『America. Do Something About It.』のカバーアート

America. Do Something About It.

America. Do Something About It.

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This week on Autocratic Despair, the comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism, Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig open on the strangest sales pitch in the country: Dana White, the UFC boss, in a Chevrolet ad, informing America that the correct response to anyone who has a problem with us is "tough shit." Nick can't let it go — the way a manufactured kind of cruelty keeps getting sold back to us as national character, as the thing we're supposed to recognize as ourselves. It's the perfect on-ramp to a show about how an autocracy teaches a country to enjoy its own meanness.Then the despair numbers. Nick comes in at a 5, and he means it, because he spent the week genuinely happy. It's summer. There's a new puppy at the house. The World Cup is on, which means Messi, who at this stage of his career is doing things that make even a casual fan sit up and ask where he ranks — not just against Maradona, but against the best anyone has ever been at anything. Nick and Craig, the latter rating his despair a 6 on his logarithmic scale, chew on the only sports question that matters: how much better is the best person at a thing than everyone else is at theirs? It's the last fun either of them gets to have for a while, and that's the point. The number was a 5 until the news caught up with it.Because then there's the reflecting pool. Nick confesses, with the self-implication the show runs on, that he spent the week fully indulging in the spectacle of Trump's roughly $14 million Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool turning green in a day, the patriotic paint peeling off the bottom in strips, contractors dumping hydrogen peroxide in by the gallon. He laughed. He sent the pictures. And somewhere in the middle of it he caught himself: the man has concentration camps running, and we threw a party because he botched a pond. The pool did its job. It reflected. It just reflected the wrong direction, away from everything that mattered, and Nick fell for it like everyone else.What it reflected away from is Minnesota. In a segment that sits beside the show's running watch on detention and protest-criminalization, Nick and Craig walk through the indictment the pool helped bury: on June 16, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen announced charges against fifteen people, mostly members of a group called Direct Action Minnesota — DAMN — framed as antifa. Craig explains what antifa actually is, a political tendency rather than an organization, no roster, no season-ending awards banquet, and why the label is so useful precisely because it describes nothing. The tell is Rosen's own answer when a reporter asked whether any federal agent was actually hurt: whether anyone suffered bodily harm, he said, "is not the measure." All of this sits downstream of Operation Metro Surge, the winter immigration crackdown in which federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens — Renee Good, and Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse shot while filming on his phone — and not one agent has been charged. The people facing prison are the ones who drove neighbors home from midnight releases, rebuilt kicked-in doors, and brought groceries to families too afraid to be seen.And then the segment the whole episode is built around. As Nick and Craig were recording, the Prairieland sentences came down in Fort Worth, and they are staggering. Benjamin "Champagne" Song, the former Marine the government called the ringleader, was sentenced to 100 years for the attempted murder of an Alvarado police officer who survived — when the sentencing floor was 20. Maricela Rueda got 70. Autumn Hill, Zachary Evetts, Savanna Batten, Meagan Morris, and Elizabeth Soto each got 50, for rioting, providing material support to terrorists, and using explosives that the defense maintains were Fourth of July fireworks. Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada got 30 years for concealing a box of documents from a grand jury. A ninth defendant, Ines Soto, had her hearing pushed to the following week. Two Trump-appointed judges, Mark Pittman and Reed O'Connor, handed down sentences totaling nearly five centuries for a demonstration where the only person shot lived. Craig names the throughline plainly: this is a legal system announcing that any association with dissent against ICE — from firing a rifle down to moving a box of paperwork — can be tried as terrorism, while the people who actually tried to overthrow an election are walking free.The hosts cope the way the show always does, with gallows humor they openly admit is a coping mechanism, and then they stop, because some of it is not funny, and they say so out loud. That honesty is the engine of the thing. The episode ends where it always ends, with the names, because someone should read them.This is Autocratic Despair: a comedy podcast that stares straight at fascism and somehow stays fun, the commedia for your particular brand of tragedy. Nick is the audience proxy catching up in real time; Craig is the scholar of authoritarianism who connects...
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