Stare into the abyss of the United States' descent into Authoritarianism with a truly funny comedian from Green Bay, WI and a very serious PHD in Global Fascism Studies from Cal-Berkeley.
•Nick Mortensen & Dr. Craig Johnson•Season 2•Episode 21
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Two very online brothers stood behind a podium at the Pentagon last week, and a sitting president accused the opposition party of trying to murder him. Only one of those stories got covered like it mattered, and it was the one with the haircuts.
This week on Autocratic Despair, the comedy podcast where Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson stare into the abyss with friends, the despair numbers come in close together and for very different reasons. Craig holds at a six, driven by the AfD's continued run through the German electorate. Nick lands at six and a half, driven entirely by the fact that Jake and Logan Paul were at the Department of Defense in suits.
Germany keeps voting, and the center keeps shrinking. Two state elections landed over the weekend. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, in the former East, the AfD took about 38 percent and first place, while the SPD slid to roughly 35 percent. The story is what happened to the Christian Democrats. The CDU got shut out of the state parliament entirely. Craig explains why that should land harder for an American audience than it does: the CDU is modern Germany. It has been the governing pillar of the country since the Second World War, conservative in roughly a Mitt Romney way, comfortable with social welfare spending, and willing to work with the Social Democrats. When that party loses its seats to a party sitting just shy of open fascism, you are not watching a bad night. You are watching a realignment. Craig has a friend in the German foreign ministry who told him this could never happen there, of all places. It happened there.
There is some good news in the numbers. In Berlin, Die Linke doubled its vote share, and Craig makes the case for why that matters: the German left has the longest and clearest record of opposing the Nazis, which is precisely why the Nazis came for them first. Nick also stumbles onto a piece of history he had never heard, which is that Berlin's 2021 election was thrown out entirely and rerun in 2023 after a day of long lines, missing ballots, and a marathon closing the streets. Also in the mix: the BSW, a party of wing nuts that cleared five percent in Saxony-Anhalt and did not clear it here, and what a coalition against the AfD would have to look like to hold.
Then the Pauls. On September 17, Jake and Logan Paul toured the Pentagon, visited the 9/11 memorial, met Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and addressed uniformed service members from the press briefing room. Nick opens with a correction, since the photos have been read wrong all week: they were not giving a press briefing. They were using the briefing room as a venue. The visit came ahead of National POW/MIA Recognition Day.
Nick asks the audience proxy question, which is who the hell are these guys, and Craig takes it seriously, which is the point. The Pauls came up as vloggers in the late Tumblr era, became bona fide celebrities with about a hundred million in combined reach, and have since rebranded as fitness influencers for men and boys, a lane that runs straight into male supremacist and warrior ethos territory. Craig places them on a spectrum somewhere between Mr. Beast and Andrew Tate, with better PR instincts than the Tate brothers and the same underlying contempt. One of them beat Mike Tyson in a fight Craig describes as elder abuse. Nick argues Logan Paul is a legitimately excellent professional wrestler, which is not a compliment so much as a warning: he knows exactly how to be hated on purpose.
There is also money in the room. The brothers paid for their own travel and also met Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Jake promoted Justin Sun's crypto tokens without disclosing he was paid. Logan is facing a class action over the CryptoZoo NFT project, which the plaintiffs call a rug pull and which he denies, having offered money back to buyers who drop out of the suit. Craig defines a rug pull for anyone who needs it, and then makes the argument that holds the segment together: being impossible to take seriously is the product. They want you to see the dumb kids at the end of the cul-de-sac. What they are is very good at getting what they want.
Somewhere in there the episode detours into why every young service member in those photos has a mustache, and Craig has an actual answer involving Prussian practice and gas mask seals. Comedy ballast, fully earned.
New Low, now weekly. The back half is the segment Nick is putting on a schedule from here to the midterms, because the question keeps coming up whether we like it or not. This week's candidate: on Tuesday, September 15, on Truth Social, the president wrote that the assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pennsylvania was a Democrat plot to get him out of the election, that the evidence was missing, altered, corrupted, or gone, and that former FBI Director Christopher Wray should pay a price. The evidence offered was nothing.
Nick gives a full Butler primer for anyone who was not paying attention in July 2024: Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, on a rooftop with a line of sight to the stage; Trump hit in the ear; Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old husband, father, and former volunteer fire chief, killed; David Dutch and James Copenhaver critically wounded; Crooks killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper; Director Kimberly Cheatle resigning ten days later. He also steelmans the anger, because the security failure was real.
Then the turn. Craig walks through who gets blamed after political violence and why evidence rarely changes it, from the reaction to Charlie Kirk's assassination back through the late 1960s and the Years of Lead in Italy. Nick lays out the part he cannot get past: James Comey was indicted in April over a photo of seashells reading 86 47, while Jack Posobiec posted 86 46 about Joe Biden in 2022 and was never charged. So seashells get you indicted, but an accusation of attempted murder against an entire party produces no arrests at all. Craig's answer covers the loyalty test, the purge, the Night of the Long Knives, and what an authoritarian does when public support slips.
Also discussed: what Trump's own FBI leadership, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, concluded about whether Crooks acted alone; what Attorney General Todd Blanche would and would not say; what Senator Chuck Grassley's newly released files actually show, including the Bob Dole alias and the anonymous donor who paid for the cremation; whether any of it survives contact with a conspiracy theory; and the one president in American history Craig can name whose opposition really did try to kill him, which turns out to be Abraham Lincoln and turns out not to be comforting.
Coming next week: Jack Posobiec, the book Unhumans, and the endorsement it just picked up.
Autocratic Despair is a comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism. Nick Mortensen is a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dr. Craig Johnson holds a PhD in global fascism, lectures at UC Berkeley, and wrote How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.
SPEAKER_00
My dude, you can't it can't happen here in fucking Germany. It's Germany. It did.
SPEAKER_01
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_00
Last week I was at a six or a six and a half. I think I'm still about there. The FD's continued roll through the German electorate is freaking me out. But that's been balanced by some victories, I guess we're forced to call them in the United States political context, where Trump didn't get every single thing that he wanted. I'm at a six.
SPEAKER_01
Let's drill down on this AFD thing a little bit. There were two elections this weekend in Germany, one from the Mecklenburg Vorpermann, former East Germany. Once again, the AFD overperformed there. They took 38% of the vote, first place, and the SPD down just a slight bit second place with 35% of the vote. The left and the greens still got enough to qualify for some seats in the parliament, but the CDU, the Christian Democrats, they got shot out.
SPEAKER_00
And that is the thing that is really disturbing, folks. The Christian Democratic Union, the CDU, they are modern Germany. Since World War II, the CDU is the government of Germany, more or less continuously, especially in West Germany. Them losing to a much more right-wing party, because the CDU is conservative in at most a Mitt Romney kind of way. They actually like a lot of social welfare spending, and they're progressive compared to the United States on a number of fronts. They work with the Socialist Party. They're a mainstream party. Them losing to the just shy of fascist AFD, and basically the AFD completely eating their lunch, taking all of their votes, all of their seats, it represents a total realignment in German politics, and it represents a moment where the center cannot hold. The pillar of German politics after Adolf Hitler has been the CDU. And if it's crumbling, I actually don't know what comes next. I don't think anybody does.
SPEAKER_01
A few weeks ago in Saxony Anholt, the AFD overperformed too. But there's one key difference. In the Saxony Anholt election, the BSW, a party of absolute wing nuts, managed to garner more than 5% of the vote. They weren't even around in 2021. And now they have 5% of the vote, which means that they could theoretically coalesce with the AFD and cause some big problems. So far, they haven't to their credit. In Mecklenburg-Vorpamen, they didn't get enough of the vote to qualify for any seats in parliament. So they're not going to be doing anything with the AFD at all. Yeah. There was another vote in Berlin this week, which had some pretty interesting consequences too. The left party doubled its vote share from 2023. That's a good thing. Yes.
SPEAKER_00
That is very good and exciting because the left in Germany knows what the fuck is up about fascism. They were the first and original opponents to the Nazis. That's why the Nazis go after them first. We've all heard the poem. First they went for the trade unionists, first they went for the Social Democrats. That's the left. That's the Nazis' original enemy. That's why they go after them. These guys are serious about the AFD. To their credit, the CDU and the Social Democrats are too. The hope is that they can form some sort of coalition against them and also address some of the real problems that German people are facing that make people vote for the AFD.
SPEAKER_01
This is another update on the German elections from Autocratic Despair of the Podcast. I know that nobody else is talking about the German elections.
SPEAKER_00
No, no, no, no. We talk about it a lot on this show because we think it's important. If you're a listener in the Anglophone world, which you probably are because we're speaking English, this might sound like something far away and not important, but Germany is the biggest and most important country in the European Union, which is one of the United States' most important trade partners, political partners, and also it's Germany. This is the place that the right wing looks to almost everywhere. They lionize Hitler, they are excited about following that mandate, following that example. The fact that Germany is moving in this direction is just wild. I have a friend who works in the German foreign ministry. After the AFD won in Saxony, I asked him what he was going to do when the AFD ran the national government. And he said, nah, it's never gonna happen. My dude, you can't it can't happen here in fucking Germany. It's Germany.
SPEAKER_01
It did. You'd think the Germans would have a plan for this exact scenario.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you know.
SPEAKER_01
Germans love to make plans. No contingency is too small. Pretty surprising to find out that they're caught with their pants down on the old what should we do if there's ever a resurgence of national socialism conundrum? Feels like they should have a couple of contingency plans available on this one. One would hope. But instead they're looking to the USA to see what we're up to. What we're up to is denial mixed with magical thinking. That's the easiest thing. As far as the Germans are concerned, that's perfect. You sure? Wasn't that your plan last time? You don't want to tighten that one up a little bit? God damn it.
SPEAKER_00
I have a history professor, friend of mine, who made a joke. I won't say his name because this is the kind of joke that people don't like. His joke was, well, now that communism is over, Eastern Europe can proceed down its natural political path towards fascism. It's not even a little wrong. No.
SPEAKER_01
My Autocronic Despair number this week is six and a half. And it's because Jake and Logan Paul were at the Pentagon. Dr. Craig, who the hell are Jake and Logan Paul?
SPEAKER_00
Oh my god. Jesus. They have some of the most confusing, convoluted, weird, gen Zitgeist careers of anybody, I would say. If you look at their Wikipedia today, it would seem as if they are primarily martial artists and boxers. And that's kind of what they do a lot of. But they were also originally the paradigmatic streamers, popular for popularity's sake, talking shit, filling the void that should have been occupied by watching Jack Osam and MTV in your cousin's basement smoking a joint. They bring that kind of energy. It's just kind of like a morning zoo, except that it's only full of dudes who are fucking around. That's what they do. However, in the last couple years, they've rebranded themselves as fitness influencers for men and boys, which has put them in a particular political zone that is fully right-wing, very male supremacist, and all about testosterone, manliness, and warrior ethos crap. One of them beat Mike Tyson in a boxing match in what can only be described as elder abuse. They're a bad crowd, they're a bad influence, they're just bad news.
SPEAKER_01
The Pauls have been at it for a long time. They have. They've been at it since the late Tumblr era. They were known for having vlogs back in the day. Video blogs. Before the word streaming even existed, there were vloggers. These were people that did little videos talking about what kind of shit they were up to every day in their life and then uploaded them to YouTube. And they became spectacularly famous.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, they've taken a more paternalistic attitude towards their audience, which is still young. This is gonna sound awful. Their niche, their brand is like, what if Andrew Tate weren't as cruel? Because they say similar shit. Rather than talking about how you're a worm and a loser man, like Andrew Tate does, the Paul brothers are, hey bro, how's it going? Today we're gonna cover my car with eggs, and then I'm gonna attack an old man. That's what they do.
SPEAKER_01
The Tate Brothers, except they understand and value PR professionals in their lives.
SPEAKER_00
If there's a spectrum between Mr. Beast and Andrew Tate, the Paul Brothers are exactly in the middle. Bona fide celebrities.
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah. Hundred million worldwide reach. Logan Paul is a surprisingly good professional wrestler. He wrestles with the WWE. He really understands how to communicate how much he should be hated, which is a lot. Very few people know how to tap into the resentment of the audience. It's the rarest skill of all in professional wrestling. He plays the chicken shit heel by embracing the selfish vividity of the millennial generation, the personification of those guys that are doing selfies in the locker room and then being pissy when you say something to them. And he knows how to get underneath your skin. Logan Paul is surprisingly athletic. That is the other thing, is that these guys are actually pretty athletic. It's true. On September 17th, the brothers Paul dropped by to kick it at the Pentagon. A spokesperson confirmed they were there to prop up active service members from the briefing room floor. Then a moment of quiet reflection at the 9-11 memorial. Only had time for a micro brow down with Pete Heggs. God damn it. Strictly surface level, no chalk used at all. Hardly did any crossfit whatsoever. Barely a sesh. Missed Grizzly Sprint Day, which is a lung burn. That's true. They were wearing suits. That's just a no-go. It's not practical. Yeah, you know. I've seen photos of that. All young, under 25. Every single one's got a mustache. Twinsies. Don't understand it. Been noticing a lot of people under the age of 25 are wearing mustaches lately. Not in an ironic way. In a I think Morgan Whalen's a pretty awesome dude way. Can't figure it out. Since Judd Nelson rocked a sweet goatee as unorthodox detective Nick Peretti in the 1991 film New Jack City, the goatee, more properly known as the Van Dyke to the facial hair purist, has been the tough guy facial hair of choice. Equidistant between fully shaven and bearded, the goatee fully usurped the mustache by 1993. If you're under the age of 35, having a mustache has been something that you only do for sport or irony's sake. Huh. I'd say 90% of all the mustaches that I've seen on men under the age of 40 for the last 30 years have been just kidding around mustaches.
SPEAKER_00
I haven't picked up on this one. I'll have to see. Maybe it's some sort of code, maybe it's some sort of in-group sign.
SPEAKER_01
People wrongly attribute the popularity of the goatee starting in 1991 to Stone Cold Steve Austin, but he was still stunning Steve in 1991. Hadn't even conceived of the Stone Cold character at that point, much less the character's look. That's interesting. The Stone Cold part of Stone Cold Steve Austin was no doubt an homage to the 1991 film Stone Cold, starring former college football star Bryant Bosworth as Joe Huff, an Alabama cop that goes undercover as John Stone to infiltrate a white supremacist motorcycle gang known as the Brotherhood. John Stone notably had no facial hair whatsoever, which I'm sure made infiltrating the Brotherhood all the more difficult. Where was yes, the mustache.
SPEAKER_00
And the mustache is the only form of facial hair that you're allowed to have in the military, which is like an old Prussian practice. And it's also useful today because you need to be able to have a seal on a gas mask in order to serve in the military. So the mustache is the only facial hair you can have and have that work.
SPEAKER_01
You know who's got a surprisingly convincing mustache for this generation? Nick Fuentes.
SPEAKER_00
He actually does. Yes. He does wear a mustache quite a lot. I think it's partly because his beard isn't that great.
SPEAKER_01
He pulls off a mustache in a way where he's a good friend of your aunt that has a roommate. Yeah. He's kind of a joy boy, I think they called him back in the day, where you weren't really sure what his thing was, but knew he was a confirmed bachelor.
SPEAKER_00
There have always been rumors about Fuentes and his sexuality, and the fact is that on a human level, I don't care what his sexuality is. On a political level, it's clearly important because the man is a fucking Nazi and talks about hating homosexual people. If that's part of self-hatred and fueling him in that way, that's sad, but it's also bad and wrong.
SPEAKER_01
I do begrudge Nick Fuentes his sexuality considering But if he had that mustache and he did all the same shit, I would be like, he doesn't need to say it out loud. He told us.
SPEAKER_00
It's none of our business, really. Yeah. We get it. Again, that's what I'm saying. Is in the San Francisco Bay Area, if you see a person under 30 and they just have a mustache, it's like, okay, yeah, dude, see you in the Castro. I guess my opinion on Nick Fuentes is fuck him. But actually you shouldn't.
SPEAKER_01
I also met with Treasury Secretary Scott Besson. Jake and Logan did have some shenanigans involving cryptocurrency. Jake promoted Justin Sons crypto tokens without acknowledging he was paid. Logan Paul had a slightly deeper, shady involvement in the NFT cryptocurrency space in 2021 that didn't go so hot. Fans are class action suing him over it, calling it a rug pull. Dr. Craig, what is a rug pull?
SPEAKER_00
A rug pull is the online speak name for when a person, quote, artificially enhances the value of an online asset that is actually worth nothing, like a crypto coin or an NFT, in order to then sell it. It's basically short selling.
SPEAKER_01
Logan Paul denies that. Said he's offered to give people $2 million back for their NFTs, as long as they agree to drop that lawsuit. There's no way to look at that other than he's currently in a negotiation with the members of a class action lawsuit that'll settle somewhere between $2 million and every last asset that he has in his name. So you can see why they might want to pop into Besson's office just to say, what up? You know, it's just smart business.
SPEAKER_00
That's the thing about these people. The fact that they're professional wrestlers, professional boxers, they're showmen. Part of their brand is that it's hard to take them seriously. But Nick and I are here begging you to take them seriously, which is the last thing they want you to do. They want to look like those ne'er do well dumb kids that live at the end of your cul-de-sac and throw water balloons at your car. That's what they want you to think about them. That's not what they are. They're master political and economic manipulators. Very successful carnies. They're barkers. They're carnies, they're performers, they do it all.
SPEAKER_01
I hope when they stop into Besson's office, he makes them sit in his lap while he feeds them the bottle. And I don't mean that in a gay way either. I mean that as a power move. Scott Besson is a loud and proud gay man. I don't think this would have anything to do with that. I just think it's the most humiliating thing that I can imagine, and I like the imagery. And to be clear, I have no idea what Treasury Secretary Scott Besson gets off on, other than lying to the American public and being unnecessarily condescending while doing so. I doubt he has a shame kick or anything like that. Doesn't seem to be capable of feeling internal shame, at the very least.
SPEAKER_00
See, the thing is, these guys, the Pauls, much like Nick Fuentes and much like the Tate brothers, they hate male homosexuality. They're afraid of it. They think that there's something wrong with men who are gay. Whereas there was an older version of the new right wing that was totally fine with male homosexuality because it hated women. It's just that now the new right wing's answer is that they hate both men and women, and also non-binary and trans people, arguably more than they hate men, about as much as they hate women.
SPEAKER_01
Last week we talked about whether President Trump had established a new low by offering the public $5,000 apiece to vote Republican. We try not to pay obsessive attention to the orange man, but that just means we pay less attention to Trump than we want to, and we're restraining ourselves the best that we can, which is what makes this a good podcast. We don't have to be constantly reacting to the stuff that he does. But we have pledged to acknowledge new lows as they happen, which really hasn't been an every single week occurrence. Where we left off was that the $1.776 billion slush fund he attempted to extract from the DOJ, an agency he oversees to settle his $10 billion lawsuit, overleaking some tax information that, though accurate, was unflattering for Trump and almost cost the election, he says. The slush fund hasn't come to fruition yet, but it has hidden other aspects of that settlement that are far more egregious than a $1.776 billion slush fund intended to compensate the people who tried to do an insurrection. So I found myself wondering this week whether or not I'm nitpicking when I ask you, did we have a new low on Tuesday, September 15th on Truth Social, when the president wrote about the assassination attempt on him in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024, where he said, quote, this was all a Democrat plot to get me out of the election that failed. He also said that by the time he took office, all the evidence was gone, quote, missing, altered, corrupted, or gone. And that's why FBI director Christopher Ray should pay a price. Those are some startling allegations.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, no, them's fighting words. That's real transformative partisan language that is actually quite different.
SPEAKER_01
And Trump's got him dead to rights on this one. Irrefutable evidence. This is what he offered. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Those sneaky dems didn't leave any sort of paper trail behind, which is all the more proof that he's a hundred percent correct, because he knows how inept the Democrats are. And if they hadn't tried to assassinate him, they'd have left plenty of evidence that they did try to assassinate him.
SPEAKER_00
Do you know what I mean? Well, you know what they say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
SPEAKER_01
Instead, the Democrats went into cover-up mode, which they did perfectly, which is uncharacteristic for Democrats. To achieve anything, yes. There's a little bit of new info that's been revealed about the 2024 Butler, Pennsylvania would-be Trump assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks. A small batch of FBI files was turned over last week to the Senate Judiciary Committee chaired by Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley. You know, Chuck Grassley? The 93-year-old current Senate Judiciary Chair? The Chuck Grassley? The man who bulldozed Brett Kavanaugh's path to the Supreme Court in 2018 as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, back when he was a spry 85-year-old man? Yeah. Chuck Grassley. The nanogenian with the deep voice and incredibly bizarre Twitter presence, which can best be described as unhinged 93-year-old Midwestern great-grandpa who let the smooth-talking kid from the Verizon kiosk upgrade him to a smartphone? The same Chuck Grassley who made news recently for eulogizing a vacuum cleaner that he's had since the 1970s, which had finally gone kaput, that he had nicknamed Faithful Beth. Ha ha! The same Chuck Grassley, who on the evening of January 5th, when he was a dewy 87-year-old, told reporters that he was planning to certify the 2020 presidential election because he didn't expect Vice President Mike Pence to be there the next day. And as the longest serving senator in the majority party, Pence's duties would fall to him, which came as a surprise to Mike Pence, who was planning to be there. Yeah. But worked out either way. Chuck Grassley runs those files up the flagpole. Then he told NBC that they still don't know what Thomas Matthew Crooks's motive was. Trump's own FBI director, Cash Patel, testifies under oath about it. Says the FBI found no evidence the shooter was even talking to anyone other than his parents. Doesn't say how hard they looked. I'm sure he did his best. Our own attorney general Todd Blanche was asked for evidence of a democratic plot to assassinate Donald Trump. He shut that down. He said there's new information about the shooter's background, but there was no plot revealed so far. If anyone's gonna get to the bottom of it, though, it's 93-year-old Chuck Grassley. He'll either get to the bottom of it or he'll die trying. Smart money on the ladder. Ha ha! Here's a quick butler primer. July 13th, 2024, Trump rally, Butler, Pennsylvania. A 20-year-old named Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed onto the roof of a building near the rally with a direct line of sight to the stage. Just after 6 p.m., he opened fire with an AR-15 style rifle. Trump was hit in the ear. He turned his head to look at a char at the last second, and the turn matter. He didn't get hit by a bullet. Instead, the bullet hit a guy named Corey Comparatori, who was an audience member standing behind Trump and the bleachers. 50 years old, husband, father, former volunteer fire chief, killed instantly. Two other men there critically wounded. David Dutch, 57, James Coppenhaver, 74. A Secret Service countersniper killed Crooks. Trump does this iconic photo. Trump, having survived his assassination attempt, is hailed once again as this vessel for our lord and his work is not done. At that point, Trump's re-election was sort of fate accomplished. In retrospect, anyway. The security failure in Butler that evening was real. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheetle resigned ten days later. Congress investigated. The FBI's conclusion, Crooks acted alone. Craig, before we get to the accusation, when there's an act of political violence, who gets blamed and how fast tells you a lot about a country. What does the pattern usually look like in situations like this?
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, especially when it comes to the right wing. People like Trump, even when out of office. Remember, this was when he was running for the third time, originally intended to be against Joe Biden, turned out against Kamala Harris. Trump immediately said, it's the communists, it's the Democrats, it's gay people, it's socialists, it's the DSA, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The people who get blamed are the people that the right wing wants to crack down on anyway. No amount of evidence about who did it or why or what their motives were will change that. We saw this again only about a year ago with the successful assassination in this case of Charlie Kirk. Immediately, people were like, the killer was a communist, the killer was a leftist, the killer was a socialist. Now it does turn out that that assassin had some arguably progressive motives, although I would say that he was more brain-cooked by internet type guy. The would-be assassin in Pennsylvania, his motives seem convoluted and confusing similarly, but the assumption is that if he's trying to kill a right wing person, that he has to be a left wing person. That's despite the fact that the right wing is constantly shooting at each other and trying to kill each other. I also would argue, as a historian, rather than thinking about each individual killer and their motivations, we should be looking. At big picture stuff. The big picture stuff, the big picture fact, is that the right wing commits more political violence than the left. That's essentially true across all demographics and since the 1900s. The other big picture thing that we should be thinking about is historical precedent. Other times in history when democracies have descended into widespread partisan violence, like the United States is in the process of doing. This happened in the US in the late 60s, and yeah, there were some prominent left-wing violent activities, the Weather Underground, or some parts of the Black Panther Party. But the right wing was way more violent the whole time. The Ku Klux Klan, the Greensboro Massacre, etc. Those guys were always more violent. The real historical precedent is something called the Years of Lead in Italy, where like members of socialists, communists, and fascist parties were just kind of shooting each other a lot, and killing politicians and robbing banks and kidnapping people and blah blah blah blah blah. That's what is happening here. Violence is just becoming more common.
SPEAKER_01
He got wounded in the air. Man died. The Secret Service did blow it. So being angry about how it was handled, pretty legitimate. Yeah. Wanting answers about the FBI investigation, also legitimate. Here's the turn. In 2024, the line from Trump World was that the Democratic rhetoric caused Butler. J.D. Vance said it at a Butler rally that October. You can disagree with him, but it's a claim about the kind of speech. This is a different thing. A plot is a crime, conspiracy to commit murder. Trump's accusing the Democrats of trying to kill him in order to win an election. Trump is running the FBI now. He's the sitting president, the chief executive officer of our country. He controls the FBI, he controls the Justice Department. And he's saying that the man who ran the FBI should pay a price, who, by the way, he hired to be the FBI director in his first term, but made resign early in his second term. It can't be proven exactly that he was in on the plot, but if anyone wants to do Trump a solid and make Christopher Ray pay, that would be cool. It's six weeks before the midterms, correct? So I want to be careful, because there's a history of governments taking an attack, blaming the opposition and using it. Here's what I can't get past. The administration currently in office charges people for less. James Comey's indicted in April on two felony counts for a picture of seashells on a beach that's spelled out 8647. He said it meant to get rid of, by the way, a restaurant says 86 a menu item. He denied there was any threat at all. He's still looking at charges. Meanwhile, right-wing operative Jack Pasobiac posted 8646 about Biden in 2022. Never charged. Nobody had a problem with that. In Trump's administration, seashells will get you indicted. But if the president of the United States says the opposition party tried to murder him, and his FBI director says there's no evidence of anyone else involved, and his attorney general won't say the word plot, and nobody gets arrested, there's two possibilities now. One, Trump believes it, and his own DOJ is sitting on an attempted political assassination. Two, he doesn't believe it, yet he's saying it anyway. Either one of those things is bad. To be clear, I'm not asking for the Democrats to be arrested. I'm asking why the accusation is allowed to exist if nobody's acting on it in our country. Are they trying to flush the Democrats out into the open or something? Craig, what does an accusation like this do if nobody ever gets charged?
SPEAKER_00
That's a really good question. I think we have to think about this in two ways. One is that this is Trump doing what he always does. He's flooding the zone. He's saying something wild and crazy in order to get a weird headline, in order to get a rise out of people. He's trying to make people scared and make the conversation about him and be about how wild and crazy he is, and about how much power he actually has, which is part of the component of this, right? Is that, as you said, he has charged people for less. In fact. And that's the second part of this, which is this isn't Trump 1, this is Trump 2. He's more serious about cracking down. He's also worse at keeping the public on his side. When an authoritarian finds himself, and I say himself intentionally because they're almost all men, when an authoritarian finds himself backed up against the wall, losing public support, then it's time for him to take the gloves off, and that's exactly what Trump is doing. He might actually use some of these imperial presidential powers, even more so than he already has, in order to try to stay in power. We've already seen him do this once on January 6th when he tried to stage a coup. He might actually try to push some part of his administration to charge somebody, or to start an investigation, or to open an inquiry. And if they don't, then he can do the other part of this right-wing playbook, which is say they're on the inside, they're turning against me, the party itself, the Republican Party, is now the enemy also. The historical precedent here would be something like the Knight of the Longknives with the Nazi Party, when Nazi leadership under Hitler consolidated and eliminated potential other powerful groups in the party, in this case by murdering them, in the United States case, probably by like purging them or possibly indicting them or that kind of thing. That might be what Donald Trump is doing, trying to clean house and make sure that even if he leaves office this time, which Jerry's out, man, I don't know. Even if he does leave office, that it's his loyal leaders that are still in power after. That's what I think he's doing. I think he's doing a combo of spreading shit, you know, just like flooding the zone, and also putting out a litmus test, a loyalty test.
SPEAKER_01
It's a crazy thing to accuse the other party of trying to assassinate, you know. And I gotta be honest, I almost missed the story. I found out three days later. I I heard something about it existing, but I didn't even think it merited following up on, much less mentioning on this show at all, because it's Trump, after all. And we grade that guy on a curve of all curves. And when it comes to Trump, a messy accusation like this, well, there are a lot of different considerations you gotta give to it. One, you gotta wonder if he believes it. Two, you gotta wonder about the timing. Three, you gotta consider what other news that should merit more coverage is getting pushed off the front pages by accusations like this. Plus, I mean, you know, we should wonder, I guess, if it's factually accurate or not.
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I guess it's literally possible. It's not literally impossible, but I think it's unlikely.
SPEAKER_01
Polling suggests about a quarter of Americans do think that Butler was staged, mostly by Trump himself. Was it a false flag? Was it a conspiracy? Is it really possible that Trump would hear gunfire, get tackled by Secret Service agents, and the first thought that would come to his mind would be time for an iconic photo.
SPEAKER_00
That is that is the aspect of this that it hinges on. All of it hinges on that, in my opinion. The fact is that Donald Trump is a generational political talent. Love him or hate him, and I hate him personally, but he's a generational political talent. He knows what to do in these contexts. But that is an astonishingly quick jump for a person of his age with that kind of adrenaline pumping through him. But then again, the man does have good instincts. And knowing that this was the right time to stand up and raise your fist and let them see your blood, that's fucking Roman shit.
SPEAKER_01
Here's the actual evidence. Trump's own FBI leadership, Cash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino, have reached the conclusion that Crooks acted alone. Why it might have come up is recent reports say investigators seized 13 electronic devices belonging to Crooks and his family members, and they reviewed more than 500,000 digital files and found no evidence connecting Crooks to outside groups, foreign actors, or co-conspirators. They did find that Crooks went to the gun range the day prior. He registered for the rally as a single, only requesting a ticket for himself. It's also true that an anonymous donor did pay for his cremation 10 days after the incident, so that got the conspiracy theorists working overtime. They also found that he ordered rifle parts, tools, and items to increase his rifle's capacity from Amazon and used the name Bob Dole to have him send it to him. I didn't know that. Oh no. This is why it's capturing the public's imagination so much. It's honestly easier to believe that there's some major bullshit happening over this than to believe that there's a man so concerned with how he comes off to the public. He doesn't even lose sight of what the best thing to do when he's adrenalized. He's still got the presence of mind to try and go do a glamour shot. That's stranger than anything because you can actually believe that about Trump. He probably does think like that. It's not much of a stretch.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
Craig, I tend to shy away from it because it's every bit as easy to go down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole on this one as it is to sit and grapple with evidence that not only is there a person in this world who cares about looking cool in the most serious possible situation you could imagine, but he's the leader in the free world. It feels like a mental trap. It feels like fool's goal to me. So I've avoided it intentionally for that reason. Accusing the other side of trying to assassinate him. Is this a new low? Contextually, it doesn't feel like that, but if we're playing it by the rules, let's say we're studying this period of history later on in life, this has to be a new low.
SPEAKER_00
I think that by the book it is, and awfully by our lived experience, it's not. That's the horror of the Trump administration. By the book, absolutely. I actually cannot think of another president who has accused the opposition party of attempting to assassinate him, aside from Abraham Lincoln, where that is in fact what they did.
SPEAKER_01
What has been your experience with this story since 2024?
SPEAKER_00
I think about it in the context of other presidential assassinations and attempted presidential assassinations. I'm a historian. There's no way out of it for me. Presidents get assassinated, they get attempted assassinations for lots of reasons. You know, some of it is because a guy wanted a job, some of it is because a guy wanted to impress a particularly attractive actor, all sorts of reasons. The question as a historian isn't really like what the motive of the individual guy was. It's what does it say about the zeitgeist? What does it say about our world, that that kind of violence, that that kind of instinct is there, waiting for somebody to try to kill the president or kill a presidential candidate. Personally, I'm not one for conspiracy theories. And this is the kind of thing that if we read about it in a tell-all book in 20 or 30 years, I don't think that we could really be surprised about if it turned out that it was a false flag from the Trump administration. I don't know. I don't know. I think that that's the real takeaway from me is that I feel bewildered. The zone has been flooded with shit. It is so hard to analyze and understand this crap. It's just so difficult. The abyss is too fucking deep, man.
SPEAKER_01
Stare into the abyss with friends, the Autocratic Despair Podcast with Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson. And don't forget Dr. Craig's other podcast, 15 Minutes of Fascism, available wherever you get your podcast.
