SPEAKER_00 0:00

I really struggled to imagine something that would be actually scarier than this. We gotta fucking grow up. Get serious about this. I truly don't understand it. You cannot laugh these people away. They're real and they're here and they kill people now.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Now that is autocratic despair. This is Autocratic Despair, the podcast. I'm Nick Mortensen, a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Each week on the Autocratic Despair Podcast, I stare into the abyss with my friend, Dr. Craig Johnson, PhD in global fascism, lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of 2025's most important book, How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism. Dr. Craig, on a scale of one to ten, where would you rate your autocratic despair this week?

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Well, I uh had a really nice, relaxing weekend in the wilderness, far and away from all the horrible business. So personally, I'm at a four. In the world, I'd say that I'm at a six. Things are not looking good in terms of how the right wing is behaving in the Middle East, in Trump's relationship with major allies of the United States. The Brazilian election is not looking good. Uh, it's just fire after fire, including all of the actual fires. That's where I'm at. What about you, Nick?

SPEAKER_01 1:26

I'm at a seven. Usually I try to come up with some frivolous reason why I'm feeling the way that I'm feeling on the autocratic spirit scale. Not today, sorry. I don't think I ought to do that, but because black people have been found hanging from trees in public places across the American South. A student on a college campus in the Mississippi Delta, a 16-year-old girl in a churchyard, man in a parking lot, downtown rally this month, blocks from a Caribbean festival with thousands of people at it, 29-year-old mother of four in Jackson, Mississippi, also earlier this month. We've got a platform here and the freedom to discuss these topics for now, so I looked into the cases. I figured they were all modern day lynching. I've been hearing a lot of chatter about this, and now that I've looked into them, before I can say anything else, I can't tell you that these are all lynching. Nobody honest could tell you that. Because when you go case by case, it gets complicated and it gets sad. What I can tell you is something narrower and I think worse. Some of these hangings got a real investigation, some of them didn't. Some of them only got three days. We'll start at the bottom. Juliana Unzita, 16 years old, Charlotte, North Carolina. Juliana Unzita was reported missing on April 28th of this year. On May 8th, a man named Kenneth Tobert was walking his dog around a North Charlotte neighborhood, found her in a churchyard hanging from a tree. The medical examiner ruled it a suicide within three days. Police closed the case one day later. No autopsy. They never recovered her cell phone. Nobody from the Charlotte Police Department ever even bothered to reach out to Ken Tolbert, the man who found Unzita's body. Stew on that for a second. A 16-year-old girl is found hanging in public, and police never bother to find her phone. And they never bother to call the guy who found her? Don't even do an autopsy, just an open and shut case of suicide. Her uncle, Mattia Unzita, says he can't get a straight answer for why there was no autopsy. Four criminal justice and mental health experts told the Charlotte Observer the circumstances were unusual and merited a closer look. I thought it seemed like it was worth checking, running up the flagpole. It was only about two years ago in September 2024, also in North Carolina, that 21-year-old Javian McGee's body was found at the base of a tree with a rope around his neck. That one made news. The sheriff out there talked about it publicly. His office put out a five-page document laying out a timeline of how Javian McGee's body came to be found at the base of that tree. Took them eight months to rule it a suicide. Similar cases, same state, same manner of death, vastly different amount of investigation. Four days for Juliana and Zita, no phone located, no contact with the guy that found her. Eight months for Javi and McGee. Why the difference? One reason might be because North Carolina's medical examiner system is buried. Caseloads have gone up the last few years because of all the fentanyl overdose. Available resources have diminished. North Carolina state pathologists have been carrying caseloads well above the national standard. And the average time to close a case in North Carolina runs past 200 days. Quite the backlog in North Carolina. But a slow autopsy is better than no autopsy. Last fall, Cleveland, Mississippi, a group of Delta State football players are out on a morning run. They find Trey Reed hanging in a tree outside the pickleball courts near campus. Trey Reed was a 21-year-old freshman. He had been in college for all of a month. This is in Mississippi, 50 miles from the Tallahatchie River, where they found Emmett Till in 1955. Yeah, when I tell you the whole state assumed lynching within about an hour. In Mississippi, it's a reasonable conclusion. Trey Reed's family doesn't think he was lynched. They told the Mississippi Free Press that Trey Reed sent some text messages to his girlfriend the night before he died, saying that he was going to hang himself. Mississippi State Medical Examiner ruled this one a suicide, too. The coroner said Trey Reed had no injuries consistent with an assault. Even so, Colin Capernick's organization paid for an independent autopsy of Trey Reed, and noted civil rights attorney Ben Crump took on the case. Nothing's come of that. The family says that Ben is dosed up, never even gave him results of the independent autopsy. And they've been calling and calling. The family's got no answers. Nature abores a vacuum. And in Mississippi, it doesn't take much to fill the void. Activists have said that the second autopsy shows there was a blunt force trauma to the back of Trey Reed's head. But nobody's saying how they had access to the second autopsy when even Trey Reed's family has it. It's just a guy who said he saw it, and a few other people who said they'd heard. You know, rumor, innuendo, or rumor. Nature abores a vacuum after all. The same day that Trey Reed was found, another man named Corey Zuchaitis was also found hanging. This is a homeless man. He recently had his dog taken away from him. He's a white guy, but the internet decided he was black and connected Zucadis' case with Reed. The rumor mill needs no facts. Literally, if there were facts out there, the rumors would have to compete with the facts. But when there are any facts, nature keeps the boring then vacuuming. Two more quick because they matter. February 2026, Marietta, Georgia. Kyle Basinga, a 21 Georgia State student, reported missing on Valentine's Day, body found hanging four days later. Cobb County, Georgia has surveillance video of him walking alone in the woods. They did not see. They talked to witnesses. They ruled it a suicide as well. His family said through police that they trust the process. The Cobb County Police Department in 2026 is apparently doing enough work that a grieving black family accepted the answer. That's my point. It is possible to do good police work. Then in the last few weeks, again in North Carolina, Raleigh, a 32-year-old black man was found hanging behind a restaurant on West Martin Street, blocks from the Caribbean Caribbean festival, with thousands of people downtown and kids everywhere in broad daylight. Just a couple days later, the police chief Rico Boyce and Mayor Janet Cowell of Raleigh, North Carolina held a press conference. They said they had pulled city traffic camera footage from surrounding businesses. Minute by minute, they walked the public through a timeline. This 32-year-old man, whose name has yet to be released, was last seen alive by a person at 1.32 in the afternoon. According to the video, he's seen again at 159 carrying a ratchet strap and a chair. There's a video that captures the man hanging himself just after 2 o'clock. He was discovered about 20 minutes later. He's alone. Nobody else appears in the footage, so chalk one up in the wind column for the ubiquitous surveillance day, I guess. The police chief and the mayor of Raleigh, North Carolina said that witnesses had seen the man earlier in the day, talking to himself. The police chief mentioned that he had been in contact with the man's mother, and his mother had told him that her son had a history of mental health problems. The medical examiner's final ruling is still pending, but it looks like a suicide. Officials in Raleigh, North Carolina showed their work in public two days later. Not bad, right? The thing is, nobody believed a word of it. The line that I've been seeing in every post about this is quote, black people don't hang themselves, unquote. Statistics actually back that up to a degree. The CDC's most recent publishing have suicide by suffocation, which includes hanging, happening in the black population at rates well below half that of the white population. It doesn't just seem unusual for black people to hang themselves. It is unusual. But it does happen. And when it happens outdoors, there's plenty of reason to be suspicious that it was a lynching, especially in the South. You can look at Raleigh, North Carolina, at a police department that pulled the tape and stood at the podium and showed it and say, well, people that don't believe it are just being paranoid. Or you might ask a harder question: why don't people believe? The answer is sitting in the cases. He got four-day rulings, got autopsies nobody ever did, phones not recovered, witnesses not being followed up with. Plus, well, you know, the previous 400 years in American history, when a black body and a tree meant one thing and everybody knew it, and the law called it anything but a lynching back then. Let me bring it all back around. August 3rd, 2026, Jackson, Mississippi, on a street called Road of Remembrance. Neighbors in a mostly black neighborhood find a woman's body hanging from a tree behind a vacant house. It takes three days just to identify. Her name's Taja Fortune, 29 years old, a mother of four. Her aunt called her strong-minded, big-hearted, vibrant. Taja's mother, Christy Spivey, last saw her a few days earlier at a family reunion they both attended in Kentucky. She said, quote, Taja was better than I had seen her in a long time. She was at peace. She did not do this to herself. I know my daughter. Here's where the Taja Fortune case sits. The autopsy has been done. No cause of death, no manner of death, nothing yet released. Jackson City Councilman Kenneth Stokes has written the U.S. attorney asking the feds to come in to investigate this. They do have a person of interest, a 65-year-old man who's picked up on an unrelated weapons charge. He and Taja Fortune do have a five-year-old son together. May well not be a lynching. Might not even be a suicide. May well be a woman killed by somebody who knew her. Taja Fortune's case will only get solved if somebody bothers to solve it. So we don't know. We genuinely don't know what happened to Taja Fortune. But we got an ask. It's a small ask, but it's the whole thing. When they find a black person hanging from a tree in the American South, you look, you do the autopsy, you find the phone. Call the guy who found the body. You put out a five-page timeline. Not because every one of these is lynching. Most of them, it seems, probably aren't. But you gotta look because the history is real. And because the only thing that beats a rumor is evidence. I'd like to know what happened to Taja Fortune. I think we all would. The investigation is still open. We'll be watching. That's kind of what's got me despairing. It's not just that the people are dying. It's that we've arrived at a place where the institutions can show you the tape and the tape doesn't do anything. Nobody believes in the people that are holding the tape anymore. A country where the truth doesn't have anywhere to land is a country that's been getting softened up for a long time or something worth. Some of these are suicide and they deserve to be treated like the tragedies they are. Some of them might not be. And those deserve a real investigation too. And the fact that I can't tell you which is which, and neither can their families. That's not the family's failure. It's ours.

SPEAKER_00 11:17

Have you been following these, Craig? I have, and you're absolutely right. That one of the most confusing parts of this is that some of them look like lynchings and some of them don't. But as you pointed out, that's one of the key things about what the lynching waves of the early 20th century and the 60s and 70s were. That's one of the key things about them was that there was plausible deniability. Even if it was very clear that the people had been murdered, the point of a lynching is that it's done publicly and that everybody knows who did it, and they also know that nothing's going to happen. Now, lynching would have to be different today because doing that sort of thing so openly, even now in the second Trump administration probably would not work. But if you're friends with the police department, if you're in the police department, or simply if you're in the kind of place where white people don't get prosecuted for violence against black people, then yeah, it still absolutely merits the name lynching. It still deserves to be called that. And just as you said, the other problem about this, like the other aspect, is simply that we have arrived at a place in the United States where it's impossible to believe evidence that we see. I find myself thinking, what does video evidence actually tell me at this point? The police were already faking all that kind of stuff in the 80s and the 90s. They were hiding evidence, they were hiding angles, they were hiding all that sort of stuff. Now that it's possible for anybody to type into a computer, make me a video that shows this, and you can just show it to people, we simply do not have a reason to believe that isn't happening. I'm not trying to stow conspiracy theories, I don't know the particulars of these cases, I'm not appraised of all the evidence. But just as you're saying, if I were talking to the families of the people who died in these circumstances, and they said, I have questions, I feel like things aren't being answered, I feel like justice hasn't been served, we would have to agree with them. That's true. And this is entirely independent of the fact that if a person commits suicide, that is a social failure in and of itself. This means that that person didn't get adequate medical care, they didn't get adequate mental health attention, they were probably under a lot of socioeconomic stress, which is often the cause of a lot of suicidal ideation and behavior from lots of people. No matter what, it's a social failing. It's a failure. The United States has systematically and intentionally failed people.

SPEAKER_01 13:28

Last week we discussed the big Tucker Carlson manifesto, and we couldn't finish. We had so much to say about it. I want to do a quick review. Tucker Carlson decided to release a manifesto. He had a couple people backing him up. It was his vision of a future America. And he had 10 commandments, 10 ideas about what Americans should be. We're gonna go through, we're gonna say the name, we're gonna say the word, we're gonna say what he said about the word, and we're gonna say what we said about the word. As far as Tucker Carlson is concerned, America ought to be number one fair. Equal laws, no special treatment for the extent class. Craig, you looked at that and said this is the classic fascist law and order appeal to the rule of law. This is a populist anti-rich coalition, just like Trump in 2016, where he said, I know the system. I know the system is rigged because I'm the one that rigged it.

SPEAKER_00 14:18

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This one, this one is pretty classic. It's saying that it's talking about the law as if it were a neutral and simple good, uh, as opposed to a tool that maintains power for the powerful. The implication here is that if the laws were applied, if the laws that we have were applied, we would have a fair system. When, as we were just talking about in terms of the lynching regime in the South, we know that the laws are not neutral. And when they are applied neutrally or apparently neutrally, the result is not a neutral fair system. The result is an unfair system. But fascism doesn't care about that, and the right wing doesn't care about that in general.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

The second most important thing that Tucker Carlson wants in merit to be his sovereign. This one he didn't hide anything. His definition of sovereign is freedom from foreign influence, specifically Israel, specifically banks and debt. You thought that was classic anti-Semitic.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

Oh, that's just the protocols of the Elders of Zion. That's classic business. That kind of rhetoric is exactly the same as what you would hear from a 19th-century anti-Semitic author or populist in France. That's Dreyfus Affairs. That's old-time religion. That stuff goes back to medieval Spain.

SPEAKER_01 15:29

Three, Tucker Carlson thinks that America should be productive. And by that he meant an economy of tangible goods in American farmland over finance and surveillance. You thought this was the blood and soil, the productive native people versus the parasitic financial class, which is, again, right, in the protocols of the elders.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

Exactly. It's also a misunderstanding of how the economy works, which is something that the right wing is deeply invested in right now, not just in the United States, but all over the world. In the United States, the right wing likes to talk about steel mills and it likes to talk about factories and it likes to talk about miners. In the UK, they do the same thing. You know, they talk about fishermen and farmers and coal miners and stuff. More people work for the company that makes Warhammer 40,000 than fish or mine coal in the UK. More people work in museums in the United States than are coal miners. But that's not how we talk about it. We don't talk about those people as if they're the working class because when the right wing talks about the working class, they explicitly mean white men. That's that productive, quote unquote, working class. That's what they mean. The we used to build things in this country. That's what they're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 16:33

The fourth thing that Tucker Carlson and the gang thinks that America should be in the future is beautiful. Classical architecture, rejection of brutalism, clean streets, rejection of disorder. Classic dog whistles right there.

SPEAKER_00 16:44

Oh, for sure. Yeah. This is anti-urban. Urban is a dog whistle for black, also is a dog whistle for Jewish and diverse. That line in his platform could be summed up as fuck New York. That's essentially what that means.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

Number five on Tucker Carlson's list of 10 things that America should be is healthy. In that he talked about physical vigor, non-toxic food, absolute sobriety. No SSRIs, no Xanax, no ADHD medication. That was like a shot at the over-medicated millennials, right?

SPEAKER_00 17:16

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So this is this is an attack on anybody under 40, the quote, over-medicated, overtherapized crowd. It's also a sort of like olive branch towards the crunchy suburban mom who's anxious about GMOs. But fascists and the right wing in general have always been obsessed with bodily health and equating bodily health with moral health with social health. That's classic stuff, too, dating all the way back to the Boy Scouts, the origin of the Boy Scouts and the Scouting movement, founded by right-wing British imperialists who thought that urban life was hurting white bodies and they needed to get out and rough and tumble, eat some dirt, and grow up and get hair on their chest.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Number six, Tucker Carlson thinks that America should be honest. He wants all those secrets to come out from the government. He doesn't want there to be any classified information anymore.

SPEAKER_00 18:04

What do we say that this way? So this one is a classic anti-corruption appeal. What Carlson is saying here is that the government is lying to you. And the problem with saying that is that it is true. We all know that that's true. What he's suggesting is that his government won't lie to you, which is another lie that's transparently false. And it is also a way to completely flatten any policy disagreements or arguments that anybody might have about how the government should work or who should be in charge or anything like that. Instead, it becomes they're all corrupt, they're all bad, I hate them all. That's a way to hide somebody's right-wing affiliation, the lie of the never Trumper crowd. Carlson himself being an example of this. The vice president of the United States, Donald Trump's vice president, having been a never Trumper, right? This is precisely these people that we're talking about here. People saying the system is corrupt, the problem is secrecy, the problem is the deep state, those are also anti-Semitic dog whistles. There's a secretive cabal of people who are hiding information about how things actually work for you. That's classic right-wing attack nonsense as well.

SPEAKER_01 19:10

I want to bring up the money quote that you had last week.

SPEAKER_00 19:12

Anti-corruption is the socialism of fools. Anti-corruption rhetoric is something that you see a lot in populist movements in the late 20th and early 21st century. Not just in the United States, but all over the world. We see this message in Indonesia, we see it in India, we see it in Japan, we see it in many Middle Eastern countries, especially after big cultural revolution type things, like the Arab Spring. The way that this works is that it flattens other disagreements and it presents the politician as being like, I'm with you, I'm against the corrupt people. Who are the corrupt people? Anyone who's ever been in politics or power. It allows somebody to present themselves as an outsider, as a reformer, as a fixer, without actually proposing anything substantive that they're going to do. This is the classic Trump message drain the swamp. Washington is corrupt. Nobody has to say that. And the problem with this rhetoric is that it is true, is that it's transparently true, which means that saying it has no content. Saying it does not actually promise any kind of change. Saying it doesn't mean that you are on the side of the people actually. It just means that, like, well, I'm going to go after the corrupt people that I don't like, and I'm just going to not go after the corrupt people that I do like. This is what Trump already is doing.

SPEAKER_01 20:32

Number seven, Dr. Craig Tucker Carlson thinks that the country should be optimistic. And he was talking about giving birth.

SPEAKER_00 20:39

This is an attack on feminism. It's an attack on reproductive health, women's ability to choose whether or not they want to have children. It's also, this is another attack on sort of younger people, the millennial generation, Gen Z, for choosing not to have children or for deciding whether or not they wanted to have them. It's another anti-immigration message saying that there should be more white babies. It's all of these things all combined.

SPEAKER_01 21:01

Number eight point on Tucker Carlson's manifesto is that America should be wise. By that he meant an education in immutable truths and unchanging human nature. And he also called on us to understand AI.

SPEAKER_00 21:14

Yeah, so this is another attack on feminism, you know, saying, hey, we should teach children that there are only two genders and that homosexuality is a mental illness, going back to how the establishment talked about these things back in the 60s and 70s, erasing decades of progress in terms of queer rights and feminist rights. It's him kind of triangulating about AI because Carlson and people who are better fascists than Donald Trump, I think would have a more nuanced perspective on AI than Trump does. They want jobs for white people. They want jobs for white people and they want to preserve jobs for white people. That means that they might be reticent to hand the economy to industries that would destroy quite so many jobs as AI is going to. Back a couple of years ago, in the when the big economic Concern was self-driving cars. There were really competent fascists saying things like this about that technology and saying I would never support it or allow it because it would take too many jobs from white men. They would just say that explicitly. Carlson isn't quite going that far. That's because he's a better political communicator and is actually trying to communicate to the masses here.

SPEAKER_01 22:18

The number nine thing that Trevor Carlson thinks that America ought to be is decent. It's a fundamentally pro-human nation that strictly wages war only in self-defense and values human life over systems.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

This is the original America First right-wing isolationism stuff.

SPEAKER_01 22:34

I think it might tip its hat to the healthcare insurance companies. When it says human life over systems. No, I think so. The tenth thing that Tucker Carlson wants America to be is United. He wants us to halt mass immigration. He wants English to become the official language so we have a common national identity.

SPEAKER_00 22:52

This is the most mask-off that this thing gets. It might as well say America should be white. That is what that means. He's saying whiteness should be the core of the United States, English should be the core of the United States. Whiteness as it exists now should be protected. That's his claim here. It's pretty transparent.

SPEAKER_01 23:08

We said that this was as close to the 14 words as possible. The 14 words refers to the most recognized white supremacist slogan in the world. The exact 14 words are we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. That's still what undergirds this whole movement. That phrase reflects the core white supremacist belief that the white race is facing extinction due to increasing global diversity, immigration, multiculturalism, and that extreme measures are justified. Those were the 10 points. This podcast delivered some insights that you're not going to find anywhere else. I mean it. I spent some time going through the usual suspects in the political podcast space. Nobody clocked it the way Dr. Craig clocked. Well. The Muckray came close, but the other podcast barely touched on it. Maybe a segment or two using it as drift for the mill, something to fill space between Quince advertisements. Most of them made fun of it, actually. Yeah. We're not making fun of it on the Autocratic Despair podcast. It's very frustrating to me, Dr. Craig, that the hot take a sphere barely touched on this.

SPEAKER_00 24:06

I don't know why. I don't understand. I was gonna say it annoys me, but it doesn't. It incenses me. I am furious in 2026 that people are still trying to laugh this stuff away. It's a monumental failure of our political imagination and strategy to believe that this stuff can be ridiculed and gotten rid of in that way. That's simply not true. People have been trying to laugh this shit away since Donald Trump descended a golden escalator over 10 years ago. But it's not going away. The fact that it is funny and goofy and over the top, that is part of the content. That is part of it. When you listen to major comedians talk about this and how hard it is to make material out of Donald Trump, they know this. The fact that it is funny, the fact that it is goofy and crazy and wild, that is the content. He is trying to be over the top in order to make it hard for people to take him seriously and believe that he actually believes these things. I don't know if Tucker Carlson actually believes this stuff. I don't know if he's a true believer or not. He might be, but the fact is that he talked to millions of people who are. They really do believe these things.

SPEAKER_01 25:16

I checked into it. He was getting 57 million views on anything he released at the beginning of the year, and his breach has only grown since then. So it'd be reasonable to believe that a good chunk of the country's been exposed to the ideas inside of his manifesto. I don't think 57 million people are watching the full 98-minute stream. No. Probably close to half of the United States by now has consumed some sort of content related to the manifesto, clips, podcasts that brought it up. So they're aware it exists. Both you and I think that this is a big deal, but it hasn't been treated as a big deal. This is nach Hitler uns, after Hitler Us, the historical slogan of the Communist Party of Germany, the KDP, during the waning years of the Weimar Republic in the 30s. It's one of the legendary political miscalculations of all time.

SPEAKER_00 26:01

But this time it'll work, right? I don't know. Carlson is doing something complicated. He is trying to present himself as a possible successor to MAGA, acknowledging Trump's failures, going further to the right in some capacities than Donald Trump is willing to go, especially in terms of open anti-Semitism. That's not something that comes out of Trump's mouth that much, but it is something that comes out of some of his supporters. Carlson is also specifically trying to embody a particular variant of Nazism and the extreme right. This is Carlson trying to triangulate and do something, presenting an image that historians sort of uncomfortably call left Nazism. Here he's sort of embodying the persona of a person named Strasser, who was a major Nazi politician prior to their takeover. Strasser was sort of like a he believed in promoting the power of the working man and promoting labor unions and stuff like that, but he was also anti-Semitic and also racist and also anti-queer and also opposed to women's rights and all of these other right-wing things. Carlson is trying to embody that in a way that Trump arguably also made some gestures towards, especially in Trump 1. Trump 2, it's pretty clear that he doesn't give a fuck and you know is just like an elitist. But Carlson is trying to appear to be a man of the people, and that's why all of his podcasts, instead of being in like a gilded age marble and gold palace like Donald Trump, Carlson always appears in some sort of wood-paneled den. That's why he does that, because he wants to look like your uncle, except with a collared shirt. I don't think it really works, but I guess it works for some people.

SPEAKER_01 27:43

Carlson's making a little bit of a play for the Democratic Socialists, too. So this is the brown part of the red-brown alliance. He's got some leftist talking points in there. It laid it out right next to the actual Nazi platform. Everybody hears something that they'll like. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. If you're listening to Taco Carlson, everybody gets a fair deal. Everybody gets a healthy life. Everybody gets a beautiful city with fantastic architecture to dazzle us. But not everybody, right?

SPEAKER_00 28:08

Not everybody. I mean, that is the core of the difference here between what should be a socialist message and his message, Carlson's message. Nazis do. Fascists do, in fact, want to give stuff to people. They do want to better the lives of lots of people in their constituency. And this is one of the reasons that Trump is maybe arguably not quite a fascist. He doesn't actually have any policies that materially benefit his constituents. Real fascists do. They do want government programs. The Nazi Party had a pretty good healthcare system and pension system and worker protection systems and environmental protection systems compared to many other governments in the early 20th century. It's just that they had those things and did those things literally at the expense in livelihood and actual life of millions of other people. At its best, socialism says, well, we want to better the world and we want to give people the things that they need in order to survive and thrive without depriving others. Carlson is trying to do a sleight of hand here and talk openly about who he's going to deprive. He's talking about Jewish people, he's talking about black people, he's talking about people who live in major urban cities, he's talking about queer people. He's making it clear to his supporters, to the right-wing supporters that he has that that's what he's going to do. He's going to take from those people. While to the people who can't hear those dog whistles, all they hear is, oh yeah, he's going to better our lives and he believes in health and anti-corruption and stuff like that. He's talking out of both sides of his mouth. And he's very good at this.

SPEAKER_01 29:35

Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, but at least it's an ethos.

SPEAKER_00 29:40

Literally the case. Yes, there is actual content here, as opposed to Trumpism, which at this point is a parody of a parody. It's sort of bereft of any actual content at this point.

SPEAKER_01 29:50

This is definitely gonna work. It already works. Most of it sounds like the cure for what ails us. Might have to get a few more trusted figures from the left to join up, or at least not spill the beans with what he's doing. If they got Bernie on it, oh my god. Oh yeah. It's just a countdown until Rokana gets on board. Rokana could definitely get on board with this. Absolutely. And when he gets on board, he'll make the excuse that, oh, well, sometimes you gotta form a coalition with people you don't see eye to eye with in order to stop the larger threat. That's kind of hard to argue.

SPEAKER_00 30:20

Yeah. The Popular Front is real. If you want to fight fascism, you do need to work with people that you disagree with. This is why I don't begrudge people who, in order to stop Trump, are like, we need to talk to Liz Cheney. Okay, I get it. I disagree with Liz Cheney on everything, except I don't want fascism. When people were fighting fascists in the 30s and 40s, there were monarchists working with anarchists, two almost entirely diametrically opposed political opinions. But you gotta work with what you have. As a great man once said, we make history, but not in circumstances of our own choosing.

SPEAKER_01 30:52

We've told the audience that we believe that Tucker Carlson is one of the leading political minds of this generation. We're not kidding. Here's what I would like the audience to understand about Tucker Carlson. He is not a crank who stumbled into it. He's arguably the most effective propagandist in America. He's been at it a long time, and he learned from the best. I mean that literally. It's the family business. Let's dig in a little bit. Tucker Carlson, born in 1969, San Francisco. When he's six years old, his mother leaves, just pieces out, moves to France, remarries an artist, went to find her bliss. Her bliss doesn't include Tucker or his younger brother Buckley. They stay behind. They essentially never see her again. She dies in 2011, estranged to the very end, never got right with her sons. Buckley and Tucker never came to an understanding that if she hadn't left, she would have just killed herself. This was just a survival play of her. I'm not going to sit there and play armchair psychologists, but the man has talked about it himself. One cannot become Tucker Carlson, you see, without something eating away at your soul. I'll just say this about the guy that has built a career telling an audience that they're the ones being betrayed. Do with that what you will. Here's where it gets American. His father, Richard Carlson, moves the boys to La Jolla, California. When Tucker's 10, Dick Carlson gets remarried to Patricia Swanson, as in the Swanson Frozen TV Dinner. So Tucker Carlson, populist scourge of the elites, champion of the forgotten man, was raised from age 10 as an heir to a frozen food empire. He has said it himself: quote, I'm extraordinarily loaded, just from the money I inherited. This is the man who's fighting the ruling class for you. He's the ruling class with the podcast. Tucker Carlson spends his formative years at boarding schools across the country, St. George's in Rhode Island, 60 grand a year for that one. Then Trinity College gets a BA in history, just like a couple of your favorite podcast hosts. Hey. Nothing wrong with a BA in history, except it doesn't prepare you for much. Other than how to look past the comedy so you can clearly clock America's descent into authoritarianism, which is great, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 32:49

Well, you know, it prepares you to be sad. You can do a podcast.

SPEAKER_01 32:54

By his own account, Tucker Carlson spent his college days mostly drunk. This is a true story. After college, Tucker Carlson applies to the CIA. This is documented. CIA turns him down. Propaganda shop said no thanks. His dad, once he didn't get accepted to the CIA, told him this. His father says, quote, you should consider journalism, they'll take anybody. And they did. The guy couldn't get into the official propaganda business, but he went and built his own, arguably bigger than the one that rejected him. And that brings us to his old man. Because you can't understand Tucker without understanding Dick Carlson. Dick Carlson ran Voice of America for five years under Ray. Voice of America is the United States government's official overseas propaganda broadcaster. It is literally the propaganda arm of the U.S. government. Yep. Dick Carlson ran it for five years in the 80s. Then he became a U.S. ambassador. Then he ran the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Tucker Carlson didn't learn about propaganda in a book. He learned it at the dinner table with the guy who ran the actual apparatus. Tucker Carlson understands on a cellular level how you shape what millions of people believe because it's what his father did for a living and it's what he does now. One more thing about his dad, and this kind of ties things together. Dick Carlson, towards the end of his life, ran a PR firm called Policy Impact Strategic Communications. And federal foreign agent records show the firm was a registered paid agent for Viktor Orban's Hungary. They spent $265,000 with them. Part of that contract was arranging for a Hungarian government official to appear on Tucker Carlson's show. Dick Carlson was selling slots on Tucker Carlson's show. That's interesting. Fox fired him in 2023. He didn't fade away. He got bigger, way bigger. Fox, at his absolute peak, Tucker Carlson tonight pulled in around 5 million views a night. Top show on cable. His YouTube's gotten millions of subscribers across his channels. During the week that we started the Iran War, his content did one and a half billion views. Fox's whole prime time right now averages around 3 million. Tucker alone with the camera reaches 10 times that. They aren't watching the whole show, they're just getting clicks. But Tucker Carlson can adjust. Tucker Carlson, former cable star, became something cable never was. He's not just in your living room anymore. He's in your phone, and he's in your kids' phones. That's the thing about Reach. His audience is not just old people watching a TV in the den anymore. It's not just waiting rooms and auto service centers. It's YouTube, it's TikTok, it's Instagram, it's his podcast.

SPEAKER_00 35:28

There's an aspect of the story that's, you know, the transformation of media itself. His father works in radio, he works in broadcast TV, and now he's moved on to streaming and video services, chasing whatever means he can in order to get his message out in front of as many people as possible. Failing upwards. Yep. Tucker Carlson's story.

SPEAKER_01 35:45

Literally. He's failing pretty great. He platforms who he wants. He can legitimize people just by putting them in his chair. Yeah. When the most watched independent broadcaster in the country reads a 10-point manifesto, that's not a guy shouting into the void. That's a guy with the biggest megaphone in American politics, who just told you exactly what he wants to build. Craig, any additional thoughts on Tucker Carlson himself as we move through this? Next, we're going to talk about the people that he's got at his back.

SPEAKER_00 36:09

You could ad nauseum try to figure out whether or not he actually believes these things or what he thinks he's going to get out of this or any of that stuff. We don't know. The point is that rather than pathologizing or psychologizing this individual guy, you have to think about him as a movement builder. What movement is he building? What is he trying to make? And what he's trying to make is essentially a fascist movement, even more so than Trump was.

SPEAKER_01 36:36

He's the Father Coughlin of his era?

SPEAKER_00 36:38

That is a great comparison, Father Coughlin of his era.

SPEAKER_01 36:41

Who was Father Coughlin for the audience?

SPEAKER_00 36:43

Father Coughlin was the best fascist messenger that the United States had in the early 20th century. He was called Father Coughlin because he was a Catholic priest, which was somewhat unusual for fascists in the United States at the time. Most fascists in the U.S. were actually very anti-Catholic because just like today, they were very anti-immigrant, and most of the immigrants to the United States were then, as now, from predominantly Catholic countries, except in the early 20th century, these are ethnic whites, so Polish people, Catholic Germans, Italians, Irish. Father Coughlin was a fascist ideologue in the United States, and he advocated for a racially exclusionary and authoritarian system in the U.S. He was a major radio news host at the time, one of the most listened-to radio shows in the U.S. until he was eventually banned for being a fucking Nazi.

SPEAKER_01 37:32

Who's back in Tucker? Three people right now. Joe Kent, Thomas Massey, and Marjorie Taylor Green. Oh, baby. We'll take them in order from least well-known to most well-known. Joe Kent eased the muscle of this crack squad. He's the least known quantity. On paper, Kent's the real deal. He retired in Army Green Beret, 20 years in, 11 combat deployments, six bronze stars, then a paramilitary officer for the CIA. Joe Kent is a genuine decorated special operations guy, not a cosplay. And he's been in the shit. There's a real tragedy at the center of Joe Kent's life. In 2019, his first wife, Shannon Kent, Navy senior chief, cryptologist, on her fifth combat deployment, was killed by an ISIS suicide bomber in Syria. The first female U.S. service member killed by enemy fire in Syria. She left behind two kids. That's real loss, that's real sacrifice, full stop. Here's why it matters to the story, because that loss is what launched Joe Kent into politics. He became a gold star husband to the public. He ran for Congress in Washington twice, 2022-2024. Lost both times to a centrist Democrat. And then Trump brought him into the administration anyway. First as chief of staff to Tulsi Gabbard, and then this is an interesting part. He made Joe Kent the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the agency built after 911,000 plus people. This is the country's entire counterterrorism nerve center. Was Joe Kent qualified to run that? No, but the Senate confirmed him, 52 to 44. Every no vote was a Democrat. People didn't want to vote for him because during his campaigns, Joe Kent got pretty close to some ugly stuff. The AP documented Joe Kent paying a man identified as a Proud Boy $11,000 in consulting for one of his campaigns. Consulting is not a business the Proud Boys are in.

SPEAKER_00 39:15

That means that he was paying them to either hit people or to be ready to hit people. That was what that money was for.

SPEAKER_01 39:21

You gotta specialize in stuff. He also took an endorsement from a self-described oathkee. Basically, all the people that have been convicted of sedition the last few years got Joe Kent's back. For his part, Joe Kent denies his extremist ties, but there's a through line that should stop you from believing him. The man they put in charge of watching domestic terrorism has documented ties to the exact groups that are doing the domestic terrorism.

SPEAKER_00 39:45

This is, yeah, this is real Ministry of Truth tech shit.

SPEAKER_01 39:48

At the outset of the hostilities against Iran, Joe Kent quit his job as the director of the National Counter-terrorism center in protest. He's the highest-ranking official to walk out over the Iran war. His resignation said Iran was no threat, and that Trump went to war, his words, due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lot. Joe Kent went on to say that his own wife was killed in a war manufactured by Israel. So he had to quit in protest in honor of his own deceased wife. So what does Joe Kent bring to Carlson's operation? He's the muscle. He brings credibility. He's the Green Beret, the CIA guy, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Joe Kent knows what the threats are. He knows who the threats are. So when Joe Kent says, end the wars, the government's lying to you, it doesn't sound like a podcast take. It sounds like a professional judgment. The war-tired guy, he knows what the threat looks like. And you should believe him as long as you can forget the whole Proud Boy Oathkeepers thing. Next up, the Mart. Thomas Massey is a Kentucky congressman. Still, people took him seriously because he stuck to his principles. He's a libertarian to his bones. What most people don't know about Massey is that he has an engineering degree from the MIT. He's an actual inventor. He created this groundbreaking haptic technology called Phantom, which is a way to simulate actual touch of objects in a 3D interface, usually used in medical training for surgeons to practice their virtual surgeries and feel resistance from tissue and bone. Made in major bank out. It still holds 12 patents. As a congressman, Thomas Massey is probably famous for one thing, voting no on everything. He's the guy who's the lone no vote on bills that pass 400 to 1. Massey is the one. Deficits, surveillance, foreign aid, war, always a no-vote. Stated principle, won't budge, which people admire about him, even if they don't agree with him. Massey's been in isolationist his whole career. It's the most consistent thing about, which is exactly why he's useful to this coalition. He's the one that can say, I've voted for this since way before it was cool. He's telling the truth. He gives the movement its intellectual respectability. The this is about construction, not grievance covered. Massey got crosswise with Trump last year, so Trump decided to end it. He got the Republicans to spend, and this is real, around $32 million to primary Thomas Massey in Kentucky. And that's the most expensive House primary in American history. Trump called Massey the worst Republican in the history of Congress. Massey lost the primary. He won't be continuing on as a U.S. Congressman. So now Massey is something even more useful to Carlson. He's a martyr, a guy purged by the Trump GOP for the exact positions this new movement is built around. His principle turned into grievance fuel. He brings a little bit of a halo. He's the serious one. He's the principled one. He's the one who stood fast to his beliefs. There's a little bit more information on Massey, that's interesting. He's a widower like Joe Kent relatively recently. He lost his wife. He's remarried since. And when his first wife was alive, Massey's family was the first to send out Christmas cards with the whole family holding AR-15s.

SPEAKER_00 42:35

That's right. I knew that there was something fucking goofy about that guy. I forgot.

SPEAKER_01 42:40

Rounding out this crack squad of lapsed MAGA enthusiasts is Marjorie Taylor Greene. Oh my god. Green is here for one reason. She's not a policy person, not here for her portfolio. She's here to deliver the ladies, to let them know this is a perfectly reasonable way of thinking. She used to be pretty kooky, so this is sort of her path back to respectability. I'd like to talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene's storyline art because it's the scariest thing on the whole beat. If we go back to 2021, Green first entered Congress. People thought of her as a joke, and I mean specifically a joke. She's the one that suggested California wildfires were started by a weather-controlling space laser controlled by the Rothschild family. Jewish space lasers in the parlance of our time. She compared mask mandates to the Holocaust. She was a big-time QAnon person in Congress. We're not even talking about the malapproposes. She mixed up Gaspacho with Gestapo. She called a petri dish, a peach tree dish.

SPEAKER_00 43:35

Yeah, Gaspacho Gestapo is one for one for the ages. That's a spectacular one. You couldn't write it. Like if you wrote it in an SNL sketch, you'd be like, oh, that's too much.

SPEAKER_01 43:43

The House kicked her off all the committees weeks into her first term. She was too crazy for the 2021 Republican Party. She resigned from Congress this past January on her own terms as a principled critic of Trump. She got respectful write ups from the media over it. They positioned her as a voice of a disillusioned base. Since there was no bigger MAGA enthusiast in Congress. For Trump to lose her, it must be over. She's still Madge Green, though. She didn't become more reasonable. She didn't change. We changed. The window moved towards her. The stuff that got her thrown off her committees in 2021 is now just edge of mainstream stuff. Marjorie Taylor Green is the founding figure in a movement that's being covered seriously. The Space Laser Lady is now an elder statesman of the new right, and it's not because she got saner, it's because everything slid toward her.

SPEAKER_00 44:29

That is possibly the most correct and terrifying sentence that I have ever heard in this podcast.

SPEAKER_01 44:36

So what does Green bring exactly? She brings the reach. She's got a big audience, a big mailing list, the viral engine, the millions of small dollar donuts. She's proof the fringe is now front and center in the mainstream. She's an audience delivery machine, and every movement needs one of those. That's her coalition. That's the A team. Carlson, the voice in the propaganda, the man with the planet, Hannibal. Chance, muscle, credibility, B.A. Barackas. Massey, the principal and the martyr out there, selling this play like he's the faceman. Marjorie Taylor Green is the link to the lunatic friend. She's obviously Murdoch in this scenario. Yeah, for sure. Four people, four angles. One job to sell this bullshit like it's the way for.

SPEAKER_00 45:15

That is a spectacular, spectacular metaphor to talk about these people. Oh my god. I hate how good that is.

SPEAKER_01 45:29

I went back and listened to episode two from May when we were talking about Rokana's effort to find some common ground with people where he mentioned Green and Massey specifically as people he could work with. You said in that one that Tucker Carlson will run for president in 2020 in the context of the Red Brown Alliance. You called that. Yeah. Even said that we'd see some sort of fusion dish between the squad, Rokanna, and Thomas Massey in relatively short order. Hey, nice work. Yeah. Real good for the credibility of this show.

SPEAKER_00 45:56

Get on Kalshi. Give me a finder's fee.

SPEAKER_01 45:58

We went out pretty far on a limb last week as a show when we discussed how Tucker's Manifesto is nothing more than rephrase Nazi stuff for the significant chunk of our country that loves the Nazi shit, but hates being called a Nazi for it. I've listened to a lot of discussions about Tucker's Manifesto, but I didn't hear anyone calling it like that. Or do you think that there are so few shows in our space that came to similar conclusions?

SPEAKER_00 46:20

See, this is one of these things where it's like it it's really hard for me to understand why people fail to see this stuff or try not to think about it. I really think that to a lot of people, they still for some reason believe that if you don't talk about this stuff, it will have a smaller platform. As if the fact that the left or the center or anybody who's opposed to these people, as if us ignoring them, will make them go away. I really do think it's like a child that thinks that if I close my eyes, they can't see me. It's ostrich behavior. I honestly think that that's what it is.

SPEAKER_01 46:55

They stated pretty clearly that they're not building a political party. So what are they building if not a political party?

SPEAKER_00 47:01

Yeah, they're trying to produce a post-MAGA right coalition. Donald Trump is a generational talent. He's a disruptor. He fucked stuff up real bad in the Republican Party. He brought in people that hadn't been inside before, people who had been voting Republican from the extreme right with a held nose, in the same way that I, as a big old leftist, hold my nose and vote for the Democrats. Donald Trump brought those people in explicitly. And the question on every Republican's mind, starting in 2016, was what are we going to do when this guy's gone? How are we going to hold this coalition together? And there were some people, like a Liz Cheney, who said, okay, well, the solution is to wipe this way clean and ignore that stuff and kick those people out. Clearly, transparently, that's not happening anymore. They don't want to start a third party. That's a non-starter in US politics. So their options are we let the Democrats win, or we figure out a way to keep the right wing here and we reinvent the Republican Party. And that's what Carlson is trying to do. He's trying to reinvent the Republican Party. I think he's going to run as a Republican and be like, ah, you know, I feel kind of complicated about it, but this is where the conservative voters are, and I certainly can't run as a Democrat. Alternatively, he could run as a Democrat.

SPEAKER_01 48:08

That's a scary thought. If you want to win the Republican nomination, you're going to have to cater to this Tucker Carlson crew. Whether that's J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio. They're going to have to pay to get these folks behind it. It's worth noting that Tucker's son was J.D. Vance's chief of staff until recently. If I'm a betting man, I still don't know. Maybe it's a shakedown. Maybe it's Peter Thiel and Elon Musk having a dick measuring contest. Maybe they don't know exactly what's going to happen, but they want to have some say in the matter. Because Tucker Carlson and the gang are putting together a major influence operation, and it's only going to get bigger. Whatever else Tucker Carlson is, was or ever will be, he's a lead magnet. He's pulling in names and addresses of all the people who are tired of the same old stuff. Whether they be conspiracy theorists, maha mobs, principled former military, prowl boys, libertarians who finally want to have a say in something, misogynists or the women that love them, or whatever Aaron Rodgers is. Know it all dickheads that have proven to be good at exactly one thing that we over-index, I would say. Those are some pretty big demographics and they got them covered right now. Just wait until the coalescing starts. Wait until Nick Fuentes joins up. Tucker's just getting his foot in the door. Tucker's just letting you know who watch this space. If you're looking for common sense solutions that are looking to benefit his kind of folks, Joe Sixpack types, real men who hunt and fish and have boats. Whatever this may become, and you and I think this is gonna become something terrible, it's at least a way of thinking, a way of looking at the world aspirationally. And they're looking for like-minded folks that are interested in joining their mailing list. That's good data for the Tucker Carlson game to have because they're selling something and they're gonna want you to buy it a little later on. For now, it's just gonna present itself as a direction that they'd like to turn the heads of good Americans toward. All in all, this 98-minute live stream that Tucker Carlson did with his manifesto is a pretty decent speech for the masses. It's got plenty for the old common sense solution crowds, but it still tips its cap to the lunatic fringe. He's making sure that you know that he knows that the Jews are the problem. Well, I'm actually saying. But not so subtle that you'll miss it. If you're not paying attention to things the way that you and I do, you probably don't see the problematic one.

SPEAKER_00 50:12

That's the central problem here. To his former Fox News audience that isn't terminally online, they'll just be like, well, this sounds like a reasonable guy. Whereas to the terminally online 14 to 25-year-old crowd, they know exactly what he's talking about. Those people are the future of the Republican Party. Carlson knows it, Vance knows it. Vance is trying to do exactly this thing, but he's inside the White House, and so he's handicapped in that capacity. Rubio is probably going to present himself as the reasonable moderate candidate, the guy who was here before Trump, the insider before that. But Carlson's got the reach, Carlson's got the chops.

SPEAKER_01 50:47

Have you ever encountered a really good salesman in your life?

SPEAKER_00 50:50

I have. It's scary, weird. When you get got by somebody and you know that you're getting got while you're getting got. It's a weird experience.

SPEAKER_01 50:57

I've encountered good salesmen too. I work with some really good salesmen. I've actually taken the training. I've listened to the $700 taped seminar sets. I had access to a whole library of them. Vedric Cold Calls with Chet Holt. Listen to it. Getting the Yast, all the Robert Cialdini stuff, all the classics. Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins. I've even listened to all the Tony Robbins sets a few times. I'm embarrassed to say it. I got something out of every one of them. They're corny as hell, and Tony Robbins would become an anti-vaccinist. He was always a little bit of a charlatan, but you'd be surprised. My favorite one is Jim Rohn's Challenge to Succeed. I still listen to that one here and there. Why else do you think my speaking cadence is like this? Neurolinguistic programming, baby. Do you know neurolinguistic programming, Dr. Greg? Yeah. For the audience, NLP is a psychological approach that explores the connection between neurological processes, language, and behavioral patterns learned through experience. The claims that by consciously understanding and altering how we think and communicate, we can effectively reprogram our behavior to overcome obstacles and achieve specific goals. It's popular with the self-help crowd, the sales crowd, life coaching. The broader scientific community largely considers neurolinguistic programming to be a pseudoscience due to the lack of empirical evidence supporting its claims. But what it comes down to is that certain speaking patterns and cadences are easier to listen to than others. Certain phrases that you tell yourself get altered. You don't say that you have a problem, you say you have a challenge. It'll help you reframe the situation in your mind. You don't say that you have to do something, you say you get to do something. You don't think about getting through the day, you think about getting from the day. It's just a way of programming yourself for success. There's no science backing neurolinguistic programming at all, but people swear by the result. It's the maha of the sales word. There's actually a pretty decent overlap in the Venn diagram between maha types and multi-level marketing schemes, which is more or less what those sales seminars are all about. Mary Kay, Herbalife, Amway, LulaRoe. This is the world I'm sure that you know very little about, Dr.

SPEAKER_00 52:50

Craig. Only to the extent that I know about it as a form of grift.

SPEAKER_01 52:54

You know, salespeople are constantly getting rejected, and it does take its toll psychologically. All the cult techniques are evident in multi-level marketing. They isolate you from the doubters, they trust you with special knowledge, they keep you from negative thinking, establishing us versus them mentality. If it's not going well for you, it's not the system that's failing, it's you, it's your mindset, insufficient belief in yourself. That's not just multi-level marketing, that's a cult. And increasingly, it's a political belief system. I guarantee you that if you're active in a multi-level marketing situation right now, you voted for Trump. I spent most of my life working in the large ticket manufacturing space. We sell business to business. It's a different target market than an MLM, but the principles are all just the same. You prospect, you identify pain points, you tailor your solution to meet the needs of the client, and then you partner, you close the sales. Before you can do any of that, you got to know who the decision maker is. You got to get your foot in the door. Getting your foot in the door is the great skill of a salesman. The best way to do it is by getting somebody to do you a small favor. You think that would be the other way around. You do them a favor and then they owe you one, but it doesn't work like that. People don't like the feeling of owing something. They resent you for making them feel beholden. But if they do you a small favor, it's different because you owe them now. And by doing you that favor, they have invested in you in a psychological sense. They want you to succeed. To get your foot in the door, you ask for something real small, something that they'd feel like a jerk to say no to. So they say yes. Once you get them to do you a small favor, you've gotten a tie yes. And then they've made an investment of their time or energy in you. People have a desire to remain consistent. So the next time you ask them for something, they're inclined to do it, remain consistent. My personal technique for getting a foot in the door was to buy some swag from the company. Once you send the decision maker a photo of you wearing their golf shirt, your goal, especially if it's too small or too big. The bog standard technique is asking them if they would just answer one question for you. So if they say yes, you're gold. You've already asked them a question, they've responded yes. And people have a desire to remain consistent. From there, all you need to do is stack those yeses, and eventually they'll buy what you're selling. Might take years, but when they need what you're offering, they've got a guy for them. And that guy owes them a favor. Tucker Carlson is pretty good at this. He doesn't open up the manifesto by saying, Jews, am I right? He opens on a tiny, unrefusable yes. The government lies to you. That's true. Pretty obvious by now. And then he cranks it up a little bit. They lie to drag us into wars that aren't ours. Another yes. Trump said no war, but then he bombed Iraq. He's just like the rest of the US president. Now that Tucker's got a couple of yeses, he can move in a little bit. Say something like, The people pushing those words, their loyalties aren't to us. We wouldn't be at war if that was the case. Yes. Once you're three or four yeses deep, then he starts with the usury, building number seven, or genetic heritage, because now your four yeses in and he's taking some liberty. He's looking over his shoulder to see who's in the room. The coast is clear, he hits you with the special now. If he'd open by talking about usury or genetic heritage, you'd have hung up on it. He owes you a favor now. And if you ever want to see a return on that investment, you got to go along with it. You're not an anti-Semite, if you'd think that all you did was agree to a series of small steps in that direction with someone who you don't agree with on everything, but you got a little bit of a meeting of the minds with them when it comes to Israel and the bad stuff they're doing in Gaza.

SPEAKER_00 56:01

I mean, this is precisely the thing that Trump knew back in 2015, 2016. If you say a little bit of truth and then follow it up with a big lie, people are more willing to believe it. It works. As we've said before on this podcast, Trump would say, I know the things are stolen because I steal them. And Carlson can get up on stage or get on his podcast and say, I know the media lies to you because I did it. My friends did it, but I'm not lying now. He's really good at that.

SPEAKER_01 56:26

He's been out for 25 years. You know who else is pretty good at this technique? Nick Fuentes. We talked about him a couple episodes back. He doesn't care for the Jews one bit, and he doesn't care who knows it, been right all on. You think that Fuentes and Carlson are in cahoots?

SPEAKER_00 56:40

It's a good question. Fuentes has always been a bee in the bonnet of the extreme right wing of the MAGA universe. Primarily, his opponent was Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk was going to be carrying this torch. He was going to run for president. And now that space is open, and now there's really only one guy in that kind of space, in that particular position. Carlson is going to do it. Fuentes has been trying to moderate. Fuentes has been trying to do his own triangulation. I would not be surprised at all if Fuentes has a goal of being the guy who actually says the shit in the Carlson universe. And that he gets on Carlson's show and Carlson is like, ah, you're a little bit too far for me. And then Fuentes is like, eh nice stinker. I think that that's what they're gonna do. That's what they're trying to pull.

SPEAKER_01 57:23

It seems inevitable, but for right now, they can't stand each other. Fuentes called this manifesto a loaded garbage. Carlson says he regrets ever sitting down with Fuentes on his podcast. There's a real personal beast. No, if they don't like each other. Might be Kayfabe. Yeah. Here's the thing, though, they don't need to coordinate. Carlson will get the first yes, the reasonable one, the guy you know. I'm just asking questions. Fuentes is standing there in the distance for people who keep saying yes and run out of reasonable steps. Fuentes will say the thing that Tucker only whistled at. He's been saying it since day one. Where have you been? The personal animosity helps them both. Carlson looks more like a moderate by disowning Fuentes, as you said. He can point to that guy and say, that guy's anti-Semitic. I'm just telling you Israel's got too much influence. Two different things. Why do our taxes have to go to protect Israel and allow them to have free health care in college when we can't get free health care here? Why is it such a priority for our government? Ah, I'm just asking questions. Tucker and the gang are selling the cleaned up version of Fuentes' product. Tuckle's the guy that gets his foot in the door because he's not outlandish like Fuentes, he actually kind of makes pretty good sense. And if you go along with everything Tucker wants, you may never get to the Fuentes level. But once you start listening to Tucker Carlson, you're turned in that direction. You're further along than you were. How far you want to go is up to you.

SPEAKER_00 58:41

The fact is that whether or not Carlson does, in fact, run for president, and if he runs, whether or not he wins, he represents a major shift in the Republican Party and in the right-wing coalition. He is an extremely mainstream figure, arguably the most mainstream right-wing commentator in the 21st century in the United States. He has been for decades. This is where he's at. He's as mascov fascist as anybody that your uncle knows the name of. He's just fully openly there. He's selling this to millions of people. Millions of people are buying it. Lots of people will see him critique Donald Trump and be like, oh, a reasonable guy. As many millions of Republican voters are getting disillusioned with Trump because of his transparent lies, they're going to latch on to the first major Republican figure who opposes Trump. Carlson will be able to be like, Trump lied to you. He's lying to you right now. And it will be true, which is the central problem. Carlson is a snake oil salesman. He is identifying a real disease, but he is selling you poison. If you look at him and you think that he's goofy or stupid or it's not going to work, that's because you aren't addicted to that drug. That's because you don't take it. But millions of people do. You can write them off and you can think that they're wrong and you can think that they're stupid or lazy or whatever. And I think some of those things. I disagree with these people on essentially everything. I think that they're a menace to society. I really struggled to imagine something that would be actually scarier than this. We gotta fucking grow up. Get serious about this. I truly don't understand it. You cannot laugh these people away. They're real and they're here and they kill people now.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:22

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