Episode 42: "America This Week," with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn

But, you know, I also saw the The Chinese newspaper that sometimes, you know, put out in New York on certain corners, the kind of propaganda paper. And it had, I would say, gloating headlines about the climate problems in New York. And and these pictures of this, you know, midtown Manhattan, red sky, sort of blurry.

Post-apocalyptic Manhattan were so exaggerated compared to the actual Manhattan I was seeing framing the newspaper boxes. I don't know what kind of filters they put on the photos, but they were alarmist to say.

Well, news After a calm, relatively calm week last week, news has definitely gone to 11 this week. Last night, the expected news broke that Donald Trump has been indicted. What's been the most crazy, hysterical, over the top reaction that you've seen so far?

From here on out, Donald Trump is going to be taken off the game board. On the right, or I guess you might call it the right. You see, well, it's only a.

It's only a matter of time till we're all in camps.

And I did actually see that this morning on Twitter from, you know, someone with about a million, uh, uh, you know, an audience of about a million so. But but that this is a left right issue, I think is, uh, is debatable. Um, it is a first, no matter what you think in politics or no matter how you vote. Um, to have a presidential candidate and a former president indicted on federal charges. We definitely have passed some sort of rubicon.

And the people who made this decision, I imagine, have looked down the game board. They're all chess players, they don't just do things and then wait to find out what happens.

Let's see what happened, yeah, let's put the kitten in the microwave and see what happens.

But I'd like to think they've at least thought three steps ahead.

Um, the first one doesn't meet either of those tests. The Manhattan case, like it clearly is, I mean, it's. It's barely even a crime. It would, only. It's only a crime, according to, uh, this arcane legal theory, which has never been proven before in a court. Um, and I think they'd have, they'd have a lot of work to do to get there, and, you know.

Paying off a prostitute, um, or, I'm sorry, not a prostitute, a porn star, uh, to, you know, keep quiet like that. It's pretty tough to call that like an earth shattering, uh, matter of, you know, national security here we have, um.

Sort of a crime that the current president has basically already admitted to, um, doing the same thing. And it involves this, the Espionage Act, uh, which has been abused repeatedly going back the last 15 years or so in a variety of cases. And Barack Obama sets the record for using it against leakers. It's used in the Assange case in an extremely dubious way. Um, and so he may be guilty of this, right?

There may actually be a mishandling of documents. Um, so it, it, it may meet that test, but in terms of the seriousness of it, uh, what? The the average person is going to look at this and say it's it's a politicized investigation. The same way they did the first one. No, uh, it seems to me that that's, that's going to be the reaction.

So, uh, why this should be any different, I don't know. In other words, if if. The threshold here is to convince Trump supporters or the neutral onlooker that this is in fact a grave and serious prosecution. Um, I don't think that's, and I don't think it like it will be, um, because what we don't have is any real timeline on this prosecution. Is it something that's going to go on for the entirety of the presidential election? is it going to be concluded before then?

And one can't help but note that we are now in the fundraising season. You know, for uh, for uh, presidential election, primaries haven't started, but in some way, most important, uh, phase of the modern presidential election, when you raise, the billion dollars necessary to run for president is in full force. And I can't imagine this will help Donald Trump raise money for his election. And it will, in fact, I'm sure, dissuade a lot of people from from from donating music, well, the big donors, yeah, sure.

10 $20 million, um, from big people Bigelow out at, uh, many others, uh. Reed Hoffman I believe, um. And I don't think people are going to be making that kind of investment in a indicted candidate. Maybe I'm wrong.

I mean, like, if if it were the the problem with these prosecutions is, is that it? If it were something where the ordinary person could understand the that there was something very morally serious going on. If he was being charged with January Six, for instance, some reason, some kind of involvement in a plot to legitimately forestall, uh, the transfer of power. I think that would give a lot of people pause, or, you know, the Georgia case, depending on how they decide to proceed with that. This, this idea of getting in, getting in the middle of counting votes or trying to intimidate election officials. People can process what that means and why that's important, and why you might want to a presidential candidate. This is going to look like persecution in the middle of a year where the abuse of government power is probably. You know, it's maybe the one of the most important issues in the entire election cycle.

It's it's a competition between two people who whose partisans think, I think, with some reason, that that that each other are are terrible and and and have committed crimes. Almost of a kind of unprecedented boldness, um, and uh. Strangely, though, that the crimes that Biden is at this point being accused for are are are fairly tabloid worthy. As it were, you know, uh, and stand in the great tradition of political corruption. Whereas the retention of documents is a harder thing to get emotionally upset about unless you believe those documents to be of, you know, intense national security relevance.

I mean, there were diagrams of all the the things that he might've had. And, um, we had former national security officials who went on TV and and said, Uh, you know, the mishandling of state secrets. They were really implying that that this was not just mere carelessness. But but this was some kind of a a fiendish, uh, intentional decision to maybe share, you know, the these documents with a hostile power. Um, and they cycled through a number of these different versions of the story. Which is why it's important, as you point out, that they're not going to tell us what the documents the seven mishandled that they're charging over.

Um, so, I don't know.

Uh, and today I saw in the in the News, CNN talking about how, you know, and really, CNN acting on behalf of the administration, talking about how Biden wasn't going to get down in the weeds with this thing. He was going to carry on with some very, uh, sort of sober and boring, uh speeches he's giving. And was going to project calm, and his projection of calm was going to stand in dismay. Deep and stark contrast to the chaos on the Trump side. Um, it was almost as though the CNN story was were being written by the, you know, White House Strategy Office. Here's how to look good in contrast to Donald Trump right now.

I can't tell the difference between Jen Psaki, the news reader, and Jen Psaki, the uh, the White House spokesperson.

Um, I think what we're going to see going forward, and, uh, I'm just going to be a kind of, uh, narrative speculator. Here is a lot of conflict around the Trump indictment, some of which is going to grow quite intense. Some of which may involve civil disobedience, um, and might even break out in some kind of violent conflict. The street, you know, street matters, maybe people with their trucks blocking, uh, interstates or whatever, things like that. And all of that is going to take place in the context of, uh, uh, an information control.

Regime of great power and great, uh, flexibility. So just as CNN was said to sort of be made as a station by the Gulf War. I think the new disinformation uh regime will come into play in massaging, directing and guiding the intense conflict that will come of the Trump indict.

And, uh, in other words, here's its test case. We will essentially have January 6th on a national scale, that's my fear, um, and that this will be pushed to critical levels. And all these dials and knobs that they turn, uh, wherever they turn them to try to adjust our conversation are going to be turned passionately and incessantly. And that is the part I don't look forward to. Um, because I think this is now the pretext for a total, uh intervention by the machinery of, uh, censorship, disinformation studies, and, uh, content moderation at the largest level.

Uh, essentially, um, what Lee finds out is that the election integrity partnership, which is sort of a dry run for, uh, the first, the virality project, which was this sort of cross platform, uh effort at aggregating, uh, quote unquote disinformation about the virus. Um, but then there was a similar effort, having to do with responses to Ukraine war. Um, but the um, but the EIP, uh, was in, uh, at least in part. The the the was funded by, uh, what's called the Democracy Fund, which is funded by Pierre Amityar, who was a huge Biden donor. Um, this went to the Center for Internet Security, and unfortunately, I have a lot of reason to be very familiar with that organization.

Cause I, that's one of the mistakes I made. I screwed up Cis and Cisa if you remember. if you remember in the interview, right? so yeah, acronym gate, so CiS. It turns out it had received money from DHS that year, but also it had a big donation from, Uh, the Democracy Fund, which is Amityar.

And this is where you start getting into, you know, the kind of the weeds of what the problem is with this anti disinformation world. If you start mixing in private money. And with, uh, with these various structures that are doing things like flagging items, you know, for content moderation or deamplification. And it turns out that those those donors have political sympathies in one direction or another. Then what are we talking about here? I mean, we're talking, we're talking about, kind of, it's a it's a new form of information control. Once, once upon a time, there was a reason why. Uh, the candidate that raised the most money almost always won on the one hand, and had to do with the fact that the candidate got more exposure. But there was also this sort of secondary, uh factor, which is that local news stations didn't want to upset their best advertisers.

Um, so they shaded coverage a certain way, uh, when they covered campaigns like they would, they tended to be harsher in the direction of, you know, a Bernie Sanders or Dennis Kucinich. Because they're just not going to get as much money from those folks. Um, so what happens when there's more money flowing in, uh, into this anti disinformation complex from one set of political actors, then from another? Um, that's pretty worrying, I think. It's, you add this, something that has a controversial bent. Uh, like the Trump case, where they can find pretexts for banning people or for dialing them down, right? I mean, with with J Six, they. They use the these tools to get people off the internet to, you know, to remove them from the ability to process credit card transactions.

Uh, this stuff is all, it's all next level, you know?

Surrounding public events like elections is about is, to me, forbidding and foreboding as as could be. Uh, we saw in the 2020 election. Mark ZuCkerberg Uh, basically, privately funding of of drop ballot drop boxes across the country. Now we also know that Omidyar Um funded to some extent. A, uh, content moderation to, to be, uh, mild about it, or even a censorship, uh machine that operated on behalf of one party. And they did this in conjunction with U. s. government forces, right? I mean, uh, you know, it wasn't just that he donated to the campaign or or created some uh module for the use of the campaign. They interfaced with the actual U S G to do this.

Um, this looks like the creation of a one party state in conjunction with corporate power. Uh, I don't know how else you describe it. um, and uh, you know. Will it cause America to feel more secure in its sense of our democracy? Being an honest project, not at all, it is. It's going to breed cynicism at levels.

You?

I couldn't imagine these projects even occurring before. I mean, these were not, these are not. These are what they call in, you know, math or physics discontinuities. They could not have been expected five, 10 years ago. They're, they're. They're rather sudden developments that, uh, that show a new, uh, a new fusion of power in a new direction that wasn't we couldn't anticipate.

Um, so so, with the Trump story, here's what I expect. Just to be, uh, very specific. If you go off your nut on Twitter as a Trump supporter and say, This is it, I've had it. I don't want to be a part of this country anymore. We need to find a new way. Here comes a civil war, et cetera.

Well, your demerits are piling up pretty fast. Um, the knob turners are watching at every step as anger and the disgust, uh, mount. And, you know, should any of this, uh, emerge as real conflict? You know, somebody pulls out a gun, uh. There is a clash between, uh, antifa and whoever the Patriot front. And then people weigh in on that or start to align themselves around, you know, incidents. We're going to have a mushroom cloud of anti-disinformation warfare. Um, and and I fully expect that's what we're looking at.

I mean, I don't want to be alarmist. If you're hearing this message, you're listening to the Free Version of America this week. To hear the full version, please subscribe at www..racket..news.