SPEAKER_01 0:00

I think I'm going to have to declare a beef. I'm down. Absolutely. They're a little bigger than us, Dr. Craig, as far as podcast goes on the bulwark, but uh we got beef. Wouldn't quite put it on the level of bad blood just yet, but we're on the way. Beef with the bulwark. Beef is on. 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 one to ten, where would you rate your autocratic despair this week?

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Uh on a scale of one to ten, my autocratic despair is probably at a five. And again, remember, I'm on a logarithmic scale, so a five is bad. A five is like shaking picture frames, you know, maybe your nonas tchotchkis have fallen off the shelf. I'm all mixed up. I'm all mixed up inside. And it's basically because of Platiner.

SPEAKER_01 1:14

Quick refresher on Graham Platiner. He's a 41-year-old marine combat veteran and oyster farmer from rural Maine. He's running for U.S. Senate. He's a Democratic socialist and a populist. He emerged from complete obscurity in 2025 with a viral launch video. He's got a pro-Medicator for all Bernie style message. In June, he won the Maine Democratic primary, absolutely knocking establishment Democrats' dicks in the dirt. They were. He had more votes than any Democratic Senate candidate in state history. Platner is rough around the edges. He is a thick mustache, beard going on, real manly man type. But he's a very controversial character. He talked about all the right things in all the right ways, but his history was pretty dicey. To put it lightly, he had a Nazi tattoo for 20 years, Totten Kampf. He said he didn't know that he had a Nazi tattoo until somebody pointed out he got it while he was drunk on leave in Eastern Europe. Said uh he thought it was just a cool design and he was unaware of the history. Yeah. Okay. Then Platner's Reddit comment history was discovered. He establishes himself as a history buff in there. Not all history buffs know what a Toten Kumpf is. No. He really got a freebie on that. The rest of his Reddit comments were a mixed bag besides that, but they seem to demonstrate the type of character that nobody listening to this podcast would want to hang out with. His Reddit comments got chalked up to his PTSD from his time in the military. He owned up to him. Yes. Said he's done a lot of therapy and is now a different person. Democrats in Maine want to take that Senate seat away from the Republicans so badly that they cut him a break on that one, too. Platiner could do no wrong. He had some real heavyweights in the party endorsing him. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders. A couple of weeks back, there was some salacious stuff online about him being on an adultery website looking for strange while he was married. Pretty recently, too, 2023. His wife claimed it was a private matter, and anyway they've worked it out. Might be an upside-down pineapple thing, who knows? Around the same time, an ex-girlfriend came out and accused Graham Platiner of violence in their relationship. The woman making the accusations is was a known operative for the Republican Party. So people gave him a pass on that one, too. The people of Maine were willing to buy any of his excuses, hook, line, and sinker. It was getting strange. Nothing was sticking to him, which is weird for Democrats. They can be a little holier than now at times. Plattner had become this avatar of a new kind of Democrat that is willing to roll up his sleeves and fight for them. Dr. Craig and I have discussed Graham Plattner in earlier episodes. We're not fans. We were out on the Nazi tattoo. Didn't matter what his excuse was. Probably worse if he was telling the truth that he got a Nazi tattoo and never knew what it was. Platner felt like a paradigm shift for the Democrats that neither one of us liked. It's not good. Despite our disdain for him, he was no less interesting. Dr. Craig and I, we just weren't clocking what other people saw in it. Pretty vexing, if I'm honest. On July 6th, there was another allegation of abuse by an ex-girlfriend, different woman. She accused Plattner of forcing himself on her during a period of time where they were together as regular sex partners, but not in a relationship. This one wasn't a Republican operative. I won't use her name here, but she did not decide to remain anonymous. Her name is out there. These allegations seem to be sticky. High profile people within the party like Ro Khanna and Elizabeth Warren have rescinded their endorsements. It looks like this will be the end of the Graham Platiner movement. It's not good. We told all you motherfuckers. Oh, yeah. We told you what you've given up. Why doesn't it feel fucking good that this shit is happening should be vindicating? So I think that's a good direction to go in. That's totally what we should talk about. We really fucking did lay into him that previous time. We did. The other angle here that I think might be worth playing is that he has our already had an allegation like this from a different woman. Yes. Because she was a Republican operative, it was easy to dismiss by his loyal people. So people ignored it. Their line in the sand is like a moderately credible sexual assault allegation. There's no paper tray on it exactly.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

It's just it's just awful the way people are like qualifying this. The rates of false or fake allegations about sexual assault are minuscule. It's like nothing. And so why people are like thinking, like, hmm, I don't know. Do I believe this woman this time? Oh go fuck yourself, my professional opinion.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

She's not accusing him of rape. She's accusing him of what happened. Yeah. I think she's just doing what she needs to do to make sure that guy doesn't become a powerful person. Everybody else is contextualizing it as sexual assault. It was. I don't know if that's how she necessarily viewed it when she came out with it. Yeah. I think it was this is what needs to like I gotta give a part of my sexual history that's a little embarrassing and shameful to me to ensure that this country doesn't go down this guy's road. I'm fucking amazed that it's working. Because as you know, this country, hey, it's women.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

Yeah. It's it's it's just it's just monstrous how much it took for people to get off of this guy's bandwagon. It's just wild that it took not one but several women coming forward and saying that he had done things like this to them. People didn't the Maya culpas didn't roll in when somebody said he locked me in a room overnight. What? Imagine if one of your friends came to you and said, Hey, our mutual friend locked me in a room overnight because he was mad. What would you do? How would you engage with that person? I think at the very least, you would like pull them aside and be like, dude, what the fuck is wrong with you? You need to go get help. You need help. And I need to help the person that you did this to. Our relationship is fundamentally and forever changed. Maybe you can come back from this. I don't think, Nick, I don't think either you or I are the sort of person who thinks that if a person fucks up, they fuck up real bad, and they can still repent and live a good life and do good work after that. I don't believe that that prison should last forever, and I don't believe in no restitution. But I do believe that there are certain things that you do, you know, that if you do them, you shouldn't become one of the hundred most powerful people in the country. That's pretty easy. That one doesn't feel controversial to me.

SPEAKER_01 7:28

I wonder if the possibility of being locked in a bathroom overnight by Graham Plattiner is part of the sexual appeal of Graham Plattiner. I think that you're like uh, oh, he's he does this drunk abusive father routine that I get off on somehow. Take a look at that guy, man. He's he's had that mustache for a long time. He's five foot seven. Yeah, he's not super tall. Doesn't look like he's jacked. He's working that bullshit warrior poet persona as well as anyone in the game is right now.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

Just about conned his way into the U.S. Senate. He's got a kind of Hemingway thing going on. You're right. And I and I think that you're absolutely right, like disturbingly, talking about the fact that his previous allegations, the previous allegations against him and his previous, you know, in the most generous possible way to describe them would be like consent mistakes or like errors or something. That is the single most generous way to describe this. She said he wasn't consensually conscientious. Those were her words. The legal way to describe this would be sexual assault. I think that that is how the community is treating it. We have every right to do that. None of that is papering over what the survivor herself uh says about this. But exactly like you're saying, there is in the zeitgeist out there an aspect of engaging with men's sexualities that do function this way. This is one of the major appeals of Trump. It's true for lots of Republicans, lots of conservatives, and especially lots of dudes. The fact that Trump does sexually assault people, we know this. Everybody knows this. The fact that we know that he does and that he gets away with it, there's millions of people who straight up like that. And it appeals to them. I don't want that kind of energy in my fucking party. I want those guys to be my enemies. It's absolutely true that Plattner represents for the Democrats or represented for the Democrats. As of our recording of this July 7th, 2026, it's likely slash hopeful that he'll drop out in time for the Democrats to replace him on the ticket. There is still time for that to happen, for him to not be on the ballot in the fall in Maine. He represents a kind of host liberal candidate. He says shit, he's unapologetic. He's a noble savage. That's a good way to put him. In my professional academic life, I study Argentine history quite a bit. In Argentina, there was a dictator, their most successful dictator in the 19th century. Argentina's got a lot of dictators, so you gotta say, their most successful dictator. His name was Juan Manuel de Rosas. Rosas was a big-time landowner. He was a gaucho. Gauchos are basically cowboys in Argentina. He was like the richest person in the country. But his image was like the rootiness tutinist hambre this side of the Mississippi.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

It's so deeply troubling to learn anyone would exploit their rootin' tutinity to nefarious ends like that. I don't know, I don't know how they play it in Argentina, but on this side of the pond, you put on a bolo tie and a 10-gallon hat, and it means something. There's a code. That is very funny. You can't be rootin' tootining your way into a dictatorship. It's disrespectful to the game.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

Well, he was actually rootin and tootin. Orosas would like get in knife fights when he was the leader of the country. Brawl with people, get on horses, and like ride off into the distance and just kind of like leave for a while and then come back when he was the leader of the country. Rossas is the perfect example of a type of leader that is extremely common in Latin America. That type of leader in Latin America is called a caudillo, a strong man who rules because he's a strong man. Caudillos are always quite rich people who can operate in their equivalent of boardrooms and country clubs, but can also go out in the street and like get in a fist fight and chug a beer or something. Trump has always presented himself in this exact same way, despite the fact that he is not particularly strong physically. So the image of him is like, you know, you get all these AI images of him with ripped abs and like some enormous pecs, nonsense like that, right? Platiner's trying to be that but real, a working man shucking oysters, but then he gets up on stage and like says some stuff. I don't know, whatever. Because he's from Maine, he can't do cattle, so it's gotta be the fish.

SPEAKER_01 11:45

Have you heard his voice? Yes. How it's abnormally deep. Yeah. I wonder if that's an affectation or that's his real voice.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

It could be, as a fellow, not particularly tall person who has a surprisingly deep voice. I don't know. Every once in a while I get up on stage and people people expect me to sound like this, like a poindexter, but instead I I sound like this. So maybe. I don't know. I think that Platner is a perfect example of this kind of figure. He's supposed to be this everyman, rough and tumble guy. He's a veteran, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The dark side of that personality is not a mistake. It's not an error, it's not an exception. It's part of her. The dark side of that personality is violence. Not just violence against social enemies, but violence against people who live in your society. Specifically, always women. All of these characters, to put it in the most generous 19th century terms, for landerers, to put it in contemporary terms, they're men who exploit and sexually assault women for their pleasure, based upon their own desires as opposed to consent. Platiner is revealing himself to be fully in that world. So far in the 21st century, the Democrats haven't really had somebody like that. Maybe an equivalent back in the day would be like JFK, honestly. He never pretended to be an everyman, but being a philanderer was part of his image. Do you think you could win in a knife fight with JFK? Oh, that's a good one.

SPEAKER_01 13:12

Just a hypothetical here.

SPEAKER_00 13:14

On painkillers or not. I feel like the most common thing that I pause to Google on this podcast is how tall various male politicians are.

SPEAKER_01 13:27

I don't know how tall Grant Planner is, but I assume it's five foot seven.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

I believe it. Heights of various presidential candidates and presidents in U.S. history. Here we go. Tallest president, of course, Abraham Lincoln, 6'4. JFK 6'1.

SPEAKER_01 13:44

Pretty fucking tall. I mean for the 1970s. These people are politicians. You expect me to believe their height? Even honest men lie about their height.

SPEAKER_00 13:53

I do not lie about my height, but I'm not a politician. You were correct about Graham Platiner. Graham Platner is 5'7.

SPEAKER_01 14:00

That tracks. He gives off a real scrum half vibe. Always 5'7 or shorter, desperate to compensate, so he tries to assume a leadership role on the team by being very vocal. He gets injured and you gotta make do with a guy who normally plays a wing forward in at Scrum Half and the team isn't any worse off. Important role. Oh yeah. If you're a spectator, you'd think it was the best guy in the field. But if you ever played rugby, you'd agree Scrum Half is the most useless guy on the field. He does have that spooky edge. You know, it's the PTSD thing. We're like, ah, if I get fucked up with them, who knows what he's gonna do?

SPEAKER_00 14:38

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you familiar with the concept of the dark triad? That's this. That's what we're talking about. For those listeners unfamiliar with it, this is a concept that comes from psychology and that made its way into the manosphere and like male influencer type stuff, where the idea is that society. Yeah, but if you're five foot seven, it's it's just pure. That's what we're talking about, right? That's what we're talking about with these guys.

SPEAKER_01 15:11

When you're five foot seven, that reads as being very scrappy. He's so scrappy. And so, well, what does that mean? He's just scrappy. Nobody six foot two or taller is scrappy. Everybody under five foot eight that gets in fights is scrappy. Did you read what her allegations were? I read the gist of it. At one point she said, he grabbed me by my pelvis and it hurts so much. I'm trying to parse that. Yeah. What do you think she meant? Because she didn't say he grabbed me by my hips or my waist. She said pelvis. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 15:43

Presumably he's she's talking about digging his fingers into her and like causing pain. Like Don Draper in the in the episode of Mad Men. Yes. Yeah. She's just describing it in the most clinical way that she could, which I think makes a lot of sense, right? You know, she's probably doing that in an attempt to distance herself from the experience and the memory, which I understand. I assume that she might have spoken to an attorney about this. Is this going to be liable? What's going to happen to me if I do this? And so it's possible that some of that language might be coming from there. I don't know. That's full on a guess for me. I'm not an attorney, and I'm not suggesting that I know anything about why this woman worded these things in this way. When I talk about terrible shit that's happened to me in my life, I can get pretty clinical and uh direct about it as opposed to conversational, which definitely does make it harder to relate to. At the same time, it's, you know, it's a way that you can distance yourself from a bad experience. The facts are that this woman has come forward and described experiencing sexual assault from Grand Platinum. This is on top of about a half dozen other women who have come forward and talked about other terrible shit that he's done, which ranges from domestic abuse to sexual assault. If this is the lead pipe that broke the camel's back, at least it's not too late. At the same time, Nick and I were talking before we started recording about how we were talking about this before. And folks, the next time somebody runs for Senate and it turns out that he has a fucking totem cough on his one human body, don't brush it under the fucking rug.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

Oh, it pisses me off so much. The red flag here was always the fact that he got that tattoo covered up instead of removed. Yeah. That's how you knew that he was a shit bag. You're absolutely right. It was the biggest tip-off if you look back on the situation. I'm kind of angry that's happening right now. People were cutting this motherfucker slack on everything. They were. He had a Nazi tattoo. Well, he said he didn't know what it was, and I believe him. He doesn't seem like a Nazi. Name one Nazi thing that he said. That was strange that people were willing to do it. But okay, all right. I'll try to see your way. People change. He may not have known. Grant Platinum, whatever else he is, he's a fuck up masquerading as a dump shit. Those guys are always gonna do something to let you down. After the initial thing, there was the he's going on kick with just a towel picture trying to scare up some sex from somebody that's not his wife, and then they work that out. He was walking people up to the edge of something really bad. The people that supported him, they stepped over the line of practical good sense the second that they cut him some slack on this tattoo. Anything subsequent to that has been them going further and further out on a limb for him. And if he drops out of the race, they get to pretend like that never happened. Didn't have my whole body. One pinky on this side of the line, so I get to go back there now. Never fully cross the line. In order for them to fully cross the line, he has to be elected. If I was Grant Platter, I would tell everybody that I'm still running for Senate and I will resign after I'm sworn in. Oh, yeah, of course. He wants to demonstrate to everybody that he's still an honorable guy. We got to keep Suzanne Collins out of here. Yeah, my nose was held. He resigns, the Democratic governor will appoint a Democrat to do his entire term. I still think that if he continues to run for office, he'll win. I think those people went so far beyond the line that they don't care anymore how far they are.

SPEAKER_00 19:10

I think you're right.

SPEAKER_01 19:10

Anything short of Graham Platner dressing up in a ski mask, holding a knife, hiding in a bush at night, waiting for joggers, is not enough of a sexual assault for these people. They would have jumped ship when the first woman said it.

SPEAKER_00 19:24

No, I think I think you're right that he could still win, which is a nightmare. It's a nightmare about our country that he could still win.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

I hope that if he does drop out, that there's some people that are ready to account for themselves here. Yeah. Now that we've all ventured over this line, as far as we've gone, why go back? Oh, big deal. You don't fuck Grand Platiner unless you want him to be rough at, you know, that kind of thing. I can see that happening. It's not there yet. Every time something happens with them, I'd love to go on our main subreddit and the Bulwarks subreddit and see what people are saying. How did they talk themselves into this one? What's the angle they're going to play on this one?

SPEAKER_00 20:00

I think that's going to be there. I agree. What I've seen so far on Blue Sky is certain prominent democratic politicians and left liberal people apologizing. Naomi Klein was like, hey, I fucked up. I fucked up, which is as close to the right way to handle this as possible. Although, of course, the right way to handle it was to say if you got a Nazi symbol tattooed on your one human body, you don't get to be in the United States Senate. Uh similarly, Elizabeth Warren came forward and said he should drop out. I made a mistake endorsing him, which again, you know, good, but and I mean this literally, too little, too late.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

She should resign from the Senate for having ever supported him in the first place. That's what I think.

SPEAKER_00 20:41

I mean, honestly, I think it's a black mark on your career if you supported this man. It should always be remembered. It should. You should never be able to live this down because it was so fucking obvious. That is what is so astonishing about part of it, is the obviousness of it. It's so clearly wrong and so clearly bad, and he is so clearly guilty and responsible. It's just palpable.

SPEAKER_01 21:05

If your judgment is so fucking bad that you can't see a motherfucker like that coming from a mile away, I think that might transfer over to your work as a senator. Yeah. If that's the way that you're gonna judge something, then it's so fucking obvious. So obvious. You're gonna risk your reputation on a fucking guy like that who's never done anything except find his way to a base of people that are slavishly devoted to him. That's all he's done. That's it. He's made some big promises, but he hasn't done anything. He's got no record to stand on. For these seasoned politicians, these people that have respect and esteem in our country, their credibility is fucked to me forever. What makes him so desirable to people is the fact that he's a democratic socialist. Yes. The bullshit that they're spewing out there is very appealing to some people. It's very appealing to me. I have nothing but skepticism for democratic socialists. They're playing my tune and they're playing it too well. And I know they got the data. I know that there was a sort. The initial sort was Lien's authoritarian, Lien's egalitarian. The people that leaned authoritarian, they got taken down a path to radicalization for one man. To think that there was no pipeline for lean's egalitarian, that's pure stupidity. There was. It leads us to democratic socialism, which is a fucking chain because the policies, Better Care for All, Social Safety Net, great policy. They're putting these fucking clowns in as the face of these policies.

SPEAKER_00 22:39

That's what's so embarrassing about this. The policies are slam dunks. They're wildly popular. They're fantastically successful in every single other, in every single other developed economy on the planet. They work better, they make people healthier, they make lives better, and they save money. They do everything. It's just spectacular. Spending on education is just like straight up easily good. Single payer healthcare is just good. In terms of ROI, yeah. In terms of ROI, in terms of outcomes, in terms of your my politics, I'm further left than you are, but I think this one is pretty clear common ground.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

In terms of preventing the class war that's gonna lead to me being killed fairly early on.

SPEAKER_00 23:18

If you are a capitalist, if you're a member of the bourgeoisie and you don't want communism, social democracy is the answer. That is the answer.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

We gotta close that gap between wealthy and poor in this country, because if we don't, the poor are gonna turn into violent crime against the people depriving them.

SPEAKER_00 23:35

I mean, this is something that's happened before in world history. Many times, leaders of otherwise very conservative parties or conservative social institutions end up supporting these kinds of things because they are afraid of what people will do if they organize or fight. So even Thatcher wouldn't touch the National Health Service in the UK because it was wildly popular and incredibly successful. Now that's changed recently, you know, um, and it was actually like the Blair government that really started messing around with this. And that's fairly common that it's an ostensible leftist group that starts messing around with the social safety net. In the US, we saw the same thing with Bill Clinton. It took Clinton to dismantle the welfare state. What you're talking about when it comes to democratic socialism in the US, the fact that we are so willing, we so very much want it to be about the personality of an individual guy. There was Sanders, there's Platner, there's Mamdani. The fact that these policies, which are easily good, the fact that they are so associated with the personalities of individual people, Ocasio Cortez in the Congress, even somebody like Elizabeth Warrant, a more wonkish version of this. She's very policy-oriented, not particularly personality-oriented. The fact that they're associated with these people as opposed to a party is the problem. In other countries and at other times, this stuff has been associated with a party. Parties have leaders, but leaders come and go, and the party stays, and the ideology is supposed to stay too. But we don't have that in the US. We don't have a stable organization of this kind yet. Democratic Socialists of America is trying to become that thing, but it's associated with these fucking guys, right? I don't know if any listener has ever been to a meeting of the DSA or any other leftist or left liberal organization, but they got guys out the wazoo of this particular kind of guy, and it sucks. Oh, those guys.

SPEAKER_01 25:28

Always wearing a beanie, like they're in the merchant marines. That's right. Beanies and flannels. That's it. Those guys, you know what they like? They like to complain about shit. And they love it when people are willing to listen to them complain about shit. That is true. That's why they ruin smoking for people. Oh, you're right. Yes. They ruined standing outside of a building and having a cigarette. Those guys will pop over to you and start bitching about whatever's going on. They gotta sit and listen to it.

SPEAKER_00 25:54

The purpose of those smoking conversations is to make dumb jokes and laugh and then leave in five minutes. That's the purpose of this.

SPEAKER_01 26:06

What Platner meant to people that he got to that level. It was just so surprising. He really was just a guy that thought things should be a certain way, and then people were like, Yeah, you should run for office.

SPEAKER_00 26:18

And not just you should run for like mayor of Bangor, Maine, not you should run for state house. If you're a senator, you get in history books. That's what happens to you. For the rest of your life, you get to be called senator so-and-so. Some of the most powerful and influential human beings in the last 250 years have been senators of the United States. If he won, he was gonna run for president for sure. He was gonna run for president. And the fact that people they were so willing to ignore blaring sirens, crimson warning lights flashing directly into our eyeballs at all times, because his policies were good. He can only say terrible things about us as a civilization. That's the best we could do. That's the best we could do. That's the best we could do is somebody who's a nightmare of a candidate. He's the guy we could get to say some acceptable things about mildly increasing our social safety net to be kind of on the order of the UK after they have mostly destroyed theirs. That's the best we can do.

SPEAKER_01 27:21

Awful. There has not been any announcement that he's dropped out of this race. No. Assuming that he's done. What is the lesson that we can learn from this flirtation? To me, it's that people are so desperate for this bullshit that they're willing to look past people. I mean, he just punched this hole for any slick guy to come through.

SPEAKER_00 27:38

I think you're right. I think we're gonna learn a bad lesson. And the lesson is gonna be that if you can slum it up, basically, you might be able to get past the vetting, you might be able to get past the apparatus of trying to figure this stuff out and making sure that we don't end up in this scenario. I think the lesson is just gonna be that we're gonna end up in this scenario over and over and over and over and over again. I think that that's what's gonna happen. But if these policies are so popular, and they are, then we can probably find some decent people to support them. We can probably find some people who are like fine, you know.

SPEAKER_01 28:17

The next wave of people aren't gonna be decent that have these ideas, Dr. Craig. No, they're not. No. They're gonna be absolute shitbags that are trying what they know to be popular to get over on us based on that. Did you ever get a chance to read the book uh Anatomy of Fascism by Robert Paxton? He wrote it in 2004. Sure he did. I think it's actually up there. When he talks about socialism in that book, he says that in order for fascism to entrench itself, it's necessary for the people to elect socialists as their sort of last hope. And then those socialists have to prove every bit as ineffectual and corrupt as the people that they voted out to put the socialists in. Only then will people be willing to accede to an entrenched fascism once they know that socialism won't work. When I see this stuff happening, I feel like there's a reason that people like Plattner are being elevated. And it's because they know that they're gonna fuck it up.

SPEAKER_00 29:16

That's a possibility. I think that that's part of it, is that like most people are fuck-ups. Lots of people are fuck-ups. They regret choices that they've made and they look in their life and they're not satisfied and all those sorts of things. I think that Plattner, especially for many men, they look at him and they they're like, well, he's a guy who kind of fucked up, but he found his way. That's good. I think that there's also an aspect of the unapologetic failure, the unapologeticness of it that makes him relatable. I think that Trump definitely represents this kind of bad man, but he's our bad man. He's a monster, but he's our monster. This is something that you hear in like action movies and shit. Sure, he like goes in and he does all these monstrous things, but he does it for freedom in America. Trump tries to represent that. Plattner was, hopefully, following you, Nick, using the past tense for him. Plattner was a democratic attempt to do this. Talking about socialism and its relationship to fascism, I want to steer clear from blaming socialism for fascism. It's not socialists' fault that fascists come after them. Fascists hate socialists, and they are a political ideology that is based almost exclusively on stopping socialism and communism from taking power. They always are rising at the same time. When fascism wins, it's usually because it has succeeded in capturing a certain portion of people who would otherwise be normal conservatives, who are willing to make some concessions to like bigger, wilder shit in order to stop socialism and communism. I think that the success and then eventual failure of somebody like Plattner is precisely this timeline. And it's awful that we're fully repeating this. Literally a hundred years after it happened in Germany and Italy. We are almost on the dot on time for this. It's awful. It's awful. But that's where we're headed. That's what's happening.

SPEAKER_01 31:12

Are you getting any special feeling out of being right? Because I'm not. I was telling people for the longest time, pick a place right now. Pick a line. If Platinum runs it over, you're out. And I could never nail those people down on what that line would be. I kept telling them, if it's gonna keep going, you have to find a limit for this guy. Now that the limit's been found, I should feel vindicated for having that. I don't feel good. I don't feel vindicated. I feel like that guy fucked up some really good policies. Now they're always gonna be under question because of Grant. Oh, isn't that what Graham Plattner wanted? With that one guy? Yeah, yeah. Such a major disservice to his stated beliefs for him to be a shit bag like that.

SPEAKER_00 31:54

Yeah, it's so, it's so shitty. Ugh.

SPEAKER_01 31:57

I hope people can see it like that because as of right now, he hasn't dropped out. I don't think he really needs to. I think it would be completely possible for a guy like Elon Musk to say, no, no, no, you keep running, I'm gonna bankroll you. I just want to see how off the rails this goes.

SPEAKER_00 32:11

That's actually entirely possible that he could just still win. It's only main voters who get to decide whether or not he is gonna be in the Senate. Um and if he thinks that he's still got it, then he might. I was finding myself being like, okay, well, every single roadblock that we just zoomed through, plywood flying off the windshield, just like banging through all these barriers. Every single time that it happened, I find myself being like, okay, well, I guess this wasn't it. And that's exactly the feeling that I remember having in 2015-2016 with Trump was like, that wasn't it, huh? All right. I'm honestly surprised that one wasn't it when he did this, when he did that, when he did this. I'm not gonna enumerate all of Trump's horrible, horrible things that he did just during that election cycle. With Platner, with accusation after accusation, with fuck up after fuck up, learning that it wasn't enough. It's like, okay, well, what is what was enough? I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 33:07

That's the lesson we're gonna learn. I had an initial feeling of glee. I won't lie. I'm petty like that. And then it dawned on me how many people had gone out on a limb for him. Yeah. All downside. There was no upside for some of these people to support him. Yeah. I really didn't want him to fail. I wanted him to prove me wrong. Yeah, I wanted him to have a stellar career in the Senate to prove to me that people can change and people do change. I think he might have hurt me, and I didn't know that he had the capacity to hurt me.

SPEAKER_00 33:34

Yeah. Plattner forcing the entire Democratic Party to just like fall and break their nose while we were screaming at them. Please do not do this. The other thing that gets me so much is that like people paid him as some sort of outsider candidate, and it's like fucking Chuck Schumer endorsed this guy. What are you talking about? An outside candidate. Yeah, he's unproven and inexperienced, but that doesn't make him an outsider. The mustache is the outsider part. The whole vibe is that the outsider. That's the thing. The aesthetics are the outsider part. Yeah. The cable knit sweaters, the giant mustache, the Hemingway stuff. He stopped just short of wearing a Greek fisherman's cap. He's probably worn one of those. He focus grouped all that shit, Dr.

SPEAKER_01 34:16

Craig. Oh, yeah, for sure. I'm sure there was a part of him that was like, well, should I just I'm not gonna be comfortable wearing a suit all the time. So I'll just I'll be one of those guys that is wearing an open collar suit. A dress shirt, it's a suit. I don't have a tie, I got a tie in my pocket if I need to put one on. I'm going a little cash right now. That's the look that I'd go for if I was running for Senate, because I'd want people to see me as a senator. He focus grouped his entire fucking appearance. He took a trip to the LL Bean factory in Maine, picked up some duds. What about you, Nick? I'm at about a six. I can't get over Prairie Land. I just can't. The reporting in the last three weeks on it had been more than there was in total in like the previous year. So I've watched news pieces on it. I've read think pieces in magazines. There's a podcast I listen to. It's called The Bulwark. The Bulwark is a media company made by former Republicans. They were the never Trumpers. They kind of formed their own thing, carved their own space out in the resistance movement as never Trumpers. They get a big audience. I hate listening to it for the most part. I find the people obnoxious know it all. But I do listen. Last week they had a writer on named David French. A really well-respected lawyer, used to work for the U.S. government. He's an author, opinion columnist for the New York Times, very influential guy. And he was on to make some sense of last week's Supreme Court decision. Just sort of by the by, he got asked about Prairie Land. He framed it in this horrible way, the exactly opposite way that you or I would, Dr. Craig. This is what he said, quote, the issue with that case is not the sentences with these guys. If you really dive into the facts, this was a violent ambush. Continue, quote. This wasn't like a bunch of innocent folks arriving at the protests and, like, oh my gosh, somebody has a gun. How did this happen? This was not that. He further stated, quote, these cases are tried in front of juries. Juries render verdicts based on the facts and the law. And this was violence. A cop was shot. Went on to say, I have no sympathy unless I saw some very compelling evidence that there was a miscarriage of justice. You and I don't see it that way. No. We see it as the opposite. But he's got this reach that the board exceeds ours by just a bit. Maybe a smidge. And we're closing the gap, but people do seem to sort of like the show. So he was able to frame Prairie Land for probably a million people. Yeah. Maybe 400,000 of them hadn't heard about it at all. The rest maybe hadn't heard about it enough to form an opinion. And well-respected New York Times opinion columnist, David French, does it for him? Except he didn't do any of the homework that you or I did. No. He just framed it as a lock them up and throw away the key. Yeah. You study how this stuff actually plays out. Is there a name for what happens when people who used to run the old regime become the loudest voices, telling everyone to trust institutions that are currently being hollowed out?

SPEAKER_00 36:58

One word for this would be collaborator. This is somebody who is not literally in the party, but you're certainly helping the party. And you're laying the groundwork for their increased control in the future. This is making me think of something. There's a board game. The board game is called Secret Hitler. Have you ever heard of this game? Oh. Okay, so in this game, every player starts the game with a card that's face down, and it tells you if you are a fascist or if you are a Democrat. And one of the fascists is secretly Hitler. All of the fascists, their job is to get Hitler to be elected Chancellor. That's the game. The fascists know who the fascists are, and the Democrats don't know who the fascists are. In this game, over the course of the game, you pass laws. The laws increase the power that the government has. And the government can use those powers to root out the fascists and keep them from taking power. But if the fascists take power, they now have more powers that they can use to stop democracy. That is what we're seeing now. This game teaches you this and you experience it. I think that games are an incredible tool for doing that kind of thing. Is this a board game or is this a video game? It's a board game. It's helpful because you're you're looking in people's eyes as this is happening to you, as you're doing it, and you're you're experiencing this calculation, thinking like, okay, well, maybe I'm a Democrat, but if the government had a little bit more power to crack down on some of this stuff, maybe it'd shake good for us. Maybe it'd be okay. That is what we're seeing here. The government is taking this power, ostensibly against extremism in general, Antifa, this non-existent boogeyman. And liberals, establishment people, centrists, they can say, well, of course we agree that we don't want these people to have any power and we want them to be locked up and throw away the key. The government has had these powers since the early 90s, really, since the beginnings of the war on terror, the original Al-Qaeda bombings in the Gulfs around the Arabian Peninsula, the first bombing of the World Trade Center in the 1990s, uh, the USS Cole, that's when a lot of these pieces of legislation come from, these anti-terrorist legislations. And we are seeing that coming home, being used against people who, in many cases, were not present, were not present when this occurred, or who were setting off fireworks on the 4th of July. And now the United States is calling it explosives. If you don't think that these powers that the government has are coming for you, then you have fundamentally misunderstood the United States government to such a degree that, like, I don't know what you should be doing at this point. You know?

SPEAKER_01 39:28

Go back to school. For a media outlet to frame this in such a different way than you and I see it. Yeah. I think I'm gonna have to declare a beef. I'm down. Absolutely. They're a little bigger than us, Dr. Craig, as far as podcast goes on the bulwark, but uh, we got beef. Wouldn't quite put it on the level of bad blood just yet, but we're on the way. Beef with the bulwark. Beef is on. We're walking into the prison, and on the first day, we're punching the biggest guy in the mouth to let him know who's in charge. It's you and I. Ooh. This week in Dr. Craig is Fun at Parties, Voltron. Do you know Voltron, Craig? Yes, I do. This holiday weekend, I didn't do anything for the 4th of July, but I did introduce my five-year-old to Voltron and drink a couple of CBD beverages. Sounds like a great force. I ended up watching a lot of Voltron on the Roku channel in my garage with my five-year-old. The old Voltron or the new Voltron? The old Voltron. The one that I was addicted to when I was eight years old. Nice one that I sprinted home from school to watch that cartoon every single day for probably two years of my life. Yeah. This is the first time I've seen it in 40 years. There's a lot of levels to it that I didn't realize were there at the time. When they're not being Voltron, they have to live in a dorm with just each other.

SPEAKER_00 40:46

Oh, I forgot this.

SPEAKER_01 40:47

It's a very fraught environment. I've just become fascinated with the dynamic of the Voltron force.

SPEAKER_00 40:53

It's weird when you go back and look at stuff that you were into when you were a kid and you see and realize there's all sorts of like other business going on here that I was not paying attention to. Thinking about Voltron is just making me think about Mobile Su Gundam. You see Mobosu Gundam? It's kind of like Robotech. It is kind of like Robotech. You know, it's a giant fighting robot, one of the first big anime that made it out of Japan, you know, anime is from the 50s originally. One of the first big animated shows coming out of Japan that made an international splash. It's just about Nazis, it's just about fascism. It's about Earth fighting against a militaristic, hyper-violent, revolutionary society from farther out in the solar system. You know, it's a sci-fi story. And at one point, one of the characters from the evil empire people, they just say, Have you heard about Adolf Hitler, figure from Earth's past? It's just wild the stuff that they just bring up. Point is, go back to those cartoons you watched when you were a kid. Go back to those shows you liked. There's gonna be some business. There's gonna be some weird shit in there. You know, that doesn't mean that it's positive, but it's gonna be in there. You're gonna find it.

SPEAKER_01 42:03

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