Autocratic Despair: The Podcast
Stare into the abyss of the United States' descent into Authoritarianism with a truly funny comedian from Green Bay, WI and a very serious PHD in Global Fascism Studies from Cal-Berkeley.
Very Funny. Very Serious.
Autocratic Despair: The Podcast
Hunter Biden & Nick Fuentes Walk Into a Hotel Room
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
This week's episode opens with an unusual reading on the despair scale: Dr. Craig is mellow, down to four, buoyed — improbably — by the conclusion of the World Cup & whatever fleeting sense of global togetherness a tournament can still produce. Nick walked into his office at a solid eight & then something pulled him down to a five. Not good news. Just something so perfect, so stupid, so pure that it functioned as medicine.
Steve Scalise went on CNBC in the morning — full suit, two flags behind him, entirely put together — to sell the SAVE Act's voter ID provision. And he looked into the camera and said, "For God's sakes, you can't get pasta at the Olive Garden without a picture ID."
What follows is the show at its best: a genuinely delighted deconstruction of why that sentence exists. The striking thing isn't that Scalise said something dumb. It's that after all these years, the movement pushing mandatory voter ID has never developed a decent analogy for it. There's no go-to line, no talking point they all reach for. They just let people improv, and the improv has become a competition — each guy taking the same setup and trying to top the last guy with a dumber comparison. Nick's diagnosis: it's their version of The Aristocrats. Same premise every time, and the whole game is how grotesque you can make the ending. It doubles as an object lesson in how bad the sales pitch for this stuff actually is.
Then the episode's main event, structured as a deliberate act of inoculation. Before the takes roll in, Nick hands the audience a lens.
Hunter Biden and Nick Fuentes sat down together in a Philadelphia hotel room for a filmed interview brokered by Andrew Callaghan of Channel 5. It airs at the end of the month. And the only thing anybody's reporting is the tease: they nearly came to blows, and Callaghan had to physically get between them. That's the story hitting every aggregator, TMZ-style, and it is — Nick argues — precisely the wrong thing to be looking at.
So the segment draws all three men correctly. Hunter as the ne'er-do-well son who's spent a decade as the media's punching bag and is now, unmistakably, monetizing his own notoriety — back on Twitter after ten years, on Gavin Newsom's podcast, shilling crypto, cultivating a fuck-up's credibility that gets a charming man chance after chance. Callaghan as the All Gas No Brakes gonzo star whose career detonated in 2023 over multiple sexual misconduct allegations, and who has rebranded as a Serious Interviewer whose comeback pitch is that the mainstream media wants us divided and he'll talk to anyone — which makes rehabilitating America's leading Nazi his return vehicle.
And Dr. Craig draws Fuentes, which is a service to anyone who's only seen him described as a "far-right podcaster." Craig's version: the most successful openly fascist influencer in the United States, period. A hyper-conservative Catholic, a racist, a misogynist, an apologist for slavery, running a show designed to look like a late-night program while what he's actually doing is talking to your son about fascism. Craig's advice is unambiguous and repeated: never, ever talk to this man. He's genuinely skilled at making any conversation his own, and you will not get one over on him.
Fuentes isn't talking to liberals. He's talking to young men already inside the right-wing world, and his problem is that Trump is the ceiling — the respectable, president-shaped container for all their anger, and as far as most of them are willing to go. So the move is to discredit the ceiling. Convince a disillusioned kid that Trump was soft, captured, a traitor to the real believers, and that kid's disappointment doesn't send him leftward. It sends him hunting for something more hardcore — and Fuentes has spent a year positioning himself as the only guy who told the truth. It's a permission structure: handholds that make an unthinkable position feel like common sense, one deniable step at a time. Craig extends it with the part that makes it work — the 18-to-25 cohort whose entire political consciousness has been Trump, watching the problems get worse, who can conclude either that Trump was stymied by a shadowy conspiracy or that Trump betrayed them. Both roads lead to Fuentes. He gets them coming and going.
Which brings the segment back to the hotel room and the actual transaction. Fuentes is radioactive, and a permission structure only works if the man running it looks legitimate — so he needs proximity to normalcy, and the most normalcy-conferring object you could seat across from him is a president's son. Remember: Fuentes reached out. He went shopping for legitimacy and Channel 5 sold it to him. Hunter's buying edgy relevance; Callaghan's buying his way back into the game. And the near-fistfight is the wrapper that gets the whole thing into your feed. The proof is in the marketing: Channel 5's own spokesperson promised audiences will be "shocked" by Fuentes's "evolving and changing views," and more shocked still by where the three find common ground. That's not a press release. That's a trailer for a redemption arc, running before a single frame has aired.
Then Dr. Craig Is Fun at Parties, where the object this week is the wave — the thing you do at a ballgame — and Craig delivers a twofer. First, the wave as mass spectacle: the Nazis' obsession with enormous stadiums, with Nuremberg, with Riefenstahl and Triumph of the Will, with art that can only be experienced as a mass action where you are one interchangeable part of something huge. Second, and better: the German film Die Welle — The Wave — in which a punk-rock history teacher, stuck teaching autocracy instead of the anarchy unit he wanted, lets his bored students experience a movement instead of reading about one. It starts with standing when he enters. Then a salute. The kids invent a gesture that looks like a wave. And what begins as belonging — structure for the struggling, a place for the bullied — ends the way these things end. It's a story about how ordinary people, through completely ordinary daily life, find themselves inside a fascist movement.
The episode closes on the piece of paper you were never meant to notice. NSPM-7 — National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 — has one of those dead bureaucratic names engineered to make your eyes slide off it, and it is currently the most important document in the country. Nick builds it from scratch: a presidential memorandum skips Congress entirely. No debate, no vote, no friction. One man, one signature, at a desk. That's the container. And what Trump put in it, on September 25th, 2025, is a directive that takes the entire counterterrorism apparatus built after 9/11 to point outward at foreign enemies — and turns it around to face Americans.
The indicators it lists for identifying a potential domestic terrorist include anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, anti-Americanism, and hostility to "traditional views on family, religion, and morality." Those aren't crimes. Those are opinions. Stephen Miller said the goal out loud: disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, prosecute. And the legal center of it is hollow — there is no law permitting a president to designate Americans as domestic terrorists, because Congress deliberately never created one. They're using a power that doesn't exist.
If you've been listening, you've already met this memo without knowing its name: Prairieland, where a noise demonstration produced fifty-year sentences and thirty years for a man who wasn't there; Minnesota, where the indictment's evidence included a sweatshirt, a bullhorn, and a devil emoji. Craig places it in his own scholarly wheelhouse — the Southern Cone dictatorships of the 1960s and 70s, which built exactly this framework to create a social category called subversive. Marxists, but also students. Feminists, but also women who wanted contraceptive pills. Gay people, but also people who wanted divorce law. And the crucial thing about regimes that do this: they aren't breaking the law. They've changed it.
Then the escalation. Over one week in July, Rubio convened sixty-five nations for the "Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism," unveiled a new designation — Far-Left Terrorism — and announced a visa policy targeting "economic sabotage including against public and private property," language broad enough to cover a broken window or a boycott. Watch the ladder: at Prairieland they needed a gunshot. In Minnesota, a blockade. Now, official State Department policy reaches choosing not to buy something. The pretext keeps getting cheaper. Four days later came a hundred-page State Department report naming forty-three living Americans — mayors, a sitting congresswoman, the host of Democracy Now, the Ben of Ben & Jerry's — and tying them to Cuban influence.
And the whole tower rests on the murder of Charlie Kirk as proof of an organized left-wing terror network. In a Utah courtroom this month, that theory collapsed: no cell, no network, no foreign nexus. One young man, acting alone. A man was murdered, and that matters — but Charlie Kirk wasn't assassinated by a transnational conspiracy financed by an ice cream magnate, and forty-three Americans are on a government list because of it.
There are no armed leftist movements seeking state power. There are, however, armed right-wing movements all over the planet — and in this country, they're allied with the state.
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.
According to his partner, the guy who shot Charlie Kirk never talked about Charlie Kirk prior to him shooting him. Pretty fucking disturbing, if you ask me. You know. Are you really even in a relationship if you don't know who your partner would kill? Who hasn't shared that in Pillow Talk? Do you ever hear of a bitch eating crackers?
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_00You tell me that my wife is arrested for murder, and I'm gonna assume it's Beth, all right?
SPEAKER_01I think it's a very short list.
SPEAKER_00This 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_03I think that with the conclusion of the World Cup and the coming together globally that it represents, I'm downgraded a little bit. Feels pretty okay, you know.
SPEAKER_00Until I walked into my office this morning, I was at about an eight. Now I think I'm down to five. Something so wonderful has happened. What is it? What what what happened? Please tell me. There's a clip from the CNBC of Steve Scalise, Congressman, trying to sell the Save Act. He's doing this TV hit in front of two flags in the full kit suit and tie, like seven o'clock this morning, fully ready for his close-up, looking official. It comes time for him to sell the voter ID part, and he looks dead in the camera and he says, quote, for God's sakes, you can't get pasta at the Olive Garden without a picture ID. Why not be able to show a picture ID to vote?
SPEAKER_01And it's Tisclees was shot in the head at one point. That's true. I forgot. But he did come back to Congress. I finally got it.
SPEAKER_00I finally get it now. They've never come up with a decent analogy to make mandatory voter ID palatable to John Q. Public. There's no go-to. They just let people improv. It's a game of constant one-up spinship. They all use the same setup and they compete amongst themselves to come up with the dumbest possible analogy. It's like their version of the aristocrats, I think. Oh, it is. You're right. It is an aristocrat's. It is an aristocrat's bit. First of all, they get talking points in the morning. But second of all, even if you had to play it off, you could just use an example like you got to present your ID to get your mail at the post office. That one's pretty good. But that one's not that exciting. It's true, but yeah, it's not going to make headlines. Voting and going to the post office and standing in line for a couple minutes is like a very comparable experience. It is. It's true. Both places are super official. There's a lot of flags. There's a similar cleaning product and stale coffee smell. You feel obligated to whisper rather than speak. You're right. You stand in line until a booth opens up, and then you got to be on your game, but not too on your game. Someone telling you hold your horses. If the person advising me to hold my horses is giving grandpa, say less. I will absolutely hold my horses. Sorry to make you have to consider my horses at all, sir. If you look like you're under 35, I jump right into sneering defiance. You're in no position to offer me advice about my horses one way or the other. I shall do as I please with my horses, sir. This is probably exactly how women feel when they're told by men to calm down. Honestly. Right now, I'd like to inoculate the disparables against a news story that I think everybody will be talking about in just a matter of days. There's a thing that happened, but it hasn't been released quite yet to the public. It's only been teased. I'm worried that the media is being lured into framing this disingenuously. Before all the hot takes roll in, I'd like to hand the listeners a frame. So here's the story. Hunter Biden and Nick Fuentes met at a Philadelphia hotel and sat down for a filmed interview. It's brokered by a guy named Andrew Calaghan, who runs a YouTube channel called Channel 5. The interview is set to come out towards the end of July. The headline here is the tease. The tease is that Hunter Biden and Nick Fuentes almost got into a fist fight during the interview, and Andrew Calaghan had to step in between them. That news and only that news has been appearing TMZ style. It's to whet the appetite. Probably KFib, who knows? What's known about the interview is that Fuentes reached out to Channel 5 and Channel 5 brokered it. Hunter Biden, we all know him, Joe Biden's near to well son, punching bag for the media, as of recently, unwilling to fade into the background, seems to be parlaying his notoriety into some sort of media presence. And he's good in the media. For sure. Talks like a regular guy. People seem to think he's cool. He does have an effortless charisma. He does seem to want to take on the idea that the Democratic Party has become overrun by consultants. Yeah. He's somebody that's got a fairly good foothold in both the legitimate and the scumbag worlds. I don't think most of the public believes that he's become Joe Biden's mouthpiece, but I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that most people probably assume Hunter Biden isn't going to be publicly saying anything that Joe Biden disapproves of. I don't know if he sees himself as a future politician or not, but he's definitely someone who isn't interested in becoming a private citizen. Not that it was ever possible. In June of this year, Hunter Biden returned to Twitter after a decade. He's been shilling crypto, which is something that I don't raise some red flags. So Hunter Biden is monetizing his reach and his notoriety, it looks like. He does have this sort of fuck up's credibility. He's done bad things. He's paid the price. He owns his mistake. He's handsome, charismatic, thoughtful. People are drawn to him as though he's an honest broker because he's lived his life and he's made some mistake and he owns them. Besides, they're way in the past. Hunter Biden used to be a real piece of shit. Slick back hair, sloppy stakes, dangerous nights. He's still a piece of shit, but he's a different kind of piece of shit. He's become a likable one. And I'll be good and goddamned if that doesn't get you chance after chance after chance in this America. A lot of shining examples out there right now for fail sons. Hunter Biden, with all his shit, somehow comes out looking better than all of them. It doesn't hurt that he's charming. Nick Fuentes. Dr. Craig, you wrote the book about Nick Fuentes, How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism. Why don't you tell us who Nick Fuentes is?
SPEAKER_03Oh, he's terrible. Nick Fuentes is one of the people who's trying to talk to your son about fascism very specifically. Fuentes is the most openly fascist influencer who's like pretty successful in the United States these days. He streams on whatever service he can get his grubby little face into. He's been banned from a couple of them, been unbanned from a couple of them. He's all over the place. He wears a suit, he has one of those CGI backdrops, and the whole thing is supposed to look like a late show, this guy in a suit, and he's talking at you. What he talks at you about is fascism. Fuentes is a hyper-conservative Catholic, a racist, a misogynist, an apologist for slavery, somebody who was in favor of Donald Trump when Donald Trump was the avatar of fascism in the United States. Now that Trump is back in power, Fuentes and the other right-wingers are skeptical of Trump again, wanting him to go even farther when it comes to his fascism. Fuentes is the real deal. He is the most successful fascist influencer in the United States today, period. He has been shilling his stuff for a long time. He got in the news a couple years ago for um finally getting doxxed. Somebody found out where he lived and showed up, and he grabbed her phone and maced her directly in the face upon answering the door. He lived in his parents' basement for a long time. He has since moved, or at least claimed that he's moved. He is also an incel, despite having many women who want to have sex with him because he's such a successful fascist influencer. There are rumors and suspicions that he is a homosexual. If he is a closeted homosexual person, then the teensiest sliver of my heart goes out to him, but that is overwhelmed by the evil that he has brought into the world. He is a terrible person, toxic, not the sort of person that you should ever talk to, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever should you ever talk to him. He is extremely good at adapting any conversation, any media appearance, any story, anything at all. He's extremely good at making about him, making about his politics. You're not gonna get one over on him. He's actually really good at this and quite smart. I think he dropped out of college, but that was in order to be one of the most successful influencers of all time. Talking to him is just stupid. You should never do it. He met Trump once, Fuentes did, on a sort of like curated luncheon. Trump claims that he doesn't remember. He's probably lying.
SPEAKER_00He did go and have Thanksgiving dinner with him at Mar-a-Lago a few years ago when Kanye West was at the end.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, exactly. Yes, yes, yes, yeah, that's right.
SPEAKER_00He's 27, most frequently described in the mainstream media as a far-right podcaster or controversial commentator, which doesn't even begin to say who is. Yeah. The most prominent open white nationalist in American media, that's for sure.
SPEAKER_03Yes. And he's also interesting because he has Latino heritage. Fuentes, right? He is an indicator of how certain lighter-skinned Latinos who speak unaccident English are being let into whiteness in the United States, even among open white nationalists, which Fuentes is.
SPEAKER_00We've said nothing about the America First movement.
SPEAKER_03Is it?
SPEAKER_00Is it that's what he calls his show? That's who he is. He's that guy.
SPEAKER_03Fuentes for a long time was a big rival of Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk was before he got assassinated. He was doing what Fuentes is doing, but he started 10, 15 years ago, and so it wasn't a podcast. It was, you know, a series of appearances on college campuses and shit like that. Charlie Kirk made his inroads and way into the Republican Party. His movement came to be part of the Republican national system, and they would show up at CPAC and like be there. And Nick Fuentes presented himself as a sort of right-wing outsider to these former right-wing outsiders. They're still right-wing, but they're not outside anymore. Nick Fuentes is even further right. So whenever Charlie Kirk would show up, he would have rallies and he would stage like counter-conferences outside of Charlie Kirk events. There were even a couple days after Charlie Kirk's assassination when Fuentes was hard backpedaling, terrified that it would have been one of his supporters who killed Kirk. Turns out that wasn't the case, almost certainly, but it was dicey. There was every chance that was intra-right wing fighting as opposed to somebody who got weird brain rot, which is what it turns out to be.
SPEAKER_00Andrew Calaghan was widely celebrated as a groundbreaking gonzo-style independent journalist who drove around in a van that he lived in, and he captured the fractured reality of America. If you've heard the term all gas, no breaks, it's because of him. All gas, no breaks was his show. It evolved into Channel 5. Prior to 2023, he had built a massive online following by using a deadpan, not judgmental interviewing style to get eccentric locals, conspiracy theorists, and fringe political figures to open up to him on camera. He was viewed as a raw, authentic voice for Generation Z. He even had a HBO documentary. Whatever momentum he had in his career was squandered in 2023 when multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct, including sexual coercion and non-consensual touching. To his credit, he did take ownership. I mean, he kind of had to. He lived in a van. He drove all around the country. Classic rambling man. Those guys are just pure trouble. When the accusations came out, they prompted him to apologize and temporarily step back from public life. But he's back now, baby. This time he's a serious interviewer. His whole brand is that the mainstream media wants us divided, and he'll talk to anyone. This is his combat. Rehabilitating America's leading Nazi. So we've got Hunter Bahn meeting up with Nick Fuentes in a hotel room in Philadelphia to do a joint interview moderated by Andrew Caligan. Fuentes' idea, Caligan's show. Okay, that's the lens. Hold on to this next idea because it's the thing everyone else is gonna miss. Fuentes has spent the last year attacking Trump, called him a sellout, scam artist, saying his own side got played by Trump. People hear that, they think, oh, Nick Fuentes is moderating a little bit. He's coming around. Maybe he's even gettable. And they're reading that exactly wrong. This is not an enemy of my enemy, is my friend situation. Think about who he's actually talking to. He's not talking to liberals, he's talking to young men already inside the right-wing world. And his problem as a guy trying to build a more extreme movement is that Trump is more or less the ceiling. Now, Trump is as far as most of those young men are willing to go, because to them, Trump is still respectable. He's a president-shaped container for all their anger. Fuentes' move is trying to discredit the ceiling here. If Fuentes can convince a disillusioned kid that Trump was a sellout because he was soft and he was too owned by Israel and he betrayed his real believers, then that kid's disappointment is not going to send him leftward. It sends him looking for something more hardcore, more honest. Fuentes is standing right there. Spent a year trying to build his brand as the only guy who told the truth about Trump. Fuentes is not moving towards the center by turning on Trump. He's building an off-ramp, and the off-rant turns in one direction, further right, into the open version of American Nazism. It's a permission structure. It's a set of handholds that make an unthinkable position feel reasonable, one small step at a time. Nobody wakes up and decides to become a white nationalist. They take a series of steps that each feel like common sense. I'm not a bigot. I just think certain people have too much power. Every step is deniable, and the whole path is built so people don't notice where it's leading. Do you want to talk a little bit about the permission structure that he seems to be building here, Dr. Craig?
SPEAKER_03Absolutely. I think that you're exactly right when it comes to what Fuentes is trying to do. When Fuentes attacks Trump, it's not from the left. He's attacking him from the right. Now he's done this a couple times before. He flip-flops on Trump depending on whether or not Trump is in power, whether or not Trump is doing something allied with the state of Israel. Fuentes being a fascist, like about as out of a Nazi type as any major player in the United States political universe is. Fuentes is extremely anti-Israel. And this is one of the major criticisms that he had of people like Charlie Kirk. He thought that they were getting played by Israel or that they were controlled by it or something like that. When Fuentes is criticizing Trump, it is saying he has betrayed the real movement, which Fuentes believes is inherently much further right-wing than Donald Trump himself is. Fuentes is trying to provide a place for young men who are dissatisfied. The fact is, and we know it, Donald Trump won because he identified real problems with the world, real problems that real people were facing. Prices were too high, education doesn't lead to good jobs, the kinds of jobs and industries that men had been pushed into or allowed to be in, which had been privileged before, are no longer privileged and don't make a lot of money anymore. Because of how gender roles work, men were disproportionately not moving into growth industries, nursing, or something like that. Donald Trump fixated on those realities, like a snake oil salesman. He pushed a fake cure, a cure that's worse than the disease. Saying that we're going to bring manufacturing back and that we're going to drain the swamp and blah blah blah. All lies, whatever. It's bullshit. The point is that the rhetoric hit for a lot of people. The problem is that he didn't do any of that shit, right? You know, he didn't actually make anything better. Young people who are today 18 to 25, their whole life has been dominated by Donald Trump. They see that these problems are not getting better. They're if anything worse. They can either double down and be like, okay, well, Donald Trump has been stymied by some super powerful conspiracy, which leads them right down the road of anti-Semitism, right towards Nick Fuentes, or they can say Donald Trump got captured and betrayed people or lied to you, which also leads them right down the road to Nick Fuentes. Fuentes gets them coming and going when it comes to right-wing critiques of Trump. He's extremely good at it. He's done it before. He's going to keep doing it again. Whoever the Republicans nominate in 2028, if it's Vance, Fuentes might be sort of like kind of okay with Vance because Vance is also an integralist Catholic, also a right-wing Catholic, which is a big part of Fuentes' politics. But yeah, Fuentes is trying to make sure that he is left standing.
SPEAKER_00Now we're back in the hotel room, and let's get a look at what everybody's actually buying in there. Fuentes has a problem that money can't fix. He's radioactive to the mainstream. And the permission structure only works if the guy running it looks legitimate. You can't be a truth teller when you're an untouchable cartoon Nazi. Nobody with any credibility is willing to be seen with. Fuentes needs proximity to normalcy. He needs to be a person reasonable people sit across from and discuss politics with. What is the single most normal conferring thing you could put across the table from Nick Fuentes? The president's son. Hard to be seen if untouchable if Hunter Biden will spend an afternoon drawing with you on camera, and a journalist will frame it as a fascinating meeting of the minds. Proximity is credibility conferring. Hunter Biden wouldn't be in a room with a real sketchy character, right? No history of that. Remember, the Fuentes reached out. He's the one that asked for it. He went shopping for legitimacy and he's having Channel 5 sell it to him. Calligan said that Fuentes wanted a more mainstream platform to clear up some misconceptions and discuss his evolving view. Hunter's buying too. He's buying a little bit of edgy relevance. The guy brave enough to sit down with the monster. He's gaining credibility among America's next generation of shithels. Calaghan and Channel 5 get the traffic. They get the views. They get to monetize the freak show. Everybody in that room is running a personal brand play, and they're using each other's toxicity as the currency. That's the actual transaction. Two operators working from the same market, different ends. One selling the left, the other selling the right. Meeting in the middle in a Philadelphia motel room to launder each other. Fuentes gets cleaned up a little bit. Hunter can't get any dirtier than he already is, and he gets more interesting. Calaghan gets back in the game. And the fist fight, they almost came to blows. That's marketing. I agree. If you're sitting in a room with Nick Fuentes and he's got you wound up enough to fight him as a 55-year-old man, what are you doing with your life?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, a person actually, like literally half your age. Come on.
SPEAKER_00You either punch that guy or you don't. If you're in a room with somebody, you're not gonna punch him, bitch ass.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Punch him, dude.
SPEAKER_01If you're gonna do it, then just do it. They almost came to blows.
SPEAKER_00Get the fuck out of here. Almost came to blows. Did you not hear our intro? He's America's leading Nazi. The only reason you enter a room with Nick Fuentes is to punch him in the face. Oh well, sure. There's no way not to. See, he's convinced an entire generation of American boys to stop trying to get laid. What the fuck, man? Don't stop trying to get laid, guys. You may have to go through some time and trouble to pull it off, but I assure you it's worth it. All right? In this case, the reward is the reward. Journey's pretty awesome, too. Honestly. Fucking Hunter Biden. Does Hunter Biden not think that he's going to go to heaven one day and have to give a full accounting of his life to his grandpa? Well, Gramps, it was a series of ever more remarkable fuck-ups and funerals. But when I was 55, I agreed to meet with America's leading Nazi for the express purpose of beating him to death with my bare hands. At a boy, Hunter. Fucking Hunter Biden. Could have made up for every wrong thing that he did in his whole life in one fell swoop. For sure. But instead he talks politics with America's leading Nazi. Almost comes to blows in the process. Fuck you, Hunter Biden. Can't believe I ever thought you were cool. That's the thing that makes it fun, the fight. The drama is the rap. It makes it content. That's what's gonna get you to click. That gets the laundering into your feet. You were never supposed to notice the wash cycle. You're supposed to show up and watch the fight. We're being set up for some bullshit because America loves a freak show. And here's how I know it's not me being paranoid. Here's the part that's already visible before a single frame airs. Channel 5's own spokesperson promoting this show in a press release said, quote, people will be shocked to see Knicks evolving and changing views, and even more shocked to see the issues where they found common ground. They're gonna be finding common ground. This is a trailer for a redemption. The distributor is pre-selling Fuentes' evolution and the common ground before you've seen anything. The laundering is already happening in the ad company. You're being told in advance how to feel. Surprised, he's not so bad. Surprised by the common ground. That's the product, that's what's for sale. And America's gonna be all over. When it airs, here's what you're gonna get: the entertainment version. TMC, the aggregators, they nearly threw hands. Pure spectacle does a lot of Fuentes' work for him because he's kind of a fun character. He can talk his way into and out of trouble, like Craig said. There's a certain smarmy charm about him where he's winking at you. Actually, pretty effective.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, he's very good at all that kind of shit that Trump does. He says stuff, he's kind of like a little stinker, you know. He'll like say something and be like, oh, you know, like, oh, look at me. You know?
SPEAKER_00It's really effective. Very clippable. We're also gonna Get the horse race version, the cable folk. What does this mean for Hunter's future? Is this a headache for the Democrats? It makes Hunter Biden the subject and quietly turns Fuentes into scenery. A bad thing that Hunter stepped in instead of an actor who ran a play and won. You'll get the decorum version, the very serious columnists saying, Have we no standards? How appalling. This discourse is debased. Morally correct, strategically useless. Being offended isn't the same as explaining the function. And you'll get the worst one, which is going to be the actually, this kind of dialogue is good. The contrarians, the one saying, maybe it's healthy for opposites to talk. Maybe Hunter's being brave. Maybe we should hear Fuentes out. That take is the laundry, printed as an opinion.
SPEAKER_03There's a saying on the left these days: don't argue with anybody John Brown would have shot.
SPEAKER_00John Brown would most certainly have shot Nicolas Fuentes.
SPEAKER_03And that's not saying shoot him. That's just saying don't talk to him. You're not gonna get fucking anything talking to this man. Nothing. No. No. Don't talk to him.
SPEAKER_00Where does it go if it works? The scary sounding answer is kind of the wrong. We're not heading towards President Nick Fuentes 15, 20 years from now. He's not building his kind of candidacy. He's only 27. He's a Holocaust denier. He'll never be running for office. He knows it. That's not his goal. The goal is the gravity. Fuentes' job is to sit at the far edge and drag it outward so that the guy one notch in from him seems reasonable. The guy who won't say good things about Hitler, but is willing to say something like, certain people have a little too much power. That guy's gonna start looking moderate, reasonable, electable. Fuentes is the lunatic, but his delivery, the certainty, the casual nature, the way he says the things that he says doesn't really match up with what he says. He makes the next guy seem less radical. We've talked about who the next guy looks like. He looks like JD Bann. He's got the same grievances, same targets, Yale law polish.
SPEAKER_03I am absolutely terrified of this. You're absolutely right that Fuentes is not trying to run for president, but what he is trying to do is be somebody Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon was never going to run for president either. He was a media guy, the guy behind the screen. He's that guy. Fuentes wants to be that for the next president of the United States. Or to be the demagogue who leads the people, the kind of guy that the president in the 2040s, when we get an openly fascist president, would be like, Well, I grew up listening to Nick Fuentes on the radio every day. That kind of thing, right? That's what Nick Fuentes wants. And he is so good at this that he might do it.
SPEAKER_00This Hunter Biden interview and the publicity behind it, it's gonna lead to a lot more people knowing who Nick Fuentes is. That's for certain.
SPEAKER_03One of the things that I hate about this exactly is that like it's just making Fuentes more normal. He's getting in front of more eyeballs, more people are hearing about him, he's getting sexier in the media sense. This interview will get more publicity. Kids will be told by their parents you shouldn't watch it. That'll make it more interesting. And then they'll want to see more Nick Fuentes, and then they'll see more of these people like Nick Fuentes. I don't want to do the thing that people often do when it comes to the right and when it comes to like our enemies, where we talk about them as if they're super powerful, right? We talk about them as if they're brilliant geniuses and all of this stuff. They're fuck-ups like everybody else. They're trying their best, they're doing something that's hard, but they are very good at it, is the actual fact. Nick Fuentes has been doing this for almost 10 years at this point. He's just good at it.
SPEAKER_00The last few weeks have been all about the World Cup in the United States. The World Cup has had some of the most amazing crowds. Yeah. We've seen people singing, rowing a sailboat. It's been great. Better than the common wave. That's true. I'd like to know how these crowd demonstrations at sporting events have to do with fascism. This week on Dr. Craig is Fun at Parties, the Wave. Ooh. Awesome.
SPEAKER_03I'm so excited about this one. I got a twofer. There's two different ways that we can talk about the wave when it comes to fascism. The first one is the one that you set up as a mass spectacle. The Nazis were all about mass spectacles. They loved enormous stadiums. They built a huge one at Nuremberg, which was where the biggest Nazis were put on trial and hanged. Big Nazi rallies were the subjects of extremely successful films, some of them produced by Linny Riefenstahl, the Nazis' premier filmmaker and propagandist. You might have heard of one of the biggest ones. It's called Triumph of the Will, the Nazis' version of something like Birth of a Nation, a cinematic masterpiece as craft. Many people consider it to be a masterpiece as craft. There's sort of debate about that about whether that's, forgive me, whitewashing this as a propaganda piece into something like art. There are lots of people who talk about it in this way. So this means that big, huge spectacles that you participate in as just one part are a big part of what the Nazis do and also a big part of how they present themselves. A mass group of people all doing the same thing all at once. Something that is a piece of art that can only be experienced as a mass action. Think about, for example, these people aren't fascists because they're communists, but no, think about, for example, that art forum in North Korea that's like people in a stadium making various colors and shapes, that kind of thing. The Nazis originated and perfected this. That's one way in which the wave is associated with it. But here's the other one, it's maybe more interesting. There's a movie, a German movie, whose title translates to The Wave. Are you familiar with this movie?
SPEAKER_00Not at all.
SPEAKER_03Awesome. This movie, it's a fictional movie based on something like a true story. The movie opens with our quote-unquote hero, who is a history instructor at a German high school. He's a punk. The movie's maybe 20 years old, so he's like Gen X, the Beavis and Butthead kid. As he's driving to work, he's listening to Rock and Roll High School by the Ramones. So he's a cool dude. He's hip. He gets to school and he is told that they're doing this weird new lesson plan where the kids are learning about different forms of government. And he has been assigned autocracy. He's been assigned to teach them about autocracy. Whereas the stodgy wears a sweater vest and is constantly drinking tea, old man, has been assigned to teach the kids about anarchy, which is what our cool professor wanted. The cool professor's like, oh man, this sucks. So he gets to class and he decides, you know, these are German kids. They've learned about autocracy a million times. The first season that we get in the classroom, the kids are even like, yeah, whatever. Hitler, like, yeah, I know. Like, come on. Ugh. Look at that. And so he's like, well, let's try something new. I'm gonna have them experience what it's like to be in a movement like this. He starts out small. When I enter the classroom, you have to stand up and say hello to me. And then he expands it. When I enter the classroom, you have to stand up and do a gesture at me to salute me. And what gesture do they come up with? They sort of like wiggle their arm in a pattern they say resembles a wave. The movie is called The Wave. Over the course of the film, the students in this classroom come to identify with one another, get in fights with other students in other classes. At first, it seems positive. It's like the kids that formerly were bullied, they have a place in here, there's a structure, there's a system, students who are struggling latch on to the authority and the structure and the system. Like you could imagine a movie about kids going to a military college. The fuck up comes out at the end looking good, shining his shoes, right? Except that this isn't a feel-good movie, it's more like the beginning of Full Metal Jacket. At the end of the movie, I'm gonna spoil it, it's a 25-year-old German movie. At the end of the movie, the kid who was the most bullied in school, he brings a gun to school and commits some violence in the name of this fake movement. The wave is literally a story, a message about how everyday people through their everyday life can find themselves in a fascist movement. That was a twofer.
SPEAKER_00I'd like to tell our audience about a document most people have never heard of. That's currently the most important piece of paper in the country. It's a piece of paper that you were never really meant to notice. It's boring on purpose. It's one of those dead bureaucratic names designed to make your eyes slide right off it. NSPM-7, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. I know the second I say the string of letters and a number, half of you start drifting. That's the trick. That's why they named it that. So stay with me. By the end of this, you're gonna understand that this single memo is the engine underneath almost everything scary that we've talked about on this show. Prairie land sentences, the Minnesota arrests, all of it. And this month that memo grew into something with your neighbors' names on it. Let me start with what NSPM seven even is. What is a presidential memorandum? This is the part that matters before we can even get to what it says. A law has to go through Congress. It's debated, voted on, passed by both houses. That's slow, that's deliberate, it's supposed to be slow. The friction is the whole point. It's how a free country makes sure that no one person can just decide something. A presidential memorandum skips all that. The president signs it, no vote, no debate, no Congress. It's the president giving out marching orders to the federal agencies that answer to him. And on September 25th, 2025, Trump signed NSPM-7. Before we even get to a single word of what it does, I want you to understand the shape of it. One man, one signature, no vote. That's the container. Now here's what he put in it. For 80 years, counterterrorism meant the machinery that you point outwards at foreign enemies. After 9-11, we built this enormous apparatus, the FBI, Treasury, the intelligence agencies, the whole surveillance and sanctions machine. All of it was aimed at people overseas who wanted to hurt Americans. What NSPM-7 does in one memo is turn that machine around. It takes the most powerful coercive tools the government owns, the ones we built to fight Al-Qaeda, and it points them inward at Americans. For the first time in this country's history, it does that. Formally, on paper. Who does it point at? The radical left. Here's where it stops being abstract and starts being about you. The memo lists the warning signs, indicators that someone might be a domestic terrorist. The indicators include anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, anti-Americanism, hostility to quote, traditional views on family, religion, and morality. Those are opinions, they're beliefs. Those things are not crimes. The federal government wrote people's political and religious views down on a list of things that make you a potential terrorist. It's not something you did, it's something you think. Stephen Miller, the architect of most of this, said the quiet part out loud right away. He said the goal is to, quote, disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute. The people the administration decides are political terrorists. And here's the legal problem sitting at the center of the whole thing, the thing that makes it lawless. There's no law that actually lets a president do this. We've got a system for designating foreign terrorist groups. We have deliberately, on purpose, never created one for domestic groups. Because Congress understood that the second you let the government brand Americans as terrorists for their politics, you've handed them a tool to crush dissent. So the power NSPM-7 uses doesn't exist in the law, but they're using it anyway. If you've been listening to this show, you've already met this memo without knowing its name because NSPM-7 is the engine and the prosecutions are the engine running. In Texas, at the place called Prairie Land, people held a noise demonstration outside an ice jail on the 4th of July in 2025. One person fired a shot, and the government charged the entire group with material support for terrorism on the theory that they were an Antifa cell. People who were never violent got 50 years. A man who wasn't even at the protest got 30 years from moving a box of his wife's scenes. We've gone through that. In Minnesota, they indicted 15 people as Antifa. And the evidence in the indictment included one person was wearing an I'm Antifa sweatshirt, one person owned a bullhorn, and I'm not making this up. One person put a devil emoji into a group chat. So that's your memo, NSPM7. Your beliefs are an indicator.
SPEAKER_03We're fully at thought crime. This is an all is new again type thing. Nick is absolutely right here. This is not something that the United States has done formally before. Now, the United States has designated internal people as potential terrorists before. After September 11th, the United States said all Muslims are suspect. Demanded imams, demanded mosques, prove that they weren't collaborating with international terrorism. This is now being expanded to be about politics. Anybody who believes something opposed to the Donald Trump administration's policy goals is now potentially Antifa. Which of course begs the question: what are the policy goals of the Trump administration? I guess it's fascism, I guess. Those kinds of gotchas aren't gonna work, right? The point here is that it doesn't matter who you are or what you do, if it's legal or if it's illegal. It doesn't matter what jurisdiction you're in, it doesn't matter where you do it, it doesn't matter if you're a citizen, it doesn't even necessarily matter if you do it or not. This is the kind of thing that the Trump administration can use to justify and cover its ass in terms of not just mass surveillance like we got after September 11th and still have, but actual mass counter-subversive activity. In my academic life, I study Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Spain, places like that in the 1960s and 70s. NSPM7 is precisely the kind of thing that these dictatorships wrote, precisely the kind of policies that they lived by, to create a category, a social category called subversive. Subversion is just like anything that is counter to the status quo, to the powers that be. In the countries that I studied, this is Marxists, but it's also just students. Feminists, but it's also like women who wanted contraceptive pills, people who are homosexual, but it's also just people who wanted divorce law. It's people who wanted democracy. Anybody who was opposed to the government is subversive. That's precisely the kind of framework that NSPM7 gives the United States administration. It's an important thing to remember when these regimes do this kind of shit, they're not breaking the law because they have changed the law. This is the law now. The Supreme Court could decide that it's unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court certainly ain't gonna do that. So, like, you know, it's legal. That's just what the law is.
SPEAKER_00Prairie Land, Minneapolis, that's the memo doing all that work. Yeah, that's what your beliefs are and indicator looks like when it hits the actual courtroom. It turns your book club or a Facebook post into a terrorism. A memo. No vote, no law. NSPM7 makes your opinions a warning sign and points the war-on terror machine at your neighbors. Hold that in your head. Now I have to tell you what happened this month because it grew. This July, over the course of one week, that memo stopped being a domestic tool and became a global one. July 16th, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, opened up a summit in Washington, 65 countries. It's got a name, the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism. Political terrorism, that phrase is doing enormous work. In these documents, it means domestic political opposition. The same radical left from the memo, now 65 governments have signed on to help hunt it all across the world. Secretary of State Rubio at the podium called radical leftism, quote, a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice, a revolt of the worst against the best. At the summit, they unveiled a new category of terrorists, FLT, far left terrorism. They announced a visa policy to keep those people out of the country. And here's the sentence that shows you how wide the net is. The policy targets not just violence against people, but quote, economic sabotage, including against public and private property. That's broad enough to cover a broken window. It's also broad enough to cover a boycott. The Treasury Secretary said it out loud at the same summit. He named the quieter forms of far-left terrorism, quote, campaigns to suppress people, to intimidate political opposition, and to sabotage our national institutions. Watch the latter. At Prairie Land, they needed a gunshot to hang terrorism on people. In Minnesota, they just needed a blockade of cars. And now, in official State Department policy, terrorism includes organizing a boycott. First a bullet and a blockade, now choosing not to buy something. The pretext keeps getting cheaper. It's less of a drift in that direction and more like they're hauling ass. The whole thing is built on the claim that far left violence is surging. Left-wing attacks have ticked up since Trump returned to office. They're just about to where they were with the right wing's attacks for the first time in decades. Their friends at NPR took a look at the actual number to quantify that. As left-wing's attacks go, it's a very low number, getting slightly less low. Right wing attacks actually dropped. Historically, it's not even close. There's something like 0.6 left-wing incidents per year versus 20 on the right. They built a 65 nation offensive around the 0.6, and a memo all about political violence that somehow never mentioned January 6th. July 20th, four days after the summit, the State Department published a 100-page report, and it's entitled Cuba, the Capital of Twenty First Century Communism. It names 43 current Americans and ties them to Cuban influence. The people it names are not fringe figures. They got the mayor of New York, Zoran Mandani, the mayor of Los Angeles, is in it, the host of Democracy Now, Ben Cohen from Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream, Democratic Socialists of America, which includes members of our Congress. And the evidence for some of them tells you everything. For Ben Cohen and Amy Goodman from Democracy Now, they attended a wedding of a left-wing donor. That's the link, guilt by RSVP, I suppose. For the Democratic Socialists, the report itself admits the group was, quote, not shaped by the direct and tangible influence of the Cuban government and has organic ideological commitments in the United States. It says that, and then it puts them on the list anyway. You never know what those shifty fuckers. And here's the line that ends any doubt about what this is. The report names its own template. It approvingly cites the quote, McCarthy era investigations and prosecutions of the 1950s and how effective they were at dismembering the American Communist Party. McCarthyism wasn't all that bad. It kept those commies on their toes, that's for sure. They looked at McCarthyism, wrote down that it worked, and said, let's do it again on purpose, in a published government document with names attached. It's probably worth mentioning the head lawyer for Joseph McCarthy during the Communist Witch trials was the same Roy Cohn who had later become Donald Trump's lawyer. They're playing the oldies up on Capitol Hill. What is this whole tower? The memo, the summit, the boycott ban, the blacklist actually built on. The founding event was the murder of Charlie Kirk, the conservative act, Trump's buddy. The killing is the proof the administration points to. After it happened, Director Cash Patel of the FBI testified that the Bureau was investigating the shooter's whole group chat, and even a possible his word, foreign nexus and organized cell. Earlier this month in a Utah courtroom, that theory fell apart. At a preliminary hearing, the shooter's own partner, cooperating with prosecutors, testified. And what emerged is that there was no cell. There's no network, there's no foreign nexus. By evidence, it was just one alienated young man acting alone. According to his partner, the guy who shot Charlie Kirk never talked about Charlie Kirk prior to him shooting him. Pretty fucking disturbing, if you ask me. You know. Are you really even in a relationship if you don't know who your partner would kill? Who hasn't shared that in Pillow Talk? Do you ever hear of a bitch eating crackers?
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_00You tell me that my wife is arrested for murder, and I'm gonna assume it's Beth, all right? I think everybody.
SPEAKER_01It's a very short list.
SPEAKER_00It starts with a memo, a memo that turns your beliefs into a terrorism indicator and aims the war on terror machine directly at American for sure. This month that memo grew up. It got a brand new initialism, FLT, far left terrorism. It tipped its cap to the red scare and McCarthyism. It got spread out to 65 countries. It let you know that if you stop doing business with a company that is working with the Department of Homeland Security, you do so at your own peril. Yeah. The through line is what we come back to every single week. There's no law that lets the president do any of this. So they didn't try to pass a law. They signed a memo in 2025 and they're beefing it up. They're bringing other countries into the mix. They published a report that hinged on the idea that Charlie Kirk was killed by a cabal of leftists, and they dared anyone to stop them. Everything is public. The summit was on camera, they filmed it. You can download Cuba, the capital of 21st century communism, in the form of a PDF. They're not hiding anything. They wrote the McCarthy part down in plain English.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00They're just banking on the fact that nobody likes to read in this country, which is a safe bet. That's actually the whole premise behind Autocratic Despair the podcast. We're much further down this road than any of us think.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00The only way out now is through.
SPEAKER_03I'm with you there, you know. Creating an international boogeyman, you know, creating this image of an international villain that we need to fight who is stronger than us, but also weaker than us, contemptible and everywhere. This is the Nazi playbook, the anti Semitic international conspiracy theory crap. This is Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There's no evidence of a conspiracy, but we believe in. Conspiracy because without the conspiracy, how could we not be in charge of everything? Even when we are in charge of everything, the fact that we can't get everything that we want because these people are stopping us. The left has never been weaker than it is now. Frankly. I think the left was more powerful internationally in the fucking 1870s. When Karl Marx was alive. I think the left was more powerful. There aren't major organized leftist parties or movements trying to overthrow any government anywhere. There's the Naxalites in India, but they've been around for a long time and they're not doing shit. I don't think that there really is anybody anywhere. There are no armed leftist organizations in the United States whose goal is to take state power. There were in the 1970s. Weatherman was real. You mean Weather Underground? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Weather underground. Okay. Those people are fucking professors at the University of Illinois now. There's nobody. There's nothing. We don't have anything like that anymore. Except on the right. There are armed right wing movements all over the planet whose goal is to use violence to take state power. It's just that in the United States they're allied with the state. And so the state is going to use its power to stop the left and use the power of right-wing militias to do it too. This is setting up a precedent for something awful, evil, terrible. I would not be surprised if, you know, if there is a democratic administration coming in in 2028, that they just kind of like sweep this one under the rug, they don't really get rid of it adequately, blah blah blah, and then it'll just be there. It'll just be there in the 2030s, ready to be ticked up later.
SPEAKER_00Stare into the abyss with friends, the autocratic despair podcasts 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.
