influencers. It's a straight line. First, you're watching some stuff about seed oils, then you're watching some stuff about how you shouldn't trust science, and then you're watching a video about how you should smash your face with a hammer in order to get bigger cheekbones. That is just a direct line. Ugh. It's gross, it's sad, it's weird, and it's awful because I care about my physical health. I want to live for a long and healthy time. When I go on the internet and I'm trying to find a video for a good form for deadlifts, I have to first check and be like, okay, well, is this guy like a Nazi? Or is he just a meathead? Is Joey Swole a Nazi?

SPEAKER_02 32:08

I don't want Joey Swole to be. Don't tell me if he is.

SPEAKER_00 32:11

Inconclusive, is my opinion.

SPEAKER_02 32:13

He's so jacked and he can do a back. It's impressive. That stuff's impressive. And he likes it when you're nice to people at the gym. I mean, telling people to be nice to people at the gym, that's good.

SPEAKER_01 32:24

That marks the end of this week's edition of Dr. Craig's Fun at Parties. Fitness, wellness, fascism. If you didn't see the link before, you definitely do see them now.

SPEAKER_00 32:36

You can't unsee it. I'm glad I ruined something for you.

SPEAKER_01 32:44

A couple weeks ago, we talked about Delaney Hall, the ICE detention center, the concentration camp in Newark, New Jersey, run by a for-profit publicly traded company called the GEO Group. In addition to growing protests outside of the Delaney Hall facility, a significant chunk of the detainees locked inside have been on a hunger and labor strike since May 22nd. We're in the third week. The conditions that are protesting are no air conditioning, showers hot enough to burn people, medical neglect, and moldy worm-infested food. In their own words, the facility, quote, fails to meet the basic conditions necessary to protect our health and our lives. A record 29 people have died in ICE custody in this fiscal year. This is the highest rate in more than two decades. There's a hunger and labor strike inside Delaney Hall, and there's a daily protest going on outside. And the two are coordinated. That's where we left it. What's happened since a lot, and most of it is the state of New Jersey and the protesters discovering in real time that there are almost no good options. On June 2nd, New Jersey's Attorney General Jennifer Davenport, on behalf of the governor, Mikey Sherrill, filed suit against GEO Group, asking a court to force the company to let state health inspectors inside. They wanted an expedited injunction, they wanted it to move fast. Newark's mayor Ross Baraka is going further. He's filing to shut the facility down altogether. Baraka put it about as cleanly as anyone. He said, quote, if GEO and ICE have nothing to hide, and the conditions are safe and sanitary, as they keep claiming, there is no legitimate reason health inspectors are being blocked from walking through the entire building. He's not wrong. Congress made a whole thing about this. The funding for these detention facilities, concentration camps, was supposed to come with the right for elected officials to inspect them unannounced, top to bottom, anytime they want to. That was the agreement that was codified. And yet the DHS's response was to call this lawsuit frivolous and insist that Delaney Hall complies with every applicable law, which is an easy thing to say about a building that you won't let anyone walk through. The strike has shrunk and it's grown. Many of the detainees that were striking has been transferred out of Delaney Hall in retaliation for strike. This week, dozens more women detained at Delaney Hall joined the hunger and labor strike. One of their specific demands tells you something about what's happening in there. They want the facility to fire a female guard who's been accused of sexually assaulting at least 10 immigrant women. They're not asking for her arrest, they're asking for her firing. That's what's happening inside of Delaney Hall. Outside, the protesters are facing a crackdown. The Proud Boys have shown up. They're there to protest against the protesters. There's a Fox News article on it, and it's shameful. They are framing it like the Proud Boys are there to heroically even the numbers with the out-of-state professional communist protesters from the far left now that they've joined the protest. Last week, DHS disputed the fact that there was a strike. This week, ICE put out a flat statement. There is no hunger strike. There's never been a hunger strike, and any officials saying otherwise is being reckless. The DHS handed Fox News commissary data showing the snack and food sales at the facilities actually tripled during the strike. They're buying more food than ever from the vending machine, so they can't be starving. It sounds like a gotcha. And if you think about it for one second, the hunger strike is hundreds of people refusing the food that they're served in this case. They're trying to make a point, not die of starvation. It doesn't mean that every single person in the building, including the ones not striking, stopped buying snacks from the commissary. The commissary's sales number could be evidence that the strike isn't happening. Or it could be evidence the maggots in the food are happening. You know the thing that they mentioned when they announced the hunger strike? The thing that precipitated it? When your option is food with maggots, a hunger strike isn't too hard. Probably some hunger strikers out there eating a la carte from the commissary. The commissary, if you don't know what that is, it's where you get your non-perishable goods and snacks when you're in jail. When I was in jail, I really did enjoy a hostess blueberry pie, even though it was 350 in 2007, which would be 550 now. After a long day in jail, a treat like that really does kind of hit the spot.

SPEAKER_00 37:10

I don't think that many listeners might have have known that that you spent some time in jail.

SPEAKER_01 37:17

Yes. In uh 2006, I defenestrated a man. I got 30 days in jail. First story window, second story window. I barely defenestrated this guy. I just put his shoulder through a window and it cracked and he got a little cut. Okay. Okay. Technically, I did throw a man through a window, which is what defenestration is, but it's barely. And I barely got much jail. I got 30 days. And I got a work release schedule. And after like day six, I got an offer to finish my sentence on house arrest, and I took that. So barely in jail. Enough jail to know I didn't like it. Six days is enough or would be enough for me, I think. Well, I mean, what was it like? It was a huge relief to be serving a sentence because there is a prolonged period of uncertainty as I went through the legal process. It's an absolute mindfuck. I mean, it was a relief, but it was embarrassing. I consider myself something of an honorable guy. I've made some mistakes, most of them in the service of avoiding breaking up with women. And this is about the time that I was making those mistakes. I just felt like such a loser during the trial part. I didn't think I deserved to be with the woman that I was with, and she didn't deserve to be with someone that was such a fuck up. I spent months wallowing in that misery, and I was really difficult to be around. The process really was a mind fuck. When it ended, was when I started serving my sentences. I was pretty great. I didn't spend long in jail, but I was there long enough to lose my dignity. With work release, you're allowed to leave for eight hours a day and then come back to the jail. Uh, when you get work release, you get a couple minutes to change your clothes to leave for the day in private. But when you come back, uh you got to get your jail duds back on. We had coveralls like the Fawns used to wear on Happy Days when they visited him at work. Come back to jail, you got to change back into your coveralls. The first full day I was there, I learned this. You get a garment bag for your clothes. The first morning I go into the changing room and put my coveralls in a garment bag. And I put my street clothes on for the day. That was kind of cool, if I'm honest. It seemed like I was going on a mission. Second I exited the door, I started to look around to clock if there were cameras nearby. Put my hood up like that dude from Mr. Robot. It was a cool way to go to your job. That evening, when I got back, I went into a room where I stripped out of my coveralls and put those in a bag. But before you get to put your jail duds back on, they got to search you naked. There's a guy that comes into the changing room for you with a flashlight, and he shines it right at your crotch and he says, Lift your nuts. And the first time I was doing this, it happened, and the guard shining the light at my crotch level. I guess he had a certain standard for how high you need to lift your nuts. However high I put them up, he just says higher. And that is the first time I ever got searched in this manner. I'm not trying to make this guy's job any harder. So I lift my nuts up as high as I can. I thought I did before, but this was even hard. I did it well enough, I guess. So the next thing the guy did was turn around and ask me to spread them. So I do that. And you know what the guard says? Wider. And I'm just like, oh, I'm sorry. So I spread them wider. No contraband, so I head back to my block. Now the second night I'm there changing in front of the guard, I strip down to put my street clothes in the garment bay, and the guard once again starts shining a flashlight at my bits and says, Lift up your nuts. And Craig, I'm nothing if not fast learn, okay? So I know exactly how far I need to lift my nuts to pass mustard. So I yanked them up as high as they can go. It's kind of hurt if I'm honest. And you know what that guard said? Why? Higher. I couldn't go any higher. I just started standing on my tippy toes, and that worked. Then he told me to turn around and once again spread them. And he stoops down this time to really get on my level. Oh. And you know what he said to me, Craig? Why? Wider. I mean, that's what jail is like. Jail is a constant reminder that you fucked up. Bad enough to be put in a position where you're having another person dictate when you spread yourself for them and how wide. Those people are always gonna tell you to lift your nuts higher and to spread your ass wider because it's jail. Your dignity means nothing to them. The commissary is nothing but evidence that the GEO group sells snacks at a markup to people whose meals came with worms in them. They found a way to make the denial of good food a sales pitch for their commissary at the same time. And this brings us back to an argument that we made last week. We said that the detainees do the cooking, the cleaning, the maintenance for as little as a dollar a day at the Delaney Hall detention center. And this is slavery because the 13th Amendment abolished slavery with exactly one exception as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. Duly convicted. These people haven't been convicted of anything. They're being held. So the exception doesn't apply. This week, a constitutional law scholar, Madiba Denny, writing for balls and strikes, laid out the same argument in detail with the case law attached. This is what she called it a 13th Amendment crisis. And it turns out the courts have been fighting this for years with the GEO group. Last time we talked about this, I told you that nationally, nearly three-quarters of ICE detainees have no criminal conviction. At Delaney Hall in New Jersey, specifically, the actual building we're talking about, only 12% of the people ever held there have been convicted of anything. 12%. Which means that 88% of the people the GEO group is making cook and clean for a dollar a day haven't been convicted of any crime that would make this sort of labor legal. 88%. This is standard operating procedure according to the GEO groups document. Go back to 2017, a GEO group facility in Tacoma, Washington. Detainees alongside the state of Washington sued over the dollar-a-day labor. A jury found for the plaintiffs. They awarded the detainees $17.3 million in back pay, and the state got another $5.9 million for unjust enrichment. The GEO group appealed and lost. 2025, they asked the entire Ninth Circuit to rehear it and they lost again. The full court refused. Said it plain. There's nothing in federal law or in the GEO group's contract with the government that stops the GEO group from paying minimum wage. They're a private company. They're operating for their shareholders. They have the same rules as anyone else. In that case, as they were being sued, the GEO group, in its own defense, said that paying detainees a dollar a day instead of a real wage saved it from having to hire 85 full time employees. Oh my God, they admit it. The whole point. Point of the program is to avoid paying people to do the same work. That's pretty much what we all thought, but the people are suing them for slavery. And they're like, no, no, we're paying them a dollar a day. And that's actually pretty good for our bottom line. So we don't want to stop doing that. When the GEO group finally lost, when their choice was to pay a fair wage or stop using this labor, they shut the work program down. Think about that. The work was never the point, the free was the point. It's how they keep wages down. Now, here's the part that should genuinely alarm you. It's about an argument that GEO made all the way up to the Supreme Court in a different forced labor case. This one's out of Colorado. At a GEO group facility in Aurora, Colorado, detainees were made to clean for free under the threat of solitary. The GEO group has spent years trying to get it thrown out by citing a doctrine called derivative sovereign immunity. Don't let that term glaze your eyes. Here's all it means. The idea that a private contractor, when it's acting on the government's orders, gets to borrow some of the government's own legal protection. Since the government can't easily be sued for certain things, the GEO group claims that neither can they, because they're doing the government's work. A company that runs detention centers for shareholder profit, arguing in court that it should be shielded like the state itself. The GEO group's position was that the whole point of that immunity is to spare them the trial, that having to answer for it in a courtroom was the actual offense. A company accused of making detainees work for a dollar a day went to the highest court in the country to argue that the real injustice was when they were made to show up at their own trial. The balls on these people. This past February, the Supreme Court said, no, you don't get to skip the trial. The case proceeds. If a private prison company can borrow the government's immunity, you've built a machine where the government can hire contractors specifically to do the things it isn't allowed to do. And nobody can be sued for it. They can outsource the cruelty and outsource the liability at the same time. That's the blueprint for something terrible. Dr. Craig, the GEO group went to the Supreme Court arguing that because it works under a government contract, it should get to borrow the government's own legal immunity. That being made to stand trial for forced labor was itself an injustice to them. Help me understand that move. What does it mean when a private company starts claiming legal protections as the state itself?

SPEAKER_00 46:35

That's the beginning of the end for the United States' legal system, especially considering that the president of the United States, Donald Trump, and his family are a series of shell corporations, basically, they are already trying to fuse that corporate power and those corporate interests with the state and the state's power. And so if this means that a government contractor is, for all legal purposes, also the government, then how do you sue them? How do you sue them for breach of contract? How do you sue them for misconduct? How do you hold them criminally liable for their misconduct or their misdeeds? This is one of those things that makes you wish that you had said that your autocratic despair was at a five instead of a four.

SPEAKER_01 47:19

You study how authoritarian states organize forced labor. When a government uses private contractors to extract labor from people who haven't been convicted or anything, is that new? Or is that a pattern that this fits into?

SPEAKER_00 47:31

Unfortunately, this is a relatively common pattern. If we want to go all the way back to the big example, the Nazis did this a lot. The Holocaust was not only a mass murder program, it was also a forced labor program. So many of the munitions and rockets and canned food and helmets and blah blah blah. A lot of the stuff in the Nazi war machine was made by forced laborers. You've seen Schindler's list. Schindler is a Nazi party member. He gets Jewish slaves from the ghetto, from where they had been concentrated by the Nazis. And in this case, it was a better position to be in the forced labor position as opposed to the murder factory instead. The United States has done this pretty extensively when it comes to chattel slavery of black people in the 19th century. But also after that, as you noted, the 13th Amendment does specifically enable the United States to enslave people if they have been convicted of a crime. This is something that the United States has done when it comes to the Jim Crow South. While many of those people were technically legally convicted of a crime, many of them were not. They were just rounded up and put in a chain gang, not given any due process, not given any legal recourse. Many of them hadn't been educated, so they were illiterate, and so they couldn't even read any documents that were fake and describe the things that they had supposedly done. This is unfortunately a very common pattern when it comes to fascism. The blending of the rules, any legal door or window that they can squeak through in order to get their violence done, they're gonna do it.

SPEAKER_01 49:05

As the strike has gone on, the strikers are being transferred out, they're being beat pepper spray and shipped to other ICE jails. That's not us speculating, that's human rights watch and three separate advocacy groups saying that. The strike numbers are dropping not because the people are giving up on the strike, but because the organizers are being physically removed from the building. This isn't the first time the GEO group's done exactly that. Last year, the National Labor Relations Board, a government agency, filed a former complaint against the GEO group for punishing organizers of a labor and hunger strike this time in California. They were giving the strikers solitary confinement and out-of-state transfers. That complaint went nowhere because when Trump took office in 2025, he fired the existing members of the National Labor Relations Board, and the REMAE Board withdrew the case. So the federal agency that exists to stop this, that had already started to stop this, was dismantled before it could finish the job. That's not an accident of timing, I don't think. That's kind of design. The GEO group is a $3.3 billion company. The Delaney Hall contract alone is worth over $60 million per year. It's part of a 15-year, $1.4 billion deal the GEO group has with our government. Over the last two decades, the GEO group has pulled at least $1.2 billion in taxpayer money across $550 contracts. The detention population that feeds all of it has nearly doubled under Trump. It was $40,000 when he took office. By the end of this January, it was $73,000. The government says that the people starving themselves at Delaney Hall just want better food. And the women on strike say there's a guard who assaulted 10 of them. It's hard to overstate just how messed up the whole private prison system is. They engage in slavery with their detainees. They've shipped many of these detainees from Delaney Hall, New Jersey, to other parts of the country as punishment for having the audacity to demand fewer maggots in the food. When they ship those detainees to other states, they will again be exploited as slaves. Really does fit the criteria for human trafficking. If you're one of those weirdos that needs your human trafficking to have a sexual exploitation of women angle, then good news, we've got that. Ten women have come forward to accuse a Delaney Hall detention center guard of sexual assault. These filings are in ongoing cases and at the appeal level. They demonstrate that it isn't news to the GEO group that they're making their detainees their slaves. The slavery and human trafficking at the Delaney Hall Detention Center is no isolated incident. This is the GEO group's business model. And as far as they're concerned, it's fine. They know exactly what they're doing and they'd like to keep doing it. And in fact, they'd like it written into the law that they can specifically ignore the 13th Amendment. For the GEO group, the very idea of being taken to court over something like this is an insult to their honor. They're counting on the fact that there's a prevailing voting bloc in our country that do not see undocumented immigrants as human beings. 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 fascism, available wherever you get your podcast.