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
Curtis Yarvin & Mike Gallagher Run Into Dr. Craig & Nick
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This week is about a question neither of us expected to spend an episode on: what do you actually do when you find yourself sharing a room with someone who's helping build the thing you're terrified of? Not online. Not in the abstract. In your coffee shop. At your gym. Three feet away, ordering a drink.
The despair numbers set the tone — Craig's mellow, a four, which on his logarithmic scale is still plenty bad but for him counts as "stay the course." I came in higher, and hauling a genuine moral conundrum behind me.
Here's mine. My gym is my sanctuary. I found it after fleeing a Planet Fitness with a lifted truck out front flying PRO ICE flags and, for a while, a sticker of Biden bound and gagged on the tailgate. The new place is expensive and was nearly empty when I joined, so I did what I do — I learned everyone's first name. I became, unofficially, the mayor of the gym. It got me through last winter without the seasonal depression that usually flattens me. It's where my dad got his health back. It's the best version of me.
And a few weeks ago Mike Gallagher walked in. If you're not from Wisconsin: Gallagher was our congressman. Green Bay guy, actually from here, like me. Marine, intelligence officer, Georgetown PhD, chaired the big China committee. And on paper one of the reasonable ones — one of three Republicans who voted against impeaching Mayorkas, held up his own resignation to vote for aid to Ukraine, left Congress rather than become a MAGA bomb-thrower. So why did my stomach drop? Because of what he did next: he became the Head of Defense at Palantir, and he's still there. Palantir — the data company woven through ICE, the firm behind ImmigrationOS, the system that fuses your tax records, Social Security data, DMV files, passport, and license-plate history into one profile and runs the pipeline its own documents describe as "identification to removal." Peter Thiel's company. JD Vance's sugar daddy's company. Gallagher isn't some engineer who wandered in; his whole value is the revolving door — China-committee chairman one year, selling the government surveillance software the next. He is the human shape of the revolving door, and he's smart enough to know exactly what he built.
So I did something. I stopped what I was doing, looked at him until he looked back, and asked, "How's Palantir?" He asked if I was skeptical about Palantir. I said, "Just you, Mike. Just you." And then, reaching for something like grace, "I'm sure you did your best." And I have to be honest with you, because that's the deal on this show: it felt good. Not rage — disappointment, that a guy from my exact corner of the world looked at the whole machine and took a job pointing it at people. I needed him to know I see him clearly, and I did it in three words, and it felt good, and I'm a little ashamed of how good it felt.
Which leaves me with a real problem, because he's a member, not a day-pass guy, so I'll see him again and again in the one place I go to not feel like this. And my brain keeps offering me a flattering story: I'm magnetic when I want to be, I'm the mayor, I get along with MAGA guys all the time — so maybe the noble move is to befriend Mike, and be the friendly voice in his ear if he's ever back in a position to do harm. But the story springs a leak. The MAGA guys I befriend mostly got sold something; Gallagher has the whole picture and chose it anyway. So does the grace I extend to the confused guy even apply to a man who isn't confused? And worse — 98% of my gym has no idea who he is. If the mayor is seen being chummy with Mike, I'm not influencing Mike. I'm telling the whole room Mike's a good dude. I'd be laundering him. For free. Which is the exact move I spent a whole episode nailing Hunter Biden for.
Then Craig told me his version of the same story, and it's the heart of the episode. He walked into his regular coffee shop and stopped like a Looney Tunes character skidding on a rug, because sitting in the window was Curtis Yarvin. For the uninitiated, Yarvin is arguably the intellectual father of today's alt-right — the blogger formerly known as Mencius Moldbug, who spent the 2010s arguing that democracy is a mistake and the country should be run like a corporation by a CEO-king. He's the man who introduced JD Vance to Peter Thiel. He gets clean write-ups in the New York Times. He is, in Craig's estimation, the closest thing this intellectual circle has to an out-and-out fascist. And there he was, reading a book, three feet away.
So Craig faced my exact question in his own sanctuary, and what he did is the thing I keep turning over. He didn't ignore it, and he didn't make a scene. He said his piece — the icy, dignified version — and then he asked the barista, a young Latino worker, whether he knew who that was. The worker didn't. Craig told him. And the worker's response is the whole show: "You're telling me that guy's a racist? He never talks to me. He just says what he wants and leaves." There it is. The philosopher-king of the new right, the man with the whole civilizational theory about hierarchy and human worth — and he can't be bothered to be a person to the kid making his coffee. Craig's parting shot, which might be the truest thing said all episode: I'd have liked to ask what kind of tipper Curtis Yarvin is. I assume a bad one.
Two men, two sanctuaries, two fascists sharing the space, two small doses of social friction — and the same ache afterward, because neither of us knows if it did a thing. And that turns out to be the actual subject: we have mechanisms to hold elected officials accountable. We can vote them out, protest them, show up at the town hall. We have no mechanism at all for the private citizens who build the machinery of unfreedom — the Palantir executive, the CEO-king blogger. You cannot vote out the Head of Defense at Palantir. Nobody can. So the cold look, the "just you, Mike," the question about the tip — that social friction may be the only lever an ordinary person has left. Which raises the question Craig and I couldn't answer: is that a legitimate form of accountability, or is it just a tantrum? And the scariest one, the one I sat with: the "measured, reasonable, stay-in-the-room, signal-your-limits" posture I keep reaching for is Gallagher's own theory of himself. It's the exact story he tells about staying inside the machine. So is my instinct wisdom, or am I just trying on the collaborator's comfort so I can feel principled and go back to being everybody's friend?
We don't resolve it. It's an honest conundrum, and the honest ending is that there's no clean room anywhere — no place this stuff doesn't eventually walk into, scan its membership card, and get on the machine next to you.
We close, as always, with Dr. Craig Is Fun at Parties, and this week the wholesome object is Homer's Odyssey — which Craig unspools into a story about a man punished, across ten years and an ocean, for the weird and arguably bad things he did, a hero who cannot outrun his own record no matter how far he sails. Which, sitting next to everything else this week, lands differently than it used to.
Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism — the commedia for your particular brand of tragedy. 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.
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.
And I did a full-on triple take. Stopped in my tracks like a Looney Tunes character, kicking the sidewalk up in front of me like a cloth, because sitting in the window was Curtis Yarvin.
SPEAKER_02Holy shit!
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_02This is Autocratic Despair, the podcast. I'm Nick Mortenson, a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Each week on the Autocratic Despair Podcast, I stare into the abyss with my friend, Dr. Craig Johnson, PhD in global fascism, lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of 2025's most important book, How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism. Dr. Craig, on a scale of 1 to 10, where would you say your autocratic despair is this week?
SPEAKER_00Well, the Trump administration has faced some failures in its legislative agenda, in its judicial agenda recently. On an international level, things are pretty even keeled, I guess. I'm gonna say a four. Stay the course. As a reminder, a four is really bad for me. I'm gonna stay the course. A four. What about you, Nick?
SPEAKER_02I'm a six. I'm feeling uneasy. It's a bit of an ethical dilemma, hoping to take your counsel on it.
SPEAKER_00Let's unpuel that conundrum.
SPEAKER_02Before we can get to it, I gotta tell you about my gym. If you're a regular listener, you know that Dr. Craig has recently taken up white training. He's new to it, so he mentions that this is a new path for him. I don't talk about my fitness here because I go to the gym every single day. I have for years. I am not an enthusiastic exerciser. I show up because if I don't, I feel bad. And if I feel bad, I say the wrong things. If I say the wrong things, I get into disputes with people. And if I'm in a dispute with someone or a misunderstanding, it takes an exceptional psychological toll on me. So I go work out every day just to check the box, really, and make sure that stuff doesn't happen. For the better part of the last five years, my entire gym routine has been very narrow. I show up, I change into my workout clothes, and I spend 40 to 60 minutes on just one machine, the stair machine. Because that's the most efficient exercise you can get in a small amount of time from a caloric burn perspective. For most of the last five years, I've worked out at a Planet Fitness.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's not exactly the best crowd.
SPEAKER_02I'll just say that there's some standard types that are working out in most every Planet Fitness around the country. And I got no interest in having anything in common with them. For most of the last five years, it's been show up with my ear pods in, listening to something, put my stuff in the locker room, spend the next 45 minutes or so working up an actual puddle of sweat beneath a stair machine, move on with the rest of my day. Check the box. I wasn't losing weight, but I wasn't gaining weight either. I had the whole routine on autopilot for four years. Four long years, sleepwalking through my life, ever since Planet Fitness reopened after the pandemic. Last year, they opened up a new gym over by Lambeau Field, a nice gym, pricey. I took a tour when it opened last May. It was super nice, well appointed. The monthly membership was ten times what it costs at Planet Fitness. So I didn't join right away because it was summer. In August, I noticed this pickup truck right in front of Planet Fitness. It was one of those lifted trucks, and it had two flags on either side. And they both said pro ice. Wow. I'd seen that truck plenty of times before. I knew it was driven by a MAGA enthusiast. He had Trump flags. For a while, he even had that sticker with a bound and gag Joe Biden in the back that looks like he's been kidnapped.
SPEAKER_00Oh my god, like that big decal, that wrap on the back of the truck bed. Fuck.
SPEAKER_02It wasn't on there for long. I don't know if somebody peeled it off or he just thought the wiser. But it was on there. That's Planet Fitness Green Bay. When I saw those ice flags and then went inside to Planet Fitness, I decided I was gonna take a look around to see if I could find who this guy was. This is a Friday afternoon. It was slow at Planet Fitness. Yeah. When I walked in and looked in the weight area, I found no less than six guys that plausibly could have owned that truck with the pro ice flags.
SPEAKER_00That's a wild one. That's way beyond just a MAGA hat, which I imagine lots of people have because their uncle bought them one or whatever, or some other bullshit cultural fit-in reason. That's a level. Imagine somebody riding around in their Volkswagen back in 1935 with flags that say Gestapo. That's crazy.
SPEAKER_02In some of those towns where people are actively protesting ice and blowing the whistle, there are probably counter-protesters to the protesters. Oh yeah. Gotta be. Following them around with their pro-ICE flags. So I guess there's a market for those flags. It's just weird to see on a car where I work out.
SPEAKER_00Were these like window flags, or are we talking about big full flags?
SPEAKER_02Full on, we're bringing these to the boat parade. The whole thing is dumb as dirt, but this is Green Bay. On any given day, at least half the people you talk to are mega enthusiasts. Every single dude that was over there could have been driving a pickup with flags that said pro ISO. I decide right then and there, I'm not even gonna work out today. I'm gonna go to this new gym and sign up. Membership price be damned. Maybe if I'm paying more for my membership, I'll use more of the gym, is sort of what I was thinking there. And I was right to think that. This new gym that I've been at for just about a year now is awesome. Because it was pricey, it had very few members. Like there's more now. But last August, when I started, anytime I'd go in there and it was busy, it was eight or nine people in the whole joint. Sometimes it was just me because there's so few people, I actually started lifting weights. Whenever there's anybody else in the weight area, I take out my earphones, put them in my pocket. Just so I can be available to speak with them if they'd like. It's one of the things I've done to like challenge myself, try to make more acquaintances at the gym, try to be the first name guy at this gym. You could start a conversation with anybody at this gym by looking at them and like saying, This place is awesome, right? Because it was, and there was only four people there at any given time. It was fantastic. To that end, I decided I wasn't gonna wear earphones unless I was on a cardio machine. And I was gonna get the first names of everyone at the gym. And I have. Every day, I'd introduce myself, get someone else's name, chit-chat with them a little bit, then I would put Johnny down in my notes app so I could use their first name next time I saw them. That's how I usually lock in somebody's name. Eventually, I was introducing members of the gym to one another because I was the only person that knew their names. This gym doesn't just have all the best equipment. It's got amenities, it's got a red light bed, it's got a cold plunge. What it doesn't have is one single meathead. Hey, there's no heavy lifters there to dictate the gym culture. There's just a guy that knows everybody's first name and a bunch of cool people. I love this gym. I love the staff. I bought them all Jersey Mike's gift cards last Christmas because I love the gym. And I love who I am to this gym. I'm the guy that's establishing the culture there. Damn. And I love who I am at this gym. It's a better version of me. Yeah. Every day I go in there for two hours lifting. I'm using the red light bed. Winter 2025 for the first time in my adult life, I didn't get depressed. I don't know if it was that gym specifically or the 20 minutes in the red light bed twice a week. Entirely possible. It was just the prospect of doing a podcast with my favorite podcaster where I get to use the comedian part of me that's been on ice for 15 years ago. Probably a combination of all three of those things. Whatever it was, I got to avoid seasonal depression for the first time in my adult life. And that doesn't just happen. Yeah. I get it bad. My wife gets it bad. And it starts just a little bit after the summer solstice. There's this dread of the looming depression as the nights get a little longer and the days get a little shorter. No problem last year. And that makes the membership easily worth it. Probably worth it at twice the price. I love that place so much. I made my old man join after he had a health scare that had him in the hospital. My dad's doing great there. For months I had to pick him up to go there because he wasn't allowed to drive, but he's recovered to the point now where he's allowed to drive. So I get to see him in there on a regular basis. And I love it. That dude's awesome. He says we swear too much in the podcast. He's not wrong.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I've never met your father. My mom also thinks I swear too much, but you know what I say is, I learned it from you. I did not. My mom doesn't really swear.
SPEAKER_02I'll try to do better. I'm not going to stop. I'm indulging myself in the swear words to cope with autocratic despair.
unknownOh, yeah.
SPEAKER_02I think I started swearing a lot more a few weeks back when I talked about how angry I was at myself for indulging in the whole reflection pool nonsense. You did swear a little bit. To get all caught up in the reflection pool nonsense when there are mass thugs killing people. I've been allowing myself to swear without restraint because I think it helps me remember that we're much further along than we want to believe. To get back to the topic at hand, my wife and my father love the same health club. I do, but maybe not as much as I do, but it would be hard for anyone to love it as much as I do. They get it though. It's a magical place, and there's a cold plank. The vibes of this gym are impeccable. It's very spacious, very modern. The closest thing to a dispute I've ever gotten in was when I asked a guy who was resting in between sets on the machine for too long and looking at TikTok the whole time if I could work one in. And he told me I had to wait, which I didn't like. Because of that, I've never bothered to learn his name. I could see why he didn't want me working in. I'm a very sweaty individual. It's bad gymsmanship to be resting on a machine. But when there's only four people in the weight room, you can usually get away with it. If you're resting on a machine watching TikTok and somebody asks you if you can work in, these are the unwritten rules of the gym. Yeah, they are. Regardless of how sweaty they are. He's also a guy that wears a black rifle coffee company shirt from time to time. Oh, yeah. Uh-huh. That's the closest thing we have to an out and proud mag enthusiast at the gym.
SPEAKER_00For those of you who want to wear Black Rifle is an explicitly right-wing coated coffee company that once had a marketing deal with Kyle Rittenhouse. For coffee or for sneakers.
SPEAKER_02Because whenever I hear about somebody having to deal with a company, it's always for sneakers. Oh my god. The Kyle Rittenhouses would be high tops that had a Velcro strap on the top that nobody ever Velcro. It would just keep it loose. Yeah, you're right.
SPEAKER_00I don't know what else the shoes would look like, but. I'm trying to think about like what would crying in a courtroom be like in a sneaker. I don't know.
SPEAKER_02Anyway, I truly love that gym. I look forward to the inspirational stuff the club manager writes in his monthly newsletter. He always puts a lot of thought into it, and it's concise. Four paragraph tops. That's a tight newsletter. That's what it is to me. The best version of myself, two hours a day. That's great. I tell you that to get to this. This past Friday, as I was leaving the club after my workout, I'm shooting the breeze with the gal behind the desk. She's new, and I drank one of those THC beverages before I got there, so I was feeling pretty chay. As we're chatting, the door opens up. A guy walks in, and I clam up immediately because I know the face. And even though we've never met, I know who this guy is. It's Mike Gallagher. You may not know who Mike Gallagher is if you're not from around these parts. So let me tell you who walked into my gym. Mike Gallagher was Wisconsin's 8th District U.S. Congressman. He's actually from Green Bay. He's a former Marine Intelligence Officer. In 2015, he got a PhD in government and international studies from Georgetown, and his dissertation was on Cold War strategy. He went right from there into U.S. Congress. When he entered Congress, he got his master's in strategic intelligence from National Intelligence University, which is impressive. Probably. I've never heard of National Intelligence University.
SPEAKER_00No, me neither, nor did that either.
SPEAKER_02You know those guys on Facebook that are like employed at the School of Hard Knocks?
SPEAKER_00It does kind of sound like that.
SPEAKER_02I got straight A is a National Intelligence University.
SPEAKER_00It sounds like either that or like something that is actually internal to the CIA.
SPEAKER_02More than likely internal to the CIA. He was born in 1984. Marines to Georgetown to U.S. Congress. That's his life path. He's big in intelligence in both the U.S. military and in his host's graduate work. In Congress, he ran the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. It was usually called the Select Committee on the CCP. He's the founding chairman, started it in 2023. Oh. He stated that the job was to investigate and counter the economic, technological, and security threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party. The whole committee was built and led by intelligence expert Mike Gallagher, the Select Committee on the CCP. They produced reports on decoupling from China, CCP subsidiation of the fentanyl supply chain, and forced labor links in Chinese fashion fashion. It led to Gallagher authoring the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which was introduced during the Biden administration in March of 2024. That was the bill that was going to force ByteDance to divest of TikTok within six months, or the app would be banned from the U.S. app stores. The national security theory being that the Chinese ownership let the CCP access American user data and shape what 170 million Americans see. Shortly after it was introduced in March 24, the bill passed the House. 352 yes to 65 no. That's some serious bipartisan agreement in our Congress. That was late March 2024. He's actually seen as a pretty decent congressman around these parts, not a full-on Trumper, an up-and-comer. One of the three guys in his own party to vote against impeaching Alexander Majorchis. Caught hell within his own party for that. A reasonable Republican on paper, anyway.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02He decided to resign the very next month.
SPEAKER_01Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_02Gallagher had a ton of good headlines coming his way over this, but he resigned. Another opportunity came up for old Mikey G, when he couldn't pass up. Something he'd always wanted to do in the private sector. Mike Gallagher took a job with Palantir as head of defense.
SPEAKER_00Jesus.
SPEAKER_02What do you know about Palantir?
SPEAKER_00Well. Well, the Palantir is a crystal ball that was created in the Second Age, I believe, and its purpose was to allow the evil Lord Morgoth to see into the hearts and minds of his servants. That is from the Lord of the Rings. My apologies to any Lord of the Rings nerds if I was wrong about which age it was. It might have been the first age. In any case, uh, then, as is their want, a tech bro named in this case Peter Teal used the name Palantir to create a company whose purpose is essentially a creepy surveillance and then a bunch of defense contracts, evil shit. They make drones, they make military application stuff. Palantir is one of the companies where I think it was their CEO recently, was in a live stream and just said, Yeah, we like kill people. Alex Carp. Yep.
SPEAKER_02Strange Ranger, that man.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Strange. Weird business. Essentially, Palantir is a data mining company. It's owned in large part by Peter Thiel, as Dr. Craig said, who's best described as a megalemoniacal billionaire who probably deserves his own episode of Autocratic Despair of the podcast.
SPEAKER_00Of the three billionaires who are vying to be the real life Lex Luthor, it's Teal Musk Bezos. They all got their prose for being this character.
SPEAKER_02If we did a show on Peter Thiel, I have no idea how to approach it because anyone who isn't already familiar with Peter Thiel would never believe what we said about him.
SPEAKER_00It's absolutely wild. It's crazy shit.
SPEAKER_02He's the other guy from South Africa that did PayPal besides Elon Musk. He's still close with Elon Musk. He's our vice president J.D. Vance's literal sugar daddy. J.D. Vance, right out of college, was awarded a Thiel Fellowship, which meant working for and learning from Peter Thiel. And all the adult jobs that J.D. Vance has ever had, including running a segment of Thiel's Angel Investor Fund, were procured for him by Peter Thiel. Now, Peter Thiel was the Silicon Valley guy that pioneered the trend of having young, healthy men in your employee keeping themselves fit and healthy. So that middle-aged Peter Thiel could do a blood transfusion with one of them every six weeks or so in an effort to slow down aging. He had blood boys. It is a weird thing to do. He started doing that a few years ago because he said all the data that he compiled didn't suggest that he wasn't aging at the same rate as a normal person. Can't know if you never try, right? That's true. Here's another detail about Peter Thiel. Earlier in 2026, he hosted a very serious four-part lecture series on the Antichrist. Mm-hmm. You could buy tickets, they weren't cheap. Peter Thiel has no particular credentials in religious studies. He's not a theologian. He's just super duper into the Antichrist. And he wanted to share some of his findings with the public.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, probably. Weird thing to do. I agree. He is also. This is gonna sound strange to bring this up now, but he is also gay. Nevertheless, he is a member of an ally of a number of political movements who oppose homosexuality as a lifestyle, as a sexuality, and as a community. That's just another aspect of the man. Dude's got some weird hobbies.
SPEAKER_02It's certainly a less cartoonish. What? And it's still pretty goddamn cartoonish.
SPEAKER_00Like it's still pretty cartoonish. It's still pretty funny.
SPEAKER_02He's probably a little antichrist coded himself. A little bit. There's a lot of candidates on that list right now. My bet's on Mr. Beast. Well, his name is Beast. Well, his whole deal is that he offers people fame and money for enduring physical and psychological hardships for the amusement of himself and his buddies. Mr. Beast is just too much. That's exactly the shit the Antichrist would do.
SPEAKER_00I know. He's got that corrupt your heart and soul, and I will provide you with material success in this life. But it's like too much, isn't it? I don't know. Maybe the Antichrist wouldn't be subtle. It would be very funny if he posted a video that really was here I am at the hills of Megiddo. I would watch that.
SPEAKER_02So that's Peter Thiel, megalomaniacal billionaire, has a few eccentricities, spent many years training our vice president in his ways, and then bankrolled him to run for Senate, and then strong arm Donald Trump into making him vice president. And who's also behind Palantir? And he employs former U.S. Congressman member of my gym, Mike Gallagher, as head of defense for Palantir. What Palantir does is it takes every database that it can reach and stitches them together all into one. So it or any of its partners can look a person up, have everything there is to know about that person on screen, including where they are right now. Right now, that person that they're looking for is an immigrant. Later it'll be trans people, then it'll be subversives. In April 2025, after our boy Mike Gallagher had been head of defense at Palantir for a whole year, ICE handed Palantir a $30 million contract. No bid, single source. The DHS said no other company could even build the tool that it wanted. They had to have Palantir to build it. And build the tool Palantir did. It's called Immigration OS. And here's what Immigration OS does: it pulls your tax records, pulls your Social Security data, pulls your DMV records, pulls your passport, your visa files, pulls the real-time metadata that your phone is leaking out, plus it harvests license plate reader data. So they know where your car's been at all the time. Immigration OS takes all of that data and fuses it into a single profile to flag a person, to rank a person, to prioritize a person for removal. The mistakes that ICE makes here and there, they mostly blame on this immigration OS tool. So it's gotten people killed.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Immigration OS has three jobs. One, to find and apprehend the people that they want gone. Two, to track people who self-deport in real time, and three, to streamline the whole process from identification to removal. Immigration OS, the thing that contains the whole arc of a human being, seems like it works most of the time, but when it doesn't, people die. Here's the part that should keep you up. There is nothing about this system that limits it to anyone here illegally. It's a machine for finding anyone. And the data that it runs on is riddled with errors. How many? We don't know. Some, that's for sure. Because people that aren't the subject of a removal warrant at all keep getting killed. We may never know the full extent of the errors. There's no chance of an independent audit under the Trump administration. We'd need Congress for that. They're not going to do it.
SPEAKER_00No. The only chance of any of this kind of stuff is a truth and reconciliation commission years from now. And even then, sifting through all that data is going to be hard. Especially if it's held by a private company that could fold and they could just delete the data or something.
SPEAKER_02One more thing that you might find interesting, Stephen Miller, the guy architecting the whole deportation agenda within the Trump administration, holds a financial stake in Palantir. Yeah. But it was a time not that long ago when that was a scandal, but no more. Nowadays it would be just silly for the man designing the demand for a Palantir to not have his own piece of the company. Yeah, that would just be foolish. Why would you be giving away government contracts to companies that you don't have a financial stake?
SPEAKER_00Exactly. That's a wasted opportunity. Bad business. I have this thing, it's fucking golden, and I'm not giving it away for free. Rod Blagoevich. Voice of a generation.
SPEAKER_02It would be downright financially irresponsible. Not to make a little bit of money. Yeah. This is 2026. In the last few years, Palantir has pulled in over. $900 million in federal contract. Mm-hmm. So Palantir, who provides the tool that turns five databases into a knock on the door so ICE can be as efficient in rounding up the undocumented as possible. That's where Mike Gallagher went after he left Congress, where he'd served three turns before he'd even turned 40, to run Palantir's defense business. Still had a defense at Palantir. Apparently he can work remotely because he wasn't using a day pass at my gym in a membership. That only works out financially if you go there three times or more per month. The staffer that I was chatting up, she didn't know who Mike Gallagher was. She did because his profile came up on the screen when she scanned his membership card, but she didn't know Mike Gallagher. She's 20. So I explained Palantir to her, and then I explained Peter Thiel to her, and then I explained Mike Gallagher's position with them later on. But the second Mike Gallagher came walking to that door, I stopped talking because I know who Mike Gallagher is. And it was the closest I've stood to someone who's facilitated that sort of evil in this world. So I clammed up and I sort of stared at him. And when he turned his head toward me, and I knew for certain it was Mike Gallagher, I asked him a question in a pretty neutral tone of voice, How are things at Palantir, Mike? And he just half grinned at me because I think he realized his cover was blown a little bit. Yeah. And he said to me, You sound skeptical about it. My response was uh, no, Mike, just you. Not bad in the moment. No, that's good. I haven't spent the last few days ruminating about what I should have said that was better, but obviously I know I could have had a better line than that. It was just pretty decent in the moment. But you know, then I realized I was like being a hard on to a guy at my gym. So then I tried to play it off with some Dale Carnegie, how to win friends and influence people shit. I said, you know what, Mike, I'm sure you did your best. I was just trying to do that thing when when you disagree with someone, you can still say something that sounds nice and is true. Something like, you know, if I had your exact life and all of your experiences, I'm sure I'd see it the same exact way that you do. Less of an olive branch and more of a I don't want to have a scene with a former congressman at my gym. The way I meant it was me trying to be gracious. In the contents of the moment, it may have been received as dripping in sarcasm. Which I'm cool with. Yeah, whatever. That's cool and how I meant it, that's for sure. I was just trying to neutralize what I had just done because I was afraid I was being a dick. I'm sure you did your best. I don't know how that went. It's actually a pretty cold-blooded thing to say in this case, because the subtext of this is that all this around us is people doing their best. Yes, which is brutal.
SPEAKER_00He's trying very hard to help the government deport people who wanted a better life and moved to the United States, and in so doing, is building a machine that will allow the government to round up, oppress, and kill anyone that they want. That's what he's done. And he did do his best.
SPEAKER_02Head of defense, palantier, my gym. That's a new level of autocratic despair for me.
SPEAKER_00That is a new level of autocratic despair. I did not know about this until we started talking today, and it's gonna mean that I have to share a similar story. Have I talked about this?
SPEAKER_02I won't know until you say it.
SPEAKER_00A couple weeks ago, I was on a run. I was running past a coffee shop in Berkeley. I was running with my partner, and I looked in the window of the coffee shop. It has big windows facing the street. And I did a full-on triple take. Stopped in my tracks like a Looney Tunes character, kicking the sidewalk up in front of me like a cloth, because sitting in the window was Curtis Yarvin. Holy shit! Yes. Curtis Yarvin, for those of you listening and unfamiliar with this, is probably the intellectual father of the alt-right today. He is an extremely influential thinker on the right wing. He has been for He's the guy that introduced J.D. Vance to Peter Thiel. He's the guy that introduced J.D. Vance to Peter Thiel. That's right. J.D. Vance reads Yarvin. We know. Yarvin made a blog back in the 2010s and it was called Mincius Moldbug. His username was called Mincius Moldbug. Now he goes by his actual name because username shit doesn't fly anymore in the year of our Lord 2026. He is a background-ish figure. He's gotten some squeaky clean, nice write-ups in places like the New York Times. But he is a fascist. Well, okay, he's not really a fascist. He is a reactionary. He wants to return to a time of political elites. He wants a CEO king, and Peter Thiel wants to be that. So to the extent that the right wing today has the intellectual scaffolding of something that Carl Schmidt provided for the Nazi Party back in the 1930s, that would be Curtis Yarvin. Curtis Yarvin is a big deal. I knew that he lived in the Bay Area because he was a coder and he made Bay Area upper middle class money by selling a company back in like 2008 or something like that. You know, like he sold a company and made maybe $20 million, bought a house, and he's living that life. So I know he lived around here, but I didn't know where, and now I do. In any case, I saw the guy. He's there in the coffee shop. And I'm thinking to myself, what do I do about this? I know that going into this coffee shop that I am not in and talking to him, I know that's not gonna do anything. So I walk into the coffee shop instead. There's nobody else there. Maybe there's one other person in another corner on their computer or something. Yarvin is reading a book. He's one of those coffee shop guys that reads a book. Oh I know. He went into the coffee shop to read a book. I know. Gotta do that in the privacy of your own home. I just walked up to the register. It wasn't the owner, it was a worker. I said, Do you know that guy in the window? Is he a regular? And he was like, Why do you ask? Which is a reasonable question. And I said, He is a fascist. Which again is a simplification, but I wanted to explain it to somebody. Sure. I said, he's a fascist. I'm a professor at Berkeley, and I study the right wing today. That guy in the window is an extremely influential right wing figure. He promotes slavery. He doesn't think that women should have the vote. He wants to eliminate democracy, which are all true things about Curtis Yarvin. Curtis Yarvin has said and is on the record about saying those things. If he is welcome here, then I will never come here again. And then the the worker there, who was a Latino man, said, You're telling me that guy's a racist? Yeah, he's a big racist. And he was like, Yeah, I'm not surprised. He never talks to me. He won't say a word to me. He just says what he wants and then turns around and leaves. And I was like, Well, he is a fascist. I'm sorry that he behaves that way to you.
SPEAKER_02I take some odd comfort in that. I think it'd be pretty weird if the intellectual backbone of 21st century American fascism was also a pretty cool dude around his coffee shop. I need that guy to be a verifiable creep when my whole worldview collapses. Gotta be.
SPEAKER_00Anyway, so I left and I haven't been back since to this coffee shop.
SPEAKER_02I've got different circumstances here, Dr. Trey.
SPEAKER_00I know, yeah. You can't. If this were my regular local coffee shop, this was not, I was in a different part of town. I'd be in the same conundrum. Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do? I know everybody's name here.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we have this sort of icy exchange, and I try to pull the ripcord on it. He goes to the locker room, does his work, and I was out of there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I had that exhilarating feeling that you get when you see someone from the TV up close. It was a celebrity encounter. Yep. Pretty rare outside of Packer games to run into a celebrity run. Oh, yeah. Here's the part that I gotta be honest about, because the whole show was about being honest about our autocratic despair, saying, just you, Mike, felt good. It wasn't perfect. It was, I think, just the right amount of social disapproval. Enough to tell him that he's not well perceived. And I'm a little ashamed at how good it felt. It was disappointment in a guy that's from my exact corner of the world, living a close enough life where we belong to the same well-appointed gym. He's a Marine, a PhD, a congressman. The best of us on paper. He's an intelligence guy at heart. Yeah. How could he resist taking a job at Evil Corp producing their most evil product ever? They've got all the intelligence. Now I got a real dilemma in my hand.
SPEAKER_00That's that's that's ugh, that's awful.
SPEAKER_02I'm likely to see Mike Gallagher at somewhat regular intervals in the future. Every single time I do, I'm gonna feel a certain way. And that's the exact feeling that I go to this gym every day to avoid feeling. And I'm not going to another gym. Winter's coming. And I need that red light bed. I need my little sanctuary. Yeah. Craig, as you well know, I'm a very magnetic and charismatic individual when I'm at my best. It's true. Should I bro down with Mike Gallagher?
unknownOh.
SPEAKER_02Should I be as gym friendly as possible? That's a toughie. You got other local dignitaries at this gym. We got the president of the Packers, who I'm on a first name basis with. I call him Ed, and he pretends to know my first name. We have the guy from Cheesehead TV, the largest Packers podcast, owns a whole company that produces nothing but Packers podcast. There's a couple admitted Trump voters that go to the gym. I've learned. They're not mega enthusiasts, and I'm friendly with them, and we do talk politics because I like to know how long they're gonna continue to debase themselves. And I am already on a first name basis with Mike Gallagher.
SPEAKER_00This is a really tough question. Something that I struggle with, that lots of folks struggle with, that we're all gonna be struggling with for the rest of our lives. This kind of question. How do you deal with these people? You gotta think about it strategically. What would you get out of being friendly with this guy? You're not gonna change his mind, obviously. What you could get is some sort of a social leg up. You're not being perceived by the other gym goers as uncouth or being impolite or not being Midwestern enough. You could get that kind of thing. But at the same time, legitimizing him is wrong. And I think it can only be justified if the benefits outweigh how wrong it is on a very pure and simple level. That's the question. That's the calculus.
SPEAKER_02I've been thinking about that. I mean, I could make an effort to be like the token guy with leftist politics that he regularly talks to.
SPEAKER_00It's possible, but but why?
SPEAKER_02I'll tell you why. Because he's 42. And he's got a good relationship with the billionaire that is close to owning the president of the United States. He might run for office again.
SPEAKER_00That's true.
SPEAKER_02He could easily become a senator.
SPEAKER_00That's true.
SPEAKER_02He could easily become Wisconsin's governor. He's even a plausible vice presidential candidate. Yeah, he is.
SPEAKER_00That's true. He's a plausible VP candidate.
SPEAKER_02He's 5'6. He's 5'8 at the tops. He's not going to be president. Not at that height. No. That's a VP. Or a Secretary of State or something like that. He got to be plausibly, possibly six feet. We'll settle for nothing less in America. What is the play here? The full lather and nothing else? Should I be standoffish and constantly sneering at him?
SPEAKER_00One option is all that you ever do is you look at him and don't move your head at all and say, Mike, be icy. Hey, that's it. Oh, nice. Be icy.
SPEAKER_02I'm still gonna feel like he is a guy that goes to my gym. And people that go to my gym get treated with the baseline respect that I have for everyone that's willing to show out $159 a month on their fitness journey. Except for the Black Rifle Coffee shirt wearing guy that was on TikTok. I fuck that guy forever. If I am friendly with him, then someday maybe when he's back in a position to do real harm, he'll have a decision to make and he'll hear a little voice in his head that sounds like mine. Maybe if he's on the fence about a decision, he'll think about which choice is gonna lead to him getting the least hard time by Nick from the gym. Those things might be more handy than just being a dick to him all the time. Even though he's done more evil than anyone I've ever been in the presence of. I still don't want to have bad vibes. Not at the gym, not at this gym.
SPEAKER_00I mean, it's tough. He did this to you. He brought those vibes to the gym. This is a really hard one. Because just being vitriolic and angry, nobody's gonna care. That's not gonna do anything. And at the same time, just being nice to him, what are you supposed to do about that? You shouldn't just be kind. You have to be like, yeah, I disagree with basically the whole thing about you. That's an aspect of it. Avoiding him, not saying a word to him. There's a way in which that's cowardly. You're letting him take the space and set the space. As opposed to just being like every time it comes up, or every time you ask him about if if people are talking about how they're doing, you know, you can say, like, well, yeah, you know, I'm trying to spend as much time as I can dismantling everything that you stand for because I think it's evil.
SPEAKER_02What about like uh every time I see him, I say something like, Hey Mike, you ice enabling motherfucker, you you know, just give him a little bit of a hard time about all the shit that he's done. Pick a new thing that he's done terrible all the time.
SPEAKER_00Hey Mike, did you kill anybody's grandma today?
SPEAKER_02Here's another thing I thought about him. That thing that I said, you were doing your best. He is if if I had all the same information as you, maybe I would have made the same decision. That guy does have access to all the information. So it's possible that everything that he's done is something that I would have done if I had the same level of information, which kind of frightens me.
SPEAKER_00The kind of information that he has and the way that he has been trained to think about it produces the kind of behavior that he's engaging in, right? The kind of quote, strategic thinking that he's engaged in, thinking about the world in terms of nations and rivalries, thinking about the world in terms of nations as in ethnostates and their rivalries with one another, a failure to understand what immigration is and what it's for and who it serves. Like, yeah, all of that shit would lead somebody to behave in the ways that he does. This is where I put on the hippie hat and I say, the whole system is rigged, man. The whole point is that it produces this kind of behavior no matter who's in charge. This apparatus did not begin with the Trump administration. It began back in the Clinton administration.
SPEAKER_02Maybe Mike Gallagher's a victim of circumstance.
SPEAKER_00Ha ha. If he is, he is the 30th millionth most important victim of this.
SPEAKER_02This week in Dr. Craig is Fun at Parties, the Odyssey and the classics in general.
SPEAKER_00Oh, folks, I mean, this is one that like is just screaming at you from every angle online. If you've opened your TikTok, if you've opened your Instagram, people are probably yelling at you about this. The right wing hates Christopher Nolan's adaptation of the Odyssey because it has the audacity to include Matt Damon, who is not Greek, as Odysseus, but also other people who are not Greek as Greek people. And so they're pissed off about that because they think that it's woke to have very attractive people play very attractive people from mythology. Or they're saying, like, oh, it's not quote realistic or representative or something like that. First of all, the Odyssey, if it was written by a particular person, was written about events that were mythological at the time that the story was conceived. Like the story is already from hundreds of years after when the actual Trojan War, such as it was, occurred. It is anachronistic when it describes how warfare worked at that period of time in ancient history. So there's that, like the actual source material is anachronistic. So like putting anachronism in there, it's like, okay, whatever. You know, like like they're very excellent, they're very excellent Richard III or Richard II adaptations that take place during World War II, like Shakespearean plays that are set at different times and places. Whatever. We shouldn't give a shit about that. What the right wing cares about is depicting the past as white and depicting heroes of Western myths as good men. And their claim is that Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey doesn't do that. Um but that's just like that's just like not what the story actually is. It is about a man who fucks up a lot and fails broadly, and like is beset by problems and challenges because of the weird, creepy, and arguably bad shit that he did. Like he fails the gods several times uh in the stor in the course of the story, and is beset by them, is is oppressed by them because of his failures in the world. And in the ancient Greek worldview, you know, like failing the gods, that that is failure. That constitutes moral failing. And so that's the point of the story, is that this man is a moral failure despite his um despite his prowess, despite his intellect, despite despite his cunning. And it's a story about him coming home, about him figuring out how to come back from that. So the right wing hates that because they think that all stories about the past should be about like Christian crusaders succeeding, basically. Um, like that's all they care about and want to see. They just want 300. They were just upset that it wasn't 300, basically. And this isn't even getting started about like, God, about like depictions of the classics and how the right wing loves the classics, and the Nazis loved the classics by which they meant like big armed virtuous men who are like pure white statues, and they like have big spears and big shields, and they're like killing a boar or something. When in reality, actual ancient and classical aesthetics were extremely gaudy and like all painted up with like big bright fucking kindergarten pigments, like like like I'm talking Crayola red and like mustard yellow all over those beautiful ancient pristine statues uh that we think of in our minds. That's what the ancient world actually looked like. It was incredibly like brazen and gaudy uh compared to how we think about the world today. So, like, it's just this like whole fucking crazy mess about representation, about nationalism, about nations, about the past, about Western civilization. Oh my god, it's just so much. It's too much. I haven't seen the picture.
SPEAKER_02Stare into the abyss with friends. The autocratic is their podcast with Nick Mortenson and Dr. Craig Johnson. And don't forget Dr. Craig's other podcast.
