The Bulwark Podcast

But in the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 1964, the Oompa Loompas were when it was written in 1964. Do you know what the Oompa Loompas were? Yeah. Yeah. African pygmies.

And once explained how the Oompa Loompas, whom Dahl originally wrote specifically were African pygmies, had actually come to work for Willy Wonka.

Should should we have a little bit more sensitivity towards fat kids? Are there some fat kids whose feelings get hurt reading this who are our fat not because that they're glutton's, but just because of their genes probably is it OK? Is it like is it that big of a deal, though it doesn't matter.

The deep nastiness of rolled dolls work has nothing to do with sort of one-off references or which books Matilda is reading and everything to do with the sort of deep sort of sense of cruelty and unfairness at the heart of the stories themselves. And that's what makes them great, right?

The Witches for example, which has the really egregious example of editing you mentioned where you have that bizarre line about women's like wigs and gloves and everything.

The illustration of the grand witches rotting face frightened me so much that I literally had a post-it note over it in the book because the book scared me, that image gave me nightmares but I found the tension and the stakes and the creativity of it magnetic and so I wanted to read it over and over and over again.

Slow Horses does that qualify? That's a very excellent non-comedy show.

Slow Horses you're like Mack Heron the novels are really terrific and they and he's writing them I mean they're current Mack Heron and then the bit has been turned into an excellent TV series too.

When I'm looking for a thriller I look into Slow Horses

Well, that's what Vaclav Havel did. That's what he wrote about in The Power of the Powerless.

That inspired the Mitt Romney best-selling book, No Apologies, which you may have read or may be sitting somewhere in a basement.

Do you think that maybe that book's title was a hinge point after which Republican politics shifted towards this shameless, ridiculous version of what it means to be strong, which is to never ever admit that you made a mistake?

It's called The Courage to Be Free, for the most part.

for the most part, The Courage to Be Free is courageously free of anything that resembles charisma or discernible sense of humor. Much like the author.

this one reads like a politician's memoir churned out by chat GPT.

It is the Eugene Ionesco play Rhinoceros, which was written a long time ago about a different political ecosystem in which people turned into rhinoceroses.

And we need to retain our ability to be shocked by it. Because the moment you accept it as not shocking, you've accepted that it has a legitimate place in the political system.

Right, exactly. There is a rhinoceros running through the halls of the hospital, people.

We need to stage a Zoom reading of rhinoceros with the Bulwark community and we can all get rhinoceros masks for the scenes where people turn into rhinoceros.

you explained that Thompson wrote in Fur and Loathing in Las Vegas, which at one time was one of my favorite books, you know, this Gonzo psychedelic classic. He wrote about this rare drug called Adrenochrome, right? Something only he get from a living body.

Absolutely. That's 100 percent where they got it. Adrenochrome is a real thing and it occurs in the brain. It is just kind of a, as The Times review says, it's more sasperilla than whiskey.

And the key thing here in Fear and Loving in Las Vegas is that this character in the book says I got it from a pedophile. And so there's the Adrenochrome pedophile connection.

So in 2017 I watched several Confederate statues come down in my hometown in New Orleans, statues of PGT Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee.

And so I've been thinking a lot about, well, how are these stories propagated? How are these stories told? To what extent are the people in places that have a relationship to this history telling the story honestly, running from their responsibility to tell the story honestly or kind of doing something in between?

And so I decided I need to follow it. So talk about having those conversations, right? You're going to the cemetery and talking with people that work there. And you end up going to this kind of event for the sons of the Confederate veterans and trying to talk to some of the attendees. Obviously you stand out.

And Jeff had this round belly, this salt and pepper handlebar mustache, this long ponytail, this Confederate biker vest that had Confederate paraphernalia all over it.

And I think that that is, that's the centerpiece of this, right? It's so much of this is about identity. So much is about the story we have been told, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. And part of what you realize is that for so many people, history is not about primary source documents.

Her books include Red Famine, Stalin's war on Ukraine, the Pulitzer Prize winning Gulag, a history and most recently Twilight of Democracy, the seductive lore of authoritarianism, all very uplifting pieces of writing.

Mike's new book, "The Latino Century"

Madrid's a Republican, barely, consultant. He's the author of the new book, The Latino Century, How America's Largest Minority is Transforming Democracy.

And that's really kind of the foundational question of the book, Tim. So thank you for asking it.

The really big transformation is the fact that, you know, we've always talked about how Latinos are not monolithic and there's all this diversity.

I have two chapters saying, what can the Democrats do? And the other is, what can the Republicans do? And my advice to Republicans is one sentence. Don't be racist.

Remember Sasha he wrote The Victory Lab 2012 about the Obama data nerds

So my book that victory allowed came out in 2012 and it was about all these innovations and campaigns actually involving new data that was available in a lot of campaigns to profile voters and sort of tailor their contact with them.

And it was a largely happy story about politics it was campaigns were investing in things like training volunteers to knock indoors because they could be more targeted and efficient with it you know the communication you were getting from campaigns was more likely to address the issues you cared about because campaigns no longer felt like they had to communicate with 50% of the electorate at one time they could dig in on small groups of interests voter turnout has gone up in the 21st century and I sort of argued that part of that was because campaigns were focusing on on geo tv in a new way and so this was a happy story.

I mean it was literally about engaging new people and getting new people involved in the process and like that was the whole premise of what the Obama did.

I really liked Homegoing recently I read by, I'm going to butcher her name probably, Yaa Gyasi I believe is how you pronounce her name. So you can read that one this weekend.

His most recent book, Divided We Fall, America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.

host of the Ezra Klein Show. Ezra Klein, what's happening, man? Good to be here.

And so I'm wondering what worries you most as you think about a Trump second term, Project 2025, etc.?

It's kind of related to the topic of your book, Why We're Polarized.

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On the days when I'm not alone with my children, I'm made to feel as if I'm a saint or a God or the undisputed best father of all time.

What I mean is that when we walk into CVS and my daughter is wrapped on my chest and my son toddles at my side, people stop and look and gasp and point and walk up to me asking to shake my hand.

Men tap me on the back, women touch my shoulder and touch their hearts.

The manager at the front of the store comes on to the loudspeaker to say, excuse me, may I have everyone's attention? On aisle seven, you can get three boxes of detergent for the price of two.

And on aisle five, there's an incredible father running errands alone with his children. Everyone in the store bursts into applause.

And also happy to introduce Bulwark listeners to Susan Wild and the deep cut of the gentle lady from the Lehigh Valley. But thanks for having me, Tim. Go Tigers.

And, you know, we'll explain to the listener, like what the stakes were of the, of the debate, what the impact is going to be.

It does. It does. I was thinking, I was talking to my husband and I was like, who can I have? This is earlier in the week. I was like, who can I have on on Friday that no matter what happens, we'll give real talk. We'll be authoritative. You know, we'll be able to, you know, explain to the listener, like what the stakes were of the, of the debate, what the impact is going to be.

This Will Not Pass. Available on amazon.com if you want a good July 4th beach read, mountain read, lake read, whatever.

Shameless plug for our book that Alex Burns and I wrote. This Will Not Pass. Available on amazon.com if you want a good July 4th beach read, mountain read, lake read, whatever. But I'll tell you why that the Kamala question, it wouldn't be taken seriously in the West Wing. Just look at our book, because that'll tell you what the view of Kamala Harris is in the West Wing, the actual view of her, you know? And so that's why I don't think that they're going to seriously entertain that question in Biden's inner circle.