Podbit · The Bulwark Podcast
The administration isn't just being selective about history out of nostalgia — it's a deliberate power move. If people don't know why one neighborhood in D.C. looks different from another, they assume inequality is the natural order of things rather than the result of deliberate policy. Controlling the story is how you control the present.
Where this was said
At 42:40 · chapter starts 39:00
Tim Miller poses a genuine challenge: setting aside the racist bad actors, isn't there a legitimate argument that some DEI programs metastasize into administrative overhead while the actual goal — hiring and promoting more Black employees — gets lost? Smith takes the question seriously, agreeing that a thorough, good-faith audit of what DEI programs are actually achieving would be legitimate. But he draws a sharp distinction between that hypothetical exercise and what is actually happening. The administration's anti-DEI effort, he argues, is not a policy audit — it's a structural campaign. Drawing on Adam Serwer's reporting, Smith makes the case that the executive branch is attempting to reconstitute Jim Crow: building a federal, military, and corporate infrastructure that treats Black people as incapable of serving in positions of authority and systematically removes or bars them from those positions. He acknowledges that this framing would have felt hyperbolic to him a few years ago, but argues that the policy record, taken as a whole, is no longer ambiguous about the intent.
There is a good-faith argument for auditing DEI programs for effectiveness. That argument is not what the Trump administration is making. Hegseth's campaign isn't about efficiency — it's about reconstituting a federal and military infrastructure that excludes Black people from positions of power, full stop.
Fei-Fei Li went back to Stanford from Google in 2018 specifically to build a multi-stakeholder governance framework for AI. Her argument: market forces are not societal norms. Just as biology uses IRBs and cars have safety laws, AI needs layered oversight from educators, governments, and the public — not just a few industry titans.
Andrew Santino's personal MCU of political villains is collapsing. He and Bobby speculated that a circulating photo of Mitch McConnell with a Chinese official was AI-generated compositing two separate images.
Mass surveillance is here to stay. The real battle isn't stopping cameras — it's ensuring judges and laws keep that data out of family court and civil disputes, admitting it only for violent crimes and national security. The surveillance economy currently yields more upside than downside, but only if we build the legal guardrails now.
When people cite Scandinavia as proof socialism works, Galloway says they've got it backwards. Northern Europe runs highly competitive free-market economies with more competition in many sectors than the US — they just make sure taxes are actually paid and redistributed. Billionaires and universal healthcare can coexist.
Two percent adjustments to income tax and stamp duty tweaks are deck-chair rearrangements. The UK's competitiveness hinges on four structural levers: currency valuation, energy costs, regulatory burden, and tax rates. Devalue the pound, build 56 nuclear plants, slash red tape, introduce a flat tax — and the country transforms.
Lisbon had one of Europe's worst heroin crises. Then Portugal legalised drugs and redirected all enforcement money into rehabilitation and housing. Crime collapsed. Addiction fell. Then politics moved the money elsewhere, and the problem started creeping back. Chesterton's Fence: you forget why you were spending that money.
Congress passed the Boland Amendment 411 to 0, explicitly banning CIA and Defense Department funds for the Contras. Reagan signed it — then immediately moved the operation deeper underground, essentially responding to a bipartisan prohibition by going more illegal.
The CIA planted mines in Nicaraguan commercial harbors, wrote the Contras' press releases taking credit, and promptly blew up ships from four allied nations. The Wall Street Journal broke the story, Congress erupted, and the Boland Amendments multiplied.
Oliver North was a decorated Marine and devout Catholic with zero covert operations experience. He ran the entire shadow war against Congress — planes, airstrips, arms shipments, shell companies — learning on the job. And by every operational measure, he crushed it.
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