Stare into the abyss of the United States' descent into Authoritarianism with a truly funny comedian from Green Bay, WI and a very serious PHD in Global Fascism Studies from Cal-Berkeley.
•Nick Mortensen & Dr. Craig Johnson•Season 2•Episode 17
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Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson arrive at the same number this week — a six apiece — but the sixes are doing different jobs. Craig's is about Canada. The United States has restarted a tariff fight with its most serious long-term ally in both trade and foreign policy, Mark Carney is trying to be the adult in a room that no longer rewards adults, and Craig's read is that the whole thing exists because the Iran situation is going badly and Donald Trump wants different headlines. If jettisoning Canada were the only dumb thing this administration had done, Craig says, it would be world-historic. Instead it's somewhere around number forty-five on the list.
Before Nick gives his number, the show takes a detour it did not plan and absolutely needed: Natalie Harp. The White House aide's devotion to Trump — the jogging alongside the motorcade, the sleeping arrangements at Mar-a-Lago, the sheer relentlessness of it — starts as disbelief and turns into one of the sharpest bits of analysis in the episode, because Craig recognizes the shape of it. This is what Versailles was for. You make the powerful live worse than they'd live at home, in tents in the courtyard of the king's castle, because proximity is power and the king wants everyone to remember it. The swamp Trump promised to drain turns out to run on exactly this logic: to have influence with this man, you must be physically in front of his eyeballs. Karoline Leavitt and Steven Cheung come up. So do the shoes. And Craig's all-time favorite version of the handshake power move makes an appearance — Barack Obama, Raúl Castro, a limp wrist held aloft in Havana, and the most VEEP moment in modern diplomatic history.
Then Nick's six, and he earns it the hard way. He doesn't like wrestling with the idea that there are no good guys left in American politics. He knows it implicitly; he refuses to accept it, because accepting it feels insurmountable and he has kids. So he keeps a list instead — the stories that broke through his resistance. March 4, 2024, when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that states couldn't remove Trump from the ballot, despite conservative judges like Michael Luttig arguing the Fourteenth Amendment means what it says. The day the January 6 defendants got their pardons, including people convicted of seditious conspiracy who had staged an armed quick-reaction force across the Potomac, awaiting orders. Prairieland. Each one stretched his math — his conviction that this is a twenty-five-to-thirty-year problem the rest of us can shrink to fifteen or eighteen if we make a real effort, an effort this show considers itself the beginning of. Craig's addendum is the episode's quiet thesis: people say the arc of history bends toward justice, but we have to do the bending.
And then the newest entry on the list, the one that got Nick anxious on a Sunday. Maggie Haberman and the New York Times reported that Hakeem Jeffries — House Democratic leader, presumptive Speaker if Democrats take the midterms, a man third from the presidency if you're counting chairs — held an off-the-books meeting with Jared Kushner at a mutual friend's place in Manhattan. Housing, immigration, cost of living. No press, no readout, no announcement.
The show does what it does best: it stops being outraged long enough to explain. Who is Jared Kushner? A real estate heir whose father, Charles Kushner, went to federal prison in a witness-tampering case so baroque that Craig can only respond in Godfather quotes — a case that made Chris Christie's career, ended in a Trump pardon, and somehow terminates in an ambassadorship to France. Whose Harvard admission arrived after a $2.5 million family pledge, per reporter Daniel Golden. Who bought 666 Fifth Avenue for a record $1.8 billion the year before the crash and was rescued by a firm whose major investors include the Qatar Investment Authority. Whose post-White House fund took two billion dollars from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth over the objection of that fund's own screening panel. Nick is precise about what he's claiming: not where the man's heart is — where his money is. And it's in a set of monarchies that don't hold elections. There's also the detail Jodi Kantor reported in 2017, the one that reads like a Chekhov's gun: Benjamin Netanyahu was close enough to the family that teenage Jared gave up his bedroom for him and slept in the basement. Sarah Kendzior has called Kushner a weather marker — you'll know anyone is serious about transnational corruption the day he's even on the radar. He never is. Ivanka, Josh, the whole apparatus: untouched.
Then Jeffries — Brooklyn, corporate lawyer, Pelosi's successor, the first Black man to lead a party in Congress, a politician so rehearsed he makes Jon Ossoff sound off the cuff, a man who talks like he's counting syllables on his fingers. Which matters, because a man with no unscripted moments does not have a secret meeting that leaks by accident. Nick flags the speculation as speculation and then commits: somebody wanted this out, both men had a motive, and neither motive is you. The show gives the honest counterargument its full weight — these two worked together on the First Step Act, and real people came home from prison because of it — before landing on why this is different: negotiating on leverage you don't have yet makes your opponent stronger, and nary a Democrat of note, Chuck Schumer included, seems to have a single question. Even Nick's beloved hip-hop bond with Jeffries — Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, a Tribe Called Quest after Phife Dawg, Sir Mix-A-Lot's place in the American canon — can't soften it. Craig, professional cynic, floats the darker readings, including a return to Mitt Romney politics that neither ascendant wing of either party would permit.
The back half crosses the Atlantic. On September 6, the German state of Saxony-Anhalt votes, and the AfD — a party founded in 2013 by economics professors mad about the euro, now led by Alice Weidel and classified by Germany's own domestic intelligence service as right-wing extremist — is polling at forty percent. Their lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, is on the cover of Der Spiegel as the most dangerous man in Germany, no question mark, though Nick notes the name itself is doing villain work Danhausen would respect. Craig explains the Brandmauer, the firewall agreement that has kept German fascism from power for eighty years and is visibly slipping; the east-west divide that any Midwesterner will recognize in their bones; and the word remigration — a euphemism invented because the AfD cannot say deportation, since deportation was already the euphemism, the word the Nazis used when the truth was murder. A euphemism for a euphemism. Jeff Sharlet's line hangs over all of it: the first lie of authoritarianism is its inevitability.
Next week: the True Texas Project in Tarrant County — which Nick argues is exactly the AfD, and it's happening in Texas. This is the commedia for your particular tragedy: a comedy podcast about surviving American autocracy that stares directly at fascism and the authoritarian playbook and still, against all odds, remains fun to listen to. We have to try, after all.
Names in this episode: Nick Mortensen, Dr. Craig Johnson, Mark Carney, Donald Trump, Natalie Harp, Karoline Leavitt, Steven Cheung, Barack Obama, Raúl Castro, Fidel Castro, Michael Luttig, Hakeem Jeffries, Jared Kushner, Maggie Haberman, Charles Kushner, Chris Christie, Daniel Golden, Ivanka Trump, Josh Kushner, Benjamin Netanyahu, Jodi Kantor, Sarah Kendzior, Nancy Pelosi, Jon Ossoff, Chuck Schumer, Mohammed bin Salman, Peter Thiel, Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Phife Dawg, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Mitt Romney, Alice Weidel, Ulrich Siegmund, Giorgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen, Jeff Sharlet, Danhausen.
Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.
SPEAKER_02
There was a real estate crash in 2008. You know, subprime mortgages, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac. Buying a piece of real estate for the most money ever, the year before that. This is an all-time blunder. Fuck up of the decade, according to FailSun magazine.
SPEAKER_00
Oh, really?
SPEAKER_02
This is Autocratic Despair, the podcast. I'm Nick Mortensen, a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Each week on the Autocratic Despair Podcast, I stare into the abyss with my friend, Dr. Craig Johnson, a PhD in global fascism, lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of 2025's most important book, How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism. Dr. Craig, on a scale of 1 to 10, where would you say your autocratic despair is this week?
SPEAKER_01
Well, for a lot of reasons, I am back at a six. I honestly don't remember if that's higher or lower than last week. Discerning listeners, please write in and tell me if that's true. Basically, right now I'm just thinking about all this shit with Canada and the United States trying to jettison its most serious long-term ally in both trade and foreign policy. It's just wild and stupid. If this were the only thing that Donald Trump did that was dumb, it would be world historic levels of dumb. But it's just like number 45 on world historic levels of dumb.
SPEAKER_02
I was curious as to why we started up with Canada again in the last couple days. I don't understand it. I don't know what's going to happen, but I know that Mark Carney from Canada is like trying to be an adult about it. And he's kind of like at his wit's end with it. He's like, we gotta prepare for life without him.
SPEAKER_01
It's crazy because, like, you know, the Canadian and US economies are just inextricably linked and have been for like 50 years. So, like, what are we doing here? Why are we talking about this? You know, the United States is starting up tariffs on Canada again, and Canada's saying, well, we're gonna match your tariffs. But like, Trump hates Canada for a lot of reasons. Canada is more tolerant than the US, racially, especially. Canada has a bunch of racial problems, but it's somewhat different than the United States. The baseline in Canada is a blue state in the United States, as opposed to the United States, where the baseline is like the Middle South, I guess, like a Tennessee. So Trump hates them for that reason. My read is basically that he's just starting this beef up again because shit with Iran is not going well and he wants different foreign policy press than what was going on with Iran. That's my guess.
SPEAKER_02
What's weird is he's got a gold mine in that Natalie Harp thing. I wasn't gonna talk about this, but it's interesting.
SPEAKER_01
It's a perfect Trump story.
SPEAKER_02
This thing's got some legs and it's all made up.
SPEAKER_01
It's like a perfect Trump story. If he needs a distraction, well, this is a perfect distraction, it's a perfect Trump story. I don't know why he's fucking around with his other shit. I don't know.
SPEAKER_02
I think it might be because that Carolyn Levitt's gonna leave and he's mad. So he's trying to make her jealous.
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah, could be. Or she's his nurse. Could be. Yeah, it could be.
SPEAKER_02
That doesn't look good for a guy.
SPEAKER_01
He might just feel bad about it. I take that back. He definitely doesn't actually care. He might be doing some sort of tit for tat with her. I don't know. I don't know. I've honestly been ignoring that because I feel like I'm being bird dogged. Yeah, okay, sure. Here's another weird White House incest thing. Like, I just don't need to think about this. Some of this stuff is good though. She's hiding in the trunks of cars because there's no seats for her. It's like, oh my god. That one is pretty incredible. That one's pretty incredible. Girl! I turned into a 28-year-old mother of two, or I'm like, girl! You find yourself being like, Man, just like move to you know New Mexico and open a turquoise store and like that kind of thing, right? Like, do something else with your life. Anything would be better and more productive than following this man around. Literally following. Yes, yes, yes, literally running around. Like jogging, they show pictures at her.
SPEAKER_02
That's really bad. In any other scenario, I've seen this. It's like a man treating a woman terribly in a relationship. But with this one, it's Trump does legitimately forget about her every time she's not directly in front of him with a piece of paper saying good news.
SPEAKER_01
It's a level of obsession that is worthy of the film Obsession, which is a horror movie about a woman being obsessed with a man. From what I understand, she got obsessed with Trump because he arguably saved her life. In that he signed a piece of legislation that saved her life. Thinking that Trump did it is a demonstration of a complete misunderstanding of how politics works and how the healthcare system works.
SPEAKER_02
Also, a misunderstanding of the bill that he signed that supposedly saved her life. She wasn't trying a new drug. She was just trying an off-label use for an existing drug, which technically isn't covered by that. That's a scary thing to have cancer as a young woman. Uh-huh. That's a freebie. This routine that you're doing where you're needy for like a year and a half now. Oh boy. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_01
Literally jumping over fences, actually vaulting.
SPEAKER_02
Sleeping on boxes in the Mar-a-Lago locker room because there's no room for exactly. Girl, come on, girl.
SPEAKER_01
This is like it is better for me to sleep in a tent in the courtyard of the king's castle than it is to be in my own mansion. Historically, people do that because it works. Like, this is what Versailles was for. You get all the powerful people to live next to you in less nice places than they actually live in, to elevate your own power and also to emphasize that being close to the king is how you get power. This is precisely the kind of swamp stuff that Donald Trump said that he was going to stop. But here we have actual physical proof that in order to be able to have influence with this guy, you do need to be physically in the room with him. And not just in the room, in front of his eyeballs. Otherwise, out of sight, out of mind. You know who Steven Chung is?
SPEAKER_02
I do know who Stephen Chung is. Like, what's that guy willing to do? Because he looks like he sleeps on boxes every single night.
SPEAKER_01
This is what I'm saying is all of the Trump staff are beholden to the same logic. This is some palace intrigue. This is why they wear those dumb shoes that he gets them. Oh my god, the shoes.
SPEAKER_02
He may have destroyed the country, but he he had so much pizzazz.
SPEAKER_01
The bits are undeniable. That is a good bit. It's evil, it's scary, but it's a good fucking bit, is the problem.
SPEAKER_02
You know what I haven't seen him do in this time around? Is that routine where it shakes people's hands and yanks them off balance? He might not be able to do that anymore. That's a power move from back in the day. That's gotta be tough on a guy.
SPEAKER_01
My favorite version of that is when Barack Obama went to visit Raul Castro in Cuba. Barack Obama was the first president to visit Cuba in a long time. And he went to visit Raul Castro shortly after Fidel's death because he had to wait until Fidel was dead. And they give a speech together, and Castro, being leftist leader, was gonna grab Obama's hand and hold it aloft between the two of them, like a Soviet premier. But Obama had clearly been coached that he couldn't allow that to happen because it would make him look like a communist. And so instead, Raul Castro grabs Obama's limp wrist. Obama holds his hand limply above, sheepishly, like in a sort of like, uh, it's a living kind of way. Such a beep thing. It is, it's full of beep stuff, but it really happened. You can go look up the photo. How's your authoritarian despair this week? It's called autocratic despair, Craig. We've been at this for quite a while. Oh my goodness, it's called autocratic despair. Maybe I lost the plot, folks. We're recording at a different time. My number has changed all of a sudden. My brain is all scattered. Maybe I need more coffee.
SPEAKER_02
Maybe I've had too much. I'm at a six this week. I don't like to wrestle with the idea that there's no good guys in the political sense anymore. I know implicitly, it just feels overwhelming. It feels like something insurmountable. So I have this mental resistance to anything that makes me feel that way. I can't accept it. I don't accept it. At this point, I cannot say that I think we will win, but I don't think that we've already lost, at least. And that's what's keeping me in the game. Yeah. As long as we haven't lost, I feel like there's something that we can do about it. I feel like there's something they have to do about it. That's why we're doing this show. I don't think either one of us is living in a dream or thinks that we can head something off. We know it's here. We've been here a while. By my estimation, since March 4th, 2024, when the Supreme Court, despite the many amicus briefs from members of the federal society like Judge Michael Luddig, ruled unanimously that individual states do not have the constitutional authority under section three of the Fourteenth Amendment to disqualify candidates running for federal office for having participated in an insurrection. They essentially said he's not allowed to hold office, but he is allowed to run for office. Then they just didn't bring it up after he got elected to office. The second time I felt like it was all over was when the January 6th rioters got pardoned by Trump this year. No one hit me. Some of those people were convicted of seditious conspiracy, after all. Difficult thing to prove historically. The oath keepers and the Proud Boys on January 6th, obviously working in cahoots. They had a boatload of automatic weapons ready to cross the Potomac River whenever the members of Congress had been adequately captured so they could have tribunals and execute them on the spot. Yeah. They left a paper trail. Yeah. That was quite a seditious conspiracy. I don't think I've properly reckoned with that one. I don't think any of us have. The fact that they might be given taxpayer money from a slush fund and to compensate them for their efforts, that one hit me different. Kind of hard. That's really bad. So this has happened in the United States. I know it's happened. You know what's happened. If you're listening to this show, you know what's happened. It's not going to happen. It's not about to happen if we don't stop doing what we're doing. No. It's happened. It's gonna take decades. Our whole goal here is to sort of shrink the curve on how long this lasts. I think it's a 25 to 30 year problem that we can solve in 15 to 18 years if we make a real effort.
SPEAKER_01
I think that that's a pretty good assessment. History takes time to change, and Nick is absolutely right. We're clearly in a different period of US history than we were when Obama was president. Not just because Trump himself is in power, but because of all the institutional changes, changes to the Republican Party, changes to the judicial courts, changes to the legislature, changes to corporate law. We're just in a different time. Autocratic is a pretty good way to describe this time. We are in a different period of US history than the late 90s and the early 2000s. It is one where the rich and powerful, racists, sexists, homophobic people have more power than they did. Those people have clawed back rights and privileges that they had and oppressions that they had established. They're just back now. People have said the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. But as we must remind ourselves, we gotta do the bending. It doesn't happen by itself.
SPEAKER_02
Gifted as we are with our ability to communicate ideas verbally in a world where nobody reads anymore, we've got to try. Yeah, yeah, we gotta do it. Even though I got some mental resistance to these clear indicators that this is probably a little worse than I thought, and I think it's bad. I can tell when one of these stories lands. By these stories, I mean the kind that make it hard for me to think that opposing this thing is a wasted endeavor. I can feel that timeline of 15 to 18 years becoming less realistic, and it takes its toll. I've got young sons, and I'm doing everything I'm capable of doing to prevent them from being drafted and sent to war in 2038 or something. I don't know if I can pull that off. So this weekend when I became aware that there was an article in the New York Times by Maggie Haberman about Hakeem Jeffries, the minority speaker, the head Democrat in Congress, presumptive speaker of the House if the Democrats take back Congress in the midterms, having an off-the-books meeting with Jared Kushner that has now leaked, I got anxious. Uh the story is about earlier in August 2026, at a mutual friends place, according to the New York Times, Hakeem Jeffries and Jared Kushner met up. Wasn't a deal where Jeffries was kicking it with their mutual friend. Kushner didn't decide to drop in the crib to say what's up. This was an actual meeting with the president's son-in-law, who can definitely speak for Trump, and there aren't many of those people around. The Times article said that Kushner and Jeffries talked about housing, immigration, cost of living, how Tribe Called Quest shouldn't even be called Tribe Called Quest anymore now that Fife Dog is dead and buried. Which Kushner actually brought up. It's a pretty solid take, actually.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
SPEAKER_02
You can always talk old school hip hop with Akeem Jeffries. A big part of his persona is that he's a big fan of the music I listened to on my Sony Sports Walkman while I was doing my paper out in 1992.
SPEAKER_01
I'm teaching a class on 20th century US history this semester, and I decided I had to assign a hip-hop album, and I decided on straight out of Compton.
SPEAKER_02
Tag Teams, whoop, there it is, is right there for you, Dr. Crack.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I could have gone with Anaconda or something. Sir Mixalot still alive. He come as a guest speaker.
SPEAKER_02
It's American music. It's the most American music. It might be. Kushner and Jeffries took this private meeting. They talked about real issues, and good old Maggie Harriman got to break the news. What a scoop. Dr. Good, what do you know about Jared Kushner? What do you know about Hakeem Jeffries?
SPEAKER_01
I know more about Kushner because of studying and focusing on the right wing. Kushner is, was, always shall be, I guess, unless he goes to jail or something. Essentially a businessman, a real estate type guy who married into the Trump family. Kushner is Jewish, which puts him at odds with some of the more openly anti-Semitic parts of the Trump coalition. And they consider him to be one of the examples of how the Trump administration is being puppet-stringed by Israel or the Israel lobby. Kushner has also been sort of like ambiguously put in charge of various Middle East peace initiatives that the Trump administration has, which are basically sort of like real estate deals wearing hats. He's also just like wildly corrupt and clearly an evil man.
SPEAKER_02
Most people, all they really know is that he's married to Ivanka. He does Middle East stuff. He is from a real estate family in New Jersey, went to Harvard. His dad pledged two and a half million dollars to Harvard while Jared was still in high school. That's from a reporter named Daniel Golden from his book called The Price of Admission. That's how it worked at that level. Yeah. Charles Kushner is his old man who was convicted in 2005 of tax evasion. Oh, yeah, that's right. I forgot. And witness tampering. The witness tampering was pretty epic. He didn't want a sister to testify against him, so he hired a sex worker to seduce her husband, his own brother-in-law, and get a videotape of it, and then sent the video to his sister. On the shithel scale, baller.
SPEAKER_01
That's a black belt. That's incredible. That's look how they massacred my boy, Godfather shit. Damn.
SPEAKER_02
It's the kind of stuff you can only do to your sister, I'm telling you.
SPEAKER_01
That's some New Jersey business.
SPEAKER_02
Didn't go great for him. Uh he got 14 months in federal prison over that. Chris Christie kind of made his name on that. That's what put him in position to become the governor. Trump pardoned him in 2020. He's currently the ambassador to France. Nice work if you can get it, especially for an ex-con. The Kushirs, they're loaded beyond our ability to comprehend. In 2007, Jared, still in his 20s, buys a piece of prime real estate in Manhattan. 1.8 billion. 666 Fifth Avenue. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 1.8 billion was the record for price of Manhattan real estate at the time. 2007? Not the best time to buy real estate, Dr. Craig. There was a real estate crash in 2008. You know, subprime mortgages. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac. Buying a piece of real estate for the most money ever the year before that. This is an all-time blunder. Fuck up of the decade, according to FailSun magazine.
SPEAKER_00
Oh, really?
SPEAKER_01
Jesus.
SPEAKER_02
Don't worry about Jared. He grabbed himself by the bootstraps and made a deal with a firm called Brookfield Asset Management on a 99-year lease for $1.1 billion, and they paid up front. Brookfield Asset Management was a front company for the Cutter Investment Authority. Wow. Jared Kushner can do business. He worked for Trump in the first administration. He gets the credit for the Abraham Accords, which are great and still working, right, Dr. Craig? Oh, yeah, for sure. Some of the best diplomacy we've ever done. Kushner was smart enough to drop off the Trump radar right after he lost the election to Joe Biden. He was smart enough to make sure to be overseas on January 6th. Six months later, he's got a new private equity firm called Affinity Partners that took a cool two billion from Saudi Arabia's Sovereign Wealth Fund over the objection of the fund's own screening panel. He took more from Qatar, and even more from the United Arab Emirates. I want to be precise here. I'm not telling you where the guy's heart is. As far as I know, Jared's a cool dude. I just know that he doesn't show up at the yearly Jubilee that FailSun magazine puts on. I've never been. I'm not going until they move it to Burning Man. That's where it belongs. All I can tell you is that Jared Kusher can do some business. He's often in charge of what Trump is doing business-wise right now. Possibly he has a title, the U.S. Special Envoy for Peace Missions, which is a made-up title, but some are suggesting it's a real role in the administration. We don't know. We know the rule definitely doesn't require a background check because the Cush isn't doing any background check. It's not like he'd pass him. In 2017, the New York Times, Jody Cantor wrote about how Benjamin Netanyahu was close enough to the Kushner family, where when he came to the United States, he stayed at their house. Teen Jared gave up his bedroom so Netanyahu could sleep there. The kid slept in the basement.
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02
I'm not sure where that goes in the biography of Jared Kushner, but it feels like some rather important color. I'm trying to imagine what kind of teenage boy has a room that you'd be willing to sleep in as an adult man. Ugh. One time my sister came into my room and she said it smelled like beat off in there. I played it off by telling her it was one of the new scents from the Yankee Candle Company, which I think she bought. I don't know what to make of it.
SPEAKER_01
It's probably just color, but it does feel like one of those chekoffs gun details. Especially an adult man who is a powerful politician in a very powerful sovereign nation.
SPEAKER_02
I think it's Sarah Kenzior that says that we'll know if they're serious about taking care of all the crime through the White House and through our transnational crime syndicate. If ever Jared Kushner gets on the radar, because he's never even come close to being indicted for anything. They don't have any looking at him. He's an important guy who can do business with anyone. And the next speaker of the house knows that.
SPEAKER_01
The Kushners are another one of these infinite recesses of awful things that you could learn. It's an infinite abyss of terrible stuff. It just is.
SPEAKER_02
Hakeem Jeffries is a mystery character for some. He would be the speaker of the house right now if Democrats controlled Congress, but they don't. So not everyone has gotten super familiar with Hakeem Jeffries. So let me tell you about Hakeem Jeffries. He's a New York Congressman from Brooklyn. He's a corporate lawyer before that. Took over from Pelosi in 2023. First black man to lead a party in Congress. If Democrats take the House in November, like a lot of people are predicting, he's the Speaker of the House. Big deal jobbed, third in line in presidential succession.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, one of the most powerful people in the world, Speaker of the House.
SPEAKER_02
Here's one other thing you should know about Hakeem Jeffries. He does not have unscripted moments. He's the most rehearsed politician in the party. Nothing out of his mouth seems off the cuff. The guy talks like he's constantly trying to write a limerick. Saying the words and he's counting the syllables with his hands as he's doing it. It's incredibly stiff. If you told me he had overcome a stutter or a stammer, I'd be actually pretty impressed. But that's not the case. It's just a vocal affectation. Must have found it effective because I don't know why anyone would sound like that otherwise. He makes John Osoff seem like he's working off the cup.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, this is one of the things about a congressional politician versus another type of politician. Jeffries has his district pretty locked down. Once that's the case in Congress, you're mostly trying to deal with other politicians, other powerful people, as opposed to making big appeals to the broad public. It's an entirely different kind of politics than somebody like Trump does.
SPEAKER_02
There's just no way these guys have a private meeting that leaks by accident. Someone wanted this out.
SPEAKER_01
It's possible that Kushner is trying to signal that he could be a part of the Republican Party working with a Democratic leadership after the Democrats presumably win late 2026. Like that might be what he's trying to signal. Or he might be trying to avoid prosecution, or, you know, maybe saying that he'll give info on people if he doesn't get prosecuted. Or there's a simpler answer, which is that Jeffreys doesn't actually care about the crimes that people in the Trump administration have committed, and he is going to be a powerful guy and wants a sycophant to suck up to him.
SPEAKER_02
You know, right now the Democrats are favored to take the House in November. And if that happens, it's going to be oversight, documents, subpoenas, the power to put the current administration under oath. It's definitely impeachment again for Trump. Oh yeah. Who knows? Maybe this time the Senate will surprise us. Here's the thing it's a lot of leverage for something that hasn't happened yet and may not happen. I can't tell you how bad it is to me negotiating from a position where you may have future leverage. It actually makes your opponent way more formidable because everything is dependent on something that hasn't happened. And if it hasn't happened yet, it may not happen at all. So that's why I'm a sixth. Hakeem Jeffries is definitely making me think there are no good guys. He is not making it easy. If there are any good guys, they're not at the highest end of Democratic leadership. Those guys aren't even willing to pretend they're good guys any longer.
SPEAKER_01
He is not making it easy.
SPEAKER_02
If there were any good guys in the Democratic Party, they'd have put Jeffries in the corner by now. They're gonna have to overcome Chuck Schumer. That doesn't seem likely because I've heard nary a peep from any Democratic politician of note about how this chill sesh between Hakeem Jeffries and the Cush went down. Nobody seems that concerned. Nobody even seems to have any question.
SPEAKER_01
It's yeah, I mean, I'm uh I'm almost A professional cynic. And so when I think about this kind of thing, I'm like, well, yeah, you know, like this guy's gonna be super powerful, possibly. And so Kushner's putting out feelers. I can hang, I can talk, we can engage with each other, maybe we can make some profitable deals. I don't know. Jeffries has not indicated that he is gonna be the most progressive of possible Democratic leaders in the House. So it's possible that they're both triangulating, saying, like, what if we got back to business as usual Mitt Romney type US politics? That might be what they're trying to do. I don't think that's gonna work because the right wing of the Republican Party and the left wing of the Democratic Party are the ascendant wings, not the centers of either party. I don't know what kind of basis they might be able to create something like that. I don't know, probably none.
SPEAKER_02
I kind of fear that it's Kushner letting Jeffries know what they got on.
SPEAKER_01
That's also possible. It's is that it's Kushner saying, like, hey, if you do XYZ, here's what we'll do. Like, that's entirely possible.
SPEAKER_02
I've never thought of Jared Kushner as a bagman. But that's kind of what bag men do, right? Yeah. They tell you how it's gonna go if it doesn't go the way they want it to go.
SPEAKER_01
It's not like Saudi or Dubai or Qatar haven't like murdered people about a couple billion dollars. Like that's not outside the realm of possibility.
SPEAKER_02
All right, I want to talk about an election that's coming up. Not ours. This one's in Germany, September the 6th. It's a state called Saxony Anhall. There's about two million voters there. And I know that German state politics is probably riveting stuff to our audience, but stay with us. Because here's the headline a party that Germany's own intelligence service classifies as right-wing extremist is polling at 40% there, twice as much as the second place party. If they clear a majority, that would be the first far-right party to govern a German state alone since 1945. Germany. It doesn't have a great history when it comes to having a far-right political party in charge of things. They know it. They really know it. They've gone to some great lengths to demonstrate that they've learned that lesson. Would you agree that Germany has tried to tell us that they've learned that lesson over the years, Dr. Kripp?
SPEAKER_01
Germany has famously done more than basically any other country that has a history of extreme right-wing politics to try to distance itself and be like, hey, we're not doing this anymore. They tore down all the riot monuments, they built some good new ones. The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin is quite powerful, for example. It's a really serious part of every German child's education in the way that education about slavery isn't in the United States, or Native American genocide just isn't that well taught in the US. In Germany, they're very serious about this stuff. And as you said, there are political parties that are just illegal in Germany. And the AFD, the party that Nick's talking about, that's polling so well in Saxony, is just squeaking by, just a little bit under that threshold.
SPEAKER_02
The last 15 years or so, Germany has letting up a little bit. What used to be fringe stuff has become more palatable in certain places, places that used to be East Germany. We're of course talking about the AFD, the alternative for Deutschland party.
SPEAKER_01
You tell us just a little bit more about Just like you said, the AFD is an extreme riding party in Germany. Its power base is in what used to be East Germany, which is the part of Germany that used to be a Soviet client state. In that way, it might sound kind of confusing that this territory of what is now the Federal Republic of Germany, reunited Germany, that this all used to be run by communists, but in many ways it's another authoritarian type movement. There's some connections there. Additionally, the thing is that East Germany was broadly economically left behind compared to West Germany. What do we have? We have a large number of downwardly mobile white people who are upset about social and economic and cultural transitions in their society and feeling like they're being left behind. That's perfect for fascism. That's exactly the kind of place in demographic that ends up joining a fascist movement. One of the interesting, curious things about the AFD is that they're not led by a man. They're actually led by a woman who also happens to be gay, which is one of the things that they point to when they're saying, well, no, we're not like the other extreme right-wing parties. But again, that's not even that unusual either. Georgie Maloney is straight, but she is a woman. Marianne Le Pen is straight, but she is a woman. And these are the leaders of the other big, powerful, extreme right-wing parties on the European continent. So in that sense, it's normal. This is actually why I bet that the first female president of the United States is going to be an extremely right-wing Republican.
SPEAKER_02
The AFD's version of that woman is Alice Weidell. Yeah. What's interesting about the AFD is it was founded in 2013. 13 years. And it started as a bunch of economics professors that were mad about the Europe. It's a bunch of nerds. It's always the currency nerds, man. Why do you think Peter Keel works so hard to make sure nobody knows he's Satoshi Nakaboto? One of those guys. They started this. And 13 years later, they're on the costs of becoming the biggest opposition party in the country. They're leading the national polls. They've got 27%. The current Chancellor's Party's only at 22%. And the German Domestic Intelligence Service, an agency that exists specifically because of what happened last time, that oopsie daisy called the Holocaust, they have classified the AFD as a right-wing extremist party. And they would know.
SPEAKER_01
And they've said that if the AFD wins office, that they might withhold information from them, which is like bonkers. Imagine if the FBI said, fascists have taken power in the White House, and therefore there's secrets about the US government that we are not going to tell them. That's crazy. But that's exactly what Germany's highest levels of domestic intelligence are saying.
SPEAKER_02
We're taping this before the election on September 6th. There's no results yet, but the wind definitely isn't blowing in a great direction. Here's where it stands. Saxony and Holt, which a German state. Which state would you think it would be closest to, Craig?
SPEAKER_01
Ooh, in the US? Yeah. Oh, that's an interesting question. I guess in terms of its like economic profile, I think it's closest to like a Kentucky. So it's redneck, though. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02
They're pulling at about 40, 42% there. The Christian Democrats, the second biggest party, the mainstream conservatives, they're running at about 24%. It's a nightmare. The AFD's lead candidate there is a guy named Ulrich Siegman. He's 35. Ulrich Sigmund's top-notch German villain name. It is. You're not top notch. He's been the leader of the AFD's small parliamentary group there since 2022. Der Spiegel, German's Time magazine, has him on their front page right now with a caption declaring him, quote, the most dangerous man in Germany. Not a question mark afterwards either. Period. Full stop. The most dangerous man in Germany. Ulrich Sigmund. Very evil son in it. It's a full-on bond villain. Ulrich Sigmund. It's right up there with Donovan Danhouser. But he's very nice in addition to being very evil last time I checked. The campaign slogan for the AFD is alles ist mogelijk. Anything is possible. Wow. They're not wrong. On September 20th, there's two more elections. One in Mecklenburg Vor Pemeron. Oh, in Mecklenburg-Vorpameron. I don't know. Mecklenburg-Volperon. Mecklenburg-Vorpermann. Ah, fucking. Some other place. And the AFD is polling at 38% from there. And Berlin. This week, Alice Weidel, who's the co-chairman of the AFD party, went on German television and said flat out, quote, we will form the government in Saxony Anhalt. Yeah. The first lie of authoritarianism is its inevitability. Yeah. And it's Jeff Charlotte. The point of that is that the authoritarian movements attempt to convince the public that their rise is an unstoppable certainty so that people give up resisting. Tim Snyder calls it the politics of inevitability. And telling the truth is the primary way to counter that narrative. Brandmar, what does that mean?
SPEAKER_01
That is a reference to this idea in German politics of never again. Like that there are stoves you don't touch. Basically, the idea is that all German parties have a not just an unspoken agreement, they have an actual agreement that they will not form coalitions with extreme right-wing parties, that they won't bring them into politics again. But that kind of stuff is slipping away. And it looks like AFD might actually be able to form some coalitions. It's been in coalition before, and if it's that or stay out of power.
SPEAKER_02
We thought we did. Parties don't nominate open extremists. Court rulings are respected. You concede norms, handshake deals, gentlemen's agreements. That was our fatal mistake. We always assumed that we'd want to elect a gentleman. It seemed reasonable at the time. But it's not anymore. It's very important to watch what the AFD is going to do in Germany over the next couple months, because it's coming to the United States. Our own AFD is already here and it's just starting to get traction. It'll be looming larger and larger over the next few years unless we stomp it down right now and it's crypt. And there aren't any real signs that we're gonna do that. People aren't seeing it yet. They know they're looking at something ugly, but they think it's a regional thing. Since they don't know about the alternative for Deutschland Party, they don't know where this is headed. Let's talk about remigration. We've mentioned that word before in the show, but it bears repeating. How does it come up in relation to the AFD?
SPEAKER_01
Oh boy. So remigration is a term that comes to us, like you said, from European politics. And AFD is one of the big promoters of it. But it's been taken up by politicians all over the world in places like Japan, the United States, the UK, France. Basically, it's a political platform and it's a way to say that you want to expel all non-white people or all non-Christian people from your country without using those words. It is racist rhetoric. The function of it as a dog whistle is to use the word migration to be like, oh, we're just returning them, re-migration. They're just migrating again. What they're talking about, the word that we would be using in English is deport, deportation. That's what they actually mean. One of the reasons that the AFD cannot use that word in Germany is that deportation was the dog whistle that the Nazi Party used during the Holocaust. Deportation meant murder during the Holocaust. In many Holocaust documents, including ones that are describing mass graves, they would use the word deportee, deported, or deportation, as a way to avoid writing murder or mass death. To the extent that the Nazi Party literally wrote about and made plans for, and this is quote, deportation pits. That's why the AFD can't say deport. So they came up with a different word, which means deport, remigration.
SPEAKER_02
Next week, we're gonna talk about the True Texas Project in Tarrant County, which is exactly the AFD. And it's happening in Texas. 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.
