The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1054: Adam Serwer, Lauren Egan, and Justin Jones: The Attack on Knowledge
Fri, 30 May 2025
The Trump administration is trying to exert ideological control over every knowledge-producing institution in the country. And the assault on colleges is not only about having fewer highly-educated voters, but also depriving Americans of trusted sources of information—much in the way Trump in 2020 wanted to stop counting Covid cases so it looked like he had the pandemic under control. Meanwhile, we're getting too much information about Elon's bladder control problems on his way out the door. Plus, The Bulwark's Lauren Egan and Tennessee's Justin Jones on courage, conscience, fighting a party drunk with power, and the future of the South. The Atlantic's Adam Serwer joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod, with a side serving from our live Nashville show. show notes Adam's latest piece in The Atlantic, "The New Dark Age" Lawfare's Anna Bower on her search for the administrator of DOGE Adam's book, "The Cruelty Is the Point" The NYT on Elon's intense drug use Tim's playlist
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. Just a little note on the scheduling for today. I wanted to do a traditional podcast guest for you all so you didn't have live shows back to back. And so I'm excited to have Adam Serwer coming up here in a second. But last night in Nashville, we were having a blast. And my colleague here at the Bulwark, Lauren Egan...
Chapter 2: Who are Justin Jones and Lauren Egan?
who's doing a newsletter on what is happening with the Democrats. Y'all should sign up for it at theblog.com. Interviewed Justin Jones as part of the show. If you don't know Justin Jones, he's in the legislature here in Tennessee. He was one of the Tennessee Three that the Republicans tried to boot out.
Man, that guy, if you went down a list of issues, me and him are going to have some disagreements for sure. He is definitely more progressive than I am. But I was just kind of blown away by his authenticity, his passion, his energy, his charisma. Just like I crossed the board. The dude is the real deal.
And we're looking for people in this moment who can speak to the challenges that we have with passion. And I thought that he really knocked it out of the park. And so we weren't planning on doing this, but I want to have his segment from the live show last night. We're going to do that as kind of a B block of this show if you guys want to stick around for that.
But like I said, I want to give you a kind of more traditional podcast experience. Just as a pod consumer myself, sometimes the live show isn't as great in audio because, you know, I'm hamming it up for the room. And you got to wait for the applause and all that. And I don't know, some of you guys listen to me while you're going to sleep at night, I've heard.
And so that's not great when you have random people shouting and throwing their bras on stage. So it was a great night in Nashville. I was happy to see everybody. For those that want to stick around, I recommend the Justin Jones segment that we're going to have up in segment two here. But first... I want to welcome a writer at The Atlantic, author of the book, The Cruelty is the Point.
His latest piece is on the Trump administration's attack on knowledge called The Dark Age. Pumped to have him on the pod. It's Adam Serwer.
Hey, Adam, what's happening, man? Not much. Just down here in San Antonio, finally getting a little rain. You're a San Antonio man? I am a San Antonio man. I mean, I generally don't talk about this. My wife is in the military. She's a surgeon and she's stationed here. So that's why we live here.
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Chapter 3: What are Adam Serwer's views on the Trump administration's attack on knowledge?
All right. Well, you get a lot of Wimby next year. That'll be good. Yeah. Well, I'm excited to have you on. As I mentioned, you have this new piece called The New Dark Age, which I want to get into. First, I just have a couple of news items I've got to mention for folks interested to get your take on. There's a big New York Times takeout on Elon, our former shadow president, who's been kicked out.
And I just felt like I had to mention that he's doing so much ketamine that he's having bladder control issues. It's not really great when the New York Times has a profile on you and they mention your bladder control issues several times. And so I kind of I felt it was incumbent upon me for the listeners sake in case they missed that to flag that.
But I'm interested in just in your broader take on Elon and his legacy from his four months of, I guess, ending USAID and failing at everything else. I'm wondering what you make of it all.
I mean, I just think you can look at it and see it as extraordinarily destructive, particularly abroad. One of the things I think liberals would probably always concede to the George W. Bush administration is that PEPFAR is one of the best programs that the U.S. has ever done.
And you can see now the withdrawal of this kind of international aid is affecting hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. you know, for no good reason, not just no good reason, but in my view, illegally, because Congress appropriated that money and the executive does not have the authority to impound it.
In some ways, one of the most important things about it is the sort of ideology and mentality behind the belief that all these people's lives do not matter. And you can simply withdraw the things that are keeping them alive. And that will not have any consequences whatsoever because those people's lives aren't important. To be honest, that kind of boils my blood.
I am completely unsympathetic to Elon and whatever his mental health issues are, given the impact that he's had on the country. I think his effect on American democracy has been extraordinarily negative. To have someone who, you know, when you look at what they did in the courts with Doge, you know, this sort of shell game, pretending that Elon wasn't in charge.
You have this person who was not elected, who was not appointed in any like Senate confirmed way, who was exercising all this authority to alter the structure of American government in a way that Congress did not authorize and the American people did not. vote for, I just think it's incredibly destructive.
And the fact that someone with that kind of wealth and power can simply walk into the US government and do whatever they want, I think is a real problem.
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Chapter 4: How does the Trump administration manipulate knowledge production?
And here you have two things that are extraordinarily important to the structure of the government that they created, which is to prevent the arbitrary exercise of power by the state and to prevent foreign corrupt sources from using money to... warp the government and the intentions of the government.
And here you have Trump violating both of those things and conservatives insisting that it's not really a problem at all because the president is a king who can do whatever he wants. There are a lot of historical inversions in American politics.
And I think, you know, particularly with race, there's always this sort of inversion that happens where people talk about, you know, the actual oppressed people as though they're the oppressors. This happens a lot in American history. And that is used to justify oppression of that minority group.
But here the inversion is extraordinary because you have all these people who are saying they want the government to be run exactly as the founders intended. And then they invent these legal theories that allow them to do the complete opposite. Yeah.
One more news item that I wanted to flag just because- know this is the thing that boils my blood the most and uh and i just want to keep updated with the story but it relates to to what your point about elon and usaid just about like the dehumanization of people around the globe and in this case i'm referring to the venezuelans we sent to el salvador there's a pro publica story out this morning
They obtained DHS data that shows that the U.S. knew only 32 of the 238 Venezuelans that they disappeared to that prison in El Salvador were convicted of crimes. Only six of the 238 were convicted of violent crimes.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of defunding research?
before they were sent there it recalls to mind for me i forget if it was a times or a post story from about a month ago where like even bukele i guess had asked like somebody inside the administration was like are you sure these guys are gangsters because like it doesn't really seem so to me and so i think that's pretty telling when a tin pot dictator who's known for throwing people into jail without evidence is a little concerned that they were being willy-nilly i think that was a pretty bad sign
So now we have hard data on that. I'm just wondering what your reaction is to all of that.
I think something that people simply do not want to accept because of how scary and extreme it is, is that Trump's mass deportation project is actually a demographic engineering project.
If you go back and you look at the emails that Stephen Miller was exchanging with Breitbart writers and stuff like that back in the day, his perception is that the removal of racist immigration restrictions in 1965 doomed the country.
And remember, when we're talking about these immigration restrictions, these were put in place essentially when eugenics was a reigning ideology among the American elite. So his problem is that America has gotten less white than he wants it to be. The reality of this is that there are not enough criminals to do a mass deportation of immigrant criminals, undocumented criminals in the United States.
And so instead, we're focusing resources on taking out people who are gainfully employed and who have functionally assimilated, some of whom are married to U.S. citizens, have U.S. citizen children. But in the view of the people who are running this administration, they are a demographic problem that must be removed.
And that's also why you see them closing the doors to refugees all over the world, except for white people from South Africa who are upset about the end of apartheid and don't want to live in a country with a black majority that has democratic self-determination. The reality of this is, is that it doesn't matter whether the Venezuelans are criminals.
Because the people who are running this administration don't want them there because they are Venezuelan. It doesn't matter that many of them are ideologically conservative because they're fleeing a leftist regime in Venezuela. You know what I mean? It's like, I think a lot about, you know, the example of Jewish immigration.
The first wave of Jewish immigration contains a lot of left-leaning people because they're fleeing, you know, the czar. And the second wave from the Soviet Union contains a lot of conservatives because they're coming from a communist country.
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Chapter 6: How does social media affect public perception of truth?
And they're doing this, I think, because one is that they see knowledge workers, white collar workers who are engaged in any kind of knowledge production as a kind of class enemy given educational polarization in the United States. And so they want fewer of those people because they believe that will also mean fewer Democrats getting elected.
The example that I use is if you go back to the first administration with COVID, you know, Trump saying, you know, if we stopped counting the cases, we wouldn't have so many cases. That is basically the same thing that's going on here. If we can prevent the production of empirical information.
that can be used to politically oppose the administration, then people just have to trust us and whatever it is we say, they are dependent on the fire hose of propaganda that we produce day in and day out. And I think, you know, the American research infrastructure is probably the most profitable, effective one that has ever existed in the history of humanity.
And that's simply a matter of like the time that we live in and how rich America is. I don't think it's like anything particular to humanity. But, you know, what's ironic, I think, is like, you know, you have all these people from the tech industry who are involved in this sort of dismantling of this.
But, you know, virtually every like profitable technology that we adopt, you know, starts off as some sort of government grant because prior to it becoming profitable, commercial entities can't take that kind of risk. I can't say for sure what the effect of this will be, but I know it will be bad for the country.
One of my big concerns is that if you look at the way that red states have destroyed public goods, people might say, oh, well, there will be a backlash to this.
But if you look at the way that red states have destroyed public goods, in the end, sometimes there isn't a backlash because people can be convinced to scapegoat or blame someone else for their problems and become perhaps even angrier, even more reactionary. Yeah, no, I make that point a lot.
My husband's from West Virginia. Yeah. I mean, West Virginia has collapsed economically and across basically every metric over the past two decades. And it's just gotten more and more red.
That's right. You sometimes see liberals rooting for things to get worse so that people will get angry about it. But it's just not necessarily the case that that will lead to Republicans losing power. And I think they understand that.
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Chapter 7: What role does sports play in political identity?
I mean, that stuff is really bad. My fear is partially not just that they're going to mess with technology or our ability to advance technology, but that people will stop accepting scientific conclusions because their brains are so cooked by the stuff that they're seeing on social media.
As far as Black history is concerned, I mean, on the one hand, the internet means you can do a book burning that is much bigger than an actual literal book burning. On the other hand, it is hard to delete anything from the internet now that it exists. It's not a Library of Alexandria situation where there's only one book, yeah.
We're not talking about like, you know, there are plays that Aeschylus wrote that we're never gonna get to read. You know, me personally, I grew up in Washington, DC. I went to a public school. I went to the Duke Ellington School of the Arts.
And there were classes that I took there, classes on the Harlem Renaissance, classes on black history that were there because DCPS serves a mostly black student body. And when I got to college, I knew things that other kids had not been taught because of that.
And so to some extent, my fear with this stuff, it's not so much that none of this stuff will ever get taught, but we're going to turn the clock back to a period where people simply did not know the nuances of the history that I was fortunate enough to learn because they simply won't be taught it. It will simply be censored. It will simply be taken out of academic inquiry.
And I take the point that most kids are not arguing about whether or not the Civil War was caused by slavery. The truth is we have bigger problems as far as making sure everybody learns math and reading properly. But I do fear that popular understandings of history really do affect ideological conclusions about the world. And they understand that.
So they're looking back to 2020 and the George Floyd thing, and they want to prevent something like that from ever happening again. They don't want any more awakenings around the importance of discrimination in public policy to happen because that might lead to political changes. And we can make critiques about the excesses of that period and et cetera, et cetera.
But the point is that they do not want actual factual information to reach people in a way that might make them say, well, maybe we should do something about this problem. Right. And that is actually my bigger fear, not simply that they will manage to completely prevent anybody from ever reading The Souls of Black Folk ever again. I mean, I didn't read The Souls of Black Folk till I was like 39.
Again, this is one of the cool things about growing up in DC is that we learn things that other people didn't learn, that people didn't learn until they got to college. But again, that's part of their assault on college, right? Is that they don't want people learning those things when they get to these institutions. They don't want people learning about convict leasing. Right.
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Chapter 8: How can Democrats harness energy in politics?
Eagles, like play Hotel California.
Yeah, you know, I wrote the book, obviously, because I had some things to say. And I just, you know, I wanted to... make the point more complex. So the book is more about sort of the ideological and historical currents that led to Trump to begin with. But, you know, I don't have a problem with people using the phrase.
I personally don't use it very much because I don't want to turn into say the thing, Bart. You know what I mean? Like, I just don't want to be that guy. Say the line, Adam.
Yeah. But how's your thinking about it evolved since you first wrote it as far as the implications? And I mean, we have so many more years now of information and action to kind of layer onto it.
I think for me, it remains the main political and human nature insight of the Trump people, which is that there is a kind of bond that is created when you get together to pick on somebody. And that's as true of elementary school children as it is of adults. And I think emotionally, when you involve someone in something like that, they then become invested in defending it, right?
So, you know, you look at these deportations to a gulag, like you know, when the Trump administration says they're the worst of the worst, their supporters want to agree with that because the opposite implication says something very nasty about them personally, right?
One of the aspects of this kind of politics of cruelty is that it invests people in the cruelty in a way that makes it hard for them to reflect and change course. And I think they very much understand that. Because if you've invested so much of your life in hurting innocent people, you don't want to believe that you're doing that. People want to believe they're acting in righteous ways.
And so pulling that back and saying, wait, I did something wrong, that's very hard for people to do, regardless of ideology, regardless of background. And the Trump administration, the Trump people understand this.
And they've sort of recruited people into this emotional sort of sunk cost situation where reversing yourself would mean acknowledging that you have been a party to some pretty terrible things and that that says something not necessarily positive about you as a person.
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