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
Agent Fetterman & No Kings: Controlled Opposition?
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Nick and Dr. Craig come down from the ledge this week. Both hosts drop to a five, back from the 7.5 they each posted last episode — the highest Dr. Craig had ever offered in nine months of the show, a number that on his logarithmic scale represented a professional assessment, not a mood. This week, the mood lightened. The assessment didn't.
What lowered the number is stranger than what raised it. Nick is at a five because, he explains, Agent John Fetterman has finally reached the inner circle of Trump's regime, just as planned. A little ahead of schedule, actually. Have no fear, Dr. Craig. America's finest patriot was entrusted with a sweet speaking slot on Night One of the Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas — a three-night event at the American Airlines Center that the hosts describe as "something to do in Dallas, Texas in the heat of September that isn't watching professional football." It was the first midterm convention either party has held in fifty years, staged while the NFL season kicked off on the same nights, and Nick was not watching. He is not that kind of a sicko.
Before Agent Fetterman, though, there's the matter of whether America hit a sneaky new low. Trump floated a five-thousand-dollar dividend to every American who votes Republican in the midterms — announced live, at the convention, as though the economy entitled him to hand out checks from a government that has no mechanism for doing it. Speaker Mike Johnson's initial reaction was the closest thing to pushback anyone managed: "I would assume, yes, he'd need Congress to act, and that's a creative idea." Craig hears that and translates: "That's the political equivalent of hey, good job, champ. Nice try." Within a day Johnson was carrying the water, once the talking points arrived. Nick frames the whole stretch as Trump's Game Show Host period — the era where the president of the United States started offering the public cash prizes for loyalty, and the only debate was whether it qualified as a new low or a continuation of the $1.776 billion slush fund that came before it.
The convention itself is a showcase of what Craig calls the humiliation ritual. Trump's speech in support of Ken Paxton, the Texas Senate candidate, was less an endorsement than a public hazing — Trump repeatedly told the crowd Paxton was the greatest attorney general in history while also letting them know he didn't like how Paxton looked or how Paxton talked. Craig explains the mechanic: this is medieval court politics, the prostration before the king, the demonstration that the underling will accept anything the king says and smile. George Washington refused the title "Your Excellency" and asked to be called Mr. President. Trump loves the opposite — the bigger the humiliation, the more loyalty it proves.
On Night Two, Ted Cruz delivered a speech naming three Democrats — Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, and James Talarico — and after each name, an attendee audible on the broadcast shouted "he should be shot." Three times, three names, same voice. Cruz did not react, did not stop, did not acknowledge it. A spokeswoman declined to say whether he'd heard it. Later, Cruz posted the clip himself with the shouts still audible and framed the speech as a warning about rising political extremism. Two of the three targets are Muslim, and the speech fell on the eve of the September 11 anniversary and the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk's assassination.
Which brings the show to Fetterman, and to the rhetorical device Nick designed to let both hosts say everything they need to say about a complicated figure. Agent Fetterman — the conceit that John Fetterman is a deep-cover operative who has spent years building the most convincing disguise in American political history so that he could infiltrate the far right and save the republic from within. The hoodie. The basketball shorts. The stroke. The Mar-a-Lago visits. The Jesse Watters appearances. All cover. The fact that he went on national television and called socialism an anti-American way of life — at a Republican convention — is merely evidence of his commitment to the mission. The fact that his own Pennsylvania delegation is calling him a disgrace and organizing a 2028 primary challenge is exactly what would happen if the disguise were working.
Nick doesn't believe it. He wishes he did. Because the alternative is that John Fetterman is simply a man who figured out that validating the other side costs him nothing he cares about keeping — as long as he holds the pro-choice credential, he can walk into any room in MAGA world and walk out a Democrat. And there's a word for that: controlled opposition.
Craig defines the term through its history — from the origins of parliamentary opposition in Britain, through Russia's managed democracy and Surkov's playpen parties, to the central diagnostic that Nick has been turning over for months: the question isn't whether it IS controlled opposition; the question is what would be different if it were. What would be different about Fetterman? He'd hold a credential the base couldn't argue with. He'd validate the other side on everything that actually moves. He'd be reliably present at their events and reliably absent from his own committee work. Which is what he's doing.
Craig extends the analysis to Talarico, the show's fraught former franchise subject — now the Democratic Senate nominee against the humiliated Paxton — and the Clinton-era triangulation strategy that Craig argues has produced thirty years of the Democratic agenda moving nowhere. Not only is it wrong, he says. It also won't work. Nick pulls them both back from the edge: calling the whole Democratic Party controlled opposition is a nihilism accelerant, and that nihilism is the optimal outcome for the regime. He's not making that accusation. What he is saying is that controlled opposition as a concept needs to be in the public vocabulary, because you cannot diagnose a disease you don't have a name for. He can find exactly one figure in the political-media landscape willing to use the phrase — Sarah Kendzior — and he suspects the reason nobody else goes there is not that it's wrong but that it's too expensive to consider. People would rather believe in a broken party than an empty one.
There is also a theory about the professional wrestler Danhausen being a psyop to normalize Peter Thiel's physical presence in American public life. It is ridiculous. Nick finds it a little bit plausible. Craig does not dismiss it as firmly as one might hope.
The show closes on the No Kings rallies — the October 27 event, the arc from four million to eight million marchers, and the honest conversation about what branded protest has opened and what it has nerfed. Nick is going. He's telling you to go. He's also telling you to paint your face, leave your phone in the car, and never follow a hippie to a second location. And he's asking, as the leaves turn, whether anyone has noticed that eight million people in the streets produced the last two years of Trump's presidency, and whether maybe it's time to try something different while also showing up for the thing that's scheduled.
Comedy, commedia, fascism, autocracy, and a functioning sense of fun about the end of the republic. The abyss is better with friends.
Names in this episode: Nick Mortensen, Dr. Craig Johnson, John Fetterman, Donald Trump, Mike Johnson, Ken Paxton, Ted Cruz, James Talarico, Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, Dave McCormick, Tim Scott, Dr. Oz, Conor Lamb, Charlie Kirk, Aaron Rupar, Sarah Kendzior, Peter Thiel, Danhausen, Vladislav Surkov, Vladimir Putin, Jasmine Crockett, Kaitlan Collins, Malcolm Kenyatta, Chris Deluzio, Brendan Boyle, Bernie Sanders, AOC, Lincoln Perry, Byron Donalds, Joe Rogan, Kristen Welker.
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.
Say what you will about the QAnon, folks, but at least it was a fun game. Looking for clues all over. I want a little bit of that for myself. I've earned it. Just a little conspiracy as a treat. 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_03I think I'm right back down to a six. Coming down from a seven and a half from where I was last week. Got some okay news from Swedish elections. The right wing lost their power in the Swedish parliament, which is good. Obviously the AFD winning fucking sucks, but it seems as if they're still having trouble forming a coalition, which is good news. So yeah, back down to a six. What about you? I kind of want to dish with you a little bit.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, please. With Trump offering 5k for the public to vote Republican in the midterms. Did we hit a sneaky new low last week?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, okay, that's a good point. I think we might have hit a new low. That is a pretty sneaky one. Paying for votes is something that people have done for a long time. You know, they do it right now. Usually not at the federal level, and usually not getting on his most public forum just saying, like, hey, vote for me and I'll give you money. That is a little bit of a new one. I don't think that the president has ever out and out said that before. Presidents and politicians in the 19th century would pay people to vote for sure.
SPEAKER_00But at this point, these bold proclamations are little more than loyalty tests. Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson didn't see that initially, almost went hard in the paint because it was so transparently ridiculous. When I asked him about it, he said, quote, I would assume yes, he'd need Congress to act, and that's a creative idea.
SPEAKER_03That's a creative idea. Yeah, that's like the political equivalent of, hey, good job, champ. Nice try. Good throw.
SPEAKER_00For one glorious moment, Mike Johnson spoke about Trump exactly the way he always should have. But for all that embarrassing compromise. It's weird. Mike Johnson, he's a very compromised man. Within a day, Mike Johnson was back to carrying water once the talking points arrived. Yeah. I wasn't watching the three-night rally last week. I am not that kind of a sicko. This slapdash bullshit in Dallas didn't seem too promising at all. But I was trying to keep tabs on it. Following Aaron Rupar as one does, I trust his judgment. If he's gonna clip something, it's probably worth watching. This may actually be a new little. This might qualify. If you remember Despairables, we try not to keep an obsessive eye on the Mad King here at Autocratic Despair at the podcast because there's a lot of stuff coming out and it draws you in. You can't help it. We try to keep that to a tasteful minimum here at Autocratic Despair the Podcast. That's a little beneath us. That's a Ben Kissel politics show or whatever. It is.
SPEAKER_03That's a good bit, but it's also true, you know. Part of the Trump era is parsing when the bullshit that he says is stuff that you need to take seriously and when he's just riffing, or, like you said, making a loyalty test to see which of his underlings is gonna go along with it, and which of them is gonna be like, excuse me, what are we saying now? Ah shit.
SPEAKER_00And then get blindsided by it. One of the things I'm allowing myself to do is recognize new lows as they happen, just to observe the progression, if nothing else. Yeah. By now, new lows are pretty hard to come by. They should be. It's getting harder and harder to top themselves. Yeah. But the last new low has a bit of an asterisk on it, if we're being honest. The $1.776 billion slush fund to compensate the January 6 hostages. That one was obviously bullshit, but still plausible. You could see it happening. He'd cut some big oversized checks, present them live, and they'd react like they won the showcase showdown on the prices, right? There would have been giant checks, absolutely, no question. You could see it. Whatever was in the slush fund substantially would have been Trump's. It was more or less a test of his ability to extract $1.776 billion into his own coffers. Steamroll all over us. Plus, it grabbed the attention away from that other thing that it was supposed to distract us from. You know, the part of that settlement that said that the Justice Department and the IRS could never investigate Trump or his family forever and ever. No take backs? That sounds great. For a hot second there, it looked like he might pull it off. And it would be a demoralizing public display of how much he's got the Supreme Court by the balls. That slush fund hasn't happened, might not happen, so we might have to adjust the new low. The new low might be that he had the balls to float out a January 6th slush fund in the first place. The slush fund was some incredibly audacious bullshit, but it worked because we talk about that and we barely talk about the Trump IRS Justice Department arrangement. This is what he said. Quote, our economy is so great right now, vote Republican and we'll give you a 5K dividend. That is some real hardcore bullshit.
SPEAKER_03Incredible. That's just incredible stuff. Exactly like you're saying, we just have to remember, and it's hard to remember. Because what they do and what they say and what they talk about is just so sensational. Bald-faced lie. You gotta remember what flooding the zone means. Why they talk about it like that. The purpose of saying all sorts of crazy crap and seeing what sticks is to confuse you. It's to confuse you, it's to misdirect, it's to make it hard to report on things, it's to make it not possible to know what's important until after it's happened, and then you get bewildered. Oh wait, he said some wild thing and he didn't do it, but then he did some less wild, equally evil thing that was harder to pay attention to. That's been his strategy since the beginning.
SPEAKER_00This is actually such profound bullshit, it insults MAGA enthusiasts. So I think it might qualify as a new load because of that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00It might have needed more of an audience or more polish, more seriousness. If he'd done it as part of a presidential address, that probably would have changed the tone and tenor of it a little bit. That would have been a lot more palatable. Yeah. He did that thing in front of a live audience. Just goofy. It kind of looked like he was playing to the crap. Yeah. Does this one replace the 1.776 billion?
SPEAKER_03Oof. That's a really good question. As a scholar of fascism, I am more freaked out about the 1776 money shit. The federal government directly and intentionally paying fascists for staging a coup. I think that that's a little bit lower. Maybe in terms of the function of our democracy, trying to bribe the populace with 5,000 bucks a head to vote Republican, that's probably low. God, this is just no good to have to be like, well, which of these is worse?
SPEAKER_00Maybe we should look at it as a continuation of the slush fun. One day we'll call this his game show period. Got so bad in the second stint as president. He was offering people money to vote for him by the midterms. Yeah. That would be cool. I didn't answer, but I'm at a five this week. I'm bagging off the seven and a half where I was last week in a big way. And it's because of that same convention, which they called the Republican midterm pep rally. I took some heart in learning something between you and me and the audience here. Agent John Fetterman has infiltrated the inner circle of Trump's regime. Just as planned. A little ahead of schedule, actually. Yeah, I guess that might be one way that we could read this. What do I do to stay sane in these awful times, Craig? I make up little stories in my head about everything being an elaborate setup when there's gonna be a day of reckoning one day that's both cleansing and satisfying, or at least a bunch of people are gonna end up in Guantanamo Bay or on trial. Say what you will about the QAnon, folks, but at least it was a fun game. Looking for clues all over. I want a little bit of that for myself. I'd earned it. Just a little conspiracy as a treat. I won't let it ruin my dinner.
SPEAKER_03I'll still, yeah, I'll still listen to the podcast where the guys talk about the sad shit, but like, you know, I can fantasize a little bit.
SPEAKER_00You know, I can I can I like to pretend. It's fun. Yeah, I mean I don't want to deal with Fetterman. It allows me not to deal with Fetterman. I've always had negative feelings about him. I didn't like him in the first place. He pointed a gun at black people that he chased down, and when that came out, people were like, he'd have pulled that gun on those people, whatever color they were. Jesus Christ. It had nothing to do with them being black. He would have pulled the gun on them either way. People just accepted it. I'm baffled by that one.
SPEAKER_03What an excellent thing to hear about one of the hundred most powerful people on earth.
unknownGod.
SPEAKER_00Easier, I guess, to talk about the basketball shorts, which are nothing really. Disrespectful to his fellow senators, sure, but looking around, maybe that's all the respect they deserve anymore.
SPEAKER_03I gotta confess that as a professor teaching the children's these days, that one does get my gored a little bit, being like, my dude, it's not time for pajamas. You're in the halls of power. Some starchiness comes with it.
SPEAKER_00So it gets me, right? You start getting into him looking like a giant oaf and wearing basketball shorts on the floor of the Senate, you can miss the bigger story. There's the small matter of his brain. It isn't working the way it was prior to a stroke that he had. I think it's okay to say that from a personal communication standpoint, Fetterman hasn't fully recovered from his stroke. I thought it was just a folksy affectation. Feels kind of ableist to mention Fetterman in a negative way at all because of that. It's hard, Dr. Craig, to bring Fetterman up in a conversation like the one that we have each week without denigrating him on some level. Well, you know. Which is why I'm here to tell you, Dr. Craig, that John Fetterman is America's finest patriot. I don't know, man. He may be. You never know. He has wormed his way into the inner circle and was entrusted with a sweet speaking slot on night one of the Republican midterm. Although he appeared on video and he was all over the place, and it seemed like there were a lot of cuts, and it was a little stilted. All the better for his cover, I believe. We all know John Fetterman on some level. Even if we don't, we can all sleep a little easier at night knowing he's on our side. I mean, off chance you don't know who Fetterman is. Here's Fetterman in a nutshell, a giant oaf from Pennsylvania. Bald head, no respect for decorum, wears basketball shorts and hooded sweatshirts on the floor of the Senate. Just to troll all those stuffed shirts who care about decorum in an era where the president of the United States used to be pretty tight with America's best sex trafficker. Probably too subtle by half, but that's Fetterman. He's a complex and nuanced man of the people. As a state politician in Pennsylvania, Fetterman did the populist thing, and he got pretty far with it, Lieutenant Governor. If you want to put that in terms of gruff leftist sweethearts, he's like the alpha test for Graham Platner. Kinda.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think that that's super accurate. He presents himself as an everyman. He talks in a folksy everyday kind of way, doesn't dress in big ostentatious suits, his lifestyle doesn't appear rich. In reality, he was a celebrity before he entered politics and sort of the same class pedigree that Platner did.
SPEAKER_00People bought the populism, overlooked some other stuff. Fetterman beat a corporate Democrat named Connor Lamb in the primary by a substantial margin. And then he had the good fortune to face Dr. Oz, a TV doctor that was unfortunately not a resident of Pennsylvania during the campaigning period. But he was for sure going to move to Pennsylvania once they elected into the Senate. Don't worry about that. It seemed like even in that race, Fetterman was the better man by almost any standard. But then it got interesting when Fetterman had a stroke during the campaign and essentially disappeared from the public and hasn't really been the same ever since. Or as others like me wish to think of it, Fetterman decided to go undercover in order to stop this authoritarian menace from growing. Where's the evidence that Fetterman is a double agent? Where are the documents indicating that Fetterman is an American patriot infiltrating the far right? I got none, man. I got none. But you don't got any documents saying that's not happening, do you? Do you?
SPEAKER_03This is one of those known unknowns that I hear so much about.
SPEAKER_00Show me the receipts. Why would Ji Jinping want to flood my basement? Rust my boat flex? To what end? I asked. To what end? Ha! You ever see that?
SPEAKER_03Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_00It's one of my favorite clips of all time. It's such a wonderful thing. I've gone through the unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt at least a dozen times, and that is still the funniest thing I've ever seen. It's pretty spectacular. The Republican midterm convention, pretty big deal. The American Airlines Center in Dallas hosted it. It's the first time either party has had one of these conventions in 50 years. There are a lot of reason for it, but mostly things are a bit flat in the elephant party. Not much reason to get excited about the midterms. America is not getting great again fast enough, and people are starting to notice. Trump's not on the ballot. Woke isn't the scoundrel it used to be before armed men were in the streets rounding people up. So Trump finds a bunch of Republican candidates that are in hot races and decides to gin up some network coverage to demonstrate to the public that they've been blessed by Trump himself with some stage time on network TV. The Republicans trot them out there and they'll let them do their thing. Dazzled the public with their charismatic oratory techniques for making the public super scared about trans and wool and the Democrats transing your kids, transing everything, using the transit of property to do mathematical derivations. The trans has got to stop. Trans stops here. And dazzled these Republicans did. Whether it was Tim Scott adding his take on loud and proud Pentecostal minister to his step and fetch it routine. Did you see what Ted Cruz did? Yeah. Ted Cruz did a speech on the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk's assassination. Cruz was delivering this speech about what he calls radical Democrats. He names three people one by one. Zoran Mamdani, New York mayor, Democratic Socialist. Cruz says about Mamdani, when Mamdani says he wants to seize the means of production, he means it. Somebody in the crowd, audible to the broadcast, shouts, he should be shot. And then Cruz talks about Abdul El-Said, the Michigan Democratic Senate nominee. Cruz says, quote, when Abdul El Said says he has obligation to comply with Sharia law, he means it. Same guy shouts out audibly in the broadcast, he should be shot. And then Cruz moves on to James Tal Rico, the Texas Senate candidate. Cruz says, When James Tal Rico says he wants to dismantle capitalism, he means it. And of course, the same guy in the crowd screams out, he should be shot three times. Same voice, head Cruz did not react. He didn't stop, he didn't acknowledge. Spokeswoman declined to say whether he'd heard it even. Later, Cruz posted the clip himself with the shouts audible. Oh, well, clearly. The highlight of the night, though, was Trump putting Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton through what I imagine is an elaborate humiliation ritual. Trump did his speech that was ostensibly in favor of Ken Paxton, where he kept repeating that Ken Paxton was the greatest AG in history, but also letting the audience know that he doesn't like him. Trump said he didn't like how Ken Paxton looks, and he doesn't like how Ken Paxton talks. He does like the corruption, of course, I assume. Paxton is very obviously a criminal politician. He doesn't make much effort to hide it. Now, Craig, what is a humiliation ritual in this context?
SPEAKER_03So it's funny to talk about this. This is getting at one of these things about the Trump administration, the Trump regime, that makes it a lot more like older ways that politics worked. And by older I don't mean earlier on in the US. I mean like middle ages shit. Part of having power, especially if you were an underling, a middle guy, the duke to a king or something, is that you would have to, what's called, prostrate yourself. You would have to kneel before the king, maybe kiss his hand or kiss his ring or something like that. And that's a humiliation ritual. It's showing that you are low before the person who is high, and that he can say whatever he wants and do whatever he wants, and they can't stop him. England fought a lot of civil wars about this. This is why England has a powerful parliament, because the nobles in England didn't want to have to do this kind of crap to the king. So they made a place where the king wasn't allowed that they could insult him and stuff like that. In the United States, we've largely gotten away with not having this kind of stuff. George Washington was very clear. He didn't want to be called Your Highness, he didn't want to be called Your Excellency, he wanted to be called Mr. President. That's it. Respect, but not humiliation. Trump is all about humiliation. We talked about him as a game show host, which he literally was, right? You know, he's a reality TV show host, and that's essentially a show about humiliation. They all are. Trump loves that stuff. He loves it when people bend down and kiss his feet, rhetorically or literally. And so that's part of what is happening. Every single time that he opens his mouth and says something crazy, he wants to see all the other Republicans humiliated by how much they have to agree with him and go along with it. It's a big part of his politics.
SPEAKER_00Which leads us back to Fetterman. Fetterman was the opening act, night one, act one. That's the slot, jerking the curtain, letting people know it's time to take their seats. Fetterman came in via a pre-recorded video, wearing a hoodie, standing in front of a steel plant in Braddock, Pennsylvania, introducing his good friend, Republican Pennsylvania Senator Dave McCormick, and pledging to work with President Donald Trump to defend the steel way of life. I am so glad we have Agent Fetterman on the case. He was the only one that could convincingly assume the identity of big, dumb oaf that don't know no better. An innocent victim in the world of all these demonic forces of the woke mind virus.
SPEAKER_03Yes, a lovable, befuddled, big white man. That's the kind of Democrat that they can get behind.
SPEAKER_00Agent Fetterman did some subtle work from there. He cast himself as a common sense Democrat, the kind that doesn't like socialism, rejects it forcefully. A lot of people have lost faith in Fetterman over the last few months, which just demonstrates to me his commitment to the country. It's not what he prefers, it's what he has to do to people in order to get Trump's inner circle to let their guards down. Fetterman has embraced the role. He's become pretty disappointed with the people that don't think he's a sleeper agent. They think he really seems to have gone into business for himself. Craig, what is your read on John Fetterman? Oh, God.
SPEAKER_03It would be nice to believe. It would be nice to believe that this is all some sort of brilliant hoax. My read on Fetterman is I think he probably was a pretty moderate Democrat. Pennsylvania is a deeply politically divided state. It's probably the purplest of the purple states. He probably is fairly close to a median voter in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania famously half Kentucky, half Boston. It's a weird place. That's a good way to say it. At the same time, there's the mental health aspect like you were talking about. He had this stroke, something that can happen to anybody, and also played professional football, and that ruins your brain. We know this for sure. This guy had a job that ruins people's brains. To a certain extent, this might be a time for us to really reconcile ourselves to that fact, really see it. It's a full flowering of that. A brain addled by concussions is now potentially making or breaking the Republican control and their ability to pass oppressive legislation in Congress. That's one way to read it. I'm unfortunately contractually obligated to be the straight man in this particular relationship, Nick. And so uh I'm unfortunately not allowed to follow along with the idea that maybe he's a secret agent, but God, that is a much preferable situation.
SPEAKER_00Maybe just maybe. But what if there's a word for this when somebody who's supposed to be on your team is functionally serving the other one? I've been wanting to talk about this for months. We actually talked about this during our Alpha Run of podcast that can only be listened to by members of the 15 Minutes of Fascism Patreon, which is Craig's other, much more disturbing podcast.
SPEAKER_03Yes, 15 Minutes of Fascism is me slowly going mad. This show is me hanging out with a friend, talking about awful stuff, and trying to make each other laugh as much as we possibly can in the process.
SPEAKER_0015 Minutes of Fascism is a whole different Dr. Craig Johnson. He's cold, clinical, restrained, barely masking a rage so incandescent he's afraid to let it out. That is actually very true.
SPEAKER_03Uh, this is something I talked to my therapist about that I'm afraid to be mad.
SPEAKER_00Last week he had to remind himself that he's got a whole other podcast to be mad about stuff on. It's worth listening to. If you like this show, you'll love 15 minutes of fascism.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, this show's the chaser.
SPEAKER_00This word that I've been wanting to talk about is controlled opposition. The first thing you need to know about controlled opposition is that it isn't always clear about itself. To be more accurate, it presents itself in a myriad of often subtle ways. Dr. Craig, can you define controlled opposition as a concept for our listeners just to make sure we're all on the same page? Absolutely.
SPEAKER_03Controlled opposition is a concept that comes from the origins of parliamentary democracy. Back in the day when parliamentary democracy was getting started in the UK, there were parliaments before this, but you know, when they were actually in power. Basically there were two parties. There were the Tories, who were in favor of the power of the king, and there were the Whigs, W H I G, they were critical of the king's power. Whoever was in power, they would have government and they would be able to control the passage of laws and stuff. And the other party was out of power, but they had a special name. They were called His Majesty's Loyal Opposition. As in, you could oppose the government, but you still supported the state. You still supported the country. Controlled opposition is an even more insidious form of that. Let's say you have a Putin's Russia. In Putin's Russia, there are a lot of political parties, and you can vote for them. Some of them win. They win seats in the Duma. They have representatives. Some of them even say things that are critical of Putin. But everybody knows that those people either literally work for Putin or Or they are doing work for Putin. They appear to be in opposition, but are in fact put in their little play place, this little toddler play pen, you can only go this far, no further, and they're actually controlled, and so that's it. It is an opposition. Maybe they say things that are critical, maybe they're opposed, maybe they're in the opposite party, but they're under the control of the people who have power. That's what a controlled opposition is, and it's a feature of most dictatorships. In many dictatorships, there's a party that supports the dictatorship and a party that opposes it, and the party that opposes it doesn't get more than 30%, but they get to be in there and they get to talk and they get to say shit. It helps the foreign press not see what's actually happening. We haven't had anything quite like that in the United States.
SPEAKER_00But what we have in the United States, the question isn't whether it's controlled opposition. The question is what would be different if it was what would be different about Fetterman if he were controlled opposition? He'd still be a Democrat. Yeah. He'd hold a credential the base couldn't argue with, like being pro-choice or pro-immigration or pro-LGBTQ, and he'd validate the other side on everything that actually moves, which is what he's doing. What would be different about the Democratic Party if it was controlled opposition? It'd make slightly wrong strategic decisions, prioritize the wrong targets, diffuse anger at critical moments under the guise of being cooler heads. They would triangulate on losing issues regularly. Be reliably ineffective, but still look like it was trying. It would, I don't know, sell out transgender people for no gain whatsoever. God. Does it sound like anyone we know?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, this is unfortunately very, very evocative of a particular politician that this podcast has a fraught relationship with the image of, and that is James Tallarico, the Senate candidate for the Democrats in Texas against Ken Paxton, the very humiliated court jester type figure that Donald Trump was paying to dance earlier in the podcast. Tallerico has been doing something that is called triangulation. Triangulation is a term that existed in politics before this, but in the US, this context comes from the 90s, from the Clinton campaign. The idea was, okay, well, if the Democrats are progressive and then the Republicans are conservatives, we'll be moderates. We'll be a triangle, the third position, and we'll outflank the Republicans and also outflank the left Democrats and we'll win this way. And listener, no matter how old you are, you have spent most of your adult life watching this absolutely fail, fall on its face. The Democrats have won elections, but has their agenda been pushed forward? What that the Democrats stand for has moved forward since this has happened. I can think of one thing, and that's gay marriage. It's a really big one. But other than that, our healthcare system is not demonstrably better, Obamacare got passed and then gutted by the Republicans. Our welfare system is gutted. Our economy is in shambles, government spending is down, all sorts of other metrics that are things that the Democrats care about are dead or dying. The Democrats triangulate on immigration, which is like all parts of triangulation, all of these strategies, is not only wrong, it won't work. To me, that's the real key thing about it. Not only is it wrong, it also won't work. I just simply do not understand what the consultants for Talo Rico say. If he says, okay, yeah, maybe I could try to throw trans kids under the bus, but aren't there those clips of me saying that God is non-binary? A low information voter is not going to care about my policy position about this when they see a TikTok of me speaking what I, Craig, as an observer, thought was in his heart.
SPEAKER_00It's wild. I do not understand it. Controlled opposition doesn't come right out and admit it, right?
SPEAKER_03No. No, no, no, no, no. No, no. There's another important concept for understanding 20th and 20th century American politics that's kayfabe. They're the heel.
SPEAKER_00How can we really ever know whether the ineptitude on the part of the Democrats is intentional or not?
SPEAKER_03That's the thing. It gets into weird conspiracy theory territory if you think about it in this way. The fact is, as Nick is saying, you have to challenge yourself and ask, what would be different? What would they be doing differently if they were controlled opposition? Think about what it actually means. This doesn't mean that every single staffer in every single position and every single Democratic office is on the payroll of the Republicans. No, that's not what would be necessary. All that would be necessary would be certain big donors, certain big political operatives, believing in a world that's dead and gone, where you can compromise with the Republicans, where you can work with them, where the Democrats are forever Charlie Brown trying to kick a football that Lucy's gonna pull at the very last moment, somehow always believing that it won't happen this time. I think I might think of the Democrats instead of them being controlled opposition, it's more like they're controlling themselves. They've fooled themselves into this. That's my read on it.
SPEAKER_00I know we're getting pretty close to something dangerous here, characterizing the Democratic Party as controlled opposition. I don't want the audience to think that we're calling the Democratic Party controlled opposition. We couldn't do it if we wanted to. There's no real test to know whether it's true or not. I got no receipts, so I'm not saying that. I need you to hear me when I say that I am not saying that. The Democrats, or at least certain pockets within the Democrats, are not controlled opposition. I don't think. What am I saying? Controlled opposition never admits to being controlled opposition. It may not even know it is controlled opposition, which is difficult. I'm wondering why we don't see the accusations being bandied around among the factions during the internecine battles of the Democrats. Is that a bridge too far? Fighting words? Implying some actors and organization within progressive spaces may not be operating in good faith. It's like it's the last hold barred or something. And I wonder about that. I do. I wonder why you don't hear controlled opposition being lobbed at the centrist by the Democratic Socialist Wings, or vice versa. I think you could make a pretty convincing case for either, if I'm being honest. And yet the phrase controlled opposition never seems to come up. I wonder whether that's because most people don't understand the role controlled opposition plays and the journey from competitive authoritarianism to entrenched autocracy. Because you can't do entrenched autocracy without a robust controlled opposition. You need the public completely demoralized to get there. You need to convince the public that there's no reason to think voting makes any different at all. Craig, have we discuss the levels of autocracy?
SPEAKER_03We have a little bit, but I think way, way, way back in the day. And just like you said, we can think about there being multiple different types of autocracy. In a contemporary, big country like the United States, the military wouldn't be able to govern the United States if it tried. They could maybe swing it for a couple months as a transition period. Full-on direct martial law, not really viable. In a country this big, this diverse, with so many different environments, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Basically not possible. You need buy-in, you need civilian help, which means either there needs to be a real competition over power that the authoritarians win, competitive autocracy, or there needs to be the appearance of a real competition that the autocrats win. That's entrenched autocracy. Currently, the United States is moving towards a form of competitive autocracy. We're like, sure, the Democrats might squeak it out, but they might be able to win. It's possible. But the Republicans are fixing the books.
SPEAKER_00A major criteria for entrenched authoritarianism is a popular national candidate is not allowed to win or compete in a political race. We don't have national elections except every four years. We haven't had a situation where a popular national candidate hasn't been allowed to win. I guess we're not entrenched authoritarianism, but for all I know, we could be. Yeah. We'll find out in 2028 if we are.
SPEAKER_03That's possible. I mean, that's the thing. Controlling the knowledge that people have about politics, controlling ignorance, controlling what seems possible to people. That's a big part of politics and political action. If the Democrats were controlled opposition, what would they be doing differently? That's one of these things. The fact that they continue to maintain that socialism is impossible, despite the fact that most of the United States' major allies since World War II have engaged in it in one form or another and have massively better health, education, social, and happiness outcomes than we do in our country.
SPEAKER_00I think that a public newly aware of the concept of controlled opposition may have a question about some previous decisions that didn't make sense. I think it would shed light on some of these head scratchers, at least. That's why we're introducing the topic here. I want people to know what controlled opposition is, and I want them to be asking questions about it. Let's take a detour here to a not entirely unrelated topic. October 27th, No Kings 4, just announced. It's before Halloween, just before midterm voting. Get out there with your funnest sign, your best costume, and get your ass to the polls or something. Early voting, whatever. We're getting the band back together, baby. Are you in or you out? Yeah. Don't worry about the AI facial detection drones. I got a plan for that. We're going out there, we're doing it, folks. It's gonna be just like last fall, only better, because people will have had a whole year to brainstorm about their costume.
SPEAKER_03Or at least their sign. I'm gonna get some chuckles out of those signs. I guarantee it. The next day on Reddit, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00There's bound to be a few sensible chuckles out there.
SPEAKER_03No Kings is a tough one. You're right. Because of my super duper crazy radical politics, I find it somewhat demoralizing often to be a protest. Even ones that I am fully on board with. I often come away from them with a feeling of sadness and weakness. Yeah. My own personal psychological struggles. I don't say these things in order to discourage people from going to protests. I think protests are good and important. And I think that this is a pretty low-lift protest. But as Nick is noting, we have to be super careful about this kind of stuff. Who is it that puts these together? Well, it's the 501c3s, hashtag resist. That has its place, but limiting your resistance to Donald Trump to something like that is a mistake. It is a way of blunting the anger, the fury that I'm sure if you're a listener to this show, you feel on a regular basis about this. If this is the only thing you can get your grandma to do, cool. But this is not how the political needle is actually moved. Every single time that something really big has changed in these United States, it's because the people in power were actually worried. Cute signs do not make them worried. They might make us feel better, and that's good. It's good to feel better, but not if it stops you from staying mad.
SPEAKER_00If you've not been to a No Kings rally, you simply must. You're in for a real treat. Let me explain. The No Kings Coalition. It's led by two organizations. Indivisible, founded a week after Trump's first inauguration in 2017. Originally just a Google Doc about how to pressure your congressmen, written by former congressional staffers who knew would actually move the needle. Now it's one of the largest progressive advocacy organizations in the country. They're pairing up with the 5051 Project, which partnered early with Political Revolution, a group that was created to support Bernie Sanders' 2016 bit. There's at least a hundred more partner organizations, bunch of tryhards, if you ask me. You gotta respect it. They've got so much pep. The marches have been tremendously successful. The arc so far, June 2025, No Kings 1, Flag Day. Counterprogramming against Trump's military parade on his birthday. Oh yeah, that's right, that's right, that's right. 4 million people came out, 2,100 locations. October 25th, No Kings 2, 7 million came out. 36 were arrested, three were injured, a little bit of gunplay in Arizona, where one of the marshals was shooting at a guy with a gun and he ended up shooting someone else and killing him. Bad situation. March 2026, No Kings 3, 8 million claimed, all 50 states, international. June 2026, they had an event called Rise Up and Sing Out that I never heard of. I just found out about it today. Yeah, I didn't hear about that one. The World Cup was going on as it was happening. There's no way we were gonna get to that. It's cool if you didn't make it. It was a concert counterprogramming the America 250. And now October 27th. This one is different because this one is explicitly pivoting from protest to early vote mobilization, making sure people are ready to vote early. They're fun. I'm going. I'm not gonna vote there. I'm an absentee voter that drops his ballot off in the dropbox in front of City Hall. Besides, I'm not gonna bend one of my fundamental rules of life, never follow a hippie to a second location. Always applies, even when those hippies are 70 and we're protesting Donald Trump.
SPEAKER_03There are a fair number of hippies protesting Donald Trump in precisely this way in the Bay Area. So I yes, I I I sympathize.
SPEAKER_00Do you know that, Craig? Never to follow a hippie to a second location.
SPEAKER_03Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%. You probably shouldn't.
SPEAKER_00But go, you should go. And if you've been to them before, maybe this time you can try some digital hygiene. Probably not necessary yet, but I don't know. Facial recognition drones, man. If you go, maybe go in a way the surveillance state can't index. Wear a face covering, wear some sunglasses, at the very least. Put your hair under a hat. Just paint your face. I suggest people should go Danhausen. Danhausen is a professional wrestler from Michigan. He's got a vampire stick. He's very nice, very evil. His face paint defeats flock cameras, defeats the ALPR network, defeats the facial recognition infrastructure being built in your city right now. 42 cameras in Green Bay alone. Leave your phone in your car if you can. If you can't, airplane mode. Don't RSVP with your real email. There's gonna be some evangelicals counter-protesting, and they'll have no idea that this Danhausen face paint is a reference to wrestling. To them, it reads as menace, demonic, threatening. Let it I got a theory about Danhausen, Dr. Krang. Please. My wife went to the Mackinac Island Bridge on Labor Day weekend and she came home with quite a stash of edibles. So I have done some thanking this week.
SPEAKER_03Some Danhausen thanking.
SPEAKER_00I got a buddy in my fantasy football league, Mike Fowler, unassailable taste, and he tipped me off. If that guy recommends something, you don't wait. If he's curating something for you, you just jump on it. I got introduced to those elephant graveyard videos. Ooh, yeah. Elephant Graveyard has these hour-long think piece videos about how Joe Rogan ruined comedy that tie him to Peter Thiel. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03I haven't watched that one yet, but uh those things are so me-coded. Every once in a while you see a piece of media and you're like, it's for me. How did they make it just for me? They don't owe me. I'm shocked I managed to miss him this far.
SPEAKER_00I stopped thinking about Joe Rogan years ago when the main sponsor of his show stopped being the fleshlight, which was a jerk and off device. I forgot that it was God. He went mainstream after that. Yeah. Sold out to a non-jerk and off device company. I don't think about him at all, but whoever runs the elephant graveyard, YouTube did. It goes deep and it's funny, and it's pretty staggering how many times he linked Peter Thiel and Joe Rogan together. From this excursion into long-form content on YouTube, I've become convinced that the mainstreaming of Danhausen is a psyop to get children and normal people used to the idea of seeing Peter Thiel in the public sphere. Really? What? Danhausen is exposure therapy. Oh. Danhausen and Peter Thiel have a lot of very similar personal mannerisms. And I think that Danhausen's vaulting to celebrity is an opportunity for those weird aspects of Peter Thiel's personality to read as madcap for little kids. We all know that Peter Thiel's a weirdo, and the blood thing was true at one point, but he's not putting young people's blood in his system anymore. Oh, you're right. They are both vampires. That's a good point. He seems like Peter Thiel's very evil, but he's a little like Danhausen, so he might be a little good at the same time. I think that Danhausen is like a kind and gentle introduction to Peter Thiel. Very nice, very evil. When it comes time to pick your network state, go with Peter Thiel's. And then one day you meet the version that's just very evil. But he isn't evil at all. He's just effective. He doesn't care what gets in his way. And if ruthlessness is evil, then why did God make social paths, huh? I know it's silly, but I really did go off on a little intellectual excursion this weekend. No, I like it. I like it.
SPEAKER_03I like it.
SPEAKER_00Not opposed. I get a little bit worried about the format itself. Not the people, they seem fine. Well-intentioned, if nothing else. It's the format. Because as you said, branded protest taking over for spontaneous protest is something that's genuinely good and genuinely limiting at the same time. A branded event with a website and a logo is accessible in a way that spontaneous marches aren't. People organize for these marches. Branded protests make it easy. You get 8 million people out there. A lot of those people never protested before. You know what it is? They've taken out permits. There's probably some law enforcement there. An ambulance on standby. You can bring your mom. You can finally justify keeping that ridiculous feather boa that you got that one time at that one thing and have hung from the top of a mirror in your house since 2017. That matters. Those are the tangible advantages to scripted protests. Less danger for people, at the cost of making a slightly more impotent statement. These No Kings rallies have absolutely nerfed spontaneous protests, removed all the implied menace. When one organization owns the protest calendar, spontaneous reaction gets suppressed. Something terrible happens on Tuesday, you look around. Are there people in the streets? No, they're waiting for October 27th. But you can bet your ass they'll go extra hard because of what happened today. In the absence of protest after a specific outrage, there's a vacuum. No protest has a way of contextualizing the latest awful transgression. If it was really that bad, then where are the protests? He's really done it now, you say? Well, put it on the pile with all the others. We'll get to it in a couple weeks when we have the protests. When the leaves of color. It'll be crisp. It'll be nice. And there's a deeper thing when protest gets consolidated under a brand. People start feeling you need permission to be out in the streets. That's the opposite of how mass movements have ever generated any pressure. Yeah, that's the central issue. Nowadays there's the data too. You don't want an RSVP for this with your real email. Here's why. Every mobile sign-up, every contact shared with a coalition partner, that's a database full of suckers who still believe in democracy. Who controls it? Who are they selling it to? How would you know if it was hoovered up by the Doge Boys? What happens when it gets subpoenaed? That puts you on a list for retribution. Maybe. I don't know. It's going to at least preclude you from ever being able to infiltrate conservative spaces, which is bad, because I suspect we may need more than our man Fetterman on the inside. Mm-hmm. We may need you two to go undercover one day. Now, Craig, the last time that we talked about this, I remember you thinking that we were getting close to blasphemy. We were on the on the way to conspiracy talk. Has anything changed about your thinking on this topic since then?
SPEAKER_03Honestly, a little bit. Just the fact that it's just been several months of Democrats gearing up to face Trump and to face the Republicans in the midterm, and we are somehow still playing the 2008 playbook. I truly do not understand. When it comes to the No Kings rally, when it comes to all the various hashtag resist events, it's something that I'm like, yeah, we have to be careful. We should go. And at the same time, I find myself thinking, okay, what was the result of this form of resistance? The result was the last two years of Donald Trump's presidency, arguably the worst presidency since James Buchanan, right before the Civil War. And if this, if this is the result of all of those efforts, then we gotta try something else. We gotta do something different.
SPEAKER_00It's confounding. It's truly confounding. If the Democrats don't win big in the midterms, I think that we're gonna have to wonder more frequently if this really is controlled opposition. Yeah. Maybe the nature of the thing is that you can't see it while you're in it, but once we see the results, we'll know what happened in retrospect. This is where I land. I think that it's time. It's time that controlled opposition became a term that regular people knew. I want it in the vernacular after the midterms, especially if they don't go as well as they might. I want non-scholars, non-political junkies, regular people, your cousin, your coworker, the guy at the gym. Because I've read plenty of think pieces about what's wrong with the Democrats, what's wrong with the messaging, what's wrong with the strategy, what's wrong with their consultants, what's wrong with the vibes. And not one of them, not a single one, has ever considered the possibility that there's nothing wrong with the Democrats at all. That maybe they're doing the job they were hired to do. They're just not doing the job we want them to do. Pretty much the only person in this space who's even willing to make the suggestion that controlled opposition is happening is the unassailable Sarah Kenzie. I think the reason that nobody else goes there is not that it's wrong, it's that it's too expensive to even consider. They don't have her spunk. They don't want to pay the price she has for discussing it out loud in public. Because if it's true, it's a seismic shift in reality. It'd be absolutely demoralizing. People would rather believe in something that's broken than something that was supposed to be broken.
SPEAKER_03When I think about the Democrats and I think about what their goals are, what they're trying to do, what they're trying to achieve, in my mind there's a vacuum. People criticize me, people criticize you, people criticize us, people criticize all sorts of people who are critical of the Democrats and saying, like, the Republicans are doing all these things and you're critical of the Democrats. That's because they want me to vote for them. Idiot. They're supposed to listen to me. They want me to vote for them. People who think that it's weird for me to demand that people do stuff I want in order to get me to vote for them. What the fuck do you think this is for? I vote for them to get them to do stuff I want them to do. And if they don't do the stuff I want them to do, I say, hey, you're not doing the stuff I want you to do. I don't understand what the virtue is in just saying, like, well, you know, it's the best we can get, it's the best we can hope for. At least they're not Republicans. I believe in my heart, and also my brain, that voters are desperate for people who believe things and try things. I think that that is one of the most positive lessons from the Trump presidency. Donald Trump believes stuff. The stuff he believes is evil. He tries stuff. And the stuff he tries is even more evil somehow. Most voters don't like most of the stuff that he says and thinks and does. But they like that he believes in something, that he stands for something, that he speaks his mind. That's what they always say. And so this sort of namby-pamby triangulation, oh, we gotta follow the polls on this one, in addition to being wrong, it won't work. It just gets my gored.
SPEAKER_00Stare into the abyss with friends, the Autocratic Despair podcast with Mick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson. And don't forget Dr. Craig's other podcast, 15 Minutes of Fashion, available wherever you get your podcast.
