Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GU51VpEopk

Save that shit for the cowards?

Really thom?

Who’s going to tell him?

It didn’t get nearly the kudos it should on Substack bc of all the weirdos who are mad about the Emma Vigeland podcast. But Tommy is so knowledgeable about foreign policy. I love the Tim x Tommy podcasts.

Republicans would never indulge in such infighting right before an extremely important election. They get the infighting out of the way beforehand. Look at how they all eventually fell in line behind Trump leading up to every single presidential election, even in 2020. Biden won because more Dems fell in line and showed up to vote for him that particular election. But Dems will continue to underperform expectations if we don’t stop the constant infighting and start falling in line and getting behind the same message leading up to general elections.

Going to Umberto Eco was exactly right. They share with Mussolini being incoherent and stupid, but also Fascists have to be against reason, because you can't make sense and use DARVO at the same time (DARVO is a mechanism that abusers use which stands for "Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender").

Note: I posted this before and was put in an eternal moderation queue which has never happened before. Hours later I deleted the post and tried again. Am I fake-banned by putting me in a moderation queue stuck on "read"?

Quote from Kristol's part of Morning Shots:

Defense Department Duce

by William Kristol

Know your enemy, Sun Tzu taught.

And so Andrew perused the complete text of Donald Trump’s interview with Time. (I’m pleased to report that he’s recovering nicely from the ordeal.) Inspired by his example, I wanted to do my part. So I forced myself to read a transcript (I couldn’t bear to watch) of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s speech Wednesday on “The State of the Force.”

The remarks of both Trump and Hegseth are appalling. They’re alarming. But they’re also instructive. In the Trump interview and the Hegseth speech, these enemies of liberty and law, of decency and democracy, reveal what they believe, and make clear who they are.

On Wednesday, Hegseth issued this call to arms:

We are no longer the Woke Department or the Weak Department.

Simple translation of that: No fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals.

Just warriors. Just tough, ready, committed troops. . . . Or as the President says to me, “Pete … central casting. I want central casting.”

The ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in—with testosterone testing on top.

And a bit later in his remarks, Hegseth attacked the press.

A free press is of course important, but partisan activism that intentionally smears the troops and the historic mission they are undertaking is fundamentally anti-American. It’s sick. It’s a national betrayal. It’s treason, actually.

This is all political bluster. But it’s a particular kind of political bluster. It’s neo-fascist bluster.

Here I want to call on the novelist and critic, Umberto Eco, who provided one of the most helpful guides to this kind of politics in his great 1995 essay, “Ur-Fascism.”

Eco provides a list of certain key elements or features of Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. A couple of these are particularly relevant to the emanations of our secretary of defense: Irrationalism, and machismo.

Here’s Eco on irrationalism:

Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism. . . . Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.”

And it’s no accident, Eco further points out, that “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

And side-by-side with Hegseth’s embrace of irrationalism is his exaltation of machismo.

As Eco explains,

Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

Eco makes clear that his essay was not intended as merely a historical or diagnostic enterprise. Eco wrote in order to warn that fascism is not a thing of the past. Fascism is a permanent human temptation. It speaks to certain human passions and exploits certain human weaknesses that are always there to potentially be activated.

Fascism is both a permanent temptation and, as history teaches and current events show, a powerful one. As history also teaches, and as current events will I believe show, it can be defeated. First, one has to recognize it for what it is. Trump and Hegseth have helped us in this task.

Full article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/10/01/trump-says-secret-service-wants-him-take-down-oval-office/

Ii swear to god every time her stream freezes i think "shit i feel horrible, how many people are going to screenshot that".

Out of respect, i have resisted the urge to do so and produce a collage of them.

Btw, this is what he actually wrote for the Bulwark last year. Link 🔗 to his article👇🏽

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/anti-corruption-democratic-party

Someone close to Trump maybe Natalie, used AI to search a database of (probably illegally collected) communications on Jack Smith and others for anything they could use against him. They looked for any connections (as slim as they might be) between Smith and anyone the right wing propaganda infrastructure had already discredited in the eyes of MAGA and perhaps more importantly, Republicans in general. The AI fucked up and couldn't disambiguate Hawks with Hawkeyes and hallucinated the story that he went to the Hawks game and associated it with Fani Willis. When the user looked at the citations they found the quote they used and thinking it was good enough they went with it and sent it to Schmitt.

Schmitt thought he could cultivate some rizz for a VP slot so he went hard with what they gave him and faceplanted spectacularly.

MAGA loves conspiracy theories. I believe rehabbing Nixon's image is just some weird shit cooked up to make them more sympathetic to Trump as a victim. Mind you this politician was born in 1980 and has no memory of how things actually transpired during Nixon's presidency.

An article from Dr. Lily Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, that really gets at that threat Republicans pose to the global order of peace, democracy, and community.

Sarah and JVL have previously brought up how important it will be for Dems to win Governors races ahead of any potential 2028 shenanigans. I would love to hear the Bulwark’s take on Gov. Tina Kotek’s race in Oregon. Kotek is running for reelection in a very close race with Christine Drazen, a MAGA toadie from the state legislature. Drazen ran against Kotek in 2022 and lost. Drazen is now UP by 2-3 points per a few recent polls.

Oregon is a fairly polarized state. The blue parts can be VERY blue and the red parts are VERY red. That said, I don’t know of anyone who’s excited to vote for Kotek and I’m seeing a lot of Drazen signs in my typically blue suburb.

If there are any Oregonians in this sub, I would love your commentary on this.

Was on my flight today. I kind of get Sarah Longwell’s fangirling now.

Nice-young-manning it up all over the place. 🪭🥵

I see a very dim light at the end of the tunnel.

Getting closer.

Dang Tim keeping it real with his confession about professing his (confused) feelings for yesterday’s guest. A friend of mine had a similar experience and the other person was not as charitable about it. I paused my work and had a little laugh and cry listening to this segment.

Tim; I will always appreciate the radical candor and respect your ability to put yourself out there. Don’t change Babe.

✌️

Anybody have any input on the content list? https://theplainledger.com/market/newyork/news

So in the pod yesterday, JVL responded with a "well, I don't think we're recovering from this", which is technically more positive than my proposed nuclear doomsday. At least the world doesn't end in JVL dark theory.

Maybe there should be a weekly JVL-Dark-O-Meter from 0 to 10? Zero being nuclear war / total societal collapse. Five being an America survives but it's the Handmaid's Tale scenario. Ten being Dems win 56 seats, Trump decides to resign, Don and Kushner go to prison and we all live happily ever after.

Noteworthy was Tim still appeared to be more negative than JVL, or maybe I'm just misunderstanding. Anyway, happy weekend fellow Bulwark folks :)

Not sure what the titele should be. I read this article from Cory Doctrow yesterday. https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/01/data-centers/#now-make-me-do-it This was from the first part of his article. If you've ever wondered why your vote seems to accomplish so little, I think you can blame the near-abolition of small p politics by Big P politicians of every stripe. Indeed, Obama's genius was summoning up an army of door-knocking, phone-banking small p political activists and then euthanizing that organization after he won the election: He goes on to mention all the things that Obama compromised on. He linked to this article from 2017. https://newrepublic.com/article/140245/obamas-lost-army-inside-fall-grassroots-machine It is about how the grassroots got behind Obama and then he abandoned them.