Autocratic Despair: The Podcast
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 Podcast
Been Living Off Wealth
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This week on Autocratic Despair, the comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism, Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig open on a rare thing in 2026: a piece of good news, delivered with a knife in it. The Supreme Court handed down its decision on birthright citizenship, and the ruling went the right way — the Fourteenth Amendment holds, and anyone born in the United States is still a citizen of the United States. But the vote was six to three, and only two of the conservative justices, Chief Justice Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett, joined it. Craig sets his despair number accordingly and lets the arithmetic speak: two people decided the country stays a democracy. That's the margin now.
From there Craig does what the show exists for — he makes the thing legible. He walks through why birthright citizenship exists in the first place: it comes out of the Reconstruction amendments, written specifically so the country could never again say the children of enslaved people weren't citizens because their parents had been property. He tells the story of Wong Kim Ark, the man born to Chinese immigrants in San Francisco in 1873 who was denied re-entry to his own country, took it to the Supreme Court, and won — settling the question for well over a century, until this administration decided to reopen it. And he defines the vocabulary the fight travels under: the slur "anchor baby," and the European import "remigration," a word engineered to let people advocate mass expulsion by ethnicity without ever having to say the ugly words underneath it. Nick and Craig land on the part nobody in power wants to sit with — that undocumented immigrants pay billions into a Social Security system they'll likely never draw from, and that the country's wealth has always leaned on labor that isn't free. Craig gives the academic name for it, unfree labor, and the discomfort of the term is the point.
Then the anchor. Last week, as Nick and Craig were literally recording, the Prairieland sentences came down, and this week they do it properly — a full accounting for anyone who's never heard the case. The recap is built cold: July 4, 2025, a noise demonstration outside an ICE detention center in Alvarado, Texas, where protesters brought fireworks so the people locked inside would know somebody was out there thinking about them. It went sideways; a police lieutenant was shot and survived; one man, former Marine Benjamin Song, was convicted of firing. And then the government did the thing that turns a local crime story into a national emergency: it charged the whole group as terrorists, on the theory that everyone present was part of a "North Texas Antifa cell" — a cell it never actually proved existed. The jury acquitted everyone but Song of attempted murder, then convicted all of them of providing material support to terrorists, the terrorists being themselves.
Nick reads the sentences the way you'd read a receipt, name by name, number by number, so the gap between the punishment and the conduct does the arguing. Benjamin Song, the only person convicted of hurting anyone, got a hundred years when the floor was twenty. Maricela Rueda got seventy. Autumn Hill, Zachary Evetts, Savanna Batten, Meagan Morris, and Elizabeth Soto each got fifty — for standing outside a jail with fireworks. And Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who wasn't even at the protest, got thirty years for moving a box of his wife's zines. Seven more defendants took plea deals and face up to fifteen years each, sentenced alongside Ines Soto; Nick reads their names too — Seth Sikes, Nathan Baumann, Susan Kent, Lynette Sharp, John Thomas among the cooperating pleas, with Joy Gibson and Rebecca Morgan noted as the two who refused to cooperate — because the show reads the names every week, and because rounding sixteen people down to a cleaner number is its own small erasure. Nick won't call them the Prairieland Nine. It was never nine.
The thesis arrives in the judge's own words. Chief Judge Reed O'Connor said from the bench that he was handing down the maximum because the state wants to send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology — and Nick flags the wrinkle that O'Connor wasn't even the trial judge. Mark Pittman presided, then handed five defendants to O'Connor days before sentencing, without explanation, a procedural shuffle Nick expects to surface on appeal. Craig names what the case actually establishes in plain text: oppose the country's detention policy and spread information about it, and you can be charged with terrorism and put away for decades — and that tool won't be holstered when this administration ends. Nick and Craig also sit with the strange quiet around the defendants being trans, dead-named in official documents while the fact went otherwise unmentioned, and turn over why the people who usually seize on that chose not to.
After the weight, the show breathes. Nick turns to the Freedom 250 national fair on the Mall and the low attendance he only half-managed not to gloat about, and uses it to make a sharper point than the schadenfreude allows: this event began in 2016 as America 250, a nonpartisan celebration with Bush and Obama as ceremonial chairs, and got absorbed into a Trump C-corp that functioned mostly as a vehicle to divert already-budgeted money and extort corporate sponsorships. The fair isn't a failure of competence, Nick argues — it's the corruption worn openly, on purpose, as a flex. That sets up a genuinely joyful deep dive into Forgiato Blow, the MAGA rapper born Kurt Jantz, prep-school kid and Auto Trader heir who named himself after luxury car rims, tattooed Richie Rich on his face, drives a Rolls-Royce with "Trump's Nephew" on the hood, and insists the "Blow" in his name stands for "Been Living Off Wealth" — a man who cosplays self-made while advertising the opposite. Craig gently asks whether Nick likes him a little because of a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God recognition, and Nick, son of an owner who came up around wealthier owners' sons, concedes the fraternity while insisting he's better than every one of them. The segment becomes a real meditation, via Craig, on why blatant corruption is itself an intimidation tactic: if they aren't hiding it, it means they aren't worried, and the message is what are you going to do about it. Trump told the country he could buy politicians because he'd bought them, and it worked.
The episode closes on Dr. Craig Is Fun at Parties, where Craig takes on the strange new vocabulary of the internet — unalive, sewer slide, the euphemisms kids use because the platforms won't let them say the real words — and turns a linguistic tic into an argument about who controls the only public squares young people have left, and what it means that those squares are owned by men who showed up for the second inauguration.
It's a comedy podcast that stares directly at fascism and, against all odds, stays fun — the commedia for your particular brand of tragedy. Nick is the audience proxy catching up in real time; Craig is the scholar who connects each week's horror to the long history of how democracies die. Together they make the unbearable survivable, one despair rating at a time.
Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.
Anybody born in the United States is a citizen of the United States. It doesn't matter if your parents were citizens, it doesn't matter how long they've been in the United States. It doesn't matter if they're legal residents of the United States. It doesn't matter if only one of them is a citizen of the U.S. None of that matters. If you were born in the U.S., you are a citizen of the U.S.
SPEAKER_01This 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 one to ten, where would you rate your autocratic despair this week?
SPEAKER_04I would say my autocratic despair is six to three, which is the vote on the Supreme Court today about whether or not the United States is going to stay a democracy. Today, the Supreme Court handed out a decision on birthright citizenship, basically whether or not people born in the U.S. are citizens of the U.S. The decision was 6-3. Six judges said yes, birthright citizenship will stay in the U.S. Three of them said no. The two conservative justices who sided with birthright citizenship were Chief Justice Roberts and M. Come Barrett. So that means that two people decided that the United States was going to stay a democracy. 6'3. I guess that's uh in ratio terms of five. How'd you tell? How would you define birthright citizenship? Birthright citizenship is a law. It's part of the U.S. Constitution, according to the Supreme Court. It's from the 14th Amendment, one of the amendments passed after the U.S. civil law. What it says is that anybody born in the United States is a citizen of the United States. It doesn't matter if their parents were citizens, it doesn't matter how long they've been in the United States, it doesn't matter if they're legal residents of the United States, it doesn't matter if only one of them is a citizen. None of that matters. If you were born in the US, you are a citizen of the United States. That's very different from how a lot of other countries do citizenship. A lot of other countries do citizen shift by blood. That is, if you are born to German parents, no matter where you were born, you are German. Israelis. If you were Jewish, you can go to Israel and be a citizen of Israel, right? The United States does not work. If you were born to U.S. parents outside of the US, it's easy to be. If you're born in the US, you become a citizen of the United States. And the reason that we did that in the 14th Amendment is to prevent people from saying that the children of enslaved people are not citizens because their parents weren't citizens, because they weren't born citizens of born property. That was the original purpose of that. In the late 19th century, there was a challenge actually by a man from East Asia who had immigrated to the United States, or rather, his parents had immigrated to the United States. His name is Wong Kim Park. He was born to Chinese immigrants in San Francisco in 1873. His case made it all the way to the Supreme Court to decide whether or not he was a citizen of the United States. He left the U.S., tried to come back, and was denied reentry, saying, Well, you're not a citizen. And he was like, Well, no, I was born in the US. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court and he won. So it settled case law. It settled case law and it has been for over a hundred years, almost 150 at this point. It went back to the Supreme Court this year and was decided, or the Supreme Court makes their decisions like weeks before they announced them. It's a weird oldie time institution. They announced the decision June 30th, 2026, that they're going to keep the law the way it is. Now, this is a rule against the Trump administration, which has been trying to say there are exceptions to birthright citizenship. If your parents entered the United States without papers, then you aren't a citizen of the U.S. If you're born in the US, precisely what Wong Kim Ark experienced is that his parents entered the United States at a time when you didn't need documentation to enter. You could just come in. He was denied citizenship and then granted it by the Supreme Court. This is the Trump administration literally trying to turn the clock back by 150 years. The Supreme Court said no, but it was only two people, two conservative justices, Amy Barrett and John Roberts, who said that birthright citizenship would stay the same.
SPEAKER_01Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, guys that swore up and down. Settled case law was settled case law. Oh yeah. Decided in this case, I'm gonna make an exception. Absolutely. Thomas is a fixed mark.
SPEAKER_04Thomas, I understand. Thomas is a jackass. He's gonna choose the most evil, crazy thing that he possibly can. Kavanaugh lying on camera. They're all lying on camera saying that they won't renege on established law, but that just ain't true.
SPEAKER_01They're gonna do it. Does anybody have footage of where their hands were when they were making that statement? Did they have their fingers crossed?
SPEAKER_04Maybe behind their back. I mean, who knows what's going on? Those sleeves are huge. Who knows? Who knows what kind of signs they're making.
SPEAKER_01Couple of terms I think that are associated with this. One's sort of an ugly term, anchor baby. I hear that a lot when it comes to this. I think it kind of goes in here. I think that's sort of a slur. Oh, for sure.
SPEAKER_04It's a cruel thing to say about somebody whose parents left their country of origin because of something really bad, and they came to the United States. You're a huddled masses yearning to be free. And here are the Republicans insulting these people, insulting their families, insulting the circumstances that brought them to the United States.
SPEAKER_01A few years ago, there was some probably apocryphal story about this pregnant woman right about to cross the border. She saw like a hole in the fence and she sprinted in. As they caught her, she went into labor, so she had the baby right here. And they were talking about that. I was like, I don't know. That woman sounds like a real go-getter. I think maybe we'd like her to be an American citizen. Definitely gone to some trouble. Yeah. Overcome some adversity. Even if you believe immigration should be hard or something like that.
SPEAKER_04Well, fucking is. It's really difficult. The loopholes and ladders and legal procedures that they demand people follow, it's really difficult and it takes a long time. If you do it without papers, it's also really, really hard and expensive and dangerous. These are people who are pursuing a better life for themselves and their families, not for kicks. They're doing it because it's better to be here than it is to be in their home. I don't know why we're not celebrating that.
SPEAKER_01Remigration. Oh boy. I've been dying to shoehorn that into our podcast for some time. Today's the day, yeah.
SPEAKER_04So remigration is a term that comes actually from Europe. European nationalists have started to talk about this as a way to advocate for people who have migrated to Europe to go back to their countries of origin. In Europe, most of this migration that they're talking about is from the Middle East or from North Africa. Mostly we're talking about countries where the majority of people are Muslim. There are also immigrants from all over the rest of the world in Europe, but that's primarily what they're talking about. Remigration is a dog whistle. It's a way to talk about expelling people of a particular ethnicity without having to use words like ethnic cleansing or genocide. You can say it on TV and you know it just sounds okay. Remigration, immigration, remigration. Oh, okay, right. You know, like that's the same thing. They've done it once before. It should be easy this time. Yes, that's the implication. People migrate, people go places, they should be able to go places. What this means is that it's saying, hey, these people left a difficult circumstance and they risked themselves and they risked money and they risked the lives and mental health and physical health of their children and their families. They took big risks coming to the place that they are in now. Maybe it's Sweden, maybe it's Hungary, maybe it's France. We want them to go back. We want them to take those risks again. We want them to go back to a place that they think is worse. And again, it's like, why aren't you celebrating the fact that it's better to live where you are? Isn't that good? Switzerland, for example, last week had a referendum about capping the population of Switzerland permanently. They were like, we want to limit the population of Switzerland permanently to 10 million people. Now this failed. This didn't happen, but it got on the ballot and it got voted on. Switzerland's got a really weird democracy. They only let women vote in the 80s. Switzerland's weird. But they have a lot of direct democracy stuff. So this was on the ballot and it failed, but like essentially the question here was: do we want to say to people our country is quote full? Bullshit. Bullshit. Absolutely not. People say that about the United States, and then simultaneously like, well, we're too big to have high-speed rail. Fucking come on, man.
SPEAKER_01As often as I've heard it framed, I've never fully understood our desire to not have people immigrate into the United States. The last I checked, people that were undocumented immigrants paid into our social security system six billion dollars last year. Yes. Those people aren't gonna take a dime out of it until they become citizens, and they probably won't become citizens.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01We're supposed to be a rich country, the richest country in human history, and the only way to do that is on the backs of slaves. That's how we did it. That is how we did it. We don't have slavery anymore, except for the people in prison, undocumented immigrants, pretty close to slaves.
SPEAKER_04Very much so. These are people who don't have legal recourse when somebody steals their wages. They can't go to the cops if an employer harasses them or sexually assaults them, or if they're fired illegally. These are people who are, we can't even say second-class citizens because they haven't been granted citizenship. It's a travesty how the United States handles this. The fact that the Trump administration, by saying we also want to eliminate birthright citizenship, the fact that the Trump administration's reaction to this is like, I think it's a little too nice. I think we're a little too nice.
SPEAKER_01It's it's it's disgusting. It's disgusting. We have Purian interest in having a slave class. Yes. But it just makes all kinds of economic sense to have quite a few recent immigrants that aren't citizens yet. It's not great that we do it, but it's worked out pretty good for us so far.
SPEAKER_04It is the backbone of dozens of industries in the United States. It's disgusting that it is, but this is how many major industries in the United States work. I mean, agriculture, construction, food service, just to name a few that are transparently obvious to people how these industries work. It's disgusting, it's gross. I'm a no borders, no nations leftist person. I think that if you enter the United States, you should be able to be a citizen of the US if you want to be.
SPEAKER_01If you're listening to this and you're in the uh FDHS IC, that's Craig that said that. I think that borders are just fine.
SPEAKER_04Hey, no, you can't hide from the feds, Nick. If you live in the US and you eat the cheap food that we have, and you go to restaurants and it's cheaper than it should be, as expensive as it is, right? You buy a house that's built for cheap, right? Or at least, you know, they used to be, a lot of that saving is from undocumented workers. And as Nick is saying, this is tantamount to slavery. It's not precisely slavery, but it is definitely unfree labor. I've never heard that term before. One of those academic mouthful phrases, unfree labor. That one's always embarrassing to try to explain to students. When I teach people about the history of emancipation, you say, like, okay, enslaved people were freed in the 19th century. Most of them were still working in conditions that were not free in the way that my labor is free, right? I work at Berkeley and I could leave in the middle of any lecture and nobody would attack me or burn down my house, punch my partner. That wouldn't happen. But much labor is like that. Even if it's legally free, it's not actually free. There are millions of people in the United States who live in circumstances like that where, you know, they don't have their passport, they can't leave, they don't speak the local language, they don't have enough time or resources in order to learn it, they can't go to the police, they can't go to the legal system because they'll get deported and be separated from their families. These people are not in free conditions, even if they are not legally property. That's what that term is from. Unfree labor.
SPEAKER_01Right now, the U.S. Supreme Court is spitting out a whole bunch of decisions, right? They made them before, but they're just announcing them now. Yes. There's other stuff coming up that's kind of a big deal, too. It's decision time. What are you looking forward to?
SPEAKER_04I don't think there's anything to look forward to from the Supreme Court. You were talking yourself about this imperial presidency, you're fired shit that Trump gets to do.
SPEAKER_01Unitary executive theory. Oh, yeah. That's coming up, huh? I like that the Supreme Court throws us the bone once in a while. Amy Coney Barrett makes some surprisingly good choices.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01She routinely does stuff that you don't expect her to, and you really shouldn't expect her to, because she's a member of a fucking cult that will do anything that the forefathers say. I don't know how she's getting away with it. Those guys in that cult, the elder men, must not want her to go against this stuff. Yeah. Great cult, guys. Thanks. I was worried that you guys were gonna fuck us because you're a cult. I was worried too. The hardcore Christians that aren't a cult are fucking us super hard right now. I thought you guys would just fuck us harder. Because you're an actual cult, a real, honest to goodness cult. We've had some very important ladies that are members of cults recently. None of them are doing as much damage as you thought they would have. That's true. I'm about a seven this week, six and a half, because I have been consuming all kinds of news about the prairie land sentencing. Let me bring everybody up to speed. This is the case the country mostly didn't cover until the sentences came down. And the sentences are the reasons you're gonna want to know about it. July 4th, 2025, last Independence Day, just about a year ago as we record this. A group of people gathered outside an ice detention center in Alvarado, Texas, a place called Prairie Land, a concentration camp. The plan, by the protesters' own account, was a noise demonstration. They brought fireworks. They wanted the people inside to know there were people out there thinking about them. It went sideways. A police officer, Thomas Gross, responded, drew his weapon, and he was shot in the neck. He wasn't shot badly, he survived. His condition was never in doubt. He didn't even spend a night in the hospital. His shootings go, pretty much best case scenario. Easy for me to say I wasn't the guy who was shot. One man, a former Marine named Benjamin Song, was convicted of firing the shot. He did. Here's the part that turns a local crime story into a national one. The government didn't just charge Ben Song for the shooting, it charged the whole group for the shooting, and it charged them as terrorists. The theory put forth by the government was that everyone at that protest was part of a North Texas Antifa cell. They were initially all charged with attempted murder. The jury acquitted everyone but Ben Song on that one. The jury did convict them on providing material support to terrorists. The terrorists being Antifa Antifa is a designated domestic terrorist group. This is the first time the federal government has run that place. It went pretty well for them, which is exactly why the sentences matter so much. They really never proved that the people involved were part of the North Texas Antifa song. They never even proved that there was such a thing as a North Texas Antifa song. Now our federal government has legal precedent to charge protesters with material support for terrorism. All they have to do is say the protesters are Antifa, and therefore domestic terrorists. They don't need to prove that people were members of Antifa, which is pretty handy because Antifa doesn't exist as a group. It's more of a shared ideology. Here's the structure. Sixteen people that I know of caught up in a federal safety net. They split them into two groups, nine went to trial, all nine were convicted. Notably, during the trial, their defense rested without calling a single witness. They argued that the government hadn't proven a case worth answering. Seven more took pleas before the trial. Each of those people pled guilty to one count of material support for terrorism, and they're all looking at fifteen years apiece. They get sentenced July 1st. Most of them agreed to cooperate and to testify against others. Two of them, of the seven that took plea deals, refused to cooperate. Sentences have been pretty heavy-handed. Twenty-five-year-old Marine veteran Ben Song did the shooting and got a hundred years. He fired the shot that wounded the officers. Convicted of attempted murder, plus rioting, plus material support to terrorism, plus explosives, the fireworks. He's the only person convicted of actually hurting anyone. Sentencing floor was 20 years, he got a hundred. Maricero Ruedas, she got 70 years. Same base charges as all the rest of the people, material support to terrorism, rioting, explosives. She got 50 for those. She got 20 additional years for one more thing. Conspiracy to conceal documents. After her arrest, she called her husband to move a box of zines from her closet. Autumn Hill got 50 years, Zachary Evitts got 50 years, Savannah Batten got 50 years. 42-year-old Megan Morris, no prior criminal history. Elizabeth Soto, also 50 years. The one person that moved the box, his name is Daniel Sanchez Estrada. He got 30 years. Wasn't even there. Just moved a box of zines for his wife. If we're ranking miscarriages of justice here, he'd have to be the one on the top of the list. Over the last week, I've spent a disproportionate amount of time looking at stories about this, which is good because prior to this verdict, we were one of the only podcasts that was talking about Prairie View. One outlet started calling the Prairie Land 9. I thought about adopting that. It's clean, it's got a civil rights ring to it, but there were seven other people that pled. Well there were 16 in all, Prairie Land 16, I don't know. Five of them cooperating witness against the rest. Their names are Seth Sykes, Nathan Bauman, Susan Kent, Lynette Sharp, John Thomas, denoted in their pleas that they were cooperating witnesses. I'm not going to judge that. Incarceration is a mindfuck. If there was any doubt about whether it was the right call to cooperate or not, we need only look at the sentences that the noise protesters who went to trial received. Two of these seven were listed as non-cooperating. Their names are Joy Gibson, Ben Song's partner, who also attended the rally, and Rebecca Morgan, a recent college graduate with a degree in neurobiology. All seven who took the plea deal are looking at 15 years maximum, though you'd think there might be more lenient sentences for the five who cooperate. We'll see. It's going to be pretty demoralizing if the people who cooperated and the people who didn't all get 15 years, so I wouldn't rule it out. It's worth noting that not even one of these five that cooperated knew anything about the North Texas Antifa cell. Probably because there wasn't. I don't know what they were dangling in front of them, but you'd have to think that it would have come out by now if they were looking to cut deals. 100 years for the man who shot the police officer. 50 years five times over for the people who stood outside a jail with fireworks. 30 years for a man who wasn't there who moved his wife's box of zines. The officers survived, the explosives involved were fireworks. The sentence really stopped matching the conduct after Ben Sung. When moving a box gets you 30 years and being present gets to 50, the sentence really isn't about what you did anymore. It's about who you are. And the government decided who these people were before the trial started. The trial was just the price that they're gonna make people pay for pushing back. I'm sure, Craig, that you've followed it as I have in the last few days. It's horrifying, demoralizing. It's almost good that the sentences were that long because national outlets are framing sentencing the same way that you and I have. This is about setting a precedent. The New Republic, a national magazine, ran their story under the headline, quote, the Prairie Land sentences are a national emergency. Their lead was the thing most all media outlets seized on. It said, quote, it's rare for a judge to acknowledge he's handing down a sentence for political reasons, but that's precisely what Chief Judge Reed O'Connor did from the bench, saying he was ordering the maximum sentences because, quote, the state wants to send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology. O'Connor wasn't actually the presiding judge in the case. It was another one of the justices in the Northern District of Texas, names Mark Pittman. We've gotten into him previously, he seemed to have a bit of an agenda or marching orders. I'm sure that'll come up in the appeals process. O'Connor, the one who said that he was handing out the max sentences because the state wants to send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology, wasn't even involved in the case at all until June 18th, when Mark Pittman sent over five of the Prairie Land defendants and postponed sentencing to June 23rd. O'Connor sentenced four of them, Autumn Hill to 50 years, who they kept calling Cameron Arnold, alias Autumn Hill. Zachary Evitts got 50 years. Savannah Batten, the young artist in her mid 20s, got 50 years. Danielle Sanchez Estrada, tattoo artist, Marisela Rueda's husband, who wasn't at the protest, he got 30 years. Inez Soda, the husband of Elizabeth Soto, the father of three, is scheduled to be sentenced on July 1st, along with the plea defendants. There's no reason to think. He'll get anything less than 50 years. In previous mentions of Inez Soto on this show, I was misgendering Inez Soto. I th I thought Inez and Elizabeth Soto were sisters, they're spouses, my bad. Craig, what have you noticed, if anything, about the coverage?
SPEAKER_04Honestly, uh, I think that it is severely lacking. But you know, I think that you're right, the alarm bells are not sounding on this, which is amazing because what this case is explicitly saying is if you oppose the US's concentration camp policy and you spread information about it at all, you can be charged with terrorism and put in jail for decades. That's the plain text of the case. That's gonna be used against people, and it probably won't stop when Trump stopped being president.
SPEAKER_01I've noticed that despite several defendants being trans women or trans men, it didn't really come up at all beyond just hinting at it by dead naming several of the defendants, which I assume that would have played more of a role in the case had there been any public outcry about what was happening as it was happening, right?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, you're right. I'm curious about that too. Conservative or fascist attention to this doesn't really talk about the fact that the relatively large number of the people involved in this case are trans. Why aren't they talking about that? Is it that they think it would make them look bad or make people who care about trans rights care about this and they don't want those people to care about this? Is it some aspect of that? Are they running some calculus about it?
SPEAKER_01I don't know. They didn't have any problem referring to Ben Song as Ben Champagne Song on much of the local news coverage that went throughout the nation on the scripts networks. That's the name that he goes by in the Activisty Universe, apparently. It's not like his regular name. It's not like the name he got on the JV football team that stuck with him his whole life. It's just what he was using as his handle in the signal chats. It was weird seeing in the Chiron Ben Champagne quotation song. A nickname like Champagne kind of made him seem like a showboat. You're right. It is a confusing impulse to like include that.
SPEAKER_04Is it to make him seem small? Is it to be like, oh, Champagne socialism? Is that what it is? It's curious. It's confusing.
SPEAKER_01I'm kind of proud of myself that this week I didn't get too caught up in paying attention to the low attendance at the Freedom 250 National State Fair. I did a little. I can't help myself.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, well, you can't help.
SPEAKER_01It's a little fun. That arch is pretty funny. I'm sad about it. They started planning this America 250 event in 2016. Bush and Obama were the ceremonial chairs. It was meant to be a nonpartisan event. When Trump got into office in 2025, he formed a C Corp called Freedom 250 and slowly but surely has been absorbing the America 250. Conceptually, a US fair with all the states representing themselves would have been pretty awesome, especially with all those foreigners in the United States for the World Cup. I don't think most foreigners draw much of a distinction between the states in the United States. They just think of the United States as one whole thing. They did fuck this up, but it was more of a vehicle to divert money that had already been budgeted for the event and extort corporations for sponsorship packages. But he's not like fucking up the America 250 celebration as much as he's rubbing our nose in the corruption. That's how I see it anyway. Even if they did make this a partisan event for the far right, it still could have come off pretty awesome. There's some pretty solid bands on the festival and fair circuit that are pro-Trump. The Beach Boys, Leonard Skinnard, Creed, I assume. Forgiato Blow. Do you know who that is? No, I don't know who that is. What is that? Among the lower tier MAGA celebs, definitely among the most aggravating. He's like if the embroidery on the pockets of a pair of $140 jeans that can only be bought at the buckle at the mall became sentient. He's a rapid response culture war rapper. Oh. Whatever today's culture war flashpoint is, that guy will have a rap and a video of it up within five days. He's got a giant Donald Trump head gold chain. Wow. His real name is Kurt Jance. He's born in 1988. He's from Tampa, Florida. Florida man of distinction. Very much so. Prep school kid. His grandfather founded the Auto Trader magazine. He's basically the grown-up version of the annoying fat kid that you played with in school because he had all the latest video games and central air at his house. You know that guy? The kid with the good snacks? Pizza roll.
SPEAKER_04My version of this from elementary, middle, and high school is a person with such a distinct name that I'm not going to say it. We were both the overweight middle class kids whose parents would buy them whatever video game they wanted. My only saving grace was that I was not an asshole.
SPEAKER_01Would never have pegged you for a chubby kid that had a lot of video games growing up, Patrick Craig. People change. Forgiato Blow drives a Rolls Royce with Bitcoin symbols all over it and the words Trump's nephew decorating the hood. He's not related to Trump, but it's a great way to get people that would normally never want to hear rap music to listen to his. He's got a Richie Rich tattoo on his face. Richie Rich? Comic character? Richie Rich? His name is Forgiato Blow, and he says the word Blow is an acronym for Ben living off wealth because his grandpa started Auto Trader magazine and became a very rich guy around Tampa, Florida. Cool dude. That's fascinating. He has a Trump tattoo on his face. That's an incredible commitment to Trump. He's been at this since Trump's first term, but he didn't get the face tattoo until Trump was re-elected. He weighed that out. He had a pro-cons list for Trump tattoo on my face. When the pro side was it's Trump, he's great. And the con side was nothing. So he's kind of a thinking man. Back in my day, face tattoos were strictly for Mike Tyson and people who would be eventually diagnosed as having bipolar disorder. And that was it. This guy's videos are actually pretty solid for rap videos. Aww. Definitely understands the angles and the visual tropes. There's a lot of production values in him, like Hype Williams doing the Puff Daddy video in 1998 level of production values. He's not fucking around when it comes to being the official gangster rapper of the MAGA enthusiast. The raps themselves, they're not that great. He's certified whack. Certified whack, yo. Is that what we're saying? He's always trying to start beefs with real MCs, which just have nothing to do with them, won't even acknowledge them. He's had Roger Stone cameo in his videos. He's had Marjorie Taylor Green while she was in Congress in his videos. He's had Enrique Terrio of the Proud Boys in his videos. He did a collab with Vanilla Ice in 2025. He's actually broken the careers of similarly untalented rappers that like to play around in the QAnon space, which is kind of savvy. Oh, what? Yeah. He had some dude do a song with him called Boycott Target, accusing Target of grooming children by carrying pride merchandise. And they shot the video in a Target. That is actually really smart marketing. That's a that's an untapped market for sure. It was number one on iTunes. What? To put that in perspective, the national anthem sung by the January 6th prisoners through a phone also hit number one on iTunes. Oh my god. It's not billboard, all right? It's just iTunes. I don't think you need many sales. It's not nothing. It just sounds like a bigger deal than it actually is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wouldn't be surprised if he's got some production house down there in Florida where rich parents send their kids to be turned into a rapper for their bar mitzvah. Like what happened with Rebecca Black and Friday. That's true. Here's some other songs from the Forgiato Blue El. One's called I Stand with Ice. Shocker, I know. One's called Hunter Biden Hacked. Probably his best work, actually, if I'm honest. Yeah. One's called Vanilla Sprite, which is an ice ice baby rework that Vanilla Ice himself guests on. And then he had that one called MTG, which actually had Marjorie Taylor Green in the video. That sounds like pretty excellent work. The commitment to the bit is off the charts. I almost respect the dude. The music's not great, but the production turnaround and the pinpoint exact marketing that he's doing is pretty baller. It's a hell of a hustle for a rich kid. He's putting more effort into it than most rich kids. If you told me that he was able to support his whole operation based on revenue from TikTok and Rumble, I'd believe it.
SPEAKER_04That's true. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01He's really hustling. He's really going for it. We're a lot of things at the Autocratic Despair podcast, but uh, I don't think either you or I would be interested in knocking the hustle. We can't.
SPEAKER_04He sounds like a horrible, despicable person, and I hate all of his works, but at the same time, he is doing it. You and I, we talk about like we stare into the abyss. Part of the purpose of this show is that we're both two people who stare at the abyss all the time, and we're like, we shouldn't do it by ourselves. And the hope is for the show that you can do it with us and maybe feel a little bit less alone. But one of the weird things that happens when you stare into the abyss is that it does stare back, and sometimes you see like a guy and you're like, oh man, I hate you, but I can't understand you. This is something that I experience in my academic research as well. I read about a guy who's similar socioeconomic background to me, who became a fascist in Argentina, and I'm glad that you're dead and that you failed in all your endeavors, but you come to understand them in a we're not so different, you and I, like supervillain type speech way. And it's it's awful. It's awful. It's one of the worst feelings. It's one of the worst feelings in the world. It's deeply embarrassing, uh, which is why I'm telling the entire internet about it.
SPEAKER_01He would have done that show. CNC Music Factory canceling, Martina McBride canceling, Forgiato Blow would have done that show. The Nil Ice did. The Nil Ice did do the show. Almost. Even if they wanted to make this America 250 thing completely partisan or completely a celebration of Donald Trump, they failed miserably. They could have at least had a midway as festive and deeply disturbing as your standard CPAC or turning point USA event. It would have been a great opportunity to shit down the throats of the liberal media while debuting a particularly large Donald Trump statue, or at least a particularly large couple of inflatables of Trump. They weren't trying to make this good. They made this whole thing suck intentionally because they could pocket all the money they set aside for it that they didn't spend. They're throwing it in our face. That's the thing that people are missing. This is not the festival they've been planning for a decade. This is Trump letting us all know that he's got us and there's not a goddamn thing that we can do about it. It's intimidating. Could you talk for a little bit about how blatant corruption can be an intimidation mechanism in an autocracy?
SPEAKER_04The more obvious corruption and flounting the law in general are, the more useful they are to a regime because it shows people how the rules really work. The rules really aren't for the people in power, they're for everyday people. And the more money you have, the more you can break the rules, the more you can rewrite the rules. This is something that Donald Trump talked about pretty openly the first time that he ran for president, you know, 2015, 2016. He got up on stage with Hillary Clinton and was like, I know you can be bought because I bought you and I bought your husband, like other rich people did. That was an extremely compelling message to millions of Americans.
SPEAKER_01It was to me. That's when I started thinking he was gonna win.
SPEAKER_04That's when I thought, like, oh fuck, he's got it. Because that, while gross, is true. It's undeniably true. That's what is so effective about open corruption is that it is undeniable. If they're not hiding it, it means that they aren't worried about it. If corruption is out there in the open, they have enough power that they don't even need to think about it. They don't need to think about it at all. They can just be corrupt and just be like, yeah, what are you gonna do about it? What are you gonna do about it? And the answer is nothing. Additionally, the more money you get, the more power you have, the more you can fuck around. Do you think it's like a flex to all the other autocrats? Oh, that's a good question. Does Trump get on the phone to Andragon and say, like, they gave me two jets, so you only got one? Yeah. Honestly, maybe he might do that. I don't know if the other ones do it. Trump probably would. Like, I wouldn't put it past him. 12-year-old in the playground be like, Well, I got six skateboards and my dad bought me a whatever. That kind of energy for sure is what you feel coming off this guy.
SPEAKER_01Because he has to be the best autocrat. Yes, he can't be one of the autocrats, he's gotta be the best, and he knows that Putin's got him by the balls. That's true. So he's gotta pretend to all the lower level autocrats like Javier Millet and the cool dictator. Bukele. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04They all got angles. They do. Yeah, Bukele is cool. Miley is crazy, and he does that duck face thing.
SPEAKER_01That's one of his bits. Plus, he's got the Rod Stewart hair. He does. They all have crazy hair, but he has the most crazy cool hair. It kind of works for him. You know, he used to be the front man of a band. I've seen him playing in a band. He was wearing a bomber jacket.
SPEAKER_04This guy's nothing. So the thing is that the band he was in was a um a Rolling Stones cover band, but that was back in the 80s and 90s when the Rolling Stones were the biggest band in Argentina. People fucking love the Rolling Stones down there. Especially like older millennials and Gen X. That's who Javier Millet is. It's a whole subculture about the Rolling Stones. They're called Rollingas. That was what Javier Millet did. He was the head guy of a Rolling Stones cover band. So that's why he sort of has quote Rockero hair.
SPEAKER_01Oh, Jesus. I'm seeing that guy's hair, and I'm realizing something right now. He was into the Rolling Stones for Ron Wood. Yes. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04That's a whole different kind of guy that's into the Rolling Stones. It's a whole different kind of guy. You're right. That is an important realization. I hadn't put that together either.
SPEAKER_01Ron Wood did have one really good solo album after he broke up with Rod Stewart in the faces. Ron Wood joined the Rolling Stones, and he's part of the Rolling Stones, but he is not of the Rolling Stones. He's a different guy altogether. That's exactly how to think about it.
SPEAKER_04He's a different guy. You know Javier Millet's slogan? Viva la libertad carajo? He says it all the time. This isn't literally what it means, but if you were to translate it into English, what he is saying is, freedom, motherfucker. Nice. Badass. The problem is that some of the sloganeering is pretty solid. It would be nice if a good person with good politics could get up on TV and say something that powerful and really meaning. Could you imagine John Asof with like a sweet shag? See, that's what I'm saying. He's celebrating a trans rights ruling, and he just leans into the microphone and says, Freedom, motherfucker, and leaves.
SPEAKER_01God, John Ossoff going full Liam Gallagher 1998 hair.
SPEAKER_04He's already really hot, so.
SPEAKER_01I have this feeling that John Ossof is like 5'3. He might be. Everything else is working really well for the guy. He's bringing the spread collar back like nobody's business. He's doing great work with the fitted dress shirt. So clean cut and ready to go. Just doing a quick Google here. He's 5'11. That's not bad. It's pretty okay. That guy could be our next president, huh? He certainly could. He's Jewish, though, right? Asof? Oh, uh yes, he is Jewish. Oh, that's not gonna play well with the under 25 crowd. Not at all. No.
SPEAKER_04If anybody can overcome it. That's true. I mean, this was always my take on Sanders. I wasn't sure if the US was ready to elect its first Jewish president, honestly.
SPEAKER_01People might not care now. Oh, they care now. People who were gonna vote for him care. I don't know if you've availed yourself to like the standard baseline anti-Semitism of people under the age of 27. I very much have it's different.
SPEAKER_04It's I would say Argentine in its willingness to just say anti-Semitic shit at people. It's crazy.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, there's not the there's not a little bit of shame or like a look over your shoulder both ways. That's how anti-Semitism was done in my day, Craig. You had to look over each shoulder and then ask them who their booking agent was.
SPEAKER_04That's how it was in the town that I grew up in, and I knew one Jewish person. Her dad worked at the Catholic high school. When I got to the dorm first day of freshman year, somebody walked up to me and said, Jew or Gentile? And I said, What?
SPEAKER_00I don't know how we're gonna get out of that segment. I don't think we're gonna be talking about Jewishness. I think there's a conversation to be had there, but maybe we don't shit on everybody under the age of 27 for being a casual anti-Semite. Probably not. There's plenty of them, but they're not all. Mostly good kids.
SPEAKER_04That's true. Most of them pretty solid. Damn, I'm listening.
SPEAKER_01When 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, 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. TikTok speak and the new language of TikTok.
SPEAKER_04Alright, so when it comes to like these weird internet euphemisms, unalive for dead, sewer slide for suicide, grape for rape, things like that. First of all, I'm too old for this shit. I think it's just like infantile and childish. But we have to think about it as a cultural reaction to living in a censored place. This is because so many kids, so much of their socialization happens online and happens in these communities, like TikTok or Instagram or whatever, where uh all sorts of speech and all sorts of communication is not allowed. Kids have developed these euphemisms for these things, and like, you know, one might be able to say that these euphemisms are just the way that people communicate and that that's a normal part of communication. But you shouldn't have to censor yourself when you're speaking to people. But the fact that big companies control so much of how people communicate is absolutely involved in the right wing and especially the fascist project, especially when we think about who owns these companies. Instagram is owned by Meto, aka Facebook, that's Mark Zuckerberg. X controlled by Elon Musk, TikTok, I forget who owns it. It's a Chinese company that's being bought by a US guy who's maybe a friend of Trump. All of these things are controlled by extreme tech billionaire people, and all of those people are involved in one kind of authoritarian project or another, either the post-communist one in China or the nascent fascist one in the United States. Musk and Zuckerberg and all of those people, they were hashtag woke during the Obama years and during the Biden years, and even during the first Trump term. But all those guys showed up for Trump's inauguration the second time around and loved it. They're on his side. And the fact that they are controlling, policing, literally censoring the only public fora we have left is bad. That's fascism. Plus, it's just embarrassing. It's embarrassing. Anytime that I see somebody use those terms off of an Instagram or TikTok, I'm always like, you're an adult. Just say the words. Be courageous.
SPEAKER_01It's their world, Dr. Crent. When they decide it's time, they're going to murder us. We'll both be like. I would have liked to have lasted longer, but this tracks. Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. I accept. I didn't try to be part of the generation that fucked you over so hard. But I didn't stop it from happening. Here we are. I do deserve this.
SPEAKER_04That's true. Yes. If the revolution comes and they say, hey, we're going to kill everybody over 50, I'll be like, I don't think that you're wrong for wanting to do that.
SPEAKER_01No complaints. That's why I'm always so cool to young people. On the off chance. I know you guys are too lazy to ever actually murder us in mass, but you're going to want to. I just want you to put in a word for now.
SPEAKER_00I don't expect not to be murdered. I would like to be among the last few people that you do murder. I would love to be in the last group.
SPEAKER_04Maybe I could be some sort of like curio for relics of a bygone era.
SPEAKER_01They would need people like you to tell them of the old ways.
SPEAKER_04Back in my day, people used to say slurs all the time. Not me though.
SPEAKER_01Stare 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.
