Episode 32: "America This Week," with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn

Dictators don't leave office because they know that if they do, their successor is going to find some reason to throw them in the hole. Or worse, right? Which is why, in countries where we have aspirations to less horrific means of transferring power, we tend not to cook up pretextual prosecutions of our political opponents. Because we sort of want to encourage them to feel like they can leave power without it.

You know, becoming unsafe. And it resulted in this string of denunciations from, among other things, celebrities. As though as if this were a new idea. Isn't this an old idea? isn't this something that's...?

I mean, I don't know, I think you're absolutely, first of all, you're absolutely right. Who wants to leave office to walk into the hands of any number of prosecutors and local prosecutors? But, worse, who is going to run for office that is so confident that they might not face this, they might not face this treatment afterward. Not only would you have to be inhumanly clean and inhumanly popular with all those who you might fear would go after you, you'd have to be insane.

And I don't know that this dinky prosecution, whatever it's based on, you know, we don't know what the indictment is.

It begins with this all out media assault about Trump that just never ends. It's like the ceaseless campaign that people hear about him and began hearing about him. I guess in this in the first months of 2016, when it suddenly became not OK for, you know, mourning Joe to interview him. Remember that moment when Trump stopped being funny and the sort of MSNBC intelligentsia suddenly decided that, you know, he was Hitler and he couldn't be appeased?

But that constant messaging that people got, that this is a different creature, this Trump is not a regular politician, we have to think about him in a completely different way. So, therefore, you know, that broke down all the barriers for people who might otherwise have thought, well, maybe, you know, there's due process. Maybe we should, you know, not use FISA. Spy on people in his campaign. Maybe we should wait to see if there's actually any evidence and that he's connected to, you know, Russian espionage or whatever it is. That was all broken down by the media campaign, it feels like, and now it's been going on for so long that the the plainly political nature of this case, which any, I think attorney will, will attest to.

Is no longer something that people can even discuss because they can't see it that way. All they can see is Trump is bad and we're getting him, and there's nothing else. There are no other angles to the story for people.

Its history, its traditions, its constitutional protections, and so on. Would be one real estate developer from New York. I, even in my own novelistic, worst case scenario imagination. I thought that the great challenge to the United States. That might cause it to lose its character as a sort of free place would be something like a massive foreign military threat. Or, uh, you know, an act of nature so horrible that we had to sort of militarize to face it. An asteroid strike or a, you know, complete devastation by an earthquake and our biggest metropolitan center or something.

But no, it wasn't.

And, you know, I have to fit anything that happens now into the context of what we've been talking about here for months. Which is this censorship and surveillance state? And one knows, as his fingers touch the keys of the phone to type the word Trump. Now that that word is registering in innumerable computers across the land and indeed the world. And that any statement one makes, any attitude one evinces is going into a file. It is going to be used in some fashion that one can't even imagine now. But because every event has all its echoes in the internet, it's the internet echoes of these of these, you know, big news events that are really finally more important than the events themselves. And so everyone this morning can be absolutely sure that their statements for or against, or whatever about this Donald Trump indictment are forming a sort of continent of cyber, a map of of cyber attitudes. That is going to be, you know, used in some fashion.

I really feel the chill of wishing not to comment, except that I've, you know, I've already committed myself to that as.

But then, you know, I started to feel the the fear of actually saying.

Something real about the consequences, which are probably going to be pretty serious, I think, for the country.

And you know, this wasn't a hockey player that that we're dealing with. And so that means that about half the country right now is weighing its options as to how it expresses itself on this subject.

Was taking in tons of information and they were, they were essentially doing analyses of where people stood in terms of various issues. So if if your statement was received with enthusiasm by anti-vaxxers, then you know that your statement obtained the kind of untruth. To them. It became something that you should maybe consider misinformation or malinformation. And and this is what it's the same thing that that Twitter did when they decided to get rid of Trump in the first places. They were looking at his, his tweets individually, and they were saying, Well, we can't. None of these are bannable, we can't ban him for any of these. So we're going to look at the the context surrounding which is the totality of his impact on Twitter. Which means analyzing all the reactions to all the things that he said, which includes all the crazy people and all the things that you know, they're possibly violent.

You can pick and choose all of them, and so, yes, now all of your statements are they're going to go into a big mixer. That not only includes what you say, but how people react to you, how people react to those people.

And it's hard for that not to be chilling, isn't it?

You know, make a podcast, put it up and so on. You don't know, but that you may have generated the basis for your own handcuffing. And. But you can know that over any amount of time. Unless you're absolutely hewing to what you believe to be the party line, which will change. So you can't even be sure of that, you are placing yourself in jeopardy and I don't know that.

The word for that is chilling, I think the word for that is terrifying. And I think there will have to make internet expression compulsory to get people to keep doing it, given that risk profile.

We're going to have to get people to say a whole bunch of nonsense just so we can keep traffic.

I mean, the rational, the rational response to all this. If it goes any further, if we appreciate how far it has gone with any depth, is to drop out. As they said in the 60s, to tune out and we're tuning out. Yeah, exactly, you know, maybe we're going to have a society drop out.

Yeah, turn in to tune in, turn on, drop out, tune in. They wanted, I think they meant tuning into the cosmic waves, available through SLSD and psilocybin. But yeah, so so, you know, your permanent file? The thing that they joked about in school now exists. There is a principle, and you know, it's not Nina Jankowicz or whatever. But they seem to be now casting about with this so-called restrict act, for an even more total, and, you know, dome-like.

Regime.

I've been tweeting against it.

It is in two years. There are many peaceniks in the world, I promise you, who believe that they are helping the United States by warning it about unwise warfare. You know, over commitment to conflict around the world. But I can tell you that from the centers of power, that's not seen as helpful or protective of the United States. So how are you going to settle on a set of opinions which you can be sure are in the best interest of the United States? Quote, unquote, you can't.

Pacifism could be construed as dangerous.

It almost completely.

Nullifies them in terms of their ability to have any recourse about the nature of their statements. The statements are deemed one way or another by someone else. I suppose the court cases are about whether they are properly deemed a threat or actually a threat that can't be adjudicated. All that can be adjudicated is whether they represent something that's thought to be one in the ever changing definition.

But this idea that they're going to do the same thing with speech that, you know? Any content that poses an undue risks to the interests of what's the actual text here that pose an undue or unacceptable risk to u?

S national security or the safety of U.S persons.

And you know, I don't know. I mean, that feels like it could cover an awful lot of things. And yeah.

S person I mean, an unacceptable risk. Who does the accepting, who does the unaccepting?

Where is the definition of acceptable written? That I can go find it, you know, in the time that we've done this podcast, in the many weeks, we've watched a absolute cascade of restrictions take place and ominous events. I remember a few weeks back when we were told that they were going to be able to scan natural language podcasts, that there had been a problem. Because, you know, Twitter and Instagram and Facebook consist of digital texts. But as yet, they had not been able to comb through people just talking. But that was going to be solved. So there's going to be no corner, which doesn't cross this.

Allegedly critical infrastructure called the internet, they basically created a new reality, a second layer of reality, which is everything that goes over the internet, and they've declared the internet a kind of critical infrastructure. Ergo, anything that is disturbing on the internet is somehow has a status that's other than people just talking. Because it touches this great infrastructural marvel that is so important to us and potentially degrades it or something.

Yeah, I mean, I would hope that my small town lawyer could fathom what I was up against should something ever come down against me in these.

Yeah, and I don't know that. There is a defense to a lot of these things.

It's going to be like the way they made decisions about how to get people, how to remove people from the internet. It didn't have to make sense a lot of the time, even when you appealed and you made a good argument and it didn't matter. Because they can interpret that as they pleased, according to their terms of service. That's the beauty of a privatized speech landscape, but this is essentially like a new form of.

Sort of national security-based jurisprudence. I mean, the internet is global.

You don't know whether an American on TikTok is.

Creating content there is that person considered a foreign entity, maybe posing an undue risk to U.s institutions or U.s national security. This is all like something straight out of wartime law.

When the DHS declared elections to be part of critical infrastructure and they gave themselves the power to regulate that. And there was never any legal challenge to any of that.

It just opened the door for this kind of stuff. Maybe this is going to be our life going forward. We're going to have to navigate these kinds of assessments, which are just going to be made by these new bodies. Instead of courts, we grew up in a court-based society, and maybe that's not going to be what happens going forward.

Navigate suggests that there are features to this landscape that can be known through dead reckoning, but none present themselves. To my mind. I have no way of knowing who might be cheered by my words and who might be depressed by them. I have no idea which issues will be because they represent the entire range from health to politics to culture. Might be deemed damaging or somehow helpful to a lurking enemy.

Navigate suggests I have some power in this future terrain to guide my steps in a way that reduces my risk, but I don't see that.

What do you think, Walter? What's the?

To be deemed innocent until proven guilty. Now, no one has proven anything about Donald Trump, and indictment is the word. Because. So, today I saw Nancy Pelosi saying he will have his opportunity to prove his innocence at trial. The exact opposite of the way our judicial system works. No, the state will have its chance to prove his guilt. But indictment is a great word. Because internet guilt, the kind of guilt that people get canceled for, shadow banned or have their platforms taken from them, is always about indictment.

It's never about proof, but in this case of Donald Trump, we do have a rather extraordinary case. Because the guy used to be the president of the United States, and he's running for it right now. He's a declared candidate for the President of the United States. And there is no way to interpret his indictment except to say that those on the other end of it are of the other party.

They consist largely of officials who are hostile to him and have declared their political hostility to him in the past. They're quite open about it. Bragg even sort of ran on it. And so we've got a political prosecution at the highest level, which, by the way, will not interrupt, except practically not in any legal way, Donald Trump's run for the presidency.

There's nothing that prevents a man who was indicted for whatever it is, from running for the presidency. There's nothing that prevents him from holding the president.

How do I answer someone who says he's a bad guy? Why not go for it? Well, first of all, they had many, many years to do this, and now they're doing it at basically the kickoff of a presidential campaign. I mean, give me a damn break.

I can talk away and rationalize away all sorts of weird events. If you're hearing this message, you're listening to the Free Version of America this week. To hear the rest of our conversation, please subscribe to taibbi.substack..com.