Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller.

Delighted to welcome back one of our faves, staff writer at the Atlantic.

Her latest piece is the most nihilistic conflict on earth about Sudan civil war and how the cuts to USAID have exacerbated

the crisis. Her book Autocracy Inc. will be out in paperback later this month. It's Ann Applebaum.

And I got to tell you, I was asking my husband last night. I said, do you have any questions for

Ann Applebaum?

He takes a deep breath and sighs.

And he says, no, I don't think I can handle hearing any more bad news from Ann Applebaum.

I was like, that's sad.

We love Ann Applebaum.

So can you just give our listeners some uplift before we have to hear about famine and autocracy. Is there

anything happening your life this summer that brings you joy? So I'm speaking to you from the very

deep Polish countryside and I would like to report that after three years of trying, this year,

I got my wildflowers to grow. So I now have a kind of meadow where wildflowers grow and they've killed off the weeds. So the wildflowers defeated the weeds. And this is the first time. What are the colors of wildflowers in the Polish countryside? There are many colors, yellow and blue and kind of light violet. They're very nice. That's beautiful. You might want to post, do you have an Instagram an instagram are you an instagram i have an instagram and i have already posted pictures of my

wildflower garden okay well maybe i'm not following then i've got to follow in apple bomb on

instagram it turns out okay wonderful we'll check that out now to real business i'm going to spend

plenty of time on sudana at the end because it's interesting and has a lot of geopolitical impacts

but we do have unfortunately some sad home front news we've got to get to um I'm going to spend plenty of time on Sudan at the end because it's interesting and has a lot of geopolitical impacts.

But we do have unfortunately some sad home front news we've got to get to on your autocracy beat.

Tim Apple, Tim Cook, CEO of one of the most successful companies in the world, worth untold amounts of money,

is concerned about the tariffs that the U.S. is going to charge on the equipment in his phones. He was a little concerned that the Commerce Secretary, Howard

Nutlick, was out there talking about how Americans are going to start screwing in the screws

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