Podbit · The Bulwark Podcast

Clint Smith: Make America What It Set Out to Be

Explore episode Jul 3, 2026

History

General Chappie James: The Portrait That Meant Everything

Clint Smith: Make America What It Set Out to Be · Jul 3, 2026 History

Chappie James was a Tuskegee trainer, Korean and Vietnam fighter pilot, Reagan's model soldier, and the first Black 4-star general in U.S. history. He once pulled a gun on a young Muammar Gaddafi and made him back down. When the Trump administration removed his portrait from the Pentagon's Air Force Gallery, Black officers didn't just see a picture disappear — they saw their own futures erased.

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The GDR: A Weird Glitch in German History

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Yalta: The Original Rose Garden

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At Yalta in February 1945, the Big Three carved up post-war Germany into zones of influence while the war was still ongoing. Stalin charmed everyone by bringing in an entire lemon tree for Roosevelt's martinis — the high watermark of American-Russian relations.

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Data point $10B

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Stalin never really wanted East Germany — he just wanted a buffer zone. So he stripped it: a third of all industrial plants and $10 billion of agricultural and industrial goods were extracted in the first two years, ensuring the GDR's economy was crippled before it even started.

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Walter Ulbricht: Last Man Standing

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The Germans: History's Most Efficient Extremists

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The Stasi: Born from Paranoia, Built on Survival

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Data point 1 in 6

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The Stasi had 91,000 full-time officers and 170,000 informal informers — one in every six East Germans. Throw a party and invite twelve guests: statistically two of them are reporting back. No secret police force in history came close to this penetration rate.

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The Wall of Smells

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From 1979, the Stasi built a vast archive of citizens' odour samples stored in airtight glass jars — a library of smells used to train sniffer dogs for tracking dissidents. The German federal prosecutor was still dipping into this archive in 2007.