Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. One quick note, once again, for the Bullwork takes podcast feed. There's just so much crazy shit happening in the world, you know?

And I taped a podcast yesterday morning on the protests, which I thought was very cute and important and a change of pace for what we're doing around here often.

And then, you know, two minutes later, we have an American Pope that's crapped on J.D. Vant.

So me and JVL got on, our House Catholic, you know, our House Catholic in good standing, at least.

And so, you know, if you wanted a quick response to what's happening when crazy stuff happens, just go ahead and make sure to download the Borg takes feed.

And if you missed it yesterday, go listen to JVL because he's really great on this stuff. But we're going to do a little bit more on the Pope right here today for those of you who are patient who can wait 24 hours in this world.

That's a good practice. And we've got a good guest for it. It's my old friend, a writer and editor

at Protect Democracy and contributor to if you can keep it on substack. It's Amanda Carpenter. What's up, Amanda? Hey, happy Friday. Are we all feeling a little Catholic this morning?

It's Friday. Well, you know, I mean, as a cradle Catholic, I got to tell you, we had some bumps.

I had some bumps in the road with my Catholicism, but my little brother went to Villanova.

Oh. It's an American pope. I saw multiple tweets about how it's a bulwark pope because he was a, he voted in the

Republican primary in 2016, we have from the records, but he sent some quite negative

tweets about Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.

So we have a bulwark pope who went to Villanova, who's American.

I don't know.

I'm feeling about as Catholic as I've

felt in a while. I'm ready to do some hymns from my childhood. I know. I feel like I should

congratulate you and JBL. Although I am sort of like trying to adjust to the idea that we

have a Pope who tweets or exes or to active at social media. I mean, it's very cool.

I think a lot of people are, you know, rightly excited.

Yeah, and it's so strange.

It does, like, bring home just the Pope, even to me as a Catholic as a kid, it just,

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