Autocratic Despair: The Podcast
Stare into the abyss of the United States' descent into Authoritarianism with a truly funny comedian from Green Bay, WI and a very serious PHD in Global Fascism Studies from Cal-Berkeley.
Very Funny. Very Serious.
Autocratic Despair: The Podcast
The True Texas Project is Our AfD & It's Taken Over Fort Worth
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Both hosts at 7.5. Craig's highest number in 9 months of the show.
Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson both come in at seven and a half this week. That number matters. In nine months of this show, Dr. Craig — whose scale is logarithmic, meaning a four is much worse than a three — has never gone higher. A seven and a half from Craig is not a mood. It is a professional assessment from a man with a PhD in fascism studies who does not use words carelessly.
They earn it.
Two episodes ago, the show previewed an election in a German state called Saxony-Anhalt. They were careful — every number was dated, every projection hedged with "as of taping." This week, the results are in, and the results are worse than the polls suggested. The AfD — the Alternative for Germany, a party founded in 2013 by economics professors angry about the euro and now classified by Germany's own domestic intelligence service as right-wing extremist — took 43.9 percent of the vote. They more than doubled their 2021 result of 20.8 percent. They won 39 seats in an 83-seat parliament, falling three short of an outright majority. The Christian Democrats, the center-right party that governed Saxony-Anhalt for a generation with 37 percent just five years ago, collapsed to 17.2 and lost 25 seats in a single night.
Craig walks the audience through what the numbers mean. Three seats short sounds like a loss. It is not a loss. To keep the AfD from governing, every other party in the parliament — the CDU, the SPD, the Greens, the Left, and a brand-new populist party called BSW — must agree to form a coalition together. Five parties that agree on almost nothing except that the sixth one cannot be allowed to govern. And on election night, BSW's lead candidate said his party has "overlaps" with AfD positions and that it would be "completely undemocratic" to exclude the largest party from government entirely. The AfD's 39 seats plus BSW's 5 equals 44. That is a majority. The smallest party in the room just offered to open the door for the biggest one.
The man who won is Ulrich Siegmund. He is thirty-five years old. And in November of 2023, he sat in a villa outside Potsdam — the lake town outside Berlin where Truman and Stalin divided postwar Europe, and a short drive from the villa on the Wannsee where the Nazis planned the logistics of the Final Solution — at a secret meeting where far-right figures discussed a plan they called remigration: the mass removal of asylum seekers, residents, and German citizens with migration backgrounds deemed unassimilated. Investigative journalists at Correctiv exposed the meeting in January of 2024. More than a million Germans marched in response, in hundreds of cities, carrying signs that read "Never again is now" and "We are the firewall." A million people in the street bought thirty months. The man from the villa just won his election.
Nick lays the growth curve on the table: the party that became the Nazi Party started with fifty-five members and a numbering trick — membership cards beginning at 501 so the room looked ten times bigger than it was. Thirteen years later, that party governed Germany. The AfD was founded in 2013. Thirteen years later, it holds 44 percent of Saxony-Anhalt and leads the national polls. And in two weeks, on September 20, two more German states vote — Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the AfD has doubled from 16.7 to 36 in the polls, and Berlin, the capital, the multicultural city everyone assumed was immune, where the AfD has gone from 9 percent to 18. Same pattern, every state: the far right doubles and the center-right halves.
Then Nick pivots — and the pivot is the episode.
Because the word remigration did not stay in Germany. It is on a conference flyer. In Fort Worth, Texas. Published by an organization called the True Texas Project.
The show introduces the audience to Tarrant County — not the rural Texas they imagine when they hear "north Texas," but the county where the Dallas Cowboys play, home to Fort Worth, a city of a million people bigger than San Francisco, in the fourth-largest metro in America. A county that was 75 percent white twenty years ago and is now 42 percent white, majority-minority, median age thirty-five. The last big urban county in Texas that Republicans still control. The county where Biden won by 1,800 votes in 2020 and Trump won by 42,000 in 2024. And the county where, on September 1, a five-person commissioners court voted three to two along party lines to cut 92 Election Day polling places — a thirty percent reduction — while also eliminating voting sites at the University of Texas at Arlington and two community college campuses, over the objections of the NAACP, the ACLU of Texas, and more than a hundred speakers who showed up to say no. The room chanted "shame" after the vote. Commissioner Roderick Miles called it a modern-day poll tax. Commissioner Alisa Simmons, who is running against the county judge in November, said to his face: this is not about cost, this is about power, this is campaigning from the dais.
The True Texas Project was founded in 2009 as the NE Tarrant Tea Party by Julie McCarty. After the El Paso Walmart massacre of 2019 — twenty-three people murdered by a gunman with a Great Replacement manifesto — McCarty wrote publicly that she did not condone the actions but certainly understood where they came from. Her husband Fred wrote that you cannot demographically replace a once proud, strong people without getting blowback. Later that year, the group rebranded. The new name reflects, per their own website, an expanded vision and reach. Both of those things are true, in that order.
The organization now has fifteen chapters across Texas, funded through a PAC that in 2022 received over ninety-two percent of its money from Defend Texas Liberty — a PAC funded almost entirely by West Texas oil billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, the same PAC whose president hosted Nick Fuentes for seven hours at its offices in October 2023. After that story broke, the PAC renamed itself the Texas Freedom Fund for the Advancement of Justice. Same wallet. New paint. That wallet also funds Bo French, the former Tarrant County GOP chair now running for the Railroad Commission, who spoke at a True Texas Project event and called for deporting a hundred million people at CPAC. And Leigh Wambsganss, the Patriot Mobile executive who built the Southlake school board takeover and co-founded her PAC with Tim O'Hare — the same O'Hare who now presides as county judge over the commissioners court that just cut the polling places. One money trail. One ecosystem. One county where the tightest Senate race in Texas since 1988 — Ken Paxton against James Talarico — will be decided in November with 92 fewer doors.
Comedy, commedia, autocracy, fascism, and a functioning sense of fun about the end of the republic — a show about authoritarianism that somehow stays worth listening to. The abyss is better with friends.
Names in this episode: Nick Mortensen, Dr. Craig Johnson, Ulrich Siegmund, Alice Weidel, Martin Sellner, Alexander Gauland, Björn Höcke, Elon Musk, Adolf Hitler, Julie McCarty, Fred McCarty, Tim O'Hare, Matt Krause, Manny Ramirez, Alisa Simmons, Roderick Miles Jr., Tim Dunn, Farris Wilks, Jonathan Stickland, Ken Paxton, James Talarico, Catherine Godby
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.
It still might work out. Maybe Jesus Christ will show up and be like, hey, we don't want any of this. I left a book. Could you guys read it? The sun might very well come out tomorrow. 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 1 to 10, where would you rate your autocratic despair this week?
SPEAKER_00Well, Nick, I'm coming in hot this week. I'm freaked the fuck out, honestly. Somebody probably tried to kill a Democratic gubernatorial candidate. This is Amy Acton in Ohio. That happened a couple days ago, and um, it's just out of the news. We're just done. Just don't care about it anymore. You know, somebody ran up to her, lunged at her. He had two guns and a taser. He was at a state fair. His brother works for the Republican Party or used to in Ohio. Got kicked out because of a pedophilia rap. And this is just not in the news anymore. It's just not in the news anymore.
SPEAKER_01Let's not lay that guy's brother's conviction for pedophilia on him, all right? It's nice color. We all have family members that have done some sick shit. That's true. These are unrelated. I did not consider that to be a big deal. I thought, uh, this is what happens. This is how it is now.
SPEAKER_00I mean, that's the thing. In many ways, you're right. This is just how it is now. He didn't get a shot off. I mean, that's the thing, right? That news cycle lasted less than 24 hours talking about this guy, this attempted assaulter, murderer. I don't know. Yeah. And then I found myself thinking today, I was like, how long would this have been in the news if he had killed her? A week? That's bargaining. I'm bargaining with reality. Please, at least a week, we would focus on this, right? And I know that the answer is no, that's probably not true. We'd probably move on. Because political violence against the left is just totally normal and we don't give a shit about it. That's just the way our country is now, and I'm freaked the fuck out. So I guess a 7.5 was a reminder, my autocide despair is logarithmic on like the Richter scale. 7.5 is really bad.
SPEAKER_01I think what it comes right down to is he didn't dress up like a police officer and come to their house in the middle of the night and then shoot them and their dog and then drive away in a mask. It's not the worst thing a right winger has done to create violence. So I think, yeah, you're probably right.
SPEAKER_00He didn't show up at the speaker of the house's house with a mallet and beat her husband half to death.
SPEAKER_01No harm, no foul.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. He did hurt some elderly people whom he shoved down in an attempt to lunge at her. But Amy Acton, the candidate, is a medical doctor, so she just jumped down and started treating those people. Oh wow. So if it was going to be in the news at all today, it would be that was a false flag. Absolutely. I exercised some of my online detective skills on the attacker. It was fun. Did you learn anything interesting about him? I did. I found his criminal convictions before those were reported widely. I found his family history, parents divorced, etc., etc. All that shit is public record. You can just look that stuff up. Depending on what state you're in. In Ohio, you can. You can also look up property records in Ohio. You can just find people's addresses. Oh, wow. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Does he own any property? Has he been divorced?
SPEAKER_00He has never been married, as far as I could tell, or at least not in the state of Ohio, which publishes it, which is where he's from. His last legal residence was a property registered to his mother.
SPEAKER_01It's so hard to imagine that somebody would be pushed to those limits because they want Vivek Ramaswamy to be the governor of Ohio so much.
SPEAKER_00I see, yeah, like I want to know this guy's motivations. His mom worked in healthcare, so maybe there's some sort of weird gender healthcare thing going on in his brain. Amy Acton was also in charge of Ohio's COVID response, which is why a lot of people in the right wing hate her in that state. He might be like one of those, I don't have a job because the economy's bad, because of COVID crackdown, and also I resent my mother, who I think was a nurse, and Acton's a doctor, and blah blah, you know, like, plus my brother used to be this guy. There's nothing wrong with living in a house that your parents own. But his brother had this promising right-wing Republican career and kneecapped himself because he pursued a relationship with, I think, a 14-year-old.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, it's good to know the Ohio Republicans are not okay with that just yet.
SPEAKER_00I mean, that's true. There is a silver lighting here, which is that clearly they're not okay with somebody who has been convicted. He was convicted. A court said that he was guilty of it. So, like, yeah, you know, at least there's that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it was convicted of it. It wasn't like he was just merely accused of breaking his two-year-old daughter's collarbone and holding her favorite stuffed animal hostage. Oh my. Max Miller, the congressional person's also from Ohio. He's just doing a great job of coming off like a real piece of shit that's never gonna step down, that's gonna keep running for office because he knows he's gonna win.
SPEAKER_00Ohio not beating the rep. Uh, not getting out of this one. This is the northernmost state in the south. God, I hate Ohio. As a Midwesterner who is not from Indiana or Ohio, I'm contractually obligated to hate Indiana and Ohio.
SPEAKER_01There was some meme to saying something was in Ohio or goddamn Ohio a few years ago.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Zen Z had some Ohio bit for a while. I think that one got lost by the wayside. It's all about 6'7 these days. Are kids doing 6'7?
SPEAKER_01The staying power of 6'7 is fucking amazing. That was happening a full year ago. And it's still there. I thought for sure this was just somebody trying to map the networks by which meme culture gets things into the mainstream. Yeah, it was a tester, right? Yeah, I was like, oh, any day now we're gonna bump up from 67 to 88. I thought for sure that's what it was.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, like one of those drinks you take before a colonoscopy. Yeah, yeah. Tracing its way through the bowels of civilization.
SPEAKER_01That's what I thought 6'7 was. But no, 6'7 is just here to stay. We're all gonna be dealing with that from the worst dorks and dads that we know for a long time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Still happening.
SPEAKER_00You see, my students are too old for it. Maybe I'll get in like 10 years, I guess.
SPEAKER_01I don't know. The staying power of 6'7 is fucking amazing. I'm so disappointed in underage of 13 meme culture for not chewing that up and spitting it out in the quickest of orders.
SPEAKER_00Yeet, excellent. Spectacular content. It's a useful word. We always had yoink, and so yeet is the opposite, and that's helpful. That's useful. 6'7 is nothing, it's contentless. Anyway, how's your autocratic spirit?
SPEAKER_01I'm gonna 7.5. If you remember a couple episodes back, we previewed this election in Germany, talked about the rapid rise of a far-right party called the AFD, alternative for Deutschland, in a state called Saxony Anhalt. We were careful, we said as of taping about every number because we didn't know what the results would be. But now we know on September 6th, the AFD took 43.9% of the vote in Saxony Anhalt. They won 39 seats in parliament out of 83. They need 42 for the majority, they're three seats short. It's more than double the vote share that they got five years ago in 2021. Then the AFD got 20.8% of the vote in Saxony Anhalt, which was actually trending down because they'd gotten 24% in 2016. In 2021, most people exhaled. The Christian Democrats won with 37% in the mainstream held. It seemed to be whatever dalliance the country was having with the far right was getting pushed out of the mainstream. That was a good thing. The firewall was holding. It was a good thing. The AFD Party, if you'll remember, it's as close to the Nazi Party as you can get in Germany. Legally, literally, literally and legally, as close as you can get. Germany's own domestic intelligence service, the agency that exists specifically because of what happened last time, classifies them as a right-wing extremist org. The AFD is fighting that in court, but that's their current designation. They've got more than a foothold in certain parts of Germany. And they've done that by going after the culture of shame, the guilt culture around the Nazi era. They're the party of be honest, there were some pretty good ideas too, guys. We went a little overboard when we started World War II. Zeth was Adolf Pockets.
SPEAKER_00Uh hold on, did you say Adolf Pockets?
SPEAKER_01Nine! Is that what you heard? Sorry, that was into character as a guy from the AFD, and that's exactly what they would do. They wouldn't admit. I did say Adolf Pocket. Where was I? The AFD is the party of be honest, there were plenty of good ideas in there, too, guys. We went a little overboard when we started World War II. Our bad, that one's on us, but then we totally overcorrected with Volk. It wasn't just them saying it. In January of 2025, or as I prefer to think of it, the year that How to Talk to Your Son about Fascism, the book came out. What a shed moment. Elon Musk addressed an AFD rally via video alongside Alice Widell, the AFD party leader. Musk said, quote, children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents. And he also said there's just too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that. Here's another quote from that speech. It's good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that and some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.
SPEAKER_00Oh my God.
SPEAKER_014,000 people were at that rally and they cheered that lustily. The richest man in the world just admitted he was one of them. Oh my God. The Christian Democrats or the CDU has been the party that's governed Saxony Anhalt for a generation. They won in 2021, but they only got 37% of the vote, which is less than what the AFD got in 2026. This year the CDU got 17.2%. They won 15 seats, down from 40. They lost 25 seats in one election.
SPEAKER_00Now, listeners, Nick has been talking about the CDU's control in Saxony Anhalt, and like that's true, but Nick also knows this. And if you're unaware, you should know this listener. The CDU is basically what the government of Germany is. It's the party that's governed Germany since the end of the war. That's just what the German government is, is the CDU for a long, long, long, long, long, long time. It's either them or the Socialist Party. They go back and forth. That's what the government of Germany is. Angela Merkel, the prime minister of Germany, that you probably remember because she held the office for a really long time. She was from the CDU. And so this destruction of their party, crazy.
SPEAKER_01Germany's social democrats, the SPD, the center-left party, they got 9.3% of the vote. That means they get eight seats. The Greens, they got 8.9%. They're progressive environmentalists, they got eight seats. What? There's a party called Die Linke. The left. 8.6%, eight seats. They're like our Democrat socialists.
SPEAKER_00But the SPD got the same amount as the left?
SPEAKER_01That's wild. Damn. The BSW Bundes Sarah Wagenkent got 5.3%.
SPEAKER_00They're a weird personalist party around a specific lady.
SPEAKER_01We should flag this. This one's gonna matter. I'll come back to it. So the AFD has 39 seats. They need 42 for a majority. They're three short. And they said going in they would only seek to govern if they had a majority, and they don't. So the firewall holds. Let me tell you what the firewall looks like right now, though, to keep the AFD out. Every other party in that parliament, the CDU at 15 seats, the SPD at eight, the Greens at eight, the left at eight, and the BSW at five, all of them, all of them have to agree on everything for the entire term. All five of those parties that agree on almost nothing except not the AFD. More like five people holding hands, and if one lets go, it's over. That is the state of the firewall. Craig, what party do you think is most likely to coalesce with the AFD in Saxony Anholk?
SPEAKER_00Oh boy. Well, I know you're tearing me up for this one, but let's talk about it. American listeners might think that it would be the CDU, the Christian Democratic Union, because they're a socially conservative party, the CDU is. But the CDU, the whole basis of their party is we are conservatives and we also fucking hate the Nazis. That's the whole basis of their party. And so the CDU can't work with them. Now, there have been some CDU politicians that have kind of made some signals about it, but in Saxony Unhulp, they've been pretty clear that they're not going to do it. The SPD, that is the Social Democratic Party, the mainstream socialist party in Germany, they're clearly not going to do it because these guys are like the inheritors of the party of Karl Marx. They can't work with the Nazis. Same with Delinke, the left. They're even further left than the SPD, so they can't do it. Which leaves that rinky dink tiny lady party.
SPEAKER_01The BSW. They have populist left economics. They're anti-immigrant, they're anti-NATO. They got five seats, but the AFD only needs three seats. They made a statement on election night. They said, quote, their position overlaps with AFD positions in some areas. And it would also be their words completely undemocratic to exclude the AFD entirely from the government. Oh my God. The smallest party in the room just said out loud that keeping the biggest party out might be undemocratic. A day after the election, the BSW's lead candidate said he's willing to help elect an AFD governor. And the math works for the AFD-BSW collab. Yep. AFD has 39 seats plus BSW's five. It's 44. That's a majority.
SPEAKER_00This is terrifying. This would be the first time that a far-right party has governed any part of Germany since World War II. This part of Germany was one of the Nazi strongholds, but it wasn't the heart of the party's organization. The AFD's been growing a lot in what used to be East Germany, you know, the behind the Iron Curtain part. For American listeners who are up on your weird left-right authoritarian movements, the equivalent for the small right-wing, left-wing populist party would be something like a Linden LaRouche. It's like around a specific person, and supposedly they're a left-wing party, but really they function a lot more like a weird personalist cult. Except in this case, rather than being an aging boomer. LaRouche is dead, but back in the day, instead of being an aging boomer, it's a middle-aged woman who is a sort of dissident from the German left. They're populists in that their leftism makes them anti-immigrant, which is the big overlap between them and the AFD.
SPEAKER_01We're talking, of course, about the BSW party there. Yeah, the BSW. And the BSW, they haven't been around very long, but all of a sudden they've become this vitally important group. They don't have this history of maintaining the firewall. No. They don't have anything close to that. They're just a bunch of fucking nutballs, really.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yes. And now they got a lot of juice in Saxony Anhold.
SPEAKER_00Now they can name a price.
SPEAKER_01And also get a bunch of international press. The AFD really wants their man to be the leader of Saxony Anhold. Their man is Ulrich Siegmund. He's 35 years old, fantastic, evil villain name. In Saxony Anhold, they're out there doing Siegmund chants at AFD events.
SPEAKER_00God damn it. Literally, if that was in a Marvel comic book, you'd be like Ulrich Siegmund? Alright, fine, I guess. Doctor Doom, more like.
SPEAKER_01Ulrich Siegmund may very well become the elected leader if things break right for him. Here's something that most people probably don't know about Ulrich Sigmund. In November of 2023, in a villa outside Potsdam, the fancy lake town just outside of Berlin, where Truman and Stalin and Churchill sat in 1945, dividing up post-war Europe. And about 10 minutes' drive from the villa to where the Nazis planned the logistics of the final solution in 1942, there was a retreat so secret that it took investigative reporters to expose it. Corrective, published in January of 2024 about this meeting, it featured far-right figures from across Europe, and they sat with an Austrian identitarian named Martin Sellner, and they discussed a master plan for the mass removal of asylum seekers, foreigners with residency permits, and crucially German citizens with migration backgrounds that they deem unassimilated. Kirk, what does unassimilated mean in this context? Oh my god.
SPEAKER_00Wow. The layers of dog whistles are so deep, like, I don't know, like I need a fucking shovel. This is wild. I mean, unassimilated clearly means not actually German. That's pretty transparently what they mean. And by not actually German, they clearly mean not white. Germany has a very large Turkish population, especially West Germany and also Berlin. This is because Germany was completely destroyed physically after World War II, and also like a bunch of Germans were dead because they lost a big fucking war. And so they had to bring in a lot of labor. And West Germany, because it was run by NATO, they brought in a bunch of Turkish people to work in Germany. In East Germany, the equivalent population is Vietnamese people. So there's also a large Vietnamese minority in Germany. But this is also referring to Slavic people and African people. Unassimilated means that. Okay, Jesus, my god. It's hard to even start. Wow. In this context, unassimilated means people who can't become real Germans. So that's not talking about a Dutch person who could learn German and speak unaccented German and just walk around, name his kids a German name, and then nobody in his school would know that his parents weren't always from Germany. What they mean is people who you would know that their ancestors did not grow up in Germany. They're talking about race. And not just race, they're talking about color. They're talking about skin color. They're talking about racial stereotypes. And they're saying, they're implying that you can't really be German if your parents were born in Uganda. Or you can't really be German if your parents or grandparents were born in Turkey. Even if you live in Germany, you're a German citizen, you're an EU citizen, your parents were born in Germany, your first language is German. That doesn't matter to them. This is Nazi language.
SPEAKER_01Getting rid of German citizens that have migration backgrounds that are deemed unassimilated, that's called re-migration. It's a word we've used on this show a couple times, we're redefined. Ulrich Sigmund, the 35-year-old, that's the leader of the AFD in Saxony Anholt, was in that room with the far right people. That's on the public record. When they found out about that retreat, more than a million Germans marched. They knew the stakes. They held signs that said, Never again is now, and we are the firewall. For weeks they marched on the weekends all over Germany. Munich's rally actually got cut short because too many people showed up. They had six figures in Berlin in front of the Reichstag. Hamburg, Cologne, Düsseldorf, and hundreds of towns that never protest anything had protests. There's a million people in the street in January 2024 saying hell no to the right wing in Germany. It looks to have bought them about 30 months. Oh fuck. Better than nothing. Yeah. Their man from the villa just won 43.9% of the vote in Saxony Anholt. He's the leader of the largest party by 26 points. And he's the AFD's candidate for minister president of Saxony Anholt. That's like their governor. I hate it when these guys are younger than me. It fucking sucks. It's awful. I know. I feel like what am I doing with my life? I haven't even I haven't even started one right-wing party, much less losing in the ranks to become a leader. I'm blaming my iPad, spending too much time on it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm too distracted. There's that MTV.
SPEAKER_01The only thing standing between Ulrich Sigmund and the office is five parties agreeing to hold hands tightly. And one of those parties said on election night that keeping them out might be undemocratic. They're already flirting with the enemy. But whether the AFD can form a coalition or they have to wait until 2031, it won't be long now before the AFD has more than 50% of the seats in Parliament in Saxony on Hall. In two weeks, there's two more German states that are going to have a vote. Mecklenburg for Palmern, another East German state. The AFD is polling there at 36%, up from 16.7% five years ago, doubled again in their area. Berlin, the capital, multicultural city, the place everybody assumes is immune. The AFD is at 18%, up from nine. They also doubled from 2021. It's the same pattern in every state. The AFD doubles, the center right halves. The coalition required to keep them out gets bigger and more fragile every single cycle. Now, Craig, you and I have been talking about the AFD since the very first episode of Autocratic Despair at the podcast, the one that people can't hear unless they're subscribers to your Patreon. And I first heard about it on your other show, the estimable 15 minutes of fascism. Hey, yeah, thanks for the plug. We were both calibrating our expectations about the results of this election pretty well. But um, how are you doing with it, Craig?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, uh, yeah. I mean, this is another this is another one that's just like, you know, it's really getting my gorge this week. Fascism back in Germany, that is an end times sign. The fact that the firewall, uh, keeping the extreme right wing out, which again is isn't is not just some handshake agreement in Germany. It's the law. Like they have laws about what kinds of political symbols and slogans and messages you can have in that country. It is the law. And they've been doing it very effectively for the last 60, 70 years, since 1945. And the fact that it's that it's unrighteous. Unraveling now at the same time that, yes, again, lest we forget, a party that is literally descended from the Italian Fascist Party is governing now in Italy. Giorgio Maloney is the longest serving Prime Minister in Italy since like the 60s. And at the same time that that Reform UK, the UK's far-right party is also eating their mainstream Conservative Party's lunch. It's the same pattern. At the same time, that Rio Semblant National, France's far-right party, they're polling to win for their presidency. People are making World War II analogies here. And there's a big difference between this and World War II. There are two big differences. One is that these parties haven't yet done as terrible of things as happened during and before World War II. Not it it is it hasn't been that bad yet. But the other big difference is that there's fucking nobody. There's fucking nobody against these people. Of the big powerful countries on Earth, if these elections trend in the way that they're trending, there will be actually not a major powerful country with the left in power. I mean, the Labour Party currently governs in the UK, but that's really tenuous. The leftist party is governing in Spain, but is Spain really where we're gonna hang our hat? Like, I don't know. Where do you go? Brazil is the answer, but the right wing might win under election too.
SPEAKER_01This got a lot of coverage. And I think that people misunderstood it a little bit. People took the vote for Saxony Anho to be all of Germany. We're here to calibrate our listeners' level of despair on this topic. Yes. If it was baseball, which it is not, the good team would be down by one run in the bottom of the sixth. The game is not over, but the fairweather fans they might have left to beat the traffic. And this might be our best chance to get a run in for a while. Yeah. Before they bring in their closer. Yeah. Doesn't seem to be any forward momentum on that plan.
SPEAKER_00No, no, no, no. The home team has lost its edge. They're dragging a little bit. That's about as an American a way that we could possibly talk about Sherman politics.
SPEAKER_01There's no need to panic just yet. No. But the panic will come. Yeah, we'll panic. I'll panic for you. Then I'll tell you if you actually need to panic. That's the whole premise of the show, I check in with a guy that knows this shit way better than me to see how much of my mind I should be losing on any given week. That's the deal here at Autocratic Despair the Podcast. Seven and a half is the worst that you've ever named.
SPEAKER_00It is the worst I've ever named. And yeah, you know, like that's the problem is that you can be there and your life can keep going on. You can still go to work. That's the thing about it. Keep going.
SPEAKER_01A lot of people think that it's not gonna happen here. But I gotta tell you, the AFD is here in the USA, more or less. And they're growing in Texas. Yes. In Texas, a quote unquote grassroots organization called the True Texas Project is using the same word the AFD does, remigration, in the very same way, all across the state in Texas. They're trying and succeeding to take over the Republican Party at the local and county level. They're even attempting to install their own candidates, like Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is United States Senator. And if they can pull it off, the True Texas Project will likely become the True American Project. And we'll have to reckon with our own version of the AFD here in the United States. Disparables, it's coming. I'm here to warn you before it's too late. I know you got limited resources when it comes to your attention, but you've got to turn an eye toward Fort Worth, Texas. Tarrant County, to be exact, not far from Dallas. In fact, that's where the Dallas Cowboys play, Arlington, which is in Tarrant County. Same metro area. Dallas, Fort Worth. The county seat of Tarrant County is Fort Worth. There's a million people in Fort Worth, 12th biggest city in America. The city of Fort Worth itself is bigger than Denver, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco. There's 2.25 million people in Tarrant County all told. Dallas Fort Worth is like the third or fourth biggest metro area, depending on how you count. Tarrant County is the third biggest county in Texas, the 15th biggest in the United States. I just wanted to establish that in case you think that Tarrant County is a tumbleweed county. It's not. It's the largest Republican county in America. There's 1.3 million registered voters in Tarrant County. The median age in Tarrant County is 35. In 2005, Tarrant County was 75% white. Today, white people comprise 42% of the population. Latinos, about 30%, 18% are black, 6% Asian. Rapid demographic change in Tarrant County, Texas. The True Texas Project started in 2009 as the Northeast Tarrant County Tea Party, founded by Julie and Fred McCarty. The couple was in their 30s at the time. They're from Grapevine, Texas. Real estate people. Julie McCarty is the CEO. Fred McCarty is on the board. His bio says he loves talk radio and grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh. And also says he loves his boat and motorcycles and shooting things. Oh my God. You didn't have to tell me about the boat. I knew that part. One thing that might be interesting from his bio is he loves throwing hatchets and knives in the backyard. Wonderful.
SPEAKER_00Great.
SPEAKER_01Just as an aside for listeners, don't accept any invites to hot dog parties for people like this. I will not elaborate. Interested, but not shocked. In 2019, a decade after the group was founded, Fred and Julie McCarty changed the name from the Northeast Terran County Tea Party to the True Texas Project. They claim the brand shift was about how they wanted to grow the organization across Texas, and they have, but it wasn't the only reason. In early August 2019, shortly after a gunman drove 10 hours across Texas to murder 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, leaving behind a public manifesto about the Hispanic invasion of Texas and the Great Replacements Theory. You might remember this one. You might remember this one. You might. As the El Paso Walmart shooting. It was the deadliest attack on Latinos in modern American history.
SPEAKER_00One of the other amazing things about this, and I say amazing as a researcher of this stuff, it's horrifying, is that the shooter went into this place, and when he saw people whom he read as white as opposed to Latino, he told them to leave. He told them to get out, and he didn't shoot them.
SPEAKER_01But the most memorable thing about it was that a two-month-old baby boy was saved from execution by his parents, Jordan and Andre Anchado. They were killed, shielding him from gunshots. The baby was found alive beneath his mother's dead body, covered in blood. And about four days later, Trump and Melania showed up for a photo op where she's holding the baby, and he just stands there grinning like a moron, giving the thumbs up sign. Wow. Yeah. Shortly after the El Paso Walmart shooting, Fred McCarty from the True Texas Project posted on Facebook, quote, I don't condone the actions, but I certainly understand where they came from. And quote, you're not going to demographically replace a once proud, strong people without getting blowback. Wow. Even Trump was not saying that shit. Read the room, Fred. Those are the kind of thoughts that it's okay to have when you're sitting in the backyard throwing knives at shit. Best not commit them to your Facebook status updates.
SPEAKER_00Okay is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
SPEAKER_01Those particular comments really sullied the good name of the Tarrant County Tea Party. No easy task. I'm not saying it led to the True Texas Project rebrand, but it happened within a month. The rebrand of calling their group the True Texas Project definitely took things up a level. It's now a force to be reckoned with in Texas politics. They got 15 chapters all around the state. A few online groups, they claim 30, but that's their clan. They got a podcast hosted by Julie McCarty and Fran Rhodes, the president. I listened to three of them in the course of the last week for this segment, and it is the most brain dead fucking podcast I've ever heard. And I've heard three of them. I'm subscribed. I'm gonna get the next one. Oh God. I gotta cancel that subscription. Yeah, you gotta save yourself, dude. It's just exactly the kind of shit that happens when two idiots get together in 2026 to lie about the merits of being a Texas conservative. And like they let you know that you can get certified as a true Texan with them, which is a couple of bucks, and you gotta prove that they read their materials or took a course online. I think you get a button or a lapel pen. They have a poll test? If you want to be a true Texan, yes. Jesus. They got a social aspect to the True Texas Project, too. They got softball teams, volunteer project, firearms training, tactical training. You never know when you're gonna need it. They got a specific political action committee that's mostly aimed at primering elected Texas Republicans that they think of as rhinos, Republicans and names only. They've supported a number of candidates, and many local politicians are either members or guest speakers at True Texas Project events. The True Texas Project has been making waves since 2019. The Southern Poverty Law Center lifts them as general anti-government in their list of designated hate groups. The folks from the True Texas Project were pretty stoked to have made the Southern Poverty Law Center's hate groups at all. They called it a testament to their work. The True Texas Project even puts on conferences once or twice a year. Dinner, award show, guest speakers. One of the conferences made some news in early 2024, the 15th anniversary of the group, their quincinera, if you will. But they didn't say that, did they? No, no. I said it's 15 years. Okay, that's a good joke. Good, good, good. A lot of times people laugh at good jokes instead of just saying it, but I appreciate it either way.
SPEAKER_00Hey, well, yeah, you know, you know, but no, but we're professionals here, Nick. We're not here to laugh.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. For that early 2024 conference, was at the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens. If the Texas Tribune got an agenda, it had a session called, quote, Multiculturalism and the War on White America with a guy named Paul Gottfried, who an academic who coined the term paleoconservatism. Oh, that Gottfried. Oh, yeah, that guy. Yeah. Pat Buchanan loved him. Richard Spencer considered him a mentor. They coined the term alt-right with each other. Richard Spencer was the organizer of Charlottesville. He's kind of like a godfather in the extremism world. Once the story ran that Gottfried was a speaker, the management at the Fort Worth Botanical Garden canceled the event. True Texas attorneys immediately threatened legal action against the city of Fort Worth, pointing out that because the Botanical Garden is city owned and taxpayer funded, the government cannot legally deny any rental access based on political viewpoints under the First Amendment. The city had to reverse the cancellation. By then, most of the speakers pulled out over the controversy. There were large protests, almost ruined the whole weekend, but they were able to book Kyle Rittenhouse at the last second as a replacement for some of their speakers. Ah, fuck. What a downgrade. Can you imagine what kind of event you're putting on if you need the raw star power of Kyle Rittenhouse to come in and save the day?
SPEAKER_00Kyle Rittenhouse is your ringer, your pinch hitter. It's embarrassing. We're gonna need you to cry, Kyle.
SPEAKER_01We're gonna need you to cry. Think about those people that you murdered because you were trolling them so hard in Waukesha. God damn it. God damn it. The True Texas Project was none too thrilled about how their conference almost became a victim of cancel culture. Just because they had one OG from the white identitarian movement doing a breakout sesh. It's called freedom of speech, you dummies. And in response, the True Texas Project shifted how they were going to respond to accusations of racism and extremism. They decided as an organization, they were going to take a more combative position when people criticize them for being white identitarians. They were going to, quote, stop apologizing, stop backing down, and start fighting back. They put that in promotional materials, event descriptions, they instructed their followers to completely dismiss any mainstream pushback. They explicitly argued that terms like racist, white supremacist, or white nationalist are merely weaponized scarephrases deployed by the progressive left to demoralize traditionalists. They were no longer gonna live in a culture of shame about their racism. The True Texas Project doesn't want to live in a culture of shame. Where have we heard that before? That whole thing's gonna resonate. For most people, one of the big drawbacks of being openly racist is all the scorn and rebuke and the name-calling. People can get a little uptight about it when you act all aggressively racist around them.
SPEAKER_00I mean, we're joking about this, but for a lot of racists, that is kind of the consequence that they do face, is that people get to be mad at them and be mean to them. So a lot of racists, that is how they primarily experience any consequences for their racism is that people are mean to me on the internet or at work or something. Or my aunt doesn't talk to me anymore, you know?
SPEAKER_01No problem anymore for the true Texans. That had to be freeing for them. Ultimately, that's all we've got is scorn, rebuke, social disapproval.
SPEAKER_00This is also in keeping with talking about Richard Spencer, his mentors. One of the things that the alt-right was talking about all the way back in 2015, 2016, was saying the R word. That's something that they would just say. We need to say the R word. And by that they meant racist. They said that people should just say, I am a racist, in order to push back against accusations that they should just agree. What we're talking about now is the full metastasization of this. Pinocchio has woken up, I'm a real boy. They're not pretending anymore. This is an actual big organization backing political candidates, talking about this in the second most populo state in the country.
SPEAKER_01It's worth underscoring that the True Texas Project took up this stomp apologizing stance in January of 2024, well before the presidential election. They were like, y'all, he's gotten this far. He's been in a bunch of primary ballots already. Let's just be open racist for a little while and see if the Lord sends us a sign to stop. We'll stop if the Lord sends us a sign. Probably was a yee-haw in there too, Dr. Craig.
SPEAKER_00Probably took off their hats and slapped their knees, you know.
SPEAKER_01I didn't go for it. It felt cheap to mention it. Like I was making fun of them for being simple folk. I'll leave the cultural stereotyping of Texans to lesser podcasts.
SPEAKER_00No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_01The True Texas Project had two conferences this year. Both were the same theme: the Year of the Patriot. The first was January 24th, 2026, in Houston. Topics on the agenda: H1B visas, immigration, remigration, property taxes, and the Islamicization of Texas. That's a tough slot for the property taxes guy.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the property taxes guy does not have the sexiest topic there. Uh that's a throwback to their Tea Party days. We don't want government taxes, Obamacare, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
SPEAKER_01Craig, have you ever experienced attending something that involved Republican politicians at the local level?
SPEAKER_00Not in a long time. I come from a long line of living in extremely democratic cities and extremely democratic states. It's been a while. Not since I was a child, really.
SPEAKER_01I occasionally will subject myself to it if I'm invited by someone to someplace. Yeah, you're a real freak, man. I can't adequately describe the level of awkward discomfort uh that happens. If you've never had the opportunity to experience those despairables, please avail yourselves to it. It's a peak experience of embarrassment, and it is simply sublime. You're embarrassed for them because none of them are embarrassed for themselves, and you're embarrassed for yourself because it dawns on you that this is just a microcosm of Washington, D.C. on some level. It's just a fantastic moment of pure embarrassment. In 2022, there was a second True Texas Project Conference, just this past August, this one in Fort Worth. One of the breakout sessions was entitled U.S. Immigration Policy and the Disaster of the 1965 Heart Seller Act. Dr. Craig, do you know what the Heart Seller Act is?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, this one is a deep cut. This is one that I do actually teach students about when I teach U.S. history, which I do sometimes. Back in the day, in the 19th century, the United States didn't have any rules about immigration. The United States didn't have any quotas or rules or anything. Starting in the 1860s and 70s, the United States started to make some, originally directed against people from East Asia. These are often called the Chinese Exclusion Acts. And then eventually the United States lands on this regime that produces country-based quotas, basically restricting migration from not northern European countries. So from the UK, from Norway, from Sweden, they're fine. Everywhere else has a quota that's written out in a number. This act from the 60s says that's illegal. And instead, we need to have an entirely different regime that's based on how many immigrants the United States wants in general. And this radically transformed how immigration worked in the United States and meant that people from very different parts of the world had a much easier time getting to the US. And this results in a pretty big change, uh, especially explosions in migration from South and East Asia. Also, in the context that the True Texas Project is caring about, an explosion in migration from Latin America. South Asian migration is part of what they're talking about because they're talking about Islam, but they're definitely mostly talking about people from Latin America. This is part of the way that, like, who immigrates to the United States and what an immigrant is changed in the US in the 20th century. It's a super deep cut, and this isn't like we were making a joke about their attention to property tax law. This might sound like an equally boring meeting for them. No, they were probably super excited about this one because it's precisely the kind of thing that the right wing likes to sink its teeth into and be like, this right here, this is the moment that the United States changed. And to blame it all on the Democrats and all on LBJ, and blah, blah, blah. Although I don't know if they blame it on LBJ, considering that he's a Texan. Interesting question.
SPEAKER_011965. That's when it all started going catty wampus in the United States, race-wise, here in the United States. At the same August event, the True Texas Project had another session called They Gotta Go Back, the Remigration Cure. Oh my God. There's that word again. Remigration. And cure. Migrants are a disease. Jesus. Remigration is quite a dog whistle for the True Texas Project. They know that you can't hear it, not yet, but soon. Germans put a million people in the street over remigration in 2024, but we're only starting to hear that word remigration here in the United States. Trump's used the term remigration, although he prefers his own branding. So he says reverse migration. Same concept. Trump's top deputy, Stephen Miller, uses the word. He's using it more when he praises people that leave voluntarily. The edgelords that are running the Department of Homeland Security's Twitter account have used it more than a few times, ominously, doing quite a bit of that actually. Even a congressman named Andy Ogles introduced federal legislation that he titled the Remigration Act. That was designed to strip naturalized status or visas from non-citizens under specific criminal or administrative conditions and fast-track their removal. Ogles recently lost a Republican primary in the home state of Tennessee, but not because of this, because he wasn't getting anything done. He was just doing culture war bits to try to get hits on Fox News. Like he tried to alter the 22nd Amendment to allow Trump to run for president again. Oh wow. That's a pick me. He really is. He will not be missed at our next Congress. Probably won't be missed at all. Trump's got a way of rewarding dorks, so expect him to be named sub-under secretary to the whatever the fuck maybe. People are learning what remigration means. It just hasn't hit the mainstream yet. Still playing the indie venues like autocratic despair, the podcast. The term remigration hasn't quite hit critical mass yet. Not yet, but it will. It's penetrated Republican politics at the county level in Texas. Those tastemakers, those hipsters are using it. Not the ones from Austin, the ones from Fort Worth and Terran County. If anyone's gonna make fetch happen, it's the true Texans that hang out at county level Republican shindigs.
SPEAKER_00But this is where political culture actually does come from. People make fun of the right wing and people criticize it and call it astroturf, you know, that it's fake, it's not real. But that is real. These are real political organizers really doing political organizing.
SPEAKER_01They got 15 chapters across Texas, man, and a podcast.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they're changing minds.
SPEAKER_01And a softball team.
SPEAKER_00And a softball team? I mean, come on.
SPEAKER_01It sounds small, it is small. So let me tell you about another small group, Munich, September 1919, the German Workers' Party. New guy joins up, they hand him a membership card, number 555. Sounds like a real operation, right? 555 brothers in solidarity? Well, it turns out they only had 55 members. They started numbering the cards at 501, because it seemed a little more legitimate to have 500 plus members than 50. So they goosed the numbers a little bit.
SPEAKER_00Not the last time they'll goose something.
SPEAKER_01Who's counting anyway? That guy, the 55th card-carrying member of the German workers' parties? Do you know what his name was, Dr. Craig?
SPEAKER_00Uh I do. Uh his name was uh Adolf Pockets.
SPEAKER_01Adolf Pocket was always known for going out of Hitler on things. Is that the right way to say?
SPEAKER_00But that's the thing. We talk about these groups and we make fun of them, and like there's a reason to make fun of these people, and there's a reason to live with ourselves and to live our lives making fun of it because that's part of how we survive and how we spread information. That's part of what this podcast is, right? Nick and I were gonna be doing this anyway. Might as well just like calm each other down and maybe help you calm down too. But the fact is that whether it's this particular organization or another one, it's gonna catch on. Somebody's gonna get the juice. This term, remigration, and the politics that come with it, they're coming for you. They're coming for US politics.
SPEAKER_01They're already here. Hitler in Mein Kampf, his own book, did make sure to say that he was party member number seven because it sounded more important for him. Just between you and me, Adolf Hitler was often full of shit. I don't think we hear that enough. Just a fibber. In addition to being the worst human being that ever lived, I could never trust him at his word. Turns out a liar. The German Workers' Party at the beginning, they used to lie about. The size of their own mailing list. It's one of their lesser offensive, to be sure, but it helped. Because 13 years later, after a name change, the National Socialist Party, that party was governing Germany. Well on their way to starting World War II. 13 years. The AFD was founded 13 years ago in 2013 by professors that were mad about the Euro. And 13 years later, it just won Saxony onhold and it leads national polls. The True Jackets Project was founded in 2019 by a couple from Grapevine who like talk radio and throwing knives in the backyard. Seven years later, 15 chapters, a podcast, a softball team, some light militia style training available, several multi-level marketing schemes. Yeah, I assume.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I thought that went without saying, like with the boat.
SPEAKER_01Nobody is talking about the True Texas Project right now. We all should be, at least making the comparison between the AFD and the True Texas Project. Autocratic Despair, the podcast, is making that comparison because we know that in the right environment, these things grow fast. The Klan went from a few thousand to four million in five years in the 1920s. The AFD has gone from an idea to polling at 27% nationally in Germany in 13 years. And the United States in 2026 is the right environment for something awful to grow. Dr. Craig, what makes an environment right? Not every small group becomes the AFD. What are the conditions where this stuff actually happens?
SPEAKER_00There's a couple conditions that are really helpful for the growth of politics like the AFD has or like true Texas. One of the big ones is that there has to be something that, as people understand it, is actually wrong. There needs to be a real economic problem or a real racial democratic shift. Both of those are happening in Texas, right? The United States' economy is not doing that great for working middle class poor people. That's true. And as Nick pointed out at the top of this segment, the demographics of Fort Worth are changing. That happened. That means that when they go out and talk to everyday people, you know, at a Waffle House or wherever the fuck they do their political organizing down there, they will be able to point to things that are real. That means people have something to actually latch on to and blame for the problems that they're facing in their life. So there needs to be a real problem, a fake diagnosis about why that problem is happening, in this case, migration, and then a cure that will actually make the disease, that is the economic problem, worse, which is deporting all the Latino people in Texas, which would absolutely 100% collapse the nation's economy, in addition to being the worst human rights violation in the 21st century in the United States. There are a number of other factors that are really important here. One of them is the fact that the United States federal government is gonna be on their side. If anybody sues them and they somehow get some judge, I guess in Austin or something, who sides with the progressives, federal judges aren't gonna. If they make it to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court's gonna side with these guys, and it will after Trump leaves, too, because the Supreme Court justices are gonna stay.
SPEAKER_01If they end up in the Northern District of Texas, guess who's there? That's right. Yeah, the fix is in in Texas. Mark Pittman, the guy that put away the Hurryland protesters for 50 years or longer. The True Texas Project is already fucking things up in Tarrant County. Tarrant County is governed by a commissioner's court. Five people, a county judge and four commissioners. Elected positions, all of them. In Texas, county judge does not mean judge in county court. There's no robe. In Tarrant County, the county judge is the county executive. He runs the county. The body with one judge and four commissioners is called the court. It's an administrative body. It's confusing, I know, but it made sense to somebody at one time in Texas.
SPEAKER_00It's a weird holdover from when Texas was the Wild West. It's a weird oldie time shit.
SPEAKER_01In Tarrant County, the county judge is Tim O'Hare. He was a one-time mayor of a city called Farmers Ranch, an inner ring suburb of Dallas, Texas. O'Hare drew a little bit of national attention while he was mayor there for spearheading controversial municipal ordinances aimed at preventing undocumented immigrants from renting apartments or working within the city of Farmers Branch. Struck down in federal court and cost the city quite a bit of money, but it's not his money. And after that, O'Hare became the chair of the Tarrant County Republican Party. He has served on the True Texas Project's advisory team. He has been endorsed by the True Texas Project. He's taking paid speaking gigs at True Texas Project events. And now he's the head man in Tarrant County. Not to be confused with a courtroom judge. And he runs Tarrant County, is the head of a voting body that consists of four elected commissioners and himself. And the True Texas Project runs Tim O'Hare. There's four commissioners O'Hare runs Tarrant County with. Matt Krause, he's a Republican. You might know him as the guy who compiled a list of 850 books that he wanted investigated in Texas public schools. He's one of those guys. Yeah. He's financed by the same billionaires that financed the True Texas Project. Manny Ramirez, another Republican, close association with the True Texas Project. That's how it works in Tarrant County. He's up for re-election in November. There's two other county commissioners. They're essentially non-player characters. Alyssa Simmons, a Democrat. She's running against Tim O'Hare in November to be the county judge. And Roderick Miles, Jr., Democrat. They can't do anything but vote their conscience because the three Republicans, O'Hare, Matt Krauss, Manny Ramirez, are the only ones that matter. And those three Republicans are the product of the same ecosystem that produced the Two Texas Project, who tell them what to do and will take them out if they don't get what they want from them. They all vote the same way 100% of the time. Craig, when a movement actually takes over, where does it start? The courthouse, the Capitol, something smaller?
SPEAKER_00It's a good question. It depends on the country, really. In the United States, where these kinds of small movements start often is trying to take over school boards, trying to take over small municipal offices, eating away at the parts of government that people generally don't think about and don't pay a lot of attention to. In Texas, that could be all sorts of different weird little offices that they got, but I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to get a piece of that school board pie.
SPEAKER_01On August 4th, 2026, at the Tarrant County Commissioner's Court, there's a regular meeting. On the agenda was a proposal from the County Elections Administrator. It's a nonpartisan job, a guy named Clint Ludwig, proposing that they cut polling places from 316 down to 176. Early voting sites from 50 down to 42 for 1.3 million registered voters in Tarrant County. Hundreds of people show up at this event. The meeting lasts almost seven hours. O'Hare is presiding over the meeting. A speaker yells during his own allotted time, he uses profanity, gets removed. Later on, the audience claps after being told not to. Tim O'Hare orders the entire room cleared. There's a guy named Lon Burnham there who represented Tarrant County in the Texas House for 18 years from 97 to 2015. He speaks out. Four sheriff's deputies carry him out by his hands and feet, and then they arrested Burnham for not leaving fast enough. A reporter named Jen Rice was there. She covered Harris County Commissioner's Court for a long time, which is in southeast Texas. She said she'd never once seen a chamber cleared like that. Public body, considering changes to how 1.3 million people vote, responded to the public speaking out against the notion by removing the public from the room in America in 2026. The proposal to cut polling places drastically got tabled that night, unanimously, sent back for revisions, rescheduled for last week. But at that same evening, August 4th, before hundreds of people showed up, before the room got cleared, there was a vote that almost nobody noticed. The Tarrant County commissioners voted to consolidate the county's voting precincts from 707 down to 340. Three to two party line vote. There's a reason that matters, because Texas law sets the minimum number of polling places at half of your precinct count. With 707 precincts, minimal amount of polling places would have to be 354. The cut they were fighting about would have been illegal to even propose if they hadn't snuck the consolidation of the precincts thing past us in the first part of the meeting. With 340 precincts, the floor for the minimum number of polling places drops to 170. The vote everybody screamed about was the map, but the vote that made the map legal happened at the same meeting, quietly, three to two. They thought they were gonna get away with it. Here's the thing that makes Texas different from Wisconsin, from Pennsylvania, from any state that lets you have no excuse absentee voting. Texas doesn't play that shit. Texas does not have no excuse absentee voting. You can vote by mail if you're 65 or older, if you're disabled, if you're out of the country for the entire voting period, if you're in jail but still eligible, or if you're expecting to give birth within three weeks of election day. That's the list of exceptions. It's short on purpose. Texas is bottom five in the country in total absentee votes cast. About 5% of all votes in Texas are cast by mail. The national average is about 30%. Texas doesn't do absentee. So when you cut election day sites in Texas, you're not cutting one of the three options. For most people, you're cutting one of two. Early voting or the day of. The Tarrant County Commissioners cut both. September 1st, last week, the revised proposal came back. It passed three to two, party line. They said they could have 224 election day sites, 47 early voting. That's down from 316. That's 92 fewer places, 30% cut in the polling locations. The polling locations were strategically removed from areas where more Democrats vote, tilting things a little way towards Republicans in Terran County. The people of Terran County did not want this to happen. More than 100 people spoke against these cuts. 30 civic organizations rallied outside. The NAACP wrote a letter. The ACLU of Texas wrote a letter. Both sides said the same thing. The cuts fall hardest on voters of color in Fort Worth and Arlington. A woman named Catherine Godby got a minute to speak, and she told them, quote, people have fought and died for the right to vote. You're dishonoring what that means to be an American. And more than that, you're losing your humanity. No effect on how the vote came down. Three to two, the room chanted shame, shame. One of the Democratic commissioners, Rod Miles, said these words Quote, our population hasn't shrunk, our electorate hasn't shrunk. I need a clear, convincing explanation for why a growing county is providing meaningfully fewer places to vote, and I haven't gotten one yet. Commissioner Alyssa Simmons, the other Democrat on the board, said, quote, it's not about cost, this is about power. This is campaigning from the daist. She was saying that about Tim O'Hare. She said that to O'Hare's face in a room that he cleared last month. For the campuses, what specifically got cut? Simmons moved to restore three locations at the University of Texas at Arlington, two Tarrant County Community College campuses. That was voted down three to two. She moved twice, they said no twice. The answer from Republicans, students can use the subcourthouse nearby, Texas Arlington. But I gotta tell you, they've been at this for a while. If you go back to September 2024, same commissioner's court, O'Hare argued to remove early voting sites from college campuses. UT Arlington on the list, same two community colleges on that list. And that vote he lost four to one. He was the only person that wanted to see that happen. But in September 2025, this same board cut nearly half of all early voting locations in the county. September 2026, election day sites cut by 92. Campus sites gone. But the good news is you can vote at any polling place. You don't have to vote at the one in your precinct. Yes, there are less polling places to cast a physical vote, but you can cast your physical vote at any polling place you want. Long line at your usual location? We got you covered. There's another poll location about six blocks from here. Walking distance. The line's too long at that one? No worries, pal. Choose among any of the 230 additional options within Tarrant County. Because you can vote at any of them. And there's no such thing as decision paralysis in Texas. Some of these polling locations are gonna run out of ballots, probably. They have no fear. There's other polling places nearby. You may want to call ahead and get a feel for how long the lines are. Hassel as a poll tax.
SPEAKER_02Hmm.
SPEAKER_00This looks a lot like how voting rights were restricted in places like the Midwest and the West when black people started to move there in the early 20th century in the United States. So this is the time of Jim Crow. Jim Crow, the form of legal segregation and restriction, that mostly existed in the South. When black people migrated to the Midwest and the West and the Northeast in the early 20th century, those places had different ways of restricting the rights of black people. And they looked exactly like this: having fewer voting places, having the ones that black people needed to use be closed, or close early, have long lines or not have enough paper. The kind of stuff that, exactly like you said, is hard to notice and hard to publicize and hard to make a paper trail about, which is voting restriction. That's precisely what they're doing. It's very obvious that's their goal, to make it harder to vote if you're a person of color in their county, but it's just hard to prove in this particular way. The average white person hearing this would just hear complaints or not understand how long it could take to vote if there are just fewer places to vote, or how that might make people stay home if they look and see a long line, or maybe they have to go to work or something.
SPEAKER_01I care about voting, but if I get stiffed at my top three polling locations, I'm unlikely to allow it to happen for a fourth time. I care about casting American fascism out as much as anyone I know. I coined the term autocratic despair. That's only good for three detours. A man has only so much capacity for the runaround, you see. And I would be at my limit. I happen to know a guy who's at his limit. He's one of our members. We've built all that to get to this. The biggest race on any of the ballots in Tarrane County this fall is gonna be the United States Senate. Ken Paxton, the state attorney general, Republican against James Tal Rico, state rep Democrat. Not gonna linger here. Sure, Cal Rico broke our hearts. No reason to get into it. It's just lower at this point. It's explained in the back catalog. We don't need to get into it.
unknownHa ha.
SPEAKER_01What's happening in this race is the reason everything I told you matters. Paxton beat John Cornran in the primary runoff with Trump's endorsement. And Corn's not over it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01This is what he said about his own party's nominee on the record to the Texas Tribune. Quote, Ken Paxton's a poor campaigner. He's lazy and he doesn't raise money. He's making this harder than it needs to be. Nice. Textured. A true gentleman's, I'm not campaigning for that motherfucker, if I've ever heard one. Tal Rico has outraised Paxton, roughly seven to one. In direct advertising, Tal Rico has outspent Paxton 200 to one. That's not a typo. Paxton told Newsmax himself, we're a little behind on the TV. Yeah. A little behind. There isn't any smart money being thrown at Ken Paxton. So, of course, that means there's some oil billionaires, Tim Dunn, Ferris Wilkes, the pack called Defend Texas Liberty that also funded the True Texas Project. Those guys are in. Elon's in. His America pack is, supposedly. It's horrifying. Paxton polls really well with ultra-wealthy maniacs. He'll have the money that he needs. The polls. Fox News has Tal Rico 51, Paxton 48. The Texas St. MCNA poll has Tau Rico 47, Paxton 43. Overton Strategy has got a dead heat. 50-50. A Democrat hasn't won a Senate race in Texas since 1988. And the Tal Rico lead on Paxton is still within the margin of error. Paxton can't campaign. He can't raise money. Can't get Cormann to lift a finger to help him. He's not going to debate Tau Rico. Tal Rico should be running away with it, but not if the True Texas Project has any say in the matter. Oh, great. Because what they can do is turn out low propensity MAGA voters in counties where they operate. That's the true Texas Project. That's their whole game. The ground game. Yes. In a race where the ground game is all he's got. Absolutely. They've already rigged the door count in Tarrant County. Here's what I think happens. I'm going to lay this out and put a date on it. If Paxton loses, the true Texas Project stays in Texas, does a local thing, grows each year by two or three chapters. It's bad for Texas, but it's contained in Texas. If Paxton makes it to the Senate, if he wins, especially if Paxton wins Tarrant County, the True Texas Project gets all the credit. And a group that can deliver a Senate seat in the biggest swing state in America is not going to stay local. If Paxton wins, the True Texas Project model goes national. And what I think will happen is the True Texas Project will rebrand as the True American Project. By 2028, the True American Project will be all over this country. You don't have to believe me, just watch what happens if he wins. The United States has its own AFD party. Probably. Products that work in that lab are gonna get shipped. Feel a little bit better now, Craig? A little bit better?
SPEAKER_00I do feel a little bit better. Thank you, Nick. Uh it's uh Yeah, you know, it's nice.
SPEAKER_01It's nice. I kind of hit a little panic button when I saw what was going on. At least they didn't get over 50. That's true. They could have won. Take heart, people.
SPEAKER_00It can always be a little worse. Yes, it's probably gonna get a little worse, but it's not right now, currently, here, right now.
SPEAKER_01It still might work out. Maybe Jesus Christ will show up and be like, hey, we don't want any of this. I left a book. Could you guys read it?
SPEAKER_00The sun might very well come out tomorrow.
SPEAKER_01Stare 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.
