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The Most Spatially Aware Man in France · Autocratic Despair: The Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: She showed up, she stole a week's worth of headlines with the midterms looming, and then he's out?
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: That is some iconic shit.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: There should be, at minimum, a drag queen depiction of Katie Zachariah, serving Kant by the end of this week.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully with a name like catastrophe or misrepresentation.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is Autocratic Despair, the podcast.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Nick Mortensen, a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Each week on the Autocratic Despair Podcast, I stare into the abyss with my friend, Dr.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Craig, on a scale of one to ten, where would you rate your autocratic despair this week?
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'm at a seven.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's where I'm at.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of stuff going on, days getting shorter, general ennui sadness.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: And speaking of enui, my primary answer is France's descent into a kind of riotous rebellion state that the right wing is absolutely poised to take advantage of.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm at a seven.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: What the fuck is happening in France?
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: You have a good grasp on that.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my god.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's tough.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's complicated.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: So for listeners who aren't paying super close attention to what's going on in France, which, hey, you know, the point of this podcast is that it's hard to stare into the abyss.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: France is going through another round of major social upheaval.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: What began as your typical youth protests about affordability and certain issues related to students, you know, like student fees and student free speech and stuff like that, has blossomed and ballooned into a major street uprising that has taken hold of a lot of streets and neighborhoods in Paris and other major cities in France.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it's complicated because movements like this that are big and freewheeling and aren't from any particular organization and don't have particular demands anymore, that are just sort of like about how bad shit is.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes they can metastasize into something really beautiful and amazing and transformative.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes they can do the opposite.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: This past weekend, shit started popping off.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: They had half a million people in the streets, Paris, Lyon, in Lumage, somebody set the city hall on fire, destroyed a 19th-century building.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: The roof collapsed.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: That building survived World War I and World War II.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: In Paris, they pulled apart the base of the statue of Marianne.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's the symbol of the French Republic.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: She who led the revolution, now stripped by her own children, if you're looking for a little symbolism.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: 1800 arrests in one weekend.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: The Justice Ministry says more than 5,000 people had been arrested.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: 87% of those have been minor.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: These are mostly kids.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Human Rights Watch has documented teenagers seriously hurt by police stun grenades and tear gas canister.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: This is no joke.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: This is happening with the kids, but they're not fucking around.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a real movement that changes something or just a riot that hands the next election to the people the kids would least like to win?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: No, they're like being violent and there's looting and rioting happening as well.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: But as somebody who studies political change and radicalization, important to note that most of the time when looting happens, it's an expression of the lack of sufficient economic control over your life, which is usually what people are responding to.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: Is it a psyop?
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think it's a psyop.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's my read.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think that it is an earnest reflection of the fact that much like everywhere in the world, the economy is just not working for the average young person in France.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: What do they have to look forward to?
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: Aging populations, higher tax burdens, lower wages for work, and also the fact that the fascists are almost certainly going to win in the upcoming French presidential and legislative elections.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so looking forward to that, people get pissed off.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: They act out, which is something that human beings do and have done for a long time.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: France is not the first place that this has been happening in the last couple years.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: We saw something very similar happen in Nepal a couple years ago.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's the so-called cockroach party in India that shares a lot of commonalities with this.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: Youth rebellion, shit isn't working, we're the downtrodden people, we're binding together, begins with concrete complaints about student issues like funding or bus fairs or something like that.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: The bus fairs one was actually from Argentina a couple years ago.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: I personally think that if movements like this don't have concrete demands or leadership, if there isn't an organization that is helping this along, providing any kind of structure, then it's just going to be fodder for the right wing winning.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Nick, were you a fan of the band The Dead Kennedys?
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: The Dead Kennedys have a song called Riot, and the chorus is riot, an unbeatable high, riot, flames into the sky, riot playing right into their hands.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: Tomorrow you're homeless, tonight it's a blast.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's my read on this.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: I understand why people are doing this, but I don't think it's going to do anything.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: Certainly not anything that they are gonna want to happen.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know what to think about what was going on in France because I have a guy from Green Bay, but I think it's kind of important to look into it.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I did what I always do when I need to understand France.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: I consulted the most thoughtful Frenchman alive, Victor Wembanyama.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't follow basketball, Victor Wembanyama is 22.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: He's from the suburbs of Paris.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: He's seven foot four inches tall.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: The number one pick in the 2023 NBA draft.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Rookie of the year, Olympic silver medal for France in 2024.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: And this past year, he took the San Antonio Spurs to the NBA Finals, where they would eventually lose to the New York Knicks.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing that you gotta understand about Wemby is how he moves.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: He's a nimble seven foot four.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: He handles the ball like he's a guard.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: He plays out on the perimeter, shoots threes.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: He's got a green light to shoot from up to 10 feet beyond the three-point line, Steph Curry distance, off the dribble.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: He blocks shots from angles that people shouldn't be able to block shots from.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot move like that at the size he is unless you know exactly where every single thing in the room is at all times.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: The man is the most spatially aware person in France, maybe the entire world.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: And that means he's among the most intelligent people in the world right now.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm inclined to believe that that extends to other kinds of intelligence as well.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: He knows France and he knows the youth.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Here's why I trust him.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: This spring in the playoffs, he cried on the court a couple of times after big win.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: People make fun of him, of course.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: For sure.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Kevin Garnett, one of the toughest guys who ever played, who had personally mentored him in the summer of 2025, went on his own show and said he was too emotional.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: A French reporter asked Wembenyama, why did people get on you for showing emotion?
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: And this 22-year-old says, quote, Well, that's a tough question.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's first and foremost a fear of judgment, like this feeling that you have to act a certain way, social codes, I guess.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Personally, I refuse to carry the burden of having to hide my emotion.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Oh.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Which is an all-timer of a quote.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Ooh, that's good.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's a better read on masculinity than the entire manosphere has produced in 10 years.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's excellent.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: This is Victor Wembinyama.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: A 22-year-old professional basketball player.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Small detail about Victor Webinyama, he won't endorse sports betting.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Oh.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Turns down the money.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Excellent.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: 22-year-old NBA star.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know how rare that is?
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's true.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: He's spatially aware, emotionally intelligent, turns down gambling money.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: If anybody in France has the right take on this, it's him.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I look to what he said about it.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: Weminyama was asked about the protest after a preseason game, and here's what he said: quote, these are systematic inequalities, problems so deep-rooted that I'm glad that the high school students and young people in general are speaking up.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: I hear them, I support them, and I hope people all over the world will do the same.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then he made it personal by saying, quote, I was in that position not so long ago.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: I've had a chance to escape this system to escape this trouble, but it's just luck, unquote.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: A fan asked him to come and join the marches.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: He said he'd love to.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: In fairness, he said all that before this past weekend, before the fires and the 1800 arrests.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: He's backing the kids in their demand, and nobody should read it as him endorsing what happened in Lemoge.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: So, Craig, does that line up with how you see it?
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: It does.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things to know about France in this context, and it's also super important to how the French right wing works, is that France has had a pretty major rise in the number of people who are not white who live in France.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: Stereotypically and also statistically, it is true that a large number of those people who are non-white French people, immigrants who are now French citizens, or who are EU citizens, or who are residents in the EU, many of them live in what are called the suburbs of Paris.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: To a United States person, these are not the suburbs that you're thinking about.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: These are not like pick-a-fense single-family homes.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: These are big, high-rise neighborhoods.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: Something like the Bronx, maybe, is more what we're looking at here.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: These are highly dense, highly populated communities that are on metro lines that go into Paris or other major cities like Lyon.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: These parts of France are populated by lots of immigrants, and like many places in many Western countries where the majority of people aren't white, there aren't a lot of jobs, and there isn't a lot of investment, and there isn't a lot of government attention.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so one of the things that Wembayana is talking about is like, yeah, there's just divestment from these communities.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: There's using them as cheap labor pools.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: There's not a desire on the part of the wider community in France to educate these people to help them move out of these places if that's what they want.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lack of respect for the religion and language and cultures that they practice.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: France has arguably criminalized the open practice of Islam in France.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: If you are a Muslim and work for the state, you're not allowed to wear religious garb.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: You're not allowed to do it when you're working at your job.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of that is because of the French right wing very successfully organizing around a particular idea of what France is, which is white, secular Europe, as opposed to lots of people who are French, who are from Africa or who are from the Middle East.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: This is ignoring and in some ways turning on the right wing's previous position in France, which was Algeria is just France.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like remember, France colonized Algeria and held it for like a long time.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: And their position prior to the decolonization of Algeria was that Algeria was just France, period.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't a colony.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: It was exactly as much part of France as Paris or Brittany or Nice or whatever.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's just France.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: And that's also France's position in some of its other colonial possessions, that they're just France.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: France has a very unusual relationship to nationalism and nation in all of these ways, all of which is to say this is a youth movement.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's a youth explosion.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: When those happen, historically, they go one of two ways.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: Either they coalesce around a particular demand, for example, ending the Vietnam War, and there's like a bunch of other shit on the side.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: There's a bunch of other shit also there, and it's part of a bigger, wider thing.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: Or it never manages to coalesce around a particular transformative demand and instead fizzles out into an embarrassment or a justification for a right-wing crackdown.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I worry that is exactly what's going to happen with this particular movement in France.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: If it becomes lawless, that virtually assures the right wing.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: I would agree.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: I don't blame people or judge them for expressing themselves in the way that they are.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: A powerless people try to take power and experience power.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: That makes sense.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's what rebellion is.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not in their position, and I am not oppressed in the same ways that these people are, and so I don't feel like it's my position to judge them for the tactics they're using.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: What I do judge is not picking any tactic at all, not being strategic.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think that that's a failure.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: I understand why, but looking at the broad swath of history, if you want things, you have to actually try to get them.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: You need to explain to me why what you're doing will get you what you want.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: If the answer is that it can't, or that nothing can get you what you want, then okay, I guess an expression of dismay or powerlessness.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: I get it, but I don't know.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't make any sense.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: You ever hear that phrase the purpose of a system is what it does?
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's an old management maxim.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this is gonna result in a far-right wing fascistic government in France.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: It was very likely headed that direction anyway.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: You could see this unrest as the final burst against that.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Klondike breathing from the French citizenry.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Their last chance to announce that if it's fascism you want, you're gonna have to fight them for it.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: But now that the protests have pushed towards violence and property damage, it virtually assures the people of France of a far-right government.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: The same far right government that they're protesting.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: They don't want it, but they're gonna get it.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because the people on the far right might be fascists, but they can promise safety and security from violent mobs of youths.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: Very much so.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: The last French presidential election was Macron versus the Rassemblement National, the national rally of Marie Le Pen, the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was France's big right-wing guy after World War II.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: France had a big fascist movement during World War II.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: Jean-Marie Le Pen reorganized the French right to be a little bit more palatable.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: It was Macron versus Marie Le Pen.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: In the last presidential election, the French left, their slogan was Macron today, Le Pen tomorrow.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: They knew what was happening.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: They were right.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think that electorates can surprise you.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: Things are possible, but if I were a betting man, unfortunately, I'd probably bet Le Pen.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that this is gonna change that.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: So where's where's your autocratic despair this week?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think about a six or six and a half.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Last week, the biggest story out of the White House was its press secretary, Katie Zachariah.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: Ugh, fuck.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: See, I knew we were gonna talk about this.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: We have to, Dr.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Craig.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my god.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: Trump announces her on Monday.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: She has her first briefing on Tuesday, gone by Friday.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Shortest tenure in history, five days.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: The scandal that took her down, she said she was a lawyer, but she wasn't.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: She graduated from Pepperdine Law in 2011.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: She took the California bar once, didn't pass.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: The last couple of years, she's been a roving media commentator for conservative news outlets like Newsmax and One American News.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Both those stations list her as a lawyer on the TV Chiron, so that's pretty much what she is.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: I thought that the whole point of the Trump administration was that previously White House and DC in general is run by lawyers who are doing other people's jobs, and that in the Trump administration they're not pretending that they all understand the law anymore.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Prior to Katie Zachariah's splashy debut last week, she'd been working as a media advisor for the parent company of Truth Social.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: So they didn't just pick her up off the street.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: She had some qualifications.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: She says that the president of Pepperdine told her she could call herself a lawyer, but not an attorney.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: If anyone's to blame here, it's him.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: To be sure she never passed the bar, but she was lawyer adjacent.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Fair enough.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: The thing is, you don't need to pass the bar to be press secretary.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's more of a media gig than anything else.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: You just have to distract people from the really heinous shit the Trump administration does and run cover for it.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's a whole different set of skills.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't hurt to have a law degree from Pepperdine, I guess.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: Basically.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: But you don't need to pass the bar.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: JD is way more than enough to make you overqualify.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna be completely honest here, Nick.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: When I first started reading about this person and seeing videos and seeing photos, my immediate reaction was like, ah, fuck, another one.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I don't want to pay attention to this one.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: She wasn't a lawyer, and she lied and said she was, to secure a job that doesn't require her to be a lawyer, but does require her to be a liar, and she seems pretty good at that given that she lied her way into the inner circle.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: This is the dumbest scandal of the year, and Katie Zachariah was actually doing great as a press secretary.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: First, she said it herself, and she was right, she was hired as press secretary, not White House counsel.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: Second, who cares if she was calling herself a lawyer?
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: Not me, it's no skin off my sack.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know who is a lawyer?
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: Michael Cohen, Trump's fixer.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: I forgot.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: He passed the bar after graduating from Thomas M.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Cooley Law School, notoriously the worst law school in our country.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Pepperdine is a tier one law school, nothing to sneeze at.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Pepperdine is where you go when you're not Ivy League material, but you can pay Ivy League tuition.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know how hard it is to have a father that is so rich you can get into Pepperdine Law School?
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: Much less attend Pepperdine Law School to the point of graduation?
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody that hot has to try that hard.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd like to say for the record, Katie Zachariah, you were a plenty lawyer for me.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Third, why do we have to act like she was bad at the job?
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: Her first briefing was rough, so rough that it stole headlines, and it was bad.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: It was cartoonishly bad.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like a deeply uncomfortable SNL skit?
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: She was not good at reading her remarks off a sheet of paper from a podium in her first press briefing.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: So what?
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: You're supposed to have a teleprompter to read off of anyway.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, exactly.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: And they didn't have anything on the prompter for her, so she was just doing her best.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: It was her first day on the job.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't take that long to get up to snuff on reading from a teleprompter.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: Really, it's just a matter of being able to read and then getting a few reps in.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: She was obviously good enough at it to fill time on Newsmax and O-A-N-N.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: She'd have been fine.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: I've just been finding myself numbed to this particular type of Trump scandal, but I also still can't look away.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: Do you remember Werner Herzog, the director, got a question about watching the WWE?
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: Werner Herzog, famous artistic auteur director, he got some question about watching TV, and he's like, Oh yeah, I watch professional wrestling.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: And they were like, haha, that's a funny joke.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: And he was like, no.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: What he said is, you must not avert your eyes.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's how I feel.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: So much of my body desperately is like, Craig, you can't keep watching.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: You have to stop.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: Peel your eyes away.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: Take a break.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: Then something like this happens, and I'm like, fuck.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: Damn it.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what I heard about last week.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: Katie Zachariah was so mortified at what happened during her first briefing, she spent the week completely isolated and didn't function as a press secretary at all.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: Isolated in her first week.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: They couldn't even get Natalie Harp to give her a pep talk.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: Trump did talk to her and told her that she needed to ask herself whether the job was right for her, gave her an opportunity to exit with a little bit of dignity.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: She didn't think that she had what it takes to dust herself off and come back for more.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: Better to know early on in the White House commshop whether your dignity matters to you or not.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: And if it does, you better step aside, which Katie Zachariah did by the end of the week.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's too bad that we've been deprived of Katie Zachariah.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: She might have been the best to ever do the job of White House press secretary.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: She certainly was in the Trump terms.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, she had a tough time reading from a piece of paper behind a podium while hot, but she was not only making headlines from the jump, she was stealing headlines from the jump.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: She was drawing attention away from the worst week of headlines the Trump administration has ever had, with vitally important midterm elections coming up.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you're right.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's true.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's really important.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: Last week there were massive strikes on Ukraine's energy grid, despite Trump's claim that he brokered an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, which made Trump look like a total asshole.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Little matter with the media cycles obsessing over White House briefing room drama.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: That is true, actually.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: Last week there was controversy about the White House trying to help Russia in the war.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: Leaked reporting and investigative pieces revealed details surrounding the White House ordering restrictions on starlight satellite communications for Ukrainian forces.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: The administration issued denials, but the behind-the-scenes national security fallout received far less oxygen than the domestic press secretary embarrassment, barely made a blip on the radar.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, no.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: Last week there were escalating protests and civil unrest all across France, which we've discussed at length already.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: These protests barely made the background noise here in the United States.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Last Monday, the USA searched a sitting congresswoman's home for her naturalization papers, signaling their plan to denaturalize her.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: It was a major escalation, and honest to goodness, no debating it, new low.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: I would agree.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: That was somehow old news by Wednesday night, as the whole controversy over whether the press secretary ever passed the bar or not spilled into day three of Round the Clock Cover It.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: Last week the Trump administration canceled their plan to live stream the execution of the radical Islamic terrorist that infiltrated the U.S.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: Army in order to murder 12 soldiers and injure 30 others at Fort Hood in 2009, which was the only thing people were talking about the week prior.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: Basically.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: Immediately forgotten about because Trump's newest press secretary, Katie Zachariah, lied on her resume, which was somehow bigger news.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: Katie Zachariah stole headlines last week in her fuck up.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: Her first day jitters proved to be pretty valuable for the Trump administration.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's astonishing.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like we've been deprived of a prodigy.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: Difficult to imagine what she'd have been capable of once she'd gotten up to speed.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: You think one person in the White House comms department walked her through the teleprompter?
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: You think anybody helped a new girl that was that hot, who jumped the line and was there to usurp them?
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Natalie Harp set her up to fail.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: She got the sink or swim treatment.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's entirely possible.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: And she wasn't ready for an attack of the mid like that.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: She'd been out the game too long.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: You think Natalie Harp is sleeping on boxes in the back of the Mar-a-Lago so Katie Zachariah can come in there and bat her eyelashes a couple times and become the new hot thing?
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: She didn't have the time in.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: She hadn't paid her dues.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: Katie Zachariah thought she could hang.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: And those bitches in the White House put a toe tag on her from the junk.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: It was pretty impressive.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: Did you know she's 41 and had four kids in six years with a career?
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: And she's keeping it that type?
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: You think Katie Zachariah was ready to be the hottest woman in that room by a solid 25%?
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: An entire tier of hotness?
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: She lived in Malibu, man, the beach community outside of Los Angeles, the high rent district where Jackie Treehorn is from.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: No place for Jeff LeBron.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: I guarantee you, Katie Zachariah is just barely keeping up with the Joneses in her Malibu beach community.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's all trophy-wise.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: A bunch of former mistresses elevated through midlife crises of rich men and well-timed removal of an IUD that led to a grayson or a landing.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: Steep competition in Malibu.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: So many Adrianas and Cassidys doing Pilates, grabbing cold pressed juices with a hit of collagen peptides in them, spending their afternoons at Lululemon.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: She's a Green Bay 10, but she's a Malibu 8.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: And a Trump administration 9 and a half.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: I know we're reluctant on this show to talk about how women look, even when it's complimentary, but Katie Zachariah represented a pretty sizable eye candy upgrade from the Trump administration.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: That woman is putting in that sort of work.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen some photos of her with no makeup, and she had plenty to work with.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, I feel it'd be disrespectful to the game to lump Katie Zachariah in with Carolyn Levitt or Kaylee McInney.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: Looks maxers them both, but definitely a tier lower on the boyoyoing scale.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you know what I mean.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is one of these things that's weird about the Trump administration, is that Trump is so obsessed with physical beauty and especially women's bodies and beauty, the beauty pageant shit, the infantilism of it, the pedophilia parts of it.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: This is a big obsession of his, and it reflects a national obsession in the United States, in women's bodies and beauty and physical attraction.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: You just actually can't talk about Trump and his politics and his White House without talking about this.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's a really important part of who these people are in the administration.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: Nick calls them eye candy, and it's like, that's part of their job.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: I am not ready for the Katie Zachariah era in US history to end.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: She showed up, she stole a week's worth of headlines with the midterms looming, and then he's st out.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: That is some iconic shit.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: There should be at minimum a drag queen depiction of Katie Zachariah serving Kant by the end of this week.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully with a name like catastrophe or misrepresentation.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: At the very least, she deserves a spot on the real housewives of Malify.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, slam dunk.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's a slam dunk.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: She's the best at the job that there's ever been.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: To a greater extent, maybe than any other White House in American history since the dawn of television, the Trump administration, it's a fucking television studio.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: It is a reality show.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: People get their job because they're distracting on TV, and exactly as Nick is saying, this woman was great at that.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: She was an incredible reality star.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: This reality show distilled down perfectly, gaff after gaff after gaff.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's so easy to hate her, it's so easy to judge her.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: We're all being asked to do it.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: You just feel pulled into it, and they've greased the system so well that it's like we're all falling down the same hole every single time.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: But it's impossible not to.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: She wasn't ready for an attack like that.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: She'd been out the game too long.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: And those bitches in the wine house, they set her up to fail, man.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's entirely possible.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: This is one of the other aspects about the Trump administration that's not unique.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: Other political movements and communities work this way too.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's insiders, there's outsiders, there's leaders, there's followers, there's cliques, there's factions.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: Katie Zachary had no shot at surviving that gauntlet.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a suicide mission.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the part that really gets me.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: They fired her for disrespecting the institution of the law.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: This administration, the Trump administration, won't let you get away with disrespecting the legal profession?
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: Bullshit.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: They've sanctioned the judges at the International Criminal Court.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: But the line they're not willing to cross is woman embarrassed the legal profession by implying she passed a test?
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's the institution they're protecting?
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: The bar example?
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my god.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, she got crosswise with the Trump administration over her disrespect for the law and her thoughts about taking credit for credentials she hasn't earned.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: I try to avoid conspiratorial thinking, but I don't think it's a conspiracy theory to be like, okay, well, clearly somebody in the administration was like, look, we need to get a bunch of shit off of the headlines.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: We need to be talking about something else.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: And we don't want it to be some weird shit about Trump because people are already talking about Trump and we don't want that anymore.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: We want somebody else.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: They should be talking about somebody else.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: Whether or not they did that intentionally, I don't think that's in dispute anymore.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think that they're good enough at this and they've been doing it for so long that I think we have to acknowledge that they did that on purpose.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: They have to understand that the public is eager to tear down a hot woman.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if there's one thing that there's one thing that we've learned in the last few years, it's that there's so much eagerness for that.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: That the Trump administration did it intentionally, I don't think that's up for dispute.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: The part that I'm not sure about, and you know, we might not know about possibly for a long time, at least until she speaks up, is whether or not she was in on it.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: Seems like it's possible either way.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe she knew she was supposed to be a distraction.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: As you're pointing out, Nick, that's the job.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: She knows that that's the job.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: As much as people say that the people in this administration are stupid, they're wrong.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: These people are very, very, very good at at least a couple things.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: And one of those is manipulating public opinion and conversation.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: They know what to do.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: They knew what they were doing when they were hiring this person.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: If she was available to them in the stable somewhere, then that means that she's probably good at that too.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so the question to me, the only question is, did she know that she was going to be jumping on this grenade?
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: Did she do it willingly?
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: Or were they like, hey, we're gonna throw a bunch of shit and maybe you'll survive and maybe you won't.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: I could see either way, we might find out when she does some tell all interview in 15 years or whatever, if we still have interviews.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: If the only thing that the Trump administration has ever been good at beyond anything else, is distracting people from keeping their eye on something that's more important.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: This was a fucking master stroke.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: She took a week of shitty headlines for the Trumps and pushed him down off of the A1 section of the paper in favor of her own little bullshit because she photographs well.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: This was a virtuoso performance.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's perfect misdirection.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: Perfect.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: Imagine a magician whose assistant was so hot that people didn't even notice the trick itself, and so he fired her.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's what happened.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's an amazing sleight of hand.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's so goddamn good.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's fucking crazy.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: One of the all-time flameouts, sure, but it was not without purpose.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: If it's not the press secretary's job to hide that news behind a pile of shit, then what is the press secretary's job in the Trump administration?
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: When you hit a grand slam and you're first at bat, you best retire.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's no place to go from there but down.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's just so wonderful.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: Craig, even you've got to admit that this was a pretty righteous 15 minutes of fascism.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, absolutely.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's spectacular.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's one of the best 15 minutes of fascism I've ever seen in my entire life.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: She got in, she did a job, she left, and now she can be on talk shows and podcasts and whatever for fucking five years, man.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: Stare into the abyss with friends, the Autocratic Despair Podcast with Nick Mortensen and Dr.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: Craig Johnson.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: And don't forget Dr.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: Craig's other podcast, 15 Minutes of Fascism, available wherever you get your podcast.