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.
•Nick Mortensen & Dr. Craig Johnson•Season 2•Episode 11
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
0:00
|
48:48
Dr. Craig is out this week. Turkish hair surgery. Sitting in for him is Jared Yates Sexton, and he's been staring into this particular abyss a lot longer than I have.
On June 14th, 2016, Jared was a creative writing professor who went to a Trump rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, and started live-tweeting what he saw. Not the speech — the room. The people. What was actually happening in there. It went off like a bomb and it ended his old life. He walked in a fiction writer and walked out a political correspondent, because he saw the man for what he was back when the rest of us still saw a buffoonish reality TV grifter running for president to juice his own brand.
He's the author of The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Making, about how this country builds its boys and what it costs them. American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World But Failed Its People, about the myths we tell ourselves and who those myths were built to serve. And The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis, which traces a straight line from the Great Fire of Rome to QAnon and which — reading it now — predicted damn near everything that's happened since. He co-hosts the Muckrake Podcast and writes a Substack called Dispatches From A Collapsing State, which tells you everything you need to know about where his head's at. On my personal S-tier of autocracy-knowers, he's on it. He might be at the top of it.
We start somewhere I didn't plan for: two guys comparing notes on the jobs that were killing them. Jared explains why he left academia — "you can't keep doing the shit that hurts you" — and I explain why I started this show, which is that my entire goal is to replace "Trump Derangement Syndrome" with "autocratic despair" and everything else is secondary. He says it's accurate. We get into how Dr. Craig got fucked by academic publishing, why a book about keeping your son out of fascism should not be printed in twelve-point type with citations, and why a podcast with no commercials has a pace a podcast with commercials can never have. He hears we started a beef with The Bulwark last week and responds with three words I'm going to have printed on a shirt.
Then the number. Jared rates his autocratic despair an eight and a three, simultaneously — the first guest to break the format — and explains why: he thinks the destabilization we're heading into is the same thing that opens the window for actual change. We get into the rumor that Trump is about to declare Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock illegitimate senators, why that's a genuinely bad signal about whether we'll have free and fair midterms, and why picking that particular fight is a mistake that only makes both men more famous. And we land on the greatest gift these people give us: they cannot shut up. They telegraph everything they're going to do and count on nobody paying attention.
We talk about Graham Platner and the damage done to the gruff leftist sweetheart community — a title Jared claims for himself about four seconds after I say it, and then uses forty minutes later to take apart JD Vance. He explains who actually recruited Platner, why they went looking for what he calls a noble savage, and why they never bothered to vet him, because vetting was never the point. That opens into a real education on deeper politics: what happens when a regular person tries to run for Congress, why the local party in a deep red district would rather lose by forty points than let an outsider try something new, and why Jared walked away from his own 2016 run the moment he saw how the machine actually works. I pitch him my platform — insider trading, announced in real time on a billboard network — and he's more generous about it than it deserves.
We cover his enduring legacy as a meme: the 2017 Don Jr. tweet, what it's like to be tagged in the same joke every single day of your life for a decade, and the genuinely unsettling business of getting slotted into other people's conspiracy theories. The CIA-asset years. The double-agent schemes. The people who showed up at his house and had to be handled by police.
Then the part I've wanted for a long time. Jared grew up as what he calls the prototype of what became Christian nationalism. He describes his grandmother's house — a crucifix in every room — and a literal, furnished Satan. Not a metaphor. An entity that could appear as a human being, and you were expected to grab that cross off the wall and be ready. He explains what it does to a person to be raised on nothing but the Book of Revelation, why constant spiritual warfare trains you to reach for a strongman, and how the divine agent framework — Cyrus, King David — lets a believer look at a man's sins and see proof instead of disqualification. And I finally get my answer to the thing that's bugged me for years: how do people with such a well-articulated vision of the Antichrist look right at Donald Trump and whiff? He also admits the programming never fully clears. There's a part of his brain that noticed the head wound.
He tells me what this work has taken from him, and it's the most honest answer anyone has given on this show: that it has probably shortened his life. Four books in six years, because he believed if he just articulated it correctly, enough people would hear. And he explains where his pattern recognition actually comes from, which is not graduate school — it's an abusive house, and learning to read danger in the sound of a door opening.
We do JD Vance, his personal rival since before either of them mattered, the bizarro to his Superman, a butcher boy who betrayed everyone he ever knew to climb. Jared explains exactly why MSNBC welcomed him into its bosom, why the hick whisperer was such a comfortable story for liberal media, and why the theory that Vance can't win is a cope.
We get his thoughts on James Talarico, and they are not warm. We do my favorite question — favorite B or C tier MAGA celebrity — and his answer is inspired and involves aliens. He explains why that ecosystem isn't benign at all, and how watching its most unhinged corners gives you an eighteen-month preview of Fox News. He tells me how he'd handle a Jubilee, and it's a masterclass: don't argue the content, find the emotion underneath it, ask them to tell you more about the reptilians.
I ask him whether I should own a gun, having never wanted one, and he gives an answer more careful and more human than I was ready for. Then I ask if there's a moment coming when he'd change that answer — and he gives what might be the best thing anyone has said on this program, a reframe built out of the same instinct that taught him not to make dad angry.
We finish on Prairieland, on the organizing work he's doing right now, on the book proposal he's tinkering with, on why he runs every day and hates it, and on what he's looking forward to: the World Cup final, the British Open, a quiet room with a book, and his honest belief that if we win this thing, what's waiting on the other side is a better life for everybody.
Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast that stares directly at fascism and, against all odds, stays fun — the commedia for your particular brand of tragedy.
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.
SPEAKER_00
You're a gruff leftist sweetheart, Jared. I love that. I'm a gruff leftist sweetheart. Nothing to be ashamed of. Graham Platiner. Forget everything else for a second. What sort of damage has he done to the gruff leftist sweetheart community? This is Autocratic Despair, the podcast. I'm Nick Mortensen, a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Each week on the Autocratic Despair Podcast, I stare into the abyss with my friend, Dr. Craig Johnson, a PhD in global fascism, lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of 2025's most important book, How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism. Dr. Craig is out this week, Turkish hairline surgery. Sitting in for Dr. Craig this week is esteemed political analyst and OG Twitter legend Jared Yates Saxton. Jared has been staring into this particular abyss a lot longer than most of us. He shot to prominence in June 2016 when he live tweeted his experiences at a Trump rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. For many, it was our first glance into a Trump rally. The Tweet Storm took on a life of its own, and he gained 20,000 followers in a matter of hours. Jared saw Trump for exactly who he is when the rest of us still saw a buffoonish reality TV grifter running for president to juice his own brand. Since then, he's offered several books that you'll want to put into your Audible queue, including The Man They Wanted Me to Be, Toxic Masculinity in a Crisis of Our Own Making, which is all about how this country builds its boys and what that costs our society. American Rule, how a nation captured the world but failed its people, which chronicles the myths we tell ourselves and who those myths were built to serve. Most recently, 2023's The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis, which traces a straight line from the Great Fire of Rome to QA. Reading it now, the Midnight Kingdom predicted damn near everything that's happened since. From Trump's re-election to mass goon squads summarily executing people in our streets. Jared co-hosts the weekly Muckrake podcast, required listening for anyone who wishes to stay current on the United States' descent into madness. He also writes an indispensable Substack blog called Dispatches from a Collapsing State. Jared's on my personal S tier of autocracy knowers, a short list of people who saw this coming and have been trying to warn us about it ever since. Dr. Craig will be back next week. Until then, please enjoy a candid conversation with Jared Yates Sexton, where we discuss, among other things, the damage Graham Platiner has done to his community, with kicking the tires on running for U.S. Congress in 2018, his legacy as a meme, who his favorite B tier MAGA celebrity is, and his personal rivalry with Vice President J.D. Vance. Jared Yates Sexton, on a scale of one to ten, where would you rate your autocratic despair this week? Man, that's a complicated question.
SPEAKER_01
The way that I look at this thing and the mindset that I bring to it is that we are rapidly approaching a place of destabilization, which is going to open the window for actual good progressive change. So a lot of really bad stuff is taking shape. We're a couple of days, rumors are swirling that Donald Trump is going to announce that John Ossiff and Raphael Warnock are not legitimate senators. That's a problem. That's like a really, really bad problem and a bad signal. But I also think at the same time that an action like that will sort of wake some people up to the need to change things. On a scale of one to 10, I am simultaneously at an eight and a three. It's a little bit of a weird answer, but the way that I approach these things has fundamentally changed.
SPEAKER_00
I looked at that Asoff thing yesterday and I think it's great. I don't think enough people know John Asof's name. And I know that if they did, they would really like the stuff that that guy had to say. So he's going to make him more famous. John Ossof has an opportunity here to make a real name for himself.
SPEAKER_01
He's an incredible communicator. I don't know Asif as a person. I think that he is increasing in terms of visibility and also influence. A lot of members of the Democratic Party aren't willing to say the things that Asif is willing to say right now. I think it also reveals who a person is as they gain that momentum, as they gain that visibility. So I don't know what he would do with it. I don't know what he would do from a position of leadership. But I will say picking a fight with him and Raphael Warnock for that matter is not a good fight to pick, which is going to both elevate both of them in terms of visibility. At the same time, I do think it gives a larger glimpse into whether or not we're going to have free and fair midterms, whether or not we can trust the election system at this point. I think having people become aware of that is advantageous. It takes something hidden behind the scenes onto the larger stage and in the larger discourse, which I think at this point is absolutely necessary.
SPEAKER_00
The fact that we've got 48 hours to prepare for it, to get advanced notice of misinformation and disinformation, it nullifies it. I don't think this is going to go the way that Trump thinks it's going to go.
SPEAKER_01
We're incredibly lucky for a variety of reasons. One is that Donald Trump is incompetent and incapable of staying on message. On top of that, him and the fascist tech oligarchs and basically everybody who's trying to create all these problems, they can't shut up. They literally can't shut up. One leak after another, they telegraph what they're going to do. From an organizing strategist standpoint, which is where I spend a lot of my time. It's really handy. If you want to know what they're going to do, they will tell you what they're going to do and they expect people to not pay attention. That type of advance warning, it's a real advantage.
SPEAKER_00
You're a gruff leftist sweetheart, Jared. I love that. I'm a gruff leftist sweetheart. Nothing to be ashamed of. Graham Platner, forget everything else for a second. What sort of damage has he done to the gruff leftist sweetheart community?
SPEAKER_01
Um, first of all, when it comes to Platner, I never trusted this guy in the first place for a variety of different reasons. So I never put my political capital in it. I never put my emotions in it. I never got behind this thing. There were obviously red flags from the beginning. For me, it doesn't do much except for it exposes something that I think we all have to be aware of. I think our politics has to move towards the left. It has to happen. Material conditions say that we have to go in a leftist direction. We can't expect everybody who takes a position that we support or that we're all for that they're going to be people of character, they're going to mean what they say, they're going to be good leaders. I think it's going to hurt for some people to have somebody that they believed in like that and then have it sort of pulled away. They're going to move towards conspiratorial thinking. There's a lot of that developing around this stuff, which is worrisome for a variety of reasons. But I think also it's kind of a good reminder for people who really actually do want change. You're going to have wins and you're going to have losses. You're going to have things that feel really good and are really encouraging, and you're going to have moments that feel like a punch in the gut. I'm not sure what the effect is going to be in the long term, but it's never good when you have a person, first of all, being accused of what Graham Platner got accused of. It also does a little bit of damage, I think, with some people in terms of what is possible and whether or not to get their hopes up or not.
SPEAKER_00
I'm worried that some pretty powerful people invited a sexual predator into what's supposed to be a safe space. Platner's never been convicted of anything. That's important to say. I just do worry. Everybody that's like him is going to get a side eye, is going to be less trustworthy. Those gruff leftist sweethearts are a big part of this DSA thing. The thing about those guys is they've all got records to listen to. They don't want to put up with a bunch of hassle, and they certainly don't want to labor under the suspicion of being a possible sexual predator. I worry that those guys are going to sort of lose their enthusiasm.
SPEAKER_01
There's a couple of things happening there. The people who actually recruited Platinum They're acting like they didn't know. This was a thing that caused me concern from the very beginning. I think what needs to happen in this country is that we need regular people to get involved in politics. And I don't just mean running for office. I mean organizing their communities, changing the way that they live. Eventually, we're going to have to engage in collective action. Strikes, walkouts, whatever it is, protests. The people who came in and grabbed him were from a very, very wealthy, powerful background. They went looking, for lack of a better term, like sort of a noble savage. They wanted to find a gruff working class dude who could go out and talk to working class voters. They didn't care who he was. They didn't care his background, the fact that he came from affluence and privilege and wealth. If you actually look at Graham Platiner's background, like this is a person who came from a very notable and wealthy family. They weren't interested in looking at that. They weren't interested in vetting him. They were more interested in finding somebody who could fit the role that they wanted. We have to be careful where these things come from. We have to look at deeper politics, why certain people do certain things. It's not just personality contests or popularity contests. We have an entire population of people who might not understand deeper politics. They might not understand the way politics actually takes place. All they see is the ugliness of national politics. And not only do they feel like they couldn't possibly deal with the ugliness of national politics, but on top of that, all of the incentives, it's it's prohibitive against normal people going into politics. I had a moment in 2016, I thought about running for Congress, dipped my toe into it. And the moment that I saw what it was like and how it worked and who controlled it, I was like, I want nothing to do with this.
SPEAKER_00
Tell me about that a little bit because I'm thinking about running for Congress too. My office is right across the street from our congressman's office. He's a terrible congressman. I have access to a large digital billboard network. I would run strictly on the platform that I will not only trade on inside information, but I will announce the trades on this billboard network in real time as it happens. I think that that might be something that breaks through to people.
SPEAKER_01
That is an interesting strategy. I think there's like a lot of outside the box things, which by the way, if you did something like that, you would actually be exposing the incentive network at the heart of this type of politics and power. The other side of this, if you are an outsider, the way that this works is, and I'm trying to think about how to talk about this without getting too deep in the weeds with it, but deeper politics are important. If you decide that you want to run for Congress, it's not just putting your name on a ballot. Because we have a duopolistic system, you have to go interface with one of the two major parties. And what you'll actually find is that even in the most red district in the country, the Democratic Party is going to have its own machine. Most of these commissioners and directors at the county level, district level, they're going to have worked there for a long time. They're going to have their own associations. And in most of these places, let's say it's a deep, deep red district, most of them are going to have a lot of friends who are like lawyers, business owners, and they just churn around and like they're like, well, I guess it's my turn to run, right? And then they go out and they get beat by 40 points, 30 points, they get destroyed. And a large part of the problem, it isn't just becoming a US Senate candidate where you have to take on the National Democratic Party, which is its own machine. We've certainly seen it close ranks against everybody from Bernie Sanders to Zoran Mamdani and members of the squad, you know, are just prevalent examples. Even at a local level, with a party that doesn't win elections, it's almost impossible to get the nomination because they already have their little group picked out with what finances they have, and they're fine losing because it's more of an honor to be nominated or it helps your business. The other aspect of it is that maybe it'll raise some money in terms of the local people who are going to give to the party. So it's not even about running, it's much more about having these machines that are concentrations of power. And that's prohibitive to the normal person, particularly a normal person. And you know, it's funny, the idea of going to a local Democratic Party and giving them your idea, immediately they would be like, this meeting's over. They wouldn't want somebody to do something that was outside of the box that would expose the larger grift, which trickles down. It's a very complicated system that is completely programmed and incentivized towards keeping people from being able to come in and do different things. Is that what you experienced? What I experienced, let me think about how to talk about this. Back in 2016, I had this weird moment where I went super viral and I became this political commentator.
SPEAKER_00
I remember that happening in real time. You live tweeted a Trump route. Some Cub Scout kid got the shit beat out of him right next to you.
SPEAKER_01
Man, he got pulled around by his family. It was so ugly and awful. I got thrown into the deep end of the pool, and it's been a journey in the last decade plus. I had to educate myself, I had to relearn everything. But at that point, I had gained enough of a platform that back in 2016, I wasn't going to raise money going to like democratic pancake dinners. I was going to raise national money. I was going to be able to say, I want to go in, I want to do things differently. And it would have been a crowdsourcing from nationally. People would have been like, this is a candidate over here that I care about. But at that point, that small machine that I was talking about, it would almost be like going back and talking to a Neanderthal and being like, hey, let's talk about a space station. Because it's so far outside of the realm of what they did and what they would have done. It became very clear very quickly, if I would have ran, I would have been defeated by the exact same margins that every candidate had been defeated before because they weren't interested in trying something different. They were more interested in protecting what they already had. It was like a generational problem. It was an institutional sclerotic problem. And at that point, I'm already being put in danger regularly because of my reportage and my commentary. I'm not going to go down this road and also fight this thing the entire way. I'm not going to put myself in that position. And at that point, I was just like, I can do more good over here away from that.
SPEAKER_00
I didn't realize that you are a part of the fundamental lore of Twitter.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
Back in 2017, when Donald Trump Jr. finally just came out with the fact that he'd been meeting with the Russians. You're the one that was trying to break that story for months, but you couldn't get the smoking gun. And you had the great, he just tweeted it out. I didn't realize that was you. Yeah. I knew of you. I didn't realize that was you. Yeah. I thought that was coming out of the New York Times. Were you writing for the New York Times, or is it Were you writing a parallel?
SPEAKER_01
No, what had happened at that point? What a weird thing that is to think about. I will say, just on an outside note, it's weird to be a meme. Yeah, it's a very strange place to be, which is not something that I prepared for or looked for. And it's been a fundamentally um strange thing to have had something like that take off the way that it did. At that point, there were a bunch of citizen journalists who were trying to figure out everything that was going on around the Trump campaign. My particular focus is I was talking for years with people about these connections and these sort of overlaps. My idea of what happened with Russia in general and Trump has sort of not changed, but I think it's become more nuanced. I was talking to people constantly on background, trying to piece things together. The fact that Trump Jr. just came out with it the way that he did, I was so shocked because I knew so many people who had been working their asses off trying to figure out what was going on. That was one of the weirdest days of my life. I've gotten what I call super viral three or four times. I cannot explain to you how strange and surreal it knocks you off your feet for a little while. That was a very strange time.
SPEAKER_00
It's one of the more respected memes, though. Like it's it doesn't make you look like an asshole or something like that. More like they're laughing with you rather than laughing at you.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think that's the thing about it. It was very strange at the time because over the years, like there's not a day that goes by where someone doesn't tag me with it. Every day of my life, I am tagged in one of these things. And by the way, it's very funny. When it's, you know, it's something like the US has an explosive diarrhea outbreak. And then they throw it on there. I'm like, yeah, absolutely, go for it. But it was this also very strange thing, too, at the time. When it happened, there were multiple issues here. One is that a lot of mainstream corporate journalists who don't appreciate people who didn't go through the ranks, they were just like, oh, he's trying to pretend that he was so close to cracking the case. And it's like, no, this was something that I did autistically in the background. The other weird thing about this, Nick, is that going viral slotted me into multiple conspiracy theories. I became a main figure in a lot of these things. For a while, I was a CIA asset. I was um the woman at the heart of that. Natalia Velenitskaya? Velenitskaya. There was another one where I was running around the country with her running double and triple agent schemes. There were people who showed up at my house who had secret information that I had to call the cops on. Oh man. It's in good fun that I see it now, but in 2017, when that took place, it got so strange so quickly and in so many different ways. I look back on that and it's like a different person dealt with that. That's how surreal the thing was.
SPEAKER_00
You had a book a couple years ago called The Mignite Kingdom that by way of introduction, you sort of went into your upbringing as a fundamentalist Christian.
SPEAKER_01
When did you leave? The deconstruction of my evangelical faith was really strange. When you're of a young age and when you grow up within it, I was basically in the prototype of what's now become Christian nationalism. It's so omnipresent that you almost feel like you have to stay in it even as you're moving away from it. I would say that I effectively left the faith probably when I was 13 or 14. I didn't really deconstruct the thing until I was probably 18 or 19.
SPEAKER_00
In the book, you talk about how your grandmother had a belief in a real Satan. Yep. I feel a little stupid asking about this. Her real Satan, was that like a human being, Louis Cypher and Angel Hart with long fingernails peeling an egg? Or did she actually have like a little red guy with cloved hoofs and a pitchfork?
SPEAKER_01
I'm so glad you brought this up because it's such a weird period of my life now looking back on it. It's funny because when the Trump thing took off and Christian nationalism took place, there were a lot of people that were like, How are the Christians behind this? Like, what are they doing? I think a lot of people who are Christian or religious sometimes they see it as they go do something on a Sunday. Maybe they have a potluck or they have like this membership in this community. My experience was a lot more malevolent feeling. We were taught, and this is again the basis of Christian nationalism, that Satan and demons were everywhere. When you went out in the world, there were conspiracies that were being carried out. The movies, the TV shows that got released, what politicians would say they could be possessed by demons. It could be a giant conspiracy against Christendom. And that extended to real life if you had impure thoughts, or if you were feeling a certain way, that could very easily be a demon trying to persuade you to do things. And I don't mean there's evil in the world. And that extended to the idea of Satan, who I was told many times, Satan can appear as human beings, but that you might very well find yourself in a position. So, like in my grandmother's house, every room had a crucifix in it. You were taught that if the literal biblical Satan showed up, you needed to be prepared to expel the grab that cross off the wall and grab that cross and invoke Jesus Christ and get rid of him. The reason I'm talking about this the way that I am is because this isn't something that you grow up with. If you literally believe that everything has a demonic tint to it, if demonic evil is around every corner, if all culture and politics could potentially be capital E evil, or the idea that Satan could be around any corner and you might have to do spiritual warfare, that affects how you show up politically because you're in a constant crisis. You're being discriminated against, you're being persecuted. Therefore, you need to really surround yourself with quote unquote strong leaders who will do what needs to be done, which is, of course, why they ended up supporting Donald Trump, is because they saw him as a divine agent. And a divine agent, much like um Cyrus. The best biblical example would be King David. Okay. And King David did awful things, you know, murdering God knows how many people, killing his best friends so he could get with his wife. But David was seen as this vessel of God, an imperfect person who would do what God wanted him to do in order to protect the people of the faith. Really, that mindset, that idea that there's fear everywhere, it then lends itself towards throwing your weight behind authoritarians.
SPEAKER_00
I had an idea that that was true, but I I just I have such a well articulated vision of Satan. They just whiffed on Trump. There was never any like, hey, is this guy maybe Satan?
SPEAKER_01
Well, not just Satan. Okay, I'm glad we're talking about this because it feels like a place I can do it. So I was raised up in the evangelical faith. I was basically taught, because you know, it's like some people go to church and they'll talk about like Jonah and the whale. No, we only talked about the book of Revelation. Every week it was, we're nearing the apocalypse. We need to be prepared for a final apocalyptic battle. One of the things you were taught constantly was how to identify the Antichrist. There's a funny thing that happens where I'm not evangelical anymore. I've left that faith, but you still have some of that programming in your brain because you were raised in it. You look at Donald Trump, who surrounds himself with these sacrilegious statues. They're constantly worshiping him, you know, as a vessel of God. On top of that, within the Book of Revelation, the Antichrist suffers a head wound but survives. He got shot in the ear and he survived. Then there's everything that's going on with Israel and Iran. There's something in the back of your brain that's like, oh, this idea of the Antichrist is being manifested. You know what I mean? Like all of the sort of signs and symbols of that are sort of being brought in. I think there's an entire, you know, psychological worldview reason why that happens. But yeah, they don't see it because it's so fundamental to their belief that they have then thrown their personalities in this and their worldviews, I think, are so intertwined with.
SPEAKER_00
You've been staring into the abyss for a long time. Yep. What's it taken from you?
SPEAKER_01
What have you allowed it to have that you shouldn't have? Oh man, that's a great question. I'll be honest and I'll be vulnerable. My life will have been shortened. The work that I've done and sort of the focusing on it. Now I have way more gray in my beard than I did when I started all of this. Health-wise, it's been a struggle because I had to learn how to juggle paying attention to this, diagnosing it, and fighting against it. Sometimes I'm good at it in terms of striking a balance. Sometimes it wears me the hell out. It's hurt me. It's been a job. I had a time where, you know, I sort of came on the national political scene in 2016. I want to say from 2017 to 2023, I published four books. That's really quick. The political books I've written, I felt like I was racing against time. I felt like the more that I came to understand what was going on, the more that I realized how dire the circumstances were. And if we got to the crisis, if we didn't move paths, if we didn't change things, we were going to reach a point of real, real crisis. For a while, I worked my ass off. If I just tell enough people, if I just articulate it the right way, if I just get the word out and do this, which is not healthy, I've had to learn that that's not the way to sort of approach it. That took a toll on me. It really did, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally. And it's something that I've had to work on because everybody experiences the rise of authoritarianism and fascism, which I believe is a collective breakdown. I think what we're dealing with right now, not just on the right wing, but all across the political and cultural spectrum, is a breakdown. As you're experiencing this, having to navigate it and sort of wrap your head around it and your essence around it, you have to learn how to live as healthily as humanly possible. And that was a lesson that it took me a long time to get to.
SPEAKER_00
I read The Midnight's Kingdom in 2023 when it came out. I wanted to refresh myself. So I listened to the epigraph. You pretty much predicted everything that's happening right now in 2023. Down to uh killing people on the street on a regular basis. This is definitely gonna happen.
SPEAKER_01
How did you know it? I'm gonna start somewhere that doesn't seem like I should start. I grew up in an extremely dysfunctional background. I grew up in like these abusive households. One of the things that I had to learn was pattern recognition. If anybody listening ever grew up in like an abusive household, you learn to know whether or not you're in danger based on how the door opens. The sound a front door opens as someone comes home from work or a pattern of voice. I developed through that the ability to look for all of these signs and sort of extrapolate meaning out of them. And then when I sort of became a figure on the national scene, I realized I had had a really good education. I had learned conventional history, I had learned conventional politics. They didn't explain what had happened. They gave a little bit of the story, but I needed to really dive in and relearn everything that I knew. Looking through history and by looking through sources, experts and philosophers, and reading the stuff that I didn't even know existed, these are patterns. They're cycles. All of the elements that are taking place right now, we've seen them in different circumstances before. Right now, this modern time in America, it looks a lot like about six different eras in America all smashed together. The cycle, the political cycle, including the decline of America, growing precarity, income inequality, growing technology, I just got to the point where I could extrapolate both historical lessons, also just sort of see the signs. Most people aren't taught how to. Most people aren't exposed to a lot of that knowledge. Once you see it, it starts to make a lot more sense if you're not deluding yourself by believing it's just going to fix itself. If you understand that we're in this cycle, you can start to see the patterns emerge. I think that's how I was able to do it.
SPEAKER_00
What is your level of antipathy towards JD Vance? Because he is pretending to be exactly who you are. He's totally still on your flow, Garrett 8 Sexton. We allowed to curse here? Absolutely. Fuck JD Vance.
SPEAKER_01
A quick aside, JD Vance and I, again, this conversation is bringing up a lot of the surreal feelings around all of this. JD Vance and I have been rivals for a long time. We've gone rounds, JD and I have. We've been compared to each other multiple times. In a lot of ways, he feels like the bizarro to my Superman. I've hated JD Vance since I first read Hillbilly Elogy. Nick, it was very strange because I started reading it. I was told by everybody, you gotta read this. I think you and JD have a lot in common. And I'm reading and I'm like, oh, we have a lot in common. And then all of a sudden it was like the road diverged. He started blaming his family, he started blaming his community. He was doing it to make friends with powerful people and wealthy people. He is a despicable motherfucker. I describe him constantly as a butcher boy. He betrayed everybody he's ever known multiple times in order to make money and climb up a ladder. The fact that he became the vice president of the United States of America, this personal rival of mine, was one of the most surreal feelings imaginable. But I'm also glad that people are getting to see who he actually is. He's an incredibly evil, dangerous human being.
SPEAKER_00
So you knew that motherfucker was full of shit.
SPEAKER_01
From the beginning. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
Very few people knew he was full of shit from the beginning.
SPEAKER_01
And here's the reason why. What was it? The left gruff left sweetheart? Is that gruff leftist sweethearts, yes. There's a real grift in that. The joke I used to make was like the people who would go out in car hearts just be like, my dad was a hardworking guy. Meanwhile, the dad owned everything in a town. And they went to Yale, like JD did. What became clear very quickly was that he was being welcomed into liberal bastions. He was a regular guest on MSNBC. The reason why MSNBC and Liberal Bastions welcomed him was because he was sort of their hick whisperer. He was the guy who could come on and explain what was happening in rural white America with MAGA. The message that he had is the same message that he's still currently peddling, which is they're stupid, they're ignorant, they deserve everything that happens to them. To the liberal media was a real welcome message, which is these people in poor places, and don't get me wrong, some some deserve what has happened and some have done very, very bad things. But so many of those people have been victims of circumstances that have nothing to do with them. And I'm not even talking about just people who voted for Donald Trump. I'm talking about in general. He was welcomed into the bosom of liberal media because he made them feel better about what was going on. It kept them from having to have a conversation about the material conditions that have created this crisis. And so very, very quickly, as he did this, it was so obvious he was at his heart a conservative right-wing fanatic, but that he was peddling a story that was being welcomed by people who weren't going to learn the lessons that needed to be learned. And he was more than happy to do if he made a fortune and he's since become the vice president of the United States.
SPEAKER_00
There's some people that think that he'll be running for president. That has to be an anxiety dream that you have around a regular basis, right? It's like a slow-motion car crash happening in real time, where he becomes much more powerful than he is right now.
SPEAKER_01
I think most people make themselves feel better by saying Donald Trump has a very special charisma which has allowed him to do what he does. J.D. Vance is not as likable, and they'll have a hard time finding someone who will replace Trump. What's happening right now does not support that theory. I think that's a little bit of a coping mindset. I understand where it comes from because my God, I don't want someone like J.D. Vance to hold actual power. What's actually been occurring is that as Donald Trump has lost support from certain MAGA people, some people think they're like, oh, they'll just become Democrats. That's not what's going to happen. They're being groomed towards far right, more fascist politics. You know, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, to name a couple, they've already created a permission structure to see Donald Trump as a moderate betraying politician. The Iran war and the Epstein files and all that, the idea at this point is that he betrayed true patriots because he had an allegiance and he was manipulated by Jewish people, right? The fact that J.D. Vance is the vector between the far-right fascist movement and also the tech oligarchs who have just groomed him. I think that's really scary. But there's also people are like, well, people aren't going to vote for him. Well, we don't know that we're going to have free and fair elections. Whether or not somebody gets enough votes or is popular enough, we're reaching the point where that's not as important. I think there is a very real possibility that he will become president. I don't know if he's going to be the leader of the far-right fascist movement. There are reasons to believe he would be and wouldn't be. I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that this asshole will ascend to more power.
SPEAKER_00
Have you thought about James Talrico? If so, what are your thoughts?
SPEAKER_01
My general rule with politicians is that I don't trust them. Anyone at this point who is asking for power in this environment, I automatically am skeptical of. That's never done me wrong. I don't like his campaign. I don't like the decisions that he has made in terms of how to engage with all of the rhetoric, who he is, how he's going to participate. I think he has a possibility of winning. But at the same time, I watch the things he says. I think he's thrown gay and trans people under the bus. That is always a real tell for me. If you do not step up for vulnerable communities at this point, you have failed an ethical and moral test. I don't like that. I think he has a possibility of being elected, but I don't trust him.
SPEAKER_00
If he wins in Texas, you think he's going to run for presidency?
SPEAKER_01
I don't know that he has that. Uh the field going into 2028, I think, is starting to solidify in a way that keeps him on the outside. There are a lot of Democrats who have the exact same, not just credentials, but sort of ideology and sort of um platform. And I think the moderate centrist neoliberal Democrat, I think that there are so many representatives of that ideology at this point, the major heavyweights would probably keep him out of it.
SPEAKER_00
Do you have a favorite B or C tier MAGA celebrity?
SPEAKER_01
Boy, do I. I could talk about this for way too long. I keep track of this shit way too closely because there's a weirdness to it, you know? My leaderboard is always moving around. My current favorite B or C list manga celebrity, he's skyrocketing up the leaderboard, is Dr. Phil. This is like one of those things, a little small thing will happen. Laura Loomer's on there. Loomer is such a psychological mess. Every time that Loomer says something, it is just wild and revealing. But my current thing with Dr. Phil is that this TV host who has said so many dumb things. I don't know if you remember this, Nick. He was out with ice during the initial raids. I do remember that. He was out there like filming this stuff. Dr. Phil, his current thing, he claims that he was given exclusive access to UFO and UAP files. And so this TV host is all over social media right now, being like, here's what I'm learning about aliens, and you wouldn't believe the things that I'm learning. That for me right now is scratching a very particular itch. There's no other way to put it. This is a collection of freaks, just some of the most unstable, unhinged human beings. Semi Pillow guy was wonderful. Mike Lindell was a lot of fun for a very long time. Currently, yeah, Dr. Phil's scratching in an itch for me.
SPEAKER_00
He's not even on my radar right now.
SPEAKER_01
The UFO Dr. Phil stuff has really been doing it for me lately.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I gotta look into this. My favorites for a while has been Forgiato Blow, the uh rapid response rapper. And I'm thinking about moving over to Anthony Constantino, the sticker mule guy that decided to put a statue up towards Trump and now is the front runner for an actual US Congress seat.
SPEAKER_01
And that's the other thing, is their candidates are already just by the way, I don't know how if you had this, but it was like I I didn't know that Herschel Walker was an ambassador. He showed up not too long ago, did this unhinged video. It's just this weird constellation of grifter and unwell people, and the way that their sort of unhealthiness emerges within the grift. I find the whole ecosystem endlessly fascinating.
SPEAKER_00
You find yourself paying more attention to that than you should at times. I do. I've it's like something I indulge myself in from time to time because I know I can't look away from this, so I try to look at the more benign aspects of it.
SPEAKER_01
I actually don't think it's benign. I actually think, and and this is part of my my thing, is that I can express to you how much information I've gotten by watching and listening and observing some of the most unhinged subcultures of this movement. I discovered a few years back, like when Tucker Carlson came out that he had writers who were far-right groipers on his Fox show. I had sort of clocked that because I had been paying attention to far right sub-communities. Once you listen to it, you start hearing like weird things. You'll watch Fox News to study Republican talking points, and you're like, oh, that's so far outside of QAnon. And now it's being brought into the main thing. Going back to what you said about knowing what Trump is going to talk about before he does it. If you actually pay attention to these people, you get incredible psychological insight, but you also get previews of where things are going. Like what it is that is eventually going to manifest in the next like weird cycle with these people.
SPEAKER_00
Would you ever do one of those jubilees? In talking to you, I would just love to see you on one of those jubilees because you just stand up and smack the shit out of people, I think.
SPEAKER_01
I would think about doing something like that. I can talk to anybody. Even if they're bringing the weirdest, dumbest shit to me, I want to know more about what they think. One of my great prides, and this is a lot of what I do in organizing work, is teaching people to talk to people that they are diametrically politically opposed to. The secret is not to engage with what it is that they're saying, but what the emotion is underneath it. If you listen to people for a while, they give everything away. Yeah. Particularly on the right wing, because they're not even aware of why they think what they think. They're driven by a lot of unconscious anxieties and neuroses. They are only able to communicate via talking points that they've been given by MAGA leaders and culture leaders and all of that. My episode of Jubilee, if I went on it, would be strange. If someone gets in your face and they're like, the earth is flat, you can't argue with them, no, it's observable, it's not flat. There's nothing there. Better to find out why it matters to them that the earth is flat. What is the impetus for it? Because they don't know why. Okay. They've been unconsciously drugged into a belief they themselves don't understand. And in truth, if someone believes something like that, it's because they distrust authority, they have failed to enter into a certain sector of society or to achieve a certain thing. They feel like they have secret knowledge. They know something that most people don't. So it's giving them sort of a psychological push. If I were to go on Jubilee, I think I would spend a lot of time just being like, tell me more. Tell me about these reptilians. Yeah, I want to know about these reptilians. Where are they from? Then I would go after it. Then it would be a different conversation.
SPEAKER_00
I've never owned a gun. I've never wanted to own a gun. If I had a gun, I wouldn't store it in my house or any place other than a locker at a shooting club. Should I own a gun? How do I make that decision?
SPEAKER_01
I'm a gun owner, never bought a gun, inherited all my guns. For me, it was just a quick aside. It was like when my father died, all of a sudden it was like, do you want these guns? And it was like, I I got all of them, you know. I don't want to, I don't want an arsenal, you know. I I was raised in an environment with guns. It's been a cultural thing. So for me, I basically have guns because I could never really throw away anything that was my dad's after he died. It has a sentimental value. But then on top of it, I live many years being stalked and harassed and threatened by neo-Nazis. It came in handy on a couple of occasions. I think everybody has to answer that question for themselves. And I think it begins with the answer of why. But I also do know that this is an increasingly dangerous time. I do know that for some people it gifts them, I would argue sometimes it's the power of control, sometimes it's the illusion of control. Right. So I think anybody who has to answer that question, they have to begin with asking themselves why. And I think once you're able to come to sort of an answer about that, I can't prescribe it. I'm not one of those people who's like, every leftist needs to be out on the gun range yesterday. I can't do that. I think that's something that everybody sort of has to sew with.
SPEAKER_00
Do you think there's going to come a moment where you'll be suggesting otherwise? Could something happen where you would just go, you know what I said about guns before? I I don't take that back. I think we're here.
SPEAKER_01
This is a good question, especially in these times. I have to be careful about how I talk about it. I'll answer that question by answering a different question, which is when we looked up months ago, ICE was kidnapping children. ICE was kidnapping members of the community when they were shooting people in the street. Those communities were betrayed by their local representatives, they were betrayed by their governors, they were betrayed by the Democratic Party. I would hear so many liberal commentators getting on and being like, if we lay low, keep things quiet, and we don't provoke them, and I'm sure you've heard this. People are like, Trump just wants to invoke the insurrection act, so we can't give him what he wants. That anxiety to me is very much an enabling thing. And again, I mentioned to grow up in like abusive households. Don't upset dad. Don't make dad mad. If we can just lay low, everything will be fine, the storm will pass. I made the argument, and we have to be very careful with it because of the way that all this stuff works and you know, sort of the restrictions of it. I made the argument and was like, these ICE guys, they are criminals who are invading our neighborhood. And if criminals invaded your neighborhood and were getting ready to steal your neighbor's child, you would try and stop them. Now that's not to say to grab a gun and do something in that way. It's more of we have to reframe the way that we approach this. If you actually study the rise of fascism, it wasn't voting against fascists. Most communities, when the fascists would show up, they would go outside and they would beat the shit out of them so they'd leave the neighborhood. I think that we need to wrap our heads around the fact that this is an extremely dangerous kinetic situation, which means that a lot of our ideas, a lot of our framings, and a lot of our definitions change from time to time.
SPEAKER_00
Prairie Land. Do you think about it? Have you paid much attention to it? Have you given it much thought?
SPEAKER_01
One of the things that needs to happen, first of all, we need to give up on the idea that we're going to vote our way out of it. Democracy's most basic participation is voting. Things go way beyond that. I think that we need to become much, much more inventive, particularly as voting institutions are corrupted, controlled, subverted, and perverted. Stuff like that, I think, is inventive. And I think we also need to look at Decolonization struggles around the world. How have other countries dealt with colonizing violence? And what you find in that is a lot of stuff that isn't present in our current environment, we haven't thought of, and we haven't felt like we've needed to. So I think innovation in terms of protest and also trying to ward off, you know, a secret murderous police. I I think that we need to start coming up with other things.
SPEAKER_00
What are you working on right now?
SPEAKER_01
It's a pretty constant stream trying to send out educational articles to let people know what's going on, to reframe discourse and conversations. I'm working with a nonprofit on multiple organizing projects to try and organize at a local level and then a regional level and go from there and to challenge sort of the status quo. I'm tinkering around with a book proposal. I think it's time to get back to it. I feel good about it. I think my thinking and conception of what's going on and also the environment, the way it's moving, I think it's time to put something out there that sort of reframes things.
SPEAKER_00
Do you have any hobbies that you use to get away from all this stuff? That's less of an interview question, more just a concern, Jerry.
SPEAKER_01
I've had to learn fascism and authoritarianism, it's constant political, cultural, and economic abuse. While all of this is going on, you have to find time for yourself. Because it's not enough to be against something. You have to be for something. You have to harvest joy wherever you can find it. That way you can weather these assaults. I do all kinds of things. I run every single day. It's the worst part of my day. I do some metal work, I play golf, tinker around with all kinds of different things. I play music, I write fiction, get back to that every now and then. So yeah, I I I mess around with all kinds of things.
SPEAKER_00
What are you looking forward to?
SPEAKER_01
Um, you know, I again you have to answer that on a couple things. Like, we're recording this on July 14th. I'm looking forward to the World Cup final. I'm looking forward to the British Open that's gonna take place this weekend. After we do this interview, I'm looking forward to going into a quiet room and reading a book for a few minutes. And on top of that, politically, I think things are changing. I think the momentum is there. I think even people who aren't aware of it or unconsciously getting prepared for a giant change. I think we live in an extremely dangerous time. And I think it's really frightening. I think there's going to be a lot of tragedy. I think there's going to be a lot of pain, a lot of suffering. What happens on the other side of this if we win this battle, and I do think that we will, I think is going to be a better life for everybody.
SPEAKER_00
Stare into the abyss with friends, the Autocratic Despair Podcast with Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson. And don't forget Dr. Craig's other podcast, 15 Minutes of Fascism, available wherever you get your podcast.
