The Bulwark Podcast

Your new book is out this week, Losing Our Religion, an Altered Call for Evangelical America. I found it just an extraordinary read and I wish you could see all the bookmarks, including the first line of the book. If we wanted to find Jesus, we would have to lose our religion.

Well, the R-E-M song usually plays anytime that there's a segment about someone becoming an atheist or walking away from the faith. But what I found was that that's actually not what the song is about. It's about the old Southern expression, I'm going to lose my religion, meaning I'm so angry, I'm about to move from politeness into rage.

I couldn't help but wonder if the plot twist to the story of American conservative Christianity was that what we thought was the shire was more mortal all along.

If evangelicalism is just political idolatry or populist demagoguery or white nationalism or toxic masculinity or something else, then we can get at that problem merely by addressing all of those. But then you say you have to face the reality that as awful as all of those horrors are, they are made worse when they are framed as badges of religious identity.

What if a time traveler were there, stopped me in the aisle and said, let me tell you, Russell, let me tell you about evangelical Christianity several decades from now. Let me tell you about Donald Trump. Let me tell you about ongoing racism and nationalism, constantly trying to masquerade as Jesus. Let me tell you about all the people whose faces you will see the rest of your life. People who are violated at the deepest core of their being by the church.

The author of the new controversial new book, The Breach, which covers some of the key parts of the committee's investigation.

I write about that in my book The Breach is that General Honore just eviscerated this bureaucratic meltdown and incompetence of intelligence and communications that was coming from this board.

It's about the data as the new superhero. That's the untold story. And if we don't have technology, if we don't have the ability to have our facts based analysis go against these facts challenged individuals, we're in real trouble.

And I say this in The Breach, I think we have to fight in the seams.

The book is Breach. Always appreciate you coming on the Bull Work podcast.

and you know on the cover of his 2018 book Ship of Fools you know it's a it's a classic kind of conservative imprint world cover of a cartoon of a bunch of liberals and Democrats and others and not that many maybe like seven and Maxine Waters is one of them and I just always find that really striking

and as the boat goes over the waterfall the Ship of Fools is about to go over the waterfall the person at the very front of the ship with the spyglass is Bill Crystal former editor of the weekly standard who probably commissioned many pieces by Tucker Carlson and at whose wake he showed up

When I first heard about this new book, The MAGA Diaries, I thought my initial reaction was, oh great, another book about the MAGA movement. Just what we need, another book about the Trump era. But I got to say, this one is completely different.

This is not one of those books. The MAGA Diaries is a coming of age memoir. One of those tales wherein the main character goes on a transformational journey from childhood to adulthood, a political book with a curveball.

Kirkus describes it as a sobering, endlessly readable fly on the wall account of creeping fascism.

The book is The MAGA Diaries, My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right Wing and How I Got Out by Tina Wynn, who is a founding partner, national correspondent at PUC, formerly a reporter for The Daily Caller, Vanity Fair and Politico.

The first story that is mentioned in the book is about my friend, Lindsey Graham.

You called McCain's Sancho Panza Sancho.

And he said to you that there's a French saying about Devoit de Rserve, which is the duty of silence.

Remember, this is John Kelly, who also taught him who were the good guys in World War I and World War II when Trump did not know.

He literally said on the plane ride over to France for that now famous cemetery catastrophe when he wouldn't go, you know, and he called them suckers and losers. He asked John Kelly, who were the good guys in World War I?

W did not like that his predecessors were commenting on what he was doing when he was in there.

He said that when he left the Oval Office, he was going to let those that followed him do the job and that it wasn't beneficial for him to be weighing in and nitpicking and then new cycles.

But again, we're in this situation where it's not a fucking close call.

The four perilous horsemen of the apocalypse I always talk about have Donald Trump at the head of all four.

He wrote about that's right.

a new book is out today. Trust the Plan, The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy that Unhinged America by Will Sommer.

his new book on QAnon serves as a vital roadmap to one of the strangest and most disturbing movements of modern politics, writing with insight, empathy, and historical perspective.

Thank you, Charlie. As you said, it's been a long time coming and I put my sanity on the line here, but I'm happy with the results.

The subhead of your book is the rise of QAnon and the conspiracy that unhinged America.

It's Dana Milbank. I thought my subhead of my book was obnoxious, but that one is really, you just really go for it there.

Dunces and Hooligans I like.

They exceeded all expectations.

they are on course and there's not a whole lot of time left. So we're pretty sure of this to be the least productive Congress since 1860 when the union was unraveling.

I agree totally with Marjorie Taylor Greene. Our Republican House majority has failed completely.

He wrote a book about it. I'll put the link to the book in the show notes as well.

Everyone go order his book, American Ramble in memoriam of him.

With Donald Trump actually have loved being president back in 1917. That's the argument from the author of a new book called American Midnight, The Great War of Violent Peace and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis.

What I find really interesting about this book is I have a thing for histories of underappreciated periods of American life. And you read in this book never was the raw underside of our nation's life more revealingly on display than from 1917 to 1921.

The book is American Midnight the Great War of violent peace and democracies forgotten crisis

We are joined today by Charlie Warzel, contributing right over at The Atlantic, who writes the invaluable newsletter Galaxy Brain about technology media and big ideas also co-author of the book Out of Office.

He's a forthcoming book about the GRU, Russia's Intel agency.

He's a forthcoming book about the GRU, Russia's Intel agency.

So the best way to kind of view this is from the good fellas perspective, right? You know, I remember Sammy the Bull Gravana, who was John Gotti's associate who flipped, right?

I was just as I was going through your little bio Draper I had to chuckle at this one of your books many books I've read When the Tea Party Came to Town

do you remember the subtitle to that book? Uh let's see inside the U.S. House of Representatives most combative dysfunctional and infuriating term in modern history.