Transcript - America This Week, Feb 14, 2025: "The Government is a Giant Pile of Dung"
Also, Tulsi Gabbard confirmed. Plus, "Angel Fire," by our own Walter Kirn
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Matt Taibbi: All right, welcome to America This Week, I’m Matt Taibbi.
Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn, I almost forgot,
Matt Taibbi: Is it that bad, are we forgetting our names yet?
Walter Kirn: I live 50 miles from Yellowstone National Park, and in great wilderness areas there’s a phenomena at this time of year called winter kill when the weaker deer and elk and so on just basically expire, starve, bog down in the snow and give up. I’m not there yet but I’m close. If I thought there were deserving wolves that could nourish themselves on my body as they do on deer in Yellowstone, I might give myself to nature and its cycles, but...
Matt Taibbi: I’ve had exactly the same thoughts. So right outside my window, there’s a big fallen tree that fortunately fell that way and not on my house, and it’s rotting and underneath it looks like a fox family’s going to have kids this year.
Walter Kirn: Aww.
Matt Taibbi: So I thought, yeah, if it gets really bad, I can just crawl under there and feed the family for a year or so.
Walter Kirn: It’s like sky burials among the Native Americans and some sects in India. You just put yourself up on a platform and let yourself be eaten by predators or under a fox log.
Matt Taibbi: I’m totally for it, I love the idea, yeah. However, we’re not there yet, so a show we will do. And boy, what a busy few days, week/ whatever it is. In fact, it’s so busy that things are going to happen while we’re taping this show that are going to make this show irrelevant, almost certainly so-
Walter Kirn: Or eerily uncannily, synchronistically prophetic. Because without the things even happening, we may get parts of what happens through unconscious transmission.
Matt Taibbi: That’s right, yes. We may may, through osmosis, absorb truths and just relay them to you. So because of that, I want to start with something completely sort of nonspecific, or not time friendly, but just something totally-
Walter Kirn: In fact.
Matt Taibbi: Bizarre.
Walter Kirn: In fact, timeless really, because I think it will go down in history as one of the great congressional assertions.
Matt Taibbi: So this is just funny, and it’s kind of unfortunate. So this is about a congressman from Illinois, from Skokie actually, the Skokie/ Evanston area. Jan Schakowsky, who was once actually recommended as a candidate for president by the nation back in 2004, back when I knew them, and I believe I’ve worked with her office over the years on a number of issues, probably Dodd-Frank and some other things. I always thought of her as one of the smart ones, and then this week this happened. She was, I forget who the witness was, but this was the questioning.
Jan Schakowsky: Yesterday, I met with a manufacturing company, but they also are engaged in getting young people more engaged in manufacturing. So I asked them, “So how many of those students that are signing up and want to do this, how many are women?” And they said, “Well, I know there’s at least 13% or something.” It was a low number. And you had mentioned trying to engage more women in manufacturing, I’m just wondering if just the name manufacturing sounds like a guy?
Matt Taibbi: Manufacturing, it has “man” in it, apparently. So this is the ranking member of the Commerce and Manufacturing committee. The root is actually not man, it’s manu or well...
Walter Kirn: Yeah, hand, hand, as in manual, as in make, okay.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, handmade and manufactum, right, or manufactura, what’s the root there?
Walter Kirn: Well, I don’t know my Latin that well, but it’s the same word for hand that goes into manual, and she was close in the way that a three-year-old might be close. Does this mean making men? I’m surprised that she didn’t think that factories are where men come from.
Matt Taibbi: I don’t want to make too much of this, but again, this is the ranking member of the committee who doesn’t know that manufacturing means made by hand.
Walter Kirn: And the committee is named for manufacturing.
Matt Taibbi: Right, exactly.
Walter Kirn: It’s a word that she sees on stationary 1700 times a week. I wonder how long she’s been holding back this thought, this witticism. I also wonder how many people on her staff have had to nod when she makes this observation?
Matt Taibbi: No, no, no, no, no. The staff, I can’t imagine that she ran that past staffers and they all said nothing, no way.
Walter Kirn: Maybe not. I like to think highly of these staffs, because there’s only one way that Congress could still exist given the absolute stupidity I’ve seen there, and that’s that the staffs run after them, like dog trainers after dogs that haven’t yet learned not to go to the bathroom on the floor, cleaning up their messes. There was probably even a press release afterwards saying the Congress and woman’s joke was much appreciated by the manufacturing community.
Matt Taibbi: Right but yeah, I guess it would be womanufacturing.
Walter Kirn: Chickyfacturing.
Matt Taibbi: I’m sorry. This is partly on my mind because I was just in Congress this week and went through my own weirdness. There was a lot of really surreal stuff that happened at that committee hearing, and I guess we can get into some of that later. But I guess the reason this matters is because this is why the political situation right now is where it is. One side of the government is moving with tremendous alacrity and purpose controversially, I’m not sure that I agree with all of their decisions, but they’re certainly doing all kinds of things that they set out to do, and the other side is just like in this free fall where they’re stuck in this twilight zone. In fact, one of the members of Congress who questioned me or questioned us yesterday, yelled at us, didn’t question us, talked about being in the Twilight Zone, and I think they have no idea what to do, and they’re just kind of lost in this echo chamber that used to make sense. I don’t know.
Walter Kirn: Okay. First of all, Matt, in a minute, let me interview you on your experience Wednesday, because I have a few of the questions that I think anyone in the public might have. But we’ve been seeing a lot of Congress lately because of the confirmation hearings, more than we do usually, except during an impeachment or something. And all Congress people wait for those few moments where it isn’t just C-SPAN addicts who might be watching them. So this view of things, which I’ve happened to be able to see up close by being at the RFK hearings, which were incredibly well attended and very highly scrutinized, has caused me to have a whole new theory about Congress. And practically, how can I put it, especially about the Democrats in Congress and in the Senate particularly, and that’s that there was no there there for a while now, that they have been cast for various reasons, various political reasons.
It’s hard to see how any of them have really fought their way up in some true Darwinian political contest because they’re very stupid, and the ones who aren’t stupid are very fraudulent. They are often not in command of the issues that they claim to be their central issues. And so her saying that manufacturing sounds like something for guys, though it looks like a big gaffe or a joke, is to me almost the rule at this point. And I came back sort of like the ancient Mariner to Montana from the Senate saying, “Hey guys, it’s not that they’re incompetent, it’s not that they’re corrupt. Yeah, they’re all those things, but they’re also just putting on a fucking show. They don’t really know what they’re talking about. They’re like ABBA singing in English or Milli Vanilli. They really aren’t informed, aware, maybe even conscious. And also by the way, some of them are vampires.”
Ron Wyden is the closest I’ve seen to a vampire in real life. His skin looks like a combination of wax and pancake makeup, except it’s his actual skin not applied to the surface. And everybody who says to me, “Oh, I don’t know why so-and-so sold out, or how they got to so-and-so, or why they changed.” I say, “I don’t think it’s that. I think some of them are vampires and the rest of them are soap opera actors who’ve been cast for looks or background, and it’s just pure fake.” You’re talking about a masquerade, not a genuine political process. And it’s especially true on the Democrat side, and it happens sometime in the last few years because I don’t remember it from maybe over 15 years ago.
Matt Taibbi: So the phenomenon, and you probably have to lay some of this at the feet of redistricting and the fact that there are so many non-competitive districts. There’s only a handful of house districts that really are truly competitive in any given election cycle, and so most of what you’re getting are safe seats. So the choice, the person who is sitting in front of you in Congress is really someone who’s been selected by a combination of the DCCC or the Republican Congressional Committee, I forget what that one’s called, is it the RCCC? And the local chapter. And so they just cruise through often, it’s like a third of the seats are like this, and then they get assigned to a committee by a process that’s chosen by the leadership, and really it’s not always relevant to whatever their experiences, if they have any.
So you get a lot of people who are just there, and then as you mentioned, Walter, they’re not usually writing their own speeches. They figure out what the best use of the medium is not even to ask questions unless they absolutely have to in the RFK hearing. They just go up there and they give a presentation and the aides will hold stuff up behind the members’ heads, and they just read off a speech, and they’re there because they present a certain look or feel to the constituency that the party is after, and that’s true on both sides.
Walter Kirn: It is true, Matt, but this is one of the hardest aspects of my revelation. It’s so much more true or was at least in the Senate Democratic side at the RFK hearings than it was on the Republican side that I was shocked. The Republicans seemed a little bit in a time warp where, as I’ve said, they were small town bankers or guys with four car dealerships
Matt Taibbi: Or lawyers, yep.
Walter Kirn: Or lawyers who came a little late in life to be senators and are kind of guys who would be at the rotary giving a speech, and they remember the rituals of civic engagement and are kind of respectful toward them like history teachers might be or something. On the Democratic side was, as I say, it was like they had been cast in a large casting call to represent different types, to look like different types, to have different ideological specialties, but were like a boy band in which they actually weren’t singing.
Matt Taibbi: Out of sync instead of in sync.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, out of sync.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. No, I think increasingly we have to think of it in those terms, right? We have the Bernie, Warren, AOC wing of who were supposed to be the true progressives who were considered contenders in the last presidential cycle but really never had a chance, as we later found out, and then there are others who are the national security Democrats. And look, this is true of politics just generally, but I think it’s just become more clear that I always thought there was a genuine difference between Bernie and the rest of the Democrats, and I think it’s just becoming less true over time, I guess.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, I don’t know what happened there, but I’ve been reflecting on this and refining this thesis, it’s going to be my philosophy of all politics soon if I don’t stop. And I came across a Mark Twain essay from 1884. Think about how long ago that was, almost 150, 140 years ago. And it’s called, “On Consistency.” It’s an essay that comes from a speech he gave on a Monday evening social club night in Hartford, Connecticut. And basically he bemoans partisanship in politics. He says, we’re allowed to change in everything else in our life, we stop crawling and we start walking, we expand our vocabularies, we change our dress, but we’re expected to stay for a lifetime loyal to one party, political party, and often one religion too. And he says that this expectation of loyalty is really the original sin of party loyalty, the original sin of American politics. And he says this, he says, about loyalty, “The workers convention, the convention packers, know they are not obliged to put up the fittest man for the office, for they know that the docile party will vote for any forked thing they put up, even though it do not even resemble a man.”
Matt Taibbi: Any forked thing.
Walter Kirn: And that is the banner I would fly over Congress, “Any forked thing.” The convention. I almost want to shield children from this knowledge or anyone who believes in America. Immigrants, those abroad who looked at us with admiration, because if they saw inside it, it might freak them out. It actually still has me freaked out.
Matt Taibbi: Oh, yeah. Once you see how Congress works, and it’s funny, my best education from this came from following Bernie around for a month in Congress, and he wanted me to know how it worked. But over the years, I’ve increasingly been allowed to see how the whole thing works, especially the media operation, what they’re really trying to do with these public hearings, what their purpose is, and on and on. And it’s become increasingly desperate and shallow in the Trump era. Before my testimony on the censorship thing, I asked one of the aides, and then maybe not even one of Jordan’s aides, but just I think it was a committee staff, we’re like, “What are you expecting?” And they just said, “Oh, they’re just going to throw a bunch of Musk shit at you, and it’s just going to be Musk, Musk, Musk, that’s the whole thing.”
And it was that, that’s what it was. Every single thing that was said by a Democrat was about Musk or Trump, not even having anything to do with the topic at hand, again we can get into that later. But because the media cycle is now dominated by all these things that are spilling out of Doge, they’re reduced to increasingly desperate rhetorical tactics to try to, I don’t know, the pattern or break the fact that they’re kind of irrelevant in the media flow. So we saw things like, and you tweeted about this, the congressman from Long Beach, Robert Garcia, can we see this clip? So here’s the house hearing, this is Robert Garcia, the California Congressman, responding to Marjorie Taylor Green with a witticism.
Robert Garcia: Now, I find it ironic, of course, that our chairwoman, Congresswoman Green, is in charge of running this committee. Now, in the last Congress, Chairwoman Green literally showed a (censored) pic in our oversight congressional hearing, so I thought I’d bring one as well. Now, this of course we know is President Elon Musk. He’s also the world’s richest man. He was the biggest political donor in the last election. He has billions of dollars in conflicts of interest, and we know that he’s leading a power grab, also abided by and encouraged by Donald Trump, and of course the chairwoman, Congresswoman Green. This committee wants to empower the richest person in the world to hurt people so they can take all of this money that they so-called want to save and then give it to themselves, their companies, and their billionaire friends.
Matt Taibbi: Okay, all right. And then he went on CNN and gave this interview where he’s asked, “Is it a good thing to call Elon a dick?” And then he responds with dick and...
Speaker 3: I want to hear why, but do you think that calling Elon Musk a dick is effective messaging for confronting what is a potentially irreversible transformation of the US government?
Robert Garcia: Well, he is a dick, and I think he’s also harming the American public in an enormous way, and what I think is really important and what the American public-
Walter Kirn: He said enormous and dick together.
Matt Taibbi: I know, I know.
Robert Garcia: Actual weapons to the bar fight. This is an actual fight for democracy for the future of this country, and it’s important to push back on the chairperson of this committee. Marjorie Taylor Greene talks about having decorum, about bipartisanship. This is the person that lies more than anybody else in the entire Congress, and so if she’s going to make a mockery of hearings, I want to make sure that us as Democrats are bringing that same level of energy. And of course, after those comments, we went into exactly what Elon Musk is trying to do, dismantling the Department of Labor, dismantling the Department of Education, dismantling all of our consumer protection agencies. And so it’s all important, but it’s also important to get the attention of the American public and call Elon Musk out for what he is and to make people know that Marjorie Taylor Greene...
Walter Kirn: So he built a whole day around the word. He decided that dick is the word of the day, they put it up on the whiteboard back at his office in blue ink, encircled it.
Matt Taibbi: Dick.
Walter Kirn: Keep dick in the center of today’s discourse. He couldn’t help but say enormous, I have to note from my Freudian literary critic side, right after he said dick, referring to Elon. Everybody got together and thought, this is our way to counter Trump’s messaging. And not only is it desperate, it doesn’t wear well on him. He doesn’t look like a guy who does this that often. In other words, if John Fetterman were doing it or Donald Trump, it would seem to emerge somewhat organically from their personalities, but this is all deliberate, and stupid, and ineffective, and counterproductive, and what it does is it delegitimizes all the charges that come with it. They’re saving the money so they can steal the money.
Matt Taibbi: What does that even mean? I’m not even sure what that means. I don’t know why you don’t just stick with, “Hey, do we really need to be cutting Head Start?” Just do that. But this other thing they’re doing, and just Walter, just to back up for a second, I want to get into how they do this stuff because this came up during my hearing as well. A long time ago with speeches in the pre-Trump era, politicians figured out that they didn’t actually need to say anything that made sense. Their aides realized that if they did things like dial surveys and they just said certain words and strung them together, and so that’s why if you went to an Obama era speech by a Democrat, it would say things like, “Future” “Optimism” “Energy” “Technology” “Compassion.” You went to a Republican one that would be saying, “Responsibility” “Pride” “Work” “Dedication” “Family” It’s a big word salad, right? Then Trump happened, and Trump was basically reacting to the mechanization of speeches. And the reason it broke through is precisely because it was not that, right? And he would just spill stuff out of his head that was clearly not mechanized. Now, it may have been offensive, but it was human.
Walter Kirn: You just suggested or evoked for me a theory about Trump that I think is one of the best I’ve ever had, that he is a de-hypnotizer, that he came into politics at a time when it had become kind of pseudo-scientific and Cass Sunsteiny and nudgy all about words. By the way, the guy who formalized that word-based political technology was a pollster named Frank Luntz, who I went to Oxford with. And he would suggest keywords, and then he’d give audiences dials, he’d practically put electrodes on them to see if they turned up the dial in terms of their intense reaction at certain words, and then those tested words would go out, and I think the Democrats had a form of that too. But I think Trump came along with his ramshackle, Don Rickles, shocking to be shocking, the weave, digressing and so on as a way of, it’s like when you pour salt on an ice slick to melt. It just melts it, and that’s the plan. Not to say anything in particular, but to say things in a certain way so that the usual hypnotic political discourse as refined in the best behavioral labs stops working
Matt Taibbi: And because I had been in the campaign world for so long and had covered so many campaigns, I had been inculcated in this idea that the science is what works. Now, I had written a lot about how I hated it over the years and how the shallowness of it was offensive, but when Trump came along, and I was there when that whole thing happened with, was it Ted Cruz? Yeah, he was giving a speech in New Hampshire, and somebody shouted out in the crowd and Trump said, “Oh, that’s terrible, that’s the worst thing in the world. Don’t ever say that again.” And the crowd says, “What did she say? What did she say?” He goes, “No, I don’t want to say it. It was the worst thing.” And he finally says, “She said Ted Cruz is a pussy.” And of course it flies all over the internet, but as a campaign reporter, long time campaign reporter, I’m thinking, “There’s no way this is going to work, right?” Because it was so completely an anathema to the way everything was usually done.
The whole thing with John McCain and I know like people who weren’t captured, all that stuff did, according to the traditional rules, it was the opposite of what you were supposed to do. And I thought, “Nah, they’re going to kill him.” And then somebody like Marco Rubio, who is perfect at this stuff, or Buttigieg, Buttigieg is great at this stuff. I thought they would get through, I can’t believe how wrong I was, and then within about four or five months, I realized, “Oh my God, they’re voting for him because it’s not that.”
Walter Kirn: Absolutely. There’s not just a science to planting ideas in people’s heads and hypnotizing them, there’s also a science to disruption. It’s been studied, a lot of these big billionaires now or billionaires because they disrupted a settled industry. And Trump is a political disruptor in the politics industry, and he knows that sometimes it’s better just to liberate trapped energy through disruption than it is to play the game, especially if it’s not your game. And at the 2016 convention when I saw Donald Trump for the first time give a major political speech, he’s acceptance speech, and I’ve told you before that I was chemically altered during the speech. I don’t want to from the seriousness of this morning, but I had given myself a little clarity dose from the 1960s of the sort that Timothy Leary might use to see the patterns of reality.
And when Trump came out, like a casino host in his suit shooting his cuffs, after having cast a big shadow on the scrim, and then they opened it, and he came out and he gave a speech about how fucking shitty America was, how dangerous it was, how lousy it was for people, how sad, angry, and pissed off people were, and he used all this kind of language, and it was called dystopian the next day, chills went through my body because of my accelerated and chemically intensified ability to feel vibes. And I went, “Oh my God, this is punk rock coming to St. Paul after we only had Judas Priest, Nazareth, and Aerosmith.”
Matt Taibbi: Nothing wrong with a little Judas Priest.
Walter Kirn: Not in retrospect, but when I went down to the St. Paul Civic Center in 1979, and saw Elvis Costello, after having seen the Hair bands, I just went, “Oh no, something’s just changed, and they can’t put it back.” That’s how I felt in 2016.
Matt Taibbi: Right, right. Well, look, in retrospect, politically, it was way ahead of its time and whatever else you can say about Donald Trump, that’s the reason why his thing works, is because people perceive that... They see the come-ons that he does. They’re open about it, right? But-
Walter Kirn: But you see, the first... The difference between the first and the second terms, to me, is that he did it linguistically and stylistically and tonally the first time. But he was trapped politically and in terms of actual practical effectiveness as a leader by the various ops they ran and other things, Russiagate and so on. This time, he’s not just playing this disruptive game linguistically. He’s doing it in terms of the government-
Matt Taibbi: Policy-wise. Yeah. Exactly.
Walter Kirn: In terms of governance and policy and behavior and that is something they really weren’t prepared for. Because now, he’s not just saying weird stuff. He’s doing weird stuff.
Matt Taibbi: Right. Trump, I think, wanted to get into power and then be a traditional president on some level. And of course, that was never going to work-
Walter Kirn: They should have let him. They should have let him-
Matt Taibbi: They should have. Exactly.
Walter Kirn: If they had profiled him in the bowels of the intel community properly, they would’ve said, “This guy responds unusually well to pats from the establishment. He likes to be liked. So we’ll set up some establishment figures who will train him with pats on the back when he does-”
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Kiss his ass a little bit. Throw him a little bit of fish like a seal, right?
Walter Kirn: Right. Instead, we acted like a bat had gotten into the house and we had to kill it. And now, we’re seeing the aftermath of that.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. And now, they’re taking a chainsaw to the whole government and it’s pandemonium. But what you see, and it’s fascinating, somebody like Garcia-
Walter Kirn: To me, they’re taking a chainsaw to the flab. I mean, this is like trying to get... When you kill a fat animal hunting and you just have to carve off the fat to get to the meat. I-
Matt Taibbi: The meat has been completely engulfed in the fat, that’s the problem. They’re going to have to re-appropriate everything that is actually necessary, because they’ve used this human shield technique of wrapping the things that are actually good in bullshit, deception, censorship, all these other horrible things. But the problem with the democratic opposition, you see that with the Garcia thing, is that they don’t know how to respond. What they’re trying to do is they’re trying to synthesize the Trumpian politics by using the same calculated method, right? What they’re trying to do is just do the same old dial survey thing, billionaire, richest man in the world, stealing-
Walter Kirn: Oligarchy-
Matt Taibbi: Oligarchy, dick, right? Now, they’re adding dick, right? In my hearing, it was bullshit, was another one-
Walter Kirn: So Matt, one way you know you’ve won a certain kind of game is when you get your opponent to use your strategy badly, okay? That represents triumph in a lot of games where they go, “Everything we are doing doesn’t work. Let’s do what they’re doing. Except we don’t have any practice and it’s not native to us, and we’re sure to do it poorly. And then, everybody’s going to laugh at us.” Because the masters of this game are the hairy balls people, the people who came up with hairy balls over it at DOGE. That worked. Now, they want some of that energy? Oh, boy.
Matt Taibbi: No, they can’t go in that direction. The only way they can go is real earnestness and they don’t have many of those people left. They don’t have... They’ve stomped them out of the party or they stomped that instinct out of the party-
Walter Kirn: Yeah. Where’s James Traficante? This is when you need a James Traficante or whatever. Somebody from freaking manufacturing Ohio who’s Italian. You need other mobsters. They got-
Matt Taibbi: Or Frank Serpico. I don’t know. I mean, somebody who’s got some legitimacy, but who’s honest and honestly wants to promote some honest vision for federal government that is a little bit more compassionate or something like that-
Walter Kirn: But they-
Matt Taibbi: But they don’t have any of those people.
Walter Kirn: No, they don’t, because they’ve been rent seeking for so damn long and they’ve been rerouting NGO money in so many ways. They all seem like they’re on the take. I can tell that the confidence of DOGE and Trump at this moment is based on the notion that they have a hundred deep file of all this stuff they can still pull out. I know they’re not using their best stuff yet, but the stuff they’re using is working. See, the Democrats, one of the problems is that in the history of American social politics, they deracinated themselves.
They used to be full of union leaders and “white ethnics” and really talented Black people who brought a whole depth of music and intensity and grievance, but they all became financial people. They turned into true office creatures and the Republicans went and grabbed all the bloody energy that they used to have. The best they could do in the last election in terms of every man was put up this phony Tim Walz.
They are outflanked culturally. And that’s, I guess, my final point here is that looking at them and then looking at their doppelgangers on CNN and in the mainstream media, because they can all just switch places and they do.
Matt Taibbi: Right. Exactly.
Walter Kirn: The bureaucrats become anchor people. The anchor people become bureaucrats. The legislators... They’re all the same now. By the way, in that CNN interview, she set him up with that dick thing. She knew that’s what he wanted to say. She-
Matt Taibbi: Right. It was an... Look, that’s an agreed on thing, right?
Walter Kirn: Exactly.
Matt Taibbi: Where the producer tells... They pre-interview you, right? You’ve done the pre-interview, haven’t you?
Walter Kirn: Oh, sure. Yeah.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. So you get a pre-interview from the producer who tells you what the questions are going to be. And sometimes, there’s even a little negotiation. What would you like me to ask? And so, the setup comes out and it’s obviously not organic. And that’s fine. They do it on Fox too. They do it on all those channels. But the problem with this is they’re trying to look hardcore and punk or whatever it is-
Walter Kirn: And they’re trying to look like they’re on different sides. So in the case of the CNN interview, she quailed a little at the idea of saying dick. She made it look as though-
Matt Taibbi: Kind of spit it out like... Yeah.
Walter Kirn: Yeah. She made it look as though she was a little disapproving and the guy would have to defend himself from her slightly dubious attitude. Even though they had, just five minutes before, made an agreement and laughed about it. See, America, it’s fakeness. Trump, I think, identified the central issue years ago which was fakeness. And it is the American genius as a literary historian to discover fakenesses in all. That’s why American literature really got going with Mark Twain who just called bullshit on things. He spent a whole lifetime to his dying day in 1910 calling bullshit on Congressmen, on this, on that, on European manners, on fancy writers like Henry James. Maybe sometimes he did it unjustly, but calling bullshit on stuff is what Americans do.
Matt Taibbi: Right. And we’ve never tolerated phonies. It’s never been something that we really like-
Walter Kirn: Unless they’re deliberate phonies like Liberace.
Matt Taibbi: Right. Well, see... Okay. This is an important point. I know we’ve wandered a bit off field here, but I think this is a key point about how we got to this moment in American politics. Bill Clinton massively celebrated for the imageering part of politics. I mean, all of his aides, like James Carville, became rock stars for the way they constructed Bill Clinton and they managed his liabilities and all those other things. The Primary Colors book was all about how slick he was and how they managed to win the election through all these public relations triumphs. And that was part of the legend of what a good politician is, is just somebody who’s able to win, right? Because the Democrats hadn’t been able to. Then, Obama came along and Obama was clearly, for all of us who covered him, he was clearly producing this brilliant intoxicating image for liberal America.
Walter Kirn: Right. Sure.
Matt Taibbi: He was a Black candidate. His speeches were... They weren’t rousing, but they were inspiring in a way if you were of that bent. If he had come in office and actually been like the constitutional lawyer who shut that... And he had shut down Guantanamo Bay and he had rerouted the priorities of American government away from all the bullshit that Dick Cheney got us into earlier that century, then we would still be in that place where that kind of politics was celebrated. But what happened was that Obama got into office and it was a phony image. I mean, his exit was him drinking that toxic water in Flint and that was the antithesis of the kind of imageering you want to do in politics. And so, we wouldn’t have a Donald Trump if there hadn’t been a failed Barack Obama, I guess, is what I’m saying.
Walter Kirn: You’re right and let me expand on that a little bit. What you said about Clinton is true, because America likes a con man who comes off as a con man. You know what I mean? We like P.T. Barnum. We kind of like our over the top evangelists who we know are driving a Rolls Royce.
Matt Taibbi: Totally.
Walter Kirn: Because we’re all encaged in a certain kind of capitalism in this country that really depends at bottom on salesmanship. And so, we admire salesmanship that’s self-aware and we admire the scoundrel and the mischief-maker. And going back to Twain, what you might call his villains are quite attractive often. They’re scammers, but they’re scammers with a heart of gold or something like that or just a heart of larceny or they’re seducers. We-
Matt Taibbi: Or just successful.
Walter Kirn: Or just successful. See, calling Elon Musk the world’s richest man over and over, I wonder how George Soros feels about that. Does he want to call up some day, “Okay. Enough with the world’s richest man thing,” or Warren Buffett or Bill Gates?
Matt Taibbi: Well, we got yelled at about that yesterday, but go ahead.
Walter Kirn: But anyway, you’re right that he’s the anti-Obama and I’m going to propose an aesthetic theory of politics. I think politics, especially on a large scale in a mass society, is about aesthetics almost more than anything else. It’s a branch of aesthetics. You can’t expect to communicate arguments and issues very quickly. It takes a long time to get that information across. But aesthetic communication happens almost instantly and unconsciously and the defenses against it are always lower than they are to logical or policy-based arguments. Around the time of Obama, we also had the iPhone, okay? To me, Obama and the iPhone are almost contiguous. It comes in in 2009 just like he did and what it’s themed for is what they used to call, it’s the ease of its interface. Its rounded, smooth, almost egg-like, or curved surfaces. Its glassiness. Obama was like an iPhone to me. He was smooth. He didn’t cut you. He was rounded. You didn’t-
Matt Taibbi: Nuanced as the New York Times said.
Walter Kirn: Yeah. Nuanced or whatever. But I talked to a marketing expert, and maybe I’ve told this story before, toward the end of that era. He was a genius from France who had this high level marketing consultancy and worked for politicians and all kinds of people. And he said, “People don’t want the smooth interface anymore. They want some pushback from things when they hold them.” Notice the Cybertruck, how angular and ugly and awkward it looks but it’s-
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. It conveys heaviness.
Walter Kirn: Yes, it’s mesmerizing. Compared to those weird, egg-shaped Apple computers and so on. So he said one of my recommendations was to either Pepsi or Coke, that they put a little too much gas into the cans. Because when people open them, they like the drama of it spraying and coming out a little bit and making a noise. And that’s just a pure neurological trend that he had noticed. That we had that sleepy, everything’s smooth and curved and shiny thing was going out. And people wanted drama and a little conflict and something that startled them again to wake up.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. I mean, I remember when I wrote about Obama a few years ago, I found the Tolstoy quote that it’s amazing how complete the delusion is that beauty is goodness. And you talked about how the aesthetics are irresistible for people. It works on your mind before you’re even able to think about it. And Obama was just... He was pleasing to people. It speaks to the better angels inside you that you want to believe that there’s this... I remember seeing a portrait of Abraham Lincoln that was called the Great Good Man in... I think it was in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum or the Boston Museum of Art, anyway.
But people want to believe in this heroic thinker, deep, compassionate person who’s up there somewhere and it turns out to be a lie, right? And if there had been an ability to prevent us from seeing that it was a lie, then I just don’t think we would be here. But they weren’t able to preserve that illusion. And now, they’re just walking face-first into a buzzsaw of their own creation. As you say, it’s an unforced error to be talking about the richest man on earth and then having to defend Bill Gates and George Soros which they’re all doing in these speeches as well-
Walter Kirn: But it’s even more of an unforced error to cast something as a pejorative when in the world of MMA and tech billionaires and so on, people go, “That’s awesome. The world’s richest man is in our government? France, you don’t have that. You don’t have that, fancy other country. China, you don’t have that. We’ve got the world’s richest man and his kid willing to wear a dumb hat in the office next to the President of the United States with a funny placard that says Gulf of America behind them, telling us how they’re going to reorganize the government.” And I go, “America is helpless before that.” Dude, if you got invited to a party, I don’t care if you’re Lenin, okay? I don’t care if you’re Che Guevara. Tonight, you’re in Washington. Somebody says, “I have two invitations. The Congressional Democrats are partying hard tonight and there’s a MAGA party going on over-”
Matt Taibbi: In the White House?
Walter Kirn: Yeah. “MAGA pizza party. Which do you want to go to?” “Oh, I want to go hang out with Elizabeth Warren.”
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. I mean, if I were young and looking for a place to do drugs, I certainly wouldn’t be going to the Congressional side. Let’s put it that way. But yeah, no, I get your point and-
Walter Kirn: The smooth and the rough. And the smooth gets a little bit too much after a while and you need the rough. But when the rough actually comes with substance, you can’t just fight back aesthetically. So their attempt to be a little bit Fetterman-ish and say dick every once in a while and it-
Matt Taibbi: Well, that guy shouldn’t be doing that though. You see what happened? He says dick and then immediately the mask comes back on and he does his phony spiel, because he thinks that’s just the introductory way to get... It doesn’t work, right? You have to fully commit to being that, if that’s what you’re going... And it’s just not in them.
One last quick note about... You talked about the aesthetics of all this. I remember when I was writing about... I went undercover in that church in Texas and I went down there and I met somebody in Joel Osteen’s church. And I remember thinking... Because Joel Osteen had moved into The Summit. Remember The Summit which was the old stadium where the Houston Rockets used to play?
Walter Kirn: Yeah.
Matt Taibbi: They have a new one now. Or maybe it’s the same one and they’ve just redone it. Anyway, it’s a huge, gigantic basketball stadium, right? 16,000 people. And I think, “What spirituality do you find in a sports arena?” Part of his gospel was all about how God wants you to be successful and the richer you are, the more you’re in God’s graces. With my upbringing, I didn’t get it at all. But then, I started hanging around with some of their people and I realized, “That’s a huge selling point.” It was like, “Hey, I just started off as a preacher. And now, I’m preaching the gospel from The Summit. I must be really doing great.” Ordinary people connect with that. I did not understand that until that time and it’s a key... I still think a lot of people don’t realize that it’s not a pejorative to call somebody rich-
Walter Kirn: The world’s richest person.
Matt Taibbi: Right. Yeah. Exactly.
Walter Kirn: I’ll mention Yellowstone National Park here. Even the poorest person in Livingston, Montana is proud that Yellowstone National Park, the greatest natural tourist attraction in the United States, is right there. They didn’t build it. Maybe they have a gram of ownership in it because it’s a public park, but they’re proud of something by proximity. And people, I think, are proud, a lot of people, by proximity. They may be driving around in a Nissan from 17 years ago that they faked the exhaust papers on, but the world’s richest man is talking to them on Twitter and from the White House and so on. That doesn’t repel them, it makes them feel like we’re all part of the big American carnival.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. And it’s two different ways of looking at the world. I didn’t understand it until recently, like... But there’s a reason why Jimmy Carter driving around in an old Plymouth. It works as an ex-president, but not as a president, right? The people do not want somebody who looks sad and halting and full of mixed emotions sitting in that desk. They want somebody who’s commanding and aggressive and all these other things. I-
Walter Kirn: Did anyone fault JFK for... Well, besides the horrible right-wingers in Texas who may have been involved with the-
Matt Taibbi: Right. Who may have killed or-
Walter Kirn: ... and LBJ. But did anybody fault him for having a beautiful wife and going out on yachts from his compound?
Matt Taibbi: No, they sold that. That whole thing was part of the image, right? I mean, if... That’s why-
Walter Kirn: And who did they sell it to, Matt? In 1960, who were the Democrats? The Democrats were people led by Jimmy Hoffa and they were-
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. The unions. Yeah.
Walter Kirn: They were the unions. They were the working classes. They were the Iron Range miners up in Minnesota, Poles and Lithuanians and so on. America doesn’t have the class problems that Europe does. When I moved to England for a few years and I saw how the working class had just been bred to resent and hate the upper classes that spoke a certain way and dressed a certain way and so on-
Matt Taibbi: But also, to-
Walter Kirn: But they still-
Matt Taibbi: They stayed there. Yeah.
Walter Kirn: But they still reserved a kind of awe for the Queen. The Queen is not there because lawyers love the Queen. The Queen is there because shopkeepers and groundskeepers love the Queen because she gives them... It’s like having a beautiful park in a city that all can share. People don’t want Central Park to deteriorate. They don’t want their crowning people to be slobs. Trump, we captured that. Look at rap music. I mean, rap music isn’t about like, “I want to be poor.”
Matt Taibbi: No, I know and I was thinking about that when Garcia gave his speeches. I thought, “I wonder what Snoop Dogg thinks about this Congressman.” But no, the whole thing is crazy. I mean, I have mixed feelings about the idea of even the royalty. I never liked the idea of a subsidized royalty, but I understand the instinct for it. But also-
Walter Kirn: Well, Trump isn’t doing a royalty imitation.
Matt Taibbi: No-
Walter Kirn: But the theme there was that you don’t automatically create resentment when you put spectacle at the top. But the weird thing about Trump is that the visuals that we’re getting from the Oval Office, Elon with his son crawling around and the Oval Office looks so crowded. They’re putting in so much junk. It looks like a florist at Valentine’s Day where they’re crowding everything into the scene. There’s the Gulf of America map. There’s this and there’s that, there’s kids, and you’re going like, “Wow. The Oval Office is a place where stuff gets done.” It’s not this weird, reverent west wing, “Mr. President.” They sort of-
Matt Taibbi: No, it’s-
Walter Kirn: ... tiptoe up to the thing and it’s like, “Wow. It’s like a movie set. It looks like there’s a game show going on in there.”
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. And even... Look, this is the host of Pod Save America. Let’s listen to this talk about the image of all this.
Speaker 4: And also, as much as I want to throw all of Trump’s campaign promises in his face, like the price of eggs is not down, the war in Ukraine, et cetera, et cetera. He said he’d do it in 24 hours. I think most voters get that it was a schtick and they’re going to give him some time to actually get things done-
Speaker 5: Trump is... He is moving so fast. They are doing a lot. It’s not just the perception of it. They hit the ground running in a serious way. It’s genuinely impressive. Impressive in a dark and sinister way, but it’s nonetheless impressive. And if you’re turning on the news every day and hearing about all these different things Trump is doing and all the different criticisms coming out of it, you may not like all of it. But in comparison to how people felt about Joe Biden being basically absent, I imagine for a lot of people, it’s a welcome change.
Speaker 6: The energy and he’s signing things and his effect to all that, I think that is playing extraordinarily well-
Speaker 5: I know-
Speaker 4: It’s like you don’t want to seem like you’re opposed to government efficiency. But obviously, now they’re just rampaging through the government Venmo and shutting shit off left and right-
Speaker 5: Yeah-
Speaker 6: It is-
Walter Kirn: You don’t want to seem like you’re opposed to it, even though you are.
Speaker 6: I feel the same way because I’ve seen the messaging memos and it’s like... The young people, Gen Z, they like DOGE and what Elon is doing because they see government as sclerotic and inefficient. And they like the move fast and break things ethos, and they want to get stuff done, and they like the results. And it’s like, “Yeah. Yes, of course.” We all want that. We all know that government is slow. We all know that government can be inefficient. We all know that the bureaucracy can be bloated. We all worked in the fucking White House. We tried to re-organize the government. We tried to find efficiency. It’s hard to do and we think-
Speaker 5: And honestly, some of this is pretty annoying because it’s some of the stuff we should have done.
Speaker 6: Right. Yeah.
Speaker 5: You could do some of it-
Matt Taibbi: Are you kidding me?
Speaker 4: It’s like, “I can dig these Doja Cats.”
Speaker 5: Oh my god. That was horrible.
Speaker 6: Oh, no.
Matt Taibbi: Okay. How many different concessions to, “We should have done that shit. This is playing really well,” from the same people who’ve been telling us that... God, I can’t even... Because these people have been telling us to resist, with every fiber of our being, the idea that there was anything that needed to be changed about government or that any of these programs were a problem. Or as it came out in my hearing, “Oh, censorship. That’s old stuff. Who cares? Yeah. I guess it’s true. But let’s move on. Let’s talk about right now.” I don’t know. It’s just so frustrating.
Walter Kirn: Okay. First of all, that was a performance. They’re trying to catch some of the bro energy. They want a little of the rogue and bros sitting around energy. So that was just-
Matt Taibbi: But they’re not, they’re pussies sitting... Sorry. Go ahead.
Walter Kirn: Yeah. So they said, “We should have done some of this, but it was hard.” Well, so you stopped because it was hard? Oh, I thought you had a philosophy that was entirely different, like you just said, Matt, that things should, if anything, be bigger and more comprehensive. And there was too little appreciation of the bureaucracy that you didn’t build that stuff, that the leviathan helper of the government had not been allowed to have its full glorious power. And now, you’re telling us that you were like a bunch of Ron Paul people who just were having a tough time and-
Matt Taibbi: I’m sorry. It took me a minute to compose exactly what my reaction to that should have been. What that shows is that they are purely political creatures. What their reaction is, “Oh my god. This is what we should have been doing because that would’ve played better.” They don’t have any convictions about anything deep inside.
Walter Kirn: And that’s my previous point, Matt. That it’s a masquerade. That it’s purely fake. That it’s all acting. That it’s a show. That it got to that point and that these are not centered people in terms of ideology, convictions, morality, even political policy. They are the most complicated weather vanes on earth. And I’m coining a phrase here because I’ve used it a couple times on Twitter. What’s coming, I call the big scurry. The big scurry as in rodents because they’re going to start to try to adapt these new styles and these new modes, and they’re going to test these different issues and they’re going to try to imitate what they think is popular. And they’re going to try to recapture some of the energy they just lost when Tulsi and RFK go over to the other side, Tulsi, the anti-intelligence blob candidate and RFK, the anti health-
Matt Taibbi: Health corporation.
Walter Kirn: Health bureaucracy and corporate thing, because they always acted also in the Democratic Party as though the bureaucracy was what kept corporate rule at bay. But what we’ve learned is that those things worked hand in glove, man.
Matt Taibbi: Of course.
Walter Kirn: It was just like, “Pass the potatoes, you pass the Turkey, we’ll both eat and feast.” And once the bureaucracy was no longer the bulwark against greed, but the very instrument by which it could expand to infinite proportions, they lost all their principles, they lost all their value, they lost their argument, and they were all just actors trying to get a piece of the riches.
Matt Taibbi: They wanted to get ahead in the business of politics. That’s what that is. You have a long developing pieces. I have one as well. I’m not sure if I’ve aired it on the show before, but you’ve seen the movie, the French Connection, right?
Walter Kirn: One of my favorites.
Matt Taibbi: Great movie. So there’s a scene where Popeye Doyle, the detective, with Roy Scheider... They go into a club early in the movie and there’s this black band singing, “Everybody’s going to the moon.” Remember that whole thing? And they both look over at a table in the corner and Popeye says, “I make two junk connections at that table.” And then Scheider says, “Yeah, but the other one’s a policy guy.” And then there’s an Italian mobster. And Hackman, Popeye Doyle says, “That table is definitely wrong. It’s a wrong table.” And the idea was it was a whole bunch of crooks at the table, but they’re not in the same business. So what are they all doing there? And it just set off alarm bells with this detective who just decides to tail them because it doesn’t make sense to him.
Walter Kirn: Right.
Matt Taibbi: They must be up to something big if all of these crooks from disparate parts of the criminal world are all sitting at the same table. “What the fuck is that?” That’s the idea of that scene. The wrong table is what government was. I mean, in the Twitter files... I remember having that exact same thought when I was looking at the schematic for one of the censorship organizations where it’s talking about the flow of information. So you’ve got CISA over here, and then there’s pharmaceutical companies that make the vaccine over here and then Stanford over here. And then there’s literally a thing up at the top that says, “Intelligence community,” gets a notification.
They’re not supposed to all be in the same place, and they’re especially not supposed to be underneath the level of information that’s supposed to be organically coming out. It is just a horrifying reality. And the idea of just smashing all that to shit is incredibly appealing to people, isn’t it? I mean, it’s in the same way that we watched the French connection because we wanted to find out what’s this racket all about and don’t we want to break it up and put them all in jail? I think it’s the same instinct.
Walter Kirn: But you see what makes something the wrong table, what attracts these odd bedfellows, what sets off the detective’s suspicions is they’re very different, but they must have one thing in common. They must all be criminals.
Matt Taibbi: Right.
Walter Kirn: So whenever you see the intelligence agents, the social justice people, the pharmaceutical industry, and whatever, all agree-
Matt Taibbi: DHS and-
Walter Kirn: All agreeing about this misinformation thing, you go, “No honest people with convictions could ever agree on anything that is visible. There must be something invisible they’re agreeing on.”
Matt Taibbi: Absolutely
Walter Kirn: Raw power.
Matt Taibbi: Raw power, or as John Kerry would say, consensus or unity as the person from Internews would say. You talked about the concept of bureaucracy being a check on corporations. It can’t be if they’re underneath it all, working together, funding each other, if they’re moving back and forth, if the intelligence person shows up on the network owned by the same people who are making the products. That shit just doesn’t play with people. They see the con. They have the same reaction.
Walter Kirn: Yours is a great theory. The wrong table theory is something that you need to espouse maybe at book length or pamphlet length at least. Let me give you an example that just came to me the other day. During the peak of Covid, I had two kids in college, Ivy League colleges, so shoot me. Not like I have a big pull, but they ended up there and one is at the-
Matt Taibbi: Again, that’s great, but go ahead.
Walter Kirn: Right. One is at the University of Pennsylvania, my son. And when they made it a requirement that if you were to come back to school, you had to be vaccinated in 2021, ‘22, you had to take these vaccines... Now, because I knew people in the medical community, I was legitimately concerned about the effectiveness, first, of the vaccines and the long-term-
Matt Taibbi: Or the necessity.
Walter Kirn: Or the necessity. Right. Or the necessity. Especially since my son had already had Covid twice at his endless partying of freshman year. I mean, the kids there were joking about Covid like, “I’m going to get it again this weekend and then I’ll have to lay off for a couple weeks and then I’m going to go back and get Covid again at another party.” Well, so anyway, I thought, “Okay, if there’s any skepticism or any chance that this vaccine is maybe dangerous, why are they giving it to the sons and daughters of the establishment at the Ivy League schools?” Just to be a bit of a fascist for a minute here, or an aristocrat, why is America pushing a vaccine on its maybe brightest, or let’s just say most privileged people? I couldn’t understand it. I’m used to the Tuskegee experiment where they find poor people to poison-
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, exactly.
Walter Kirn: But why are they doing it to the Ivy League students? Well, yesterday a story comes out that the University of Pennsylvania, which pushed him, and which I actually have good feelings about, my son loved, by the way, just got awarded a 400 and something million dollar judgment in a lawsuit for rights they have in the development of the Covid vaccine.
Matt Taibbi: Okay. Well, there you go.
Walter Kirn: So they were actually requiring their students to take a product... And remember, a big part of the vaccine’s prestige was that Ivy League institutions and their students and so on were mandating it. And so when I saw that there’s a product in which they have a profit interest, that’s the wrong table thing. Why should university health departments-?
Matt Taibbi: Why are they at the table, right?
Walter Kirn: Why are they at the table so vociferously?
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, no, that’s exactly right. Because otherwise it would be like a dispositive. It wouldn’t make any sense. Yeah, it’s so frustrating.
Walter Kirn: They’re supposed to be the people who are calling for studies, not the people who are saying, “We don’t need studies,” the medical schools and so on. But when you realize how wide the circle goes, and let’s not just talk about this controversial vaccine, but how wide the circle goes of what’s looking more and more like collusion between bureaucracies, everybody above the line in a way, the security state, political leaders, and so on, even the press... I mean, what’s this freaky thing they came out with last night where Reuters got-?
Matt Taibbi: Oh, can we see...? Let’s look at that contract because... Have they made a public statement about this yet? And again, it’s USAspending. It’s just what they put on the contract, and I don’t think they’ve made a public statement yet, but if you look in the lower left-hand corner, it says “Description, Active Social Engineering Defense (ASED) Large Scale Social Deception, (LSD).”
Walter Kirn: And what’s the date?
Matt Taibbi: The date is September 28th, 2018 was the start date.
Walter Kirn: It goes till ‘22.
Matt Taibbi: ‘22, and it was... It’s an eight or $9 million award, something like that.
Walter Kirn: $9 million, social engineering.
Matt Taibbi: Yep. What is that?
Walter Kirn: Okay. So one of my problems about crime dramas has always been why do the gangsters keep a little book of all the people they paid off? Why do the madams keep a book of all of their clients? The search for the little black book and it’s discovery is often how the plot turns. And I go, “Why do crooks keep such good records?”
Matt Taibbi: Right. Yeah, exactly. Remember that from the scene from the Wire? “Is you keeping notes for a criminal fucking conspiracy?”
Walter Kirn: Right. Why did Peter Stroke say...? A counterintelligence agent on his own phone in text messages, “We can take this Trump guy out with our insurance policy?”
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, our insurance policy, yeah, exactly.
Walter Kirn: To a woman who he was dating who was probably going to get pissed at him at some point because... She could just cough up the text. But what I’m saying is this. What if it is that bad? What if the reason they keep records is because the cops are on the take? They never expect to get caught. Who’s going to catch them? Who’s going to catch Reuters? Reuters does the reporting.
Matt Taibbi: I mean, but still, somebody could have looked at that, that’s been on USAspending.gov, and then they would’ve done what I just did and run the acronym ASED and found that it’s a DARPA program, Active Social Engineering Defense.
Walter Kirn: And the other acronym is LSD, Large Scale Deception.
Matt Taibbi: Large Scale Deception. Let’s look at that one.
Walter Kirn: It’s literally LSD. Don’t you think that maybe all these Intel people just love their inside jokes at some level? “Let’s call it LSD.”
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. No, I think that happens a lot actually.
Walter Kirn: “You mean when we drug the public with information? Call it LSD?” “Yeah, why not? Who’s going to catch us? Reuters?”
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, exactly. No, they still haven’t made a... I can’t find what the LSD program is, but certainly ASED is out there. I don’t know what the details are. I mean, I know someone who’s going to be able to tell me what that is for real. So I’ll ask. But look, that’s just embarrassing. Whatever they come up with for an explanation for that... And maybe it’s just some kind of data collection that DARPA uses to help make the program. I don’t care. I don’t want to be involved with that. I don’t want to have a contract with fucking DARPA.
Walter Kirn: And I don’t want a company that distributes the news to be doing it.
Matt Taibbi: Right, exactly.
Walter Kirn: “Oh, we’ve got a firewall between our social engineering propaganda deception department and our giving you the truth about what happened that day department, you idiots. Don’t you think we can separate those two things?”
Matt Taibbi: And look, Reuters is already... Everybody knows it’s the state news agency and it’s different from the American system, but we didn’t think it was that different, right? That’s just crazy. And this is a good segue into I think the thing we probably should have started with with this show, which is that Tulsi Gabbard got made... She is now the director of National Intelligence, and think about what an amazing turnaround this is. And again, Walter, we have to give ourselves a little pat in the back here because we played a role in this. When that thing happened with Tulsi over the summer when she turned out to be followed-
Walter Kirn: In the Quiet Skies program-
Matt Taibbi: In the Quiet Skies program. And look, we should give credit to the people who actually broke this story. It was Tracy Beanz’s site... What was it? Uncensored DC? Uncovered DC.
Walter Kirn: Uncovered DC.
Matt Taibbi: It was Tracy Beanz’s site, Uncovered DC, and this was the story, “Federal Air Marshal Whistleblowers Report Tulsi Gabbard Actively Under Surveillance Via Quiet Skies Program.” And this is how it happened. There was an on the record person here, Sonya LaBosco, who’s from the Federal Air Marshals Association, I think is what it’s called. It’s not the actual union, but it’s an association. But because they did this story, because a couple of whistleblowers came forward and somebody was willing to go on the record about this, this led to Tulsi getting lawyers at Empower Oversight to look into it. I did a story. On Racket, you and I talked about it. Everybody dropped this story. Nobody else did it in the sort of traditional press. But Tulsi gave us an interview and confirmed a lot of the details, said that she had been held up, they had been going through her luggage and checking her underwear for weapons and all these other things. And this was an outrageous story. And she’s-
Walter Kirn: An active military officer.
Matt Taibbi: A lieutenant colonel who has to be constantly reviewed by the Department of Defense. So the TSA puts her under surveillance and a program that, by the way-
Walter Kirn: Right around the time that Kamala is becoming the nominee, right?
Matt Taibbi: Who was heavily criticized by Tulsi, by the way.
Walter Kirn: Whose last campaign Tulsi had basically chopped off at the root during a debate.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, right. And what a coincidence! And it might be. It’s possible. It could be. It could be. It’s possible.
Walter Kirn: Why should we in politics not use the common sense we use going to the store? Okay. I mean, why should we constantly be going, “Yeah, Large-scale Social Deception must not have anything to do with deception,” even though it’s a news company that’s getting the contract and would know a lot about how to deceive people and have a lot of opportunities?”
Matt Taibbi: And would know how bad that looks on paper.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, but maybe they came up with some bad words. Oh, maybe Tulsi, the active military officer, former Democratic candidate who opposed Harris and ruined her last campaign, is just by accident getting thrown into some follow-you-through airports program that had, to me the most horrific details. They would bring dogs in. They had her surrounded. It wasn’t just like one guy would follow her to the gate. They had teams waiting for her.
Matt Taibbi: Up to 15 per airport.
Walter Kirn: 15 people per airport. I mean, if that’s not a DOGE candidate right there... The Quiet Skies program is using approximately 14 too many people. Did they think that she was going to try to break out, take over a plane? Why do you need 14 people?
Matt Taibbi: Well, that’s what she said to me. She’s like, “If they think I’m a heightened risk for hijacking, why are they letting me on a plane in the first place?”
Walter Kirn: How come Popeye Doyle in the French Connection and his buddy can bust the biggest international heroin ring, but it takes 14 people to follow Tulsi to an airport because they fear what? What’s she going to do?
Matt Taibbi: That’s the whole point. And this is why DOGE is going to go... They’re going to tee off on the TSA. There’s an Inspector General’s report from years ago, from 2019 or whatever it is, that says that the Air Marshals program when its budget was... I think it was $804 million that year, and they said $395 million of it could be “better spent.” So that’s an-
Walter Kirn: But when you think about it, on what? Because there actually isn’t that big of a problem on airplanes. It occurs every once in a while quite disastrously, but they’ve got a big budget. But really, what do you do, frankly? I mean, they’ve got the TSA, they’ve got the metal detectors and the X-rays and the eye scanners now and every other thing. What are Air Marshals supposed to do? When was the last time an Air Marshal apprehended somebody, the shoe bomber or something?
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, I mean, there aren’t that many instances of it. There are probably more movies about it than there are instances. Probably many more movies about it than there are instances.
Walter Kirn: Oh, yeah. When they all pull out guns.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Yeah. There’s probably many more Liam Neeson movies about it than there are instances, but I don’t mind them having Air Marshals. I do mind them just spending hundreds of millions of dollars surveilling American citizens who aren’t even suspected of crimes. That’s what it says in the report also.
Walter Kirn: But, Matt, my common sense, Eastern European peasant mind tells me they were looking for a crime.
Matt Taibbi: Yes.
Walter Kirn: That’s what surveillance is all about, finding something.
Matt Taibbi: So when you get pulled over... This is a classical old Russian joke. When you get pulled over by a cop there and the cop says, “All right, pay me a hundred dollars fine,” the answer is, “For what? Za chto?” And the cop says, “Naydu za chto. I’ll find for what.” And that’s what they’re doing. They’re finding for what. That’s what these surveillance programs do. They endlessly watch people. There is no requirement that you show probable cause or anything like that. They’re just watching. And that’s got to go. That whole thing’s got to go.
It is just like the censorship thing. That’s got to go. All this stuff has to go. And so I think the sentiment of American people as they watch all this stuff, yeah, there’s certainly consternation about this gang of people who are doing things in a completely different way. And some of it may not even be constitutional. I’m not even sure. Well, no. I mean, look, if the courts come in and they say the president actually has to spend every dime that Congress allocates and it can only be undone by Congress, I don’t know how I feel about that. I think as a president-
Walter Kirn: Matt, I’ve read some analyses of this. It’s already moot. The Republican Congress is not going to insist on this. The judiciary is going to be left out one out of three with a Congress that doesn’t care and a Republican president who’s doing something else, and it’s not going to work for them to hold up the whole deal versus two other branches of government. It’s not a long-term strategy. But aside from this whole argument over efficiency and cutting and so on, there’s a couple of things I wanted to get to about your testimony yesterday, because we’ve now moved past censorship to, like I said the other week, sponsorship.
We’ve seen the way in which... There’s a big budget for shutting people up, but there’s an even bigger budget for getting people to say what you want. And between the two, they’ve defined the role of information in society as getting people to do what the government wants all at the same time and as big numbers as possible. That’s their goal, apparently. And that to them is what they call our democracy. So in that hearing, which should be about an issue that they care so much about, you as the critic, as the skeptic, as the gadfly, as the investigator of the excesses were asked but one question.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, one question, and the question was, “Is Congress part of government?” And I was like, “Yes,” and then, “Reclaiming my time.” That was it.
Walter Kirn: And in what context did they ask you this?
Matt Taibbi: Well, I think they were trying to make a point that they... In order to not have me answer the question, they moved to Craig Aaron, the Democratic witness and asked him-
Walter Kirn: You mean they asked it and you didn’t even get to answer it?
Matt Taibbi: I answered my part. And then they moved to him and said, “Is the president part of government?” And what they’re trying to say is that when the president sues... I think the question was about suing media companies. And this was part of a long list of things that they were identifying as censorship that are not censorship. It’s not censorship when the government shuts down its own website. When it cuts programs that have certain words in it, that’s not censorship either. When you have your credentials taken away... And I said this to the members in Congress because they phrased it as, “Is it okay when the president bars somebody from reporting?” That’s right. I did get asked that as well. Okay. And I said, “Barred how?” And they were talking about the AP thing. They got their credentials revoked. And I’m like, “I’m not really sympathetic to reporters who whine about having their credentials revoked. I come from independent media where they don’t give me credentials.”
Walter Kirn: Right, right.
Matt Taibbi: “We’re supposed to be on the outside.”
Walter Kirn: We couldn’t even get into the damn Democratic convention.
Matt Taibbi: Right. Yeah, exactly. That’s not censorship either. That’s just, “Deal with it.” And they kept talking about the threatening atmosphere where Trump is saying all these things like, blah, blah, blah. This is from a committee that threatened to put me in jail or Democrats, and I certainly didn’t stop reporting because part of the job is to ignore threats. If you’re afraid of a president saying these people should lose their license or whatever it is, you shouldn’t be in journalism. You’re a pussy. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say that. You should not be in journalism if you’re intimidated by the President of the United States.
Walter Kirn: But with the other hand, they’re reserving the right to shut people up about Covid vaccine injuries and other things. The basis of their argument in the Supreme Court against Bhattacharyya and Kulldorff, et cetera, is that the president has a right to speech too. And somehow that means a right to censor speech. They actually argued for it.
Matt Taibbi: No, they argued that that was the bully pulpit. And this didn’t come up yesterday. I wanted to talk about this.
Walter Kirn: It’s not called the pussy pulpit.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, exactly.
Walter Kirn: It’s the bully pulpit.
Matt Taibbi: The bully pulpit is when you get up and you proudly say, “No, that’s wrong.” That’s not when you go underground and you reach around to the source of information and yank it out without being detected so nobody can see you. That’s cowardly. That’s not the bully pulpit. Anyway, but the hearing was very frustrating because it was a prime example of everything we’re talking about where they don’t want to engage on any of this stuff. They don’t have an answer for it.
Walter Kirn: They pretended the issue didn’t exist, yet they all showed up to talk about it.
Matt Taibbi: Exactly.
Walter Kirn: How listened to did you feel?
Matt Taibbi: Oh, not at all. They don’t listen. They show up. They give their speeches and they leave.
Walter Kirn: Okay. That was what I was told, because I’m an innocent. I’m the little match girl. I’ve just wandered onto the field as far as congressional hearings go. The first one I went to was the best attended one ever, the RFK thing. And I was told later by RFK’s son that, “Walt, you saw a black swan here.”
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, exactly.
Walter Kirn: “All the senators stayed the whole time.” And I said, “What do you mean they stayed the whole time? They don’t usually?” He says, “Well, a lot of times they don’t show up at all. But also they usually just show up to give their spiel, and then they leave.”
Matt Taibbi: Yes.
Walter Kirn: And the little boy scout in me went, “What?” Frank Capra, Jimmy Stewart dope, though he used to be a hero... I think we’re dopey if we don’t realize these things now. And he said, “Yeah, they don’t even attend their own hearings.” And as a linguistic patrolman, which is my job now, even more than a journalist, I will say, we should change the name from congressional hearings to congressional tellings.
Matt Taibbi: Yes, that’s right. Yeah.
Walter Kirn: Because they don’t listen.
Matt Taibbi: No, they don’t listen. And yeah, what you saw was a very rare phenomenon where the members all stay. In fact, even my first hearing on the Twitter files, the members mostly stayed because what they were there to do was make us look like jerks. So that was supposed to be a tag team effort. Normally, even for purely functional hearings, like Rules Committee hearings, they just show up when they have to vote or they have to make a statement. And I understand that because they’re pressed for time, frankly. There isn’t a lot of time to do the job, but-
Walter Kirn: Just to be an innocent here, what are they pressed for time about? Because they have to go meet with donors or what’s going on?
Matt Taibbi: Donors, lobbyists, yeah. I mean, constituents. There is a lot of stuff they do. They also-
Walter Kirn: School groups.
Matt Taibbi: Yes, but especially the ones who do investigations. Some of them actually want to sit in on the interviews and stuff like that. I mean, it’s legit. I think they work pretty hard while they’re there. But the things that you see at a hearing, like the one I was at, it’s so obnoxious because they show up, they read a speech that’s been written for them by an aide. They don’t engage on the material at all, and then they walk away. And it’s a parody of government, especially when it’s an important issue. It’s just very frustrating.
Walter Kirn: It’s what the British call mummery, a mum show, a Christmas pageant where everybody just shows up in the sort of most basic costume representing their character. “I’m an angel. Look at my halo.” “I’m a socialist. Look at my wagging finger.”
Matt Taibbi: Right, right.
Walter Kirn: “I’m a puritanical scold from Harvard, and my name is Elizabeth Warren.” And they just put on the least amount of costume to play their role. They play it minimally. They read the lines without memorizing them, and then they go... I mean, movie people work harder, way harder.
Matt Taibbi: Well, yeah, especially if they can’t deliver their lines well. But no, it was amazing. The only part of this that I wanted to show was at the very end that there’s a Texas congresswoman named Jasmine Crockett, who gave an address that was just yelling at us that was so freaky that I had to pinch myself to make sure that I was at the right hearing. But you can just hear what she says.
Jasmine Crockett: ... stop the Second Amendment and say that it is limitless. Nor do we pick out the First Amendment and say that it is limitless. The thing about the Constitution is that it has always been a balancing test. There are limits to this. And right now what we continue to hear from a certain side of the aisle is that there are no limits to this lawlessness. In fact, there are limits. And I can tell you that one of those limits typically is around hate crimes.
You may or may not know that when it comes down to it, if somebody decides that they want to send something hateful in say the US mail, they can actually go to prison for that up to five years in prison. So yes, there are always going to be limits. So when we start to talk about Trump and him being pulled down on any platform, this just happened to be after he incited an insurrection. This just happened to be after in a bipartisan way, this particular chamber decided that they were going to impeach him. So there was something a little different about what he did because as we know, it led to people actually dying. But let’s talk about who’s doing the nefarious things with the tech giants.
Matt Taibbi: Here we go. Here comes the placard.
Jasmine Crockett: Because I don’t think that one side of the aisle is promoting truth, but sometimes it may seem a little treasonous. All right, so we’ve got this article right here about this guy. Meta says it will end its fact-checking program on social media-
Matt Taibbi: She doesn’t know who Mark Zuckerberg is.
Jasmine Crockett: ... posts. I’ll talk about that a little bit later. Then we have Washington Post says, “It will not endorse a candidate for president.” We also know that actually they absolutely intended to endorse Kamala Harris.
Matt Taibbi: What does this have to do with this?
Jasmine Crockett: Yeah, this one. Google Maps now show Gulf of America instead of Gulf of Mexico for app users in the United States, which is a complete farce because it’s the Gulf of Mexico. It always has been. And we know that the AP got kicked out yesterday because they refused to buy into this lie because that’s all y’all really want to promote is lie.
Matt Taibbi: She’s looking right at me while she’s thinking all y’all want to promote.
Jasmine Crockett: Elon Musk boosts a false USA conspiracy theories to shut down global aid. Now, while he was boosting-
Matt Taibbi: Now watch all the hand movements
Jasmine Crockett: ... lies about USAID and he was stopping money going for say things such as Head Start, somehow the only money that didn’t stop with the money to him and his organization. Now, I don’t know how you can have him be the watchdog as well as the guy that is literally living off of the government. If we want to talk about government welfare, it looks like Elon Musk because it’s my understanding that just on yesterday, a new contract was approved for approximately $300 million for Elon Musk. So listen, I just want y’all to be honest. You want to sit here, you want to lie because so often we hear, well, yeah, we did lie. In fact, he admitted that he lied when he was in the Oval Office yesterday. But if it’s a lie that will get you into office, such as saying, I know nothing about Project 2025, yet on day one, you literally do everything that you can to implement it, including making sure that you put say one of the main architects of Project 2025 over the OMB, it’s okay so long as you get the power that you seek.
The problem is that the game is going to be on the American people. And when I say the American people, I mean all of us. Unfortunately, I am also stuck in the Twilight Zone because of the lies that were allowed to be propagated. Just like when you’re talking about vaccines and all this nonsense. Right now in my state of Texas, there is an outbreak of measles. And what they are finding is that because there’s been so much disinformation about vaccines that kids are sick right now with measles that they did not have to have if they just trusted doctors and experts instead of randoms online. So I will end by saying this Mr. Chairman, because I know we believe in Jesus in this chamber.
Matt Taibbi: What?
Jasmine Crockett: In John 8 and 32, it says, “The truth shall set you free.” So maybe we should focus on a little bit of truth in this chamber.
Matt Taibbi: Okay. Okay. I’m sorry to put you through that, but I had to sit through it.
Walter Kirn: You had to put us through that. You had to put our audience through that because putting people through it is what it was all about. That was like when they played bad music at Guantanamo just to drive you... No, it was.
Matt Taibbi: And you couldn’t see it, but her glasses were glittery.
Walter Kirn: Matt, I saw that too. There was no... Okay. I mean, obviously there was no logic to it. Was it a combination of written? Had she rehearsed it? It was like a toilet overflowing. And then you find out about all these things that in your sewer that you didn’t know about. Like, oh, here comes a yo-yo, oh a Bible. Oh, vaccine, cyber trucks. It was just like watching a sewer back up or something. But they were doing that, I promise you, as a psychological torture technique, both for the poor people who are watching, but mostly for you going like, this is what you get for coming up here and believing in the system. You get this strange show that has nothing to do with sense, nothing to do with logic. And I saw it at the RFK hearings. Those are really consequential and they pulled that same stuff.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, it’s a stunt, but it shows-
Walter Kirn: It’s a sonic weapon. You now have Havana syndrome. Matt, if you notice that you can’t think and you’re starting to get bad headaches, it’s because they did that to you.
Matt Taibbi: And I made the mistake of trying to follow everything that she was talking about. So I was like, okay, wait, is she talking about USAID here? Because then I thought she was saying USAID was investing in Elon or whatever it was. But the most amazing part is that the one reference she made to having listened to the hearing was about what I had said about vaccines. And what I had said was that Alex Berenson, the New York Times reporter, had been taken down after White House pressure because he had said that the vaccine doesn’t prevent transmission or infection, which is true, right? In her mind, that becomes internet randos saying that. You should listen to doctors instead of internet randos.
Walter Kirn: Matt, are you sending money to the kids in Texas who have measles, whose parents can’t afford medical care?
Matt Taibbi: I guess I should have.
Walter Kirn: You gave it to them. Okay. As I say, it was a torture technique. It absolutely was. But no one on her staff tells her, you just made a fool out of yourself. Presumably those are smart people. In other words, this is a complete masquerade. And Matt, the reason we love you so much and America loves you is that you use vast amounts of your precious creativity coming up with excuses for these people and reasonable explanations for their behavior.
Whereas I just work back from the worst case scenario, and I don’t really work back very far. And I just go like what you saw if you were an alien was what that was about. It was a bunch of freaking crazy yelling that was to make you never want to go before Congress, never want people to see Congress. Think about it. And it was also in a weird way a reproach to your intelligence. In other words, you go up there, you give an opening statement. That’s the thing I saw at the RFK thing. The witness in these things are so careful, they’re so respectful. Good morning, Madam Chairman or whatever you say, and I have a short statement and you read it. And even if it’s peppery, it shows a of respect for the system that they don’t themselves show.
Matt Taibbi: It’s funny, I was thinking about that exact thought because my opening line was going to be, I prepared a polite version of this speech and an impolite one and then put the polite one to the side. And I was going to say I would’ve torn it up, but I was raised by parents, not by the former speaker of this house, and I decided not to do that because I thought that would be too rude. But then she went and tore something in the middle of the address.
Walter Kirn: But that’s an acting trick too. They injected the meme of the Democrat tearing up the documents when Nancy Pelosi did it at Trump’s State of the Union. So now it’s one of the thing that their acting troops does. You can take off your glasses, you can wag your finger, you can tear something up. You can use the words oligarchy. But the thing I hated most, and I saw it again there was that putting up of these placards. Remember when Ross Perot used to do chalk talks, he’d try to explain how NAFTA would injure the US economy.
And he actually things that made sense, that placard with weird comic book thought bubbles coming out of photographs of people that weren’t even really that recognizable and that she didn’t even know the identities of. That is bad childhood theater. It is not meant to convey any information of the useful kind. It’s spectacle. It’s what the Marxist theorist Dee DeBoard called the Society of the Spectacle. And it’s crap spectacle. Yeah. Give us a spectacle that means something. That feels like something. It’s entertaining. There is no more dickless energy than is felt by the congressional aide who has to put up that stupid placard.
Matt Taibbi: Well, it was probably that aide’s idea. Well, maybe not in that case.
Walter Kirn: I think they draw lots for who has to be the farm animal who carries the placard.
Matt Taibbi: It’s true. It’s true. The lowest in the totem pole is the one who has to do those kinds of jobs. But anyway, that was crazy. And the problem is when you’re a witness, you might be asked the question about anything that they say. So you have to pay attention.
Walter Kirn: Exactly. They might trip you up by breaking out of one of their sewer backup tirade to ask some question and you’re like, I’m sorry, I was thinking about making dinner tonight and not having a migraine while you were talking.
Matt Taibbi: Right? Yeah. No, but I guess next time I do that, and maybe that’s what I should do, instead of trying to pay attention to that.
Walter Kirn: Oh, you expected me to listen to that?
Matt Taibbi: I did.
Walter Kirn: Oh, sorry.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, I’m sorry. Can repeat the question please. Reclaim your time. Anyway, it was crazy, but interesting day. Is Kennedy confirmed? Can we check that?
Walter Kirn: Let’s check. Yes. Senate confirms Kennedy, a prominent vaccine skeptic as Health Secretary.
Matt Taibbi: Oh, okay. All right.
Walter Kirn: They always need that clause, that little... The attack clause, world’s richest man, prominent vaccine skeptic, bad husband.
Matt Taibbi: The Senate confirms Kennedy, douche bag we hate as Health Secretary, we should just do the not-New York Times. Can we do that?
Walter Kirn: Oh, yes.
Matt Taibbi: That would be awesome.
Walter Kirn: There’s so much we could do.
Matt Taibbi: Just do those headlines. That would be fantastic.
Walter Kirn: Well, let me look at the small... Oh, I wanted to see the smaller subheading because there’s got to be some character assassination in there.
Matt Taibbi: Oh no, that’s pretty decent.
Walter Kirn: Where his father and uncle once served as Democrats.
Matt Taibbi: Sheryl Gay Stolberg, have some feelings about that reporter. But anyway, interesting. But we don’t have time to talk about unfortunately.
Walter Kirn: But I will say just for a sense of closure, because I’ve talked about being, there was some real suspense about whether it was going to happen.
Matt Taibbi: For sure.
Walter Kirn: There really was. And the thing I heard over and over from the people in the know was that maybe he’d get through, but Tulsi was going be the sacrificial lamb. I think I heard that a thousand times.
Matt Taibbi: I heard that a thousand times too.
Walter Kirn: Tulsi, The Sacrificial Lamb, which is another reason to not trust the press because when you get around these events and then you hear the inside dope, it’s always wrong.
Matt Taibbi: I’m starting to realize that the rumors that you hear are just as scripted as the headlines. And I don’t think that was true even five years ago. This is a new thing. So anyway, fascinating stuff. We will get to RFK and there’s some other folks that are up for confirmations, but Tulsi, congratulations. I think it’s a great thing. It’s such a fuck you to the intelligence community and to the war on terror machinery and to the censors, to the people who tried to label who a Russian stooge using the freaking Hamilton 68 and everything. They all deserve it. They deserve this moment. And it’s a beautiful thing.
Walter Kirn: And let me just note, one trend that others probably have missed. Of the very few top line cabinet members who have now been confirmed, all many are fitness addicts. Pete Hegseth, we just saw the other day working out with the Special Forces dudes in Germany. RFK, world’s fittest 71-year-old or whatever. And Tulsi, who I know from a friend who works out at the same gym with her, is the most kick ass, step aside, Jillian Michaels. I’m going to freaking do it with everything you do, only holding a gun.
Matt Taibbi: She’s one of the few people I’ve ever interviewed who I actually do fear of being beaten up by the interviewee. I mean, there’s a few folks that I’ve talked to over the years. Jesse Ventura is another one who scared the crap out of me, but Tulsi’s a little intimidating in person, I have to say. All right, awesome stuff. Thanks, Walter. And let’s take a break before we do a very special short story by a great author and we’ll be right back.
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All right, so we’re doing... This portion of the show where we do a short story is usually about sort of recoiling from the real world and trying to look at things that are completely disconnected from what we’ve been talking about. But in this case, we want to use a story by our own Walter Kirn who published on Substack Angel Fire. And I’ve been thinking about this story in the last couple of days, and I think it’s both an excellent story and really thought-provoking and fun, but also very I think apropos of the moment. It’s called Angel Fire. Walter, I’m afraid to do it justice. I mean, I’ve obviously read some of your books before. I haven’t read everything, but I’m really curious to hear your thought process and hear what you were thinking as you wrote the story. Because this was 2023 when you wrote this, right?
Walter Kirn: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Matt Taibbi: And it seems pretty clearly to be about some of the topics that we’ve been talking about.
Walter Kirn: Yes.
Matt Taibbi: But it’s a fascinating journey and it also, it describes something, a mental process that I personally feel like I go through all the time, but I hadn’t thought about previously.
Walter Kirn: Which is?
Matt Taibbi: Well, it’s this whole idea of moving from one reality to the next. As one thing falls away, you get a new set of conditions. And especially in recent times as we’ve been disabused of our illusions, but we have to go through the story first. Do you want to tell people about Angel Fire?
Walter Kirn: Sure. Having written that I am in some ways the best person to talk about it and the worst, but-
Matt Taibbi: I think this is awesome. This is such a privilege to be able to do this. I’m really excited. We don’t get to interview Mark Twain or any of those folks, so this is going to be really cool.
Walter Kirn: Well, first of all, to defend the fact that it was published on a lot of good literature published on Substack these days. This is not a story of which for various reasons would’ve probably been bought by the New Yorker or the very few mainstream publications.
Matt Taibbi: I thought that too.
Walter Kirn: Published story. I didn’t even bother sending it to any of those places because it does have to do with a lot of the themes of artificiality, deception, censorship, state control that we talk about here. It was also my first experiment in science fiction.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, I was going to say, it’s so different because I was thinking about loss in meritocracy where people who are used to your writing, you have such a personable, accessible voice that sort of grounded in experience that we’ve all had. And this you have to do a completely different thing. I’m sorry, go ahead. I interrupted.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, well, no, it’s interesting to hear about myself. Mark Twain said the problem with compliments is that they never go far enough. His problem with compliments, they never go far enough. Tell me more. So I published it there because I figured that my audience for it was preselected to maybe understand or at least be interested in the themes. Here’s the story as it works. The setup is that at some point in the future, a man kind of a thug is in a prison. In the future, virtual reality is used to imprison people. We don’t incarcerate them in big penitentiaries. We let them go into a fantasy world and then into a kind of almost like medical semi-comatose state in which they’re in virtual reality. We matrixize them and it is used as a penal technology. And inside this prison, serving out his term for crimes we aren’t sure.
Matt Taibbi: Crimes of violence.
Walter Kirn: Crimes of violence. He creates an Arthurian sort of magical sword and sorcerer’s world in which violence is done by knights. And there are people sitting around a big table eating roast birds and roast beef and clanking people in armor. And the crow that hangs in a cage over the feasting round table is called Angel Fire.
Matt Taibbi: And it’s a golden cage. But go ahead. I’m sorry.
Walter Kirn: But yeah. But what’s important about this fantasy world to which he’s been sentenced is that it’s his own. He’s not been forced to live in someone else’s. He’s been allowed to create out of his own subconscious and experiences, his own fantasy world. And rehabilitation in this new kind of penal system consists of you making this world, this computerized world. You learn the programming, you do everything. And for doing it well, you earn tokens kind of like a cryptocurrency that-
Matt Taibbi: Recoins.
Walter Kirn: Yeah. Yeah. Recoins. So in the same way that prisoners who have been in for 15 years actually can come out with some money from having made license plates for 15 cents an hour, this guy has been developing an account of cryptocurrency through the construction of his Arthurian fantasy world. Anyway, one day he gets out of prison, which means he literally wakes up in the chair. They pull him out of the whatever, medical virtual reality coma, and he’s in a world. He doesn’t know much time has passed, he doesn’t know where he is, and he’s expected to adjust. Now the question is always what’s the outside world going to be like? And maybe it’s after we did Rip Van Winkle I think that I wrote this because it’s a Rip Van Winkle story. He’s been living in his dream world. What’s it like out there? And he comes back and I think I set it in the suburbs of Salt Lake City. That’s where-
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Am I back in Utah?
Walter Kirn: Yeah, yeah. He’s in Utah. And what’s the world like? Well, it’s very drab. The chief thing about the world is that it’s kind of a socialized gray, not particularly lively world, but most importantly, fantasy has been banned. Something has happened while this guy has been in prison that has caused a kind of prohibition to be enacted. And we don’t know how long it’s been going on, but you’re no longer allowed to be a gamer. You’re no longer allowed to have fantasy and virtual reality and so on. Is it a fascist world? Was there some disaster where people stopped working? Did it turn into idiocracy because everybody was just sort of living out pointless dreams. But in any case, it’s a gray world in which fantasy has been outlawed.
Matt Taibbi: I love the way you described this. He’s being told by somebody, amusement is one thing. We all need relaxation. But fully exiting the cognitive commons just vanishing down your private little dream hole is something society realizes just can’t tolerate. So you’re not allowed to disappear. You have to stay in this literal world.
Walter Kirn: Which in some ways, to me was one logical progression of this horrible control state we’re in, where they go, we’re going to ultimately outlaw your ability to have your own fantasies. We’re going to realize that you’re getting out of the cognitive infrastructure. A phrase we used to satirize on this show. You’re getting out of the consensus, science-based reality if you can just go and live in your little warlocks and witches worlds. So enforced participation in the consensus has led to this incredibly drab world. And now, back in Plato’s time, man, I love talking about my own work.
Matt Taibbi: This is great.
Walter Kirn: Back in Plato’s time, Plato actually felt that poets and fantasists and dramatists were danger to the state because they were silly, basically. And they kept people from serious business and they kept people from being thinkers and citizens and so on.
Matt Taibbi: Exactly.
Walter Kirn: He thought that they should be banned. And we also see that in Orwell, there’s not much mention of entertainment in 1984.
Matt Taibbi: But there’s like a porn-like entertainment for the proles, basically.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, yeah, exactly, low level. And there are a lot of movies and conversations we had here. Clockwork Orange is also about a kind of guy who through violence is trying to feel something in a totalitarian state, and they take it out of him. But anyway, so the hero is wandering through this gray landscape in which fantasy has been outlawed, in which you can only be a part of the consensus. And he finds around a corner a little cafe, which celebrates the old way, a bookstore.
Matt Taibbi: The Orbiter.
Walter Kirn: The Orbiter, which is sort of if you found an adult bookstore in an upright city, that’s kind of what it’s like. And inside they have old GameCubes and role-playing games and Dungeons and Dragons, and he recognizes he gets the hit of the world he left when he went into this matrix-cold storage, and it’s people playing games, it’s people playing, people having ideas, people having fun, people imagining themselves in roles other than the one the state assigns them. And so he gets a job there.
Matt Taibbi: The guy’s Olly, right?
Walter Kirn: Right, right. There’s Olly and you’re not sure, I think as you read the story, whether this place is for real or kind of a trap for the laggards of society who haven’t gotten with the program, but he goes upstairs and in the attic where all the old fantasy books and games and board games and card decks and so are stored. He finds himself, again, back in that world, before the great expurgation, before censorship of the playful mind took place.
But one night, a roving band of sort of brown shirts or moral guardians come knowing that this Orbiter Cafe where unreconstructed fantasists hangs out is a threat. And they try to burn it down. And he notices a guy who’s kind of... They’re like the John Birch Society or the moral majority or whatever they might be trying to stamp out the last vestiges of playfulness. And he’s just finally found a home. And this guy he sees running away, wants to burn it down. And then we realize, oh, this is a brute. This is a guy who is in for violence. Now he wants to kill or hurt again.
And so the story ends with him waiting for that sort of lout or bully boy to come in because that guy also, he’s like a repressed gay man or something. He comes to the Orbiter, but then he also is against fantasy and beats people up. He’s like a self-hating gamer or something, and he follows the guy out at the end of the story. And I try to give you the sense... I guess I should let you tell me what you think the ending means, that a cycle is going to begin again, a cycle that we never escape really, and is maybe our condition.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. It says, “Ben waited a minute, then followed him outside from this world to that world, whatever it proved to be, something inside him prayed it was the last.” So you get the sense he’s obviously going to go commit an act of violence against this Tim guy. Is that right?
Walter Kirn: Yes. Yeah. He’s going to go, and because the notion that I had was this really a story about reincarnation in life, how you go from one reality to the other. He went from this virtual reality imprisonment in his own fantasy world to this gray world of just facts and seriousness. Then he found his little outpost, his refuge, and now he’s going to go commit a crime that’s going to probably put him back in the virtual reality prison system. But what he means by saying he hoped it was the last-
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, he doesn’t want to go back there.
Walter Kirn: He doesn’t to keep changing. He wants there to be a final ground reality, something we can hold onto instead of just being... The word spin, it sounds cute when used in politics, but if you think about it, spinning is nauseating. It’s nauseating to go from being deceived to finding out, to being deceived, to being... From one reality to the next, never with any place to rest. And I think in some ways the story was about the longing for a bottom line in a world of constant artificiality, where even hardcore reality feels artificial because there’s always the option of the other kind.
Matt Taibbi: Well, but it’s not hardcore reality. It’s managed hardcore reality. And it’s unsatisfying to him because it lacks authenticity. Ultimately, if you don’t have fantasy, if you’re not allowed to disappear completely, that’s not reality. That’s something else. It’s a different kind of prison. And it’s their prison.
Walter Kirn: It’s prison after prison.
Matt Taibbi: It’s prison after prison. Right. Yes. He’s in his own at the beginning, but then he wakes up in everybody else’s that’s been designed for him. So I have a question, your Orbiter Cafe, because it feels a little bit like the Chestnut Tree Cafe in 1984 where Winston is attracted to this place that has... Well, actually that’s not true. Is it like that shop that has the old things that he finds that are genuine from the before times, but it turns out to be just a lore in the end?
Walter Kirn: Right. So it’s all those places, Matt. One of the things about writing short stories is that you get to go into the unconscious cultural layer and personal layer and just play there. And yeah, it’s the Chestnut Tree Cafe in 1984, it’s the bar in Star Wars where they’re all hanging out, it’s the milk bar in-
Matt Taibbi: Right. The Mallorca Bar. Yep.
Walter Kirn: ... Clockwork Orange. Yeah, it’s all those places in movies and literature where people go to be with their own kind and not have to... It’s Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca where you have refuge from the falsity of social expectations, where you can play, where you can fall in love, where you can just be yourself, where you can forget. But in this world it’s probably one of the very only places that’s left.
Matt Taibbi: But it’s not even fully satisfying to him though, is it? Because it’s fully code compliant. It’s a whiff of the satisfying thing, but it’s not the full-blown experience, is it? I don’t know.
Walter Kirn: Well, so in small town America where I love to spend my time, but which is very troubled economically and socially and has been for a long time, the fantasy bookshop, the comic bookshop, or the weird empty storefront that a bunch of guys are renting just for $100 a month and they put tables in there and they all play role-playing games like military games, those are refuges-
Matt Taibbi: That’s true.
Walter Kirn: ... for teenagers and for all kinds of people, single people. I mean, I’m not trying to run them down, but they have a character. They have a feeling. You can go in there and vape and you can play your 10-sided dice game, like comic-con and so on. And that phenomena of America, especially Americans who are in marginal places or don’t have a lot of money, trying to keep up with modernity by having some fantasy refuge really touches me. It’s poignant to me.
Matt Taibbi: Of course, yeah.
Walter Kirn: And I’ve been all over and I’ve seen the value of those places. So I wanted this guy to find a place like that, but in this world even that place doesn’t quite have the authenticity it should. It’s a honey trap or a false portal into normalcy.
Matt Taibbi: So this story makes me think about, frankly, I thought of it again this week because I was in Congress because this new brand of politician has come up that there is no second layer to them. They are completely literal human beings. There’s no nuance, there’s no second hidden character, there’s no inner life. Their outer life is their inner life. And there’s a trend in, I think, American political thought in American culture towards this just hyper literalism, this total hostility towards the fictional, towards the fantastic.
And that’s part of what this war on disinformation is really all about. It’s exactly this whole thing that you’re describing where they’re trying to force you to experience only one thing. And ultimately, the more you do that I think the more people feel like they have to lash out because there is a side to human beings that just will not be herded into that place. It cannot live there. It’s like oxygen. You need the freedom to explore, to think, to pursue things that are paradoxical, untrue, all of that stuff. And if you don’t-
Walter Kirn: Stupid.
Matt Taibbi: ... if you suppress it that’s when you’re going to lash out.
Walter Kirn: Exactly. And so to me one of the human problems that lies behind the issues we discuss on this show is where do people go that they can’t see you, that they can’t flap your fingers, that they can’t censor you, that they can’t give you a name or put you in a anti-social category that they might even criminally punish you for? What is our refuge from this cognitive infrastructure that we’re all supposed to line up and be a part of and this consensus that we’re all supposed to agree with?
And this world in which it’s hesitant. If you’re afraid of taking a shot that you don’t know what’s in it. That’s one of the most basic human fears. I was always afraid of getting a shot at the doctor and now that’s been criminalized. So is it even possible to have an interior self? And I think the story doesn’t weigh in and give a answer to that question because it’s not enigmatic, but it allows, I think, for a multiple set of interpretations, all of which I think are possible answers to the questions I just laid out.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. I mean, I agree. I think, and you mentioned before about how Plato was afraid of artists. And he was right to be afraid because artists or art, humor, all those things are inherently revolutionary. It unleashes the thing inside of you that will not be constrained. Like Winston, in 1984, I forget what it is that he buys, but it’s just some old beautiful thing.
It’s the beauty of it that stirs his human side and makes him unable to keep existing in the artificial environment. In prison, ironically in this story, they allow him to fully explore all of the visions and the mailed fists, all the things that appeal to his aesthetic. And he paid extra for the gold chain that the angel fire raven he keeps to hang from. They allow him to explore all those things in prison, I guess, because-
Walter Kirn: He can’t do anything.
Matt Taibbi: ... he can’t do anything. But it’s almost like in the real world is 1,000 times more cruel. You are not allowed to do that and that deprivation it can only lead to one place, I think. I don’t know. That was what I took away from this story.
Walter Kirn: That’s a really good reading because to me the nightmare of the story is that human beings are given one binary choice about their inner lives. You can be completely floored and completely immersed in your own personal predilections where you dress your own princess and you can make your own body stronger and hang out with elves and giants, but you have to be basically semi comatose in an armchair or you can be in the world and be in a-
Matt Taibbi: That’s so true, right?
Walter Kirn: ... a complete panopticon where every word, everything and every color is totally policed for the purposes of the cognitive emperor’s rules.
Matt Taibbi: The collective cognitive community or whatever. What was it called? The cognitive commons.
Walter Kirn: And the hell of that to me is that in each one you’re going to want the other after a while. After a while immersed in your own Arthurian made up game space, getting money for dressing your own alter ego, you’re going to want to be able to have a cup of coffee and walk across the street and see a bird, an actual bird, not a fantasy bird, but after a while when you get in that real world and it’s drained of color and it’s drained of volition, and you can be seen anywhere, and I wrote it during COVID, at the end of COVID, and the idea that people were turning into narcs on each other.
I had a friend who owned a restaurant and the restaurant had to face this big fine because somebody came in, ordered a bunch of pizzas, when they got the pizzas, they said, “I just noticed your cook back...” Their gourmet pizzas, “... isn’t wearing a mask, so you won’t be charging me for these pizzas.” And they took them away, and then they called the freaking health department after eating the pizzas of the place that they were claiming is unhealthy.
And I was like, “What if that world just went out of control?” Everybody is, “He’s squeezing fruit. Oh, he’s four feet away, not six feet away. I saw his tweet about vaccines. He’s afraid to take the booster.” And I just went, “Let’s just take that world.” But in that world where you can feel the wind on your face and you can walk along and you can have a cup of coffee and taste dessert, even that it’s so heavily policed would cause you ultimately to want out again.
Matt Taibbi: No, it’s miserable.
Walter Kirn: And the only way this guy can get from one world to the other is violence.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. There’s going to be a release in that moment and it’ll reset the frustration a little bit. But yeah, no, the relentless sense of being watched it’s incredibly oppressive. If there is no place to go we’ve weeded out the eccentricities that were once allowed. You used to be allowed even to be a prominent politician and have a religion that was not completely in accordance with everybody else’s beliefs, that it might be eccentric according to some people.
There are all kinds of things, eccentricities that were once tolerated, now not really. As you say, you either, you have have to indulge in those quietly in a sterile setting at home or you have to abandon everything and go into the real world and abide by a pretty narrow set of conditions that is just inherently unsatisfying. People need their legends, they need their weirdnesses, and they need them to be private too.
Walter Kirn: And they need them to be their own just because they’re their own. I mean, the last thing I’ll say is from doing the short story segment on this show, and I’m so flattered because I didn’t ask you to do this. It really means a lot to me-
Matt Taibbi: No.
Walter Kirn: ... that you suggested it. And by the way, the stories I’ll put the link and it’s free on my sub stack. But I will say this, in the stories we read, there’s kind of an alternation. You read Poe’s stories or Sherlock Holmes stories are these heavy on atmosphere stories and they just feel like such a refuge from this world we’re always talking about-
Matt Taibbi: Exactly.
Walter Kirn: ... of the Digital Services Act and hearings where they yell at you for having an opinion. And so we often go back and forth between those fantasy stories or those interesting trick ending or funny stories like by Saki and so on. But then we also had done especially more toward the COVID time a lot of dystopian stories. And there seems to be a basic pairing there. And you see it in the two most well-known dystopian novels. In 1984 there’s no escape. Everything’s gray, the liquor’s bad, the cigarettes are tasteless, the streets are drab. There’s no outlet. Now that’s Wawel’s form of prison. Then we have Aldous Huxley’s earlier book written in the late ‘20s in which prison was described as everybody being kind of like gaga on drugs and just living in fancy-
Matt Taibbi: Soma.
Walter Kirn: ... dream worlds. And in the book the contrast is that there’s one guy who lives outside the city, the savage who wants to live in the woods. But in other words, Huxley said, the danger is you’re all going to be entertained to death and live in this completely pointless world in which even reproduction has been automated. So you won’t even have the reality of that.
You’re going to live completely drugged in the matrix. And Orwell says it’s going to be like a sort of eastern European city writ large with just nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, and punishment will be rats eating your eyeballs or whatever you fear most. So we have that. And I said, you know what? It’s more likely to be both. You’ll alternate between the state of deprivation for creativity and just complete masturbatory idiocracy in my own-
Matt Taibbi: Your own conception, your own private... That’s what the internet is, you’ve constructed your own reality and you enjoy it. But it’s not real and you’re in there in the same way that he’s in his prison in the beginning, and then you have to click it off and go into the real world which is now unsatisfying in a different way. But I think this whole short story segment that we do, Walter, you and I both share this as kids probably growing up.
Our whole idea of fantasy and exiting the confusing parts of life and dealing with stresses growing up, and even as an adult, if you connect with literature what you do is you disappear for a while into the streets that Conan Doyle describes in a Sherlock Holmes story. You forget completely where you are. That’s the whole beauty of it. These authors understand that longing to disappear and so they create something that will always bring you to that place no matter how far in the future you go, Saki’s lunch parties, right? Exactly.
Walter Kirn: So for you, Matt, whatever that age was when you start needing this it’s maybe when you start realizing your parents now have great marriage. There’s a lot of reasons why people go to literature, and not just children’s books, but where you can read the more complex stories that come to us through history. What was your favorite vibe or venue or atmosphere?
Matt Taibbi: I mean, it was totally random that it had a major impact on my life, but I had family problems when I was in adolescence. And for some reason I read the story that we did on the show once how Muzhik fed two officials and I got really attracted to this world of old St. Petersburg and Tsarist Russia, and I just liked the aesthetics of it. So I just started reading all those stories and that became my medieval castle for this guy.
I just went back there over and over and over again. I ended up living in the place because I loved it so much and I studied there. And if things had been different I mean I might’ve chosen to live in LA because I became addicted to Raymond Chandler’s novels later on. But you need that, you need it as much as you need affection, food, anything else. Your brain needs that kind of nourishment to stay healthy
Walter Kirn: And in a healthy society you’re able to, just using your example, read as a kid. There’s trouble at home. There’s trouble in my home too. Maybe a lot of reading comes down to trying to shut out that stuff. So you’re feeling this romantic thing about the streets of Imperial Russia or the snow, the sleighs going by.
Matt Taibbi: Exactly.
Walter Kirn: The drunken soldiers marching along, the card games, the aristocrats speaking French, all those wonderfully-
Matt Taibbi: Pistols at Dawn.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, Pistols at Dawn, duels, and beautiful aristocratic, unreachable women who then meet you somewhere else and you go, “I have to live it out.” See, that is to me, healthy society. And then you grow up and you become Matt Taibbi and you move to Russia that’s very different than the one of your imagination, but also the same place. And you find it and you find a way to engage with it, which is as a reporter and as a chronicler and just a guy getting around and finding stuff out, a little bit of a spy, and that creates Matt Taibbi.
In other words, that dialectic between our fantasies and our decisions in our real life is what makes us who we are. And to me, the disaster is that we’re never able to find out the fantasy self, let alone apply it in the real world to become the three-dimensional being. And that’s why the issues that we talk about here get me so worked up and excited. And I’ll fly around and make a fool about myself and lose friends over them because what I’m really trying to defend is not just freedom of speech or something in the constitution. I’m trying to defend the right to be human in the way I understand it.
Matt Taibbi: That’s exactly right. And what this story does like all dystopian literature it describes when that contract is broken what that looks like, the horror of it. And I think it’s perfectly described this moment where you’re trapped, you’re oscillating and endlessly between two worlds that don’t quite work. That’s how reality is structured now in America. And I was thinking about this a lot during this week because, again, Washington has become this hyper literal, it’s like that gray horrible place that you described in the story. It’s just dreary. And the people are shallow. There’s nothing behind them. And it doesn’t work. You got to encourage the merging of this thing more and they haven’t done it.
Walter Kirn: And it’s not just important on an individual basis. What they really have wrong is that it’s important on a social basis. It’s where our creativity comes from. It’s where our drive and energy comes from. It’s where if you want to be really analytic about it, economic activity comes from because Matt, on the basis of your fantasy you have created a profession for yourself, work for others, reading material for your culture, political-
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, I was even a translator for people for over a time.
Walter Kirn: And all that came out of the silliness of reading that story and hearing the sleigh bells and the drunken shouts of soldiers in the street and wanting to be there.
Matt Taibbi: And Woody Allen, you ever see Love and Death? Obviously when-
Walter Kirn: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Matt Taibbi: The same thing clearly was part of his youth because he fantasizes literally about sleeping with Anna Karenina in the movie and it’s a romp where somebody who grew up loving all these stories does his own comic interpretation of returning to those worlds and everything, and it’s a beautiful thing. And a developed, grown up person who still has an attachment to his probably kid-like reaction to all this stuff it’s gorgeous when they do it well. And that’s kind of sad, is that I think we’ve fallen out of touch with the encouraging that in people, and we’ve made people scared to expose their inner whatever to the world.
Walter Kirn: And we’ve put everybody in a category. There’s two things I want to say for anybody who’s a writer in the audience. Despite this long discussion and these big themes and apparently these elegant ways in which I imagined them and put them into fiction, you write a story like this largely unconsciously and then you examine it to see if what am I writing about? It’s like doing a self-analysis. You go, “why did I have this idea? Why did this association come to mind? What am I really doing here?”
It’s not like you write an outline. “I’m going to write a story about the alternation between dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, and the suppression of the self.” No, you don’t. It comes out of doing this show too much, reading the things we read, COVID, things. And the fantasy world that I gave my character is the opposite of mine. Dude, swords and sorcerers send me running. Game of Thrones, didn’t watch five minutes. That’s the op. But for him and for people as I walk down the streets of Butte, Montana or whatever, and see these young guys, young girls going into spend the evening drinking Red Bull and playing some fantasy war game I’m like, “God bless them.”
Matt Taibbi: Yep. Yep. No, it’s great. We highly recommend. And it’s always been in the back of my mind we should do a Walter Kirn story sometime, and I’m really glad we were able to do it. And for people who want an introduction to your fiction work I think this is interesting because it’s not like a lot of your other writing which is also terrific.
Walter Kirn: My first book was a book of short stories, and they were about downbeat stories about farmers in the Midwest and Mormon kids who were trapped in difficult family situations and so on. But it was the first time I said, “I’m going to write science fiction.” In other words, I’m going to use the toolkit of imagining different worlds to make my point. And I really liked it. So anybody who wants to read it and get in touch with me on Twitter and talk about it, you can.
Matt Taibbi: That’d be awesome. Excellent. Highly encourage it. Thanks, Walter, for talking about it, and we will see you next week.
Walter Kirn: See you then.
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