Podbit · The Bulwark Podcast
Cameron Kasky was in Maine without his anxiety medication the day after a major New York Times scandal story dropped on Graham Plattner. He expected chaos. Instead, the energy was overwhelmingly positive — because in Maine, where everyone knows everyone, the 'revelations' were already known. A poll shows Plattner down just 3 to Collins.
Where this was said
At 1:03:30 · chapter starts 1:01:40
Miller asks Kasky to go deeper on his travels with progressive Senate candidates Graham Plattner in Maine and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. Kasky's Maine dispatch is vivid: he arrived the day after a major New York Times scandal story dropped on Plattner, without his anxiety medication, expecting chaos. Instead he found hundreds of Mainers in an upbeat mood. The explanation, a local offered: in a state with one or two degrees of separation between everyone, the 'revelations' were things people already knew. In Michigan, El-Sayed's campaign has evolved from combative messaging to something more aspirational — a crescendo of positivity that Kasky finds interesting to observe. Miller notes Plattner is down 3 points to Susan Collins in polling and invokes his own Tea Party experience: the trick is channeling primary-base energy outward toward Collins, not inward toward ideological purity fights.
A poll shows DSA-backed Graham Plattner trailing Susan Collins by 3 points in the Maine Senate race, testing whether primary energy can translate to a general election win.
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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