2/10/2026 Update: Welp. One of the co-hosts quit yesterday, so America This Week had to be taken behind the woodshed, out of the kids’ sightline, and shot. We are saddened by its loss, and will wait an appropriate amount of time before bringing home a new puppy.

In seriousness, to address rumors: yesterday was to be the last Monday livestream, with the taped show continuing to come out Fridays. Over the weekend, Walter and I jointly agreed to do yesterday’s show. In the interim, Walter learned of some of the other changes at Racket, some of which he felt he could not support even indirectly. So, Racket is temporarily without a show. This was not an argument about the schedule of America This Week. For those who think the schedule change was about eliminating unpaid content and leaving just one paid show, that didn’t figure in anyone’s thoughts. Walter and I are both writers and were spending two of five days a week podcasting, which proved difficult for both of us.

I don’t know what will replace ATW, but there are ideas in the hopper and we’ll likely consult with Racket readers before making a final determination. I’m truly sorry for the disruption. America This Week was fun. It had its issues, but I enjoyed doing the show and will miss Walter and the interplay with readers and subscribers it generated.

2/9/2026: America This Week returns today at 4:00 p.m. We’re not going anywhere, but we will be on a new schedule going forward, and Walter and I wanted to say a proper farewell to our Monday live segments. Therefore we’re digging a little deeper today, testing a theory Walter’s come up with, one with an amusingly unmentionable title. It involves the overflow of news (and particularly unresolved news), the question of how the average person can stay sane in an increasingly atomized information landscape, and an adjustment to our goals, heading into what promises to be a very confusing year.

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Listen to Episode 166

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Listen to Episode 166

Matt Taibbi: Welcome to America this week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, I’m in an undisclosed location outside the United States, so everybody’s got to be patient with me today.

Walter Kirn: Are you safe? Are you safe in this undisclosed location? Are you in a place with full diplomatic relations with the United States?

Matt Taibbi: I am in such a place, actually. A place that’s actually very good on those issues and has already confirmed all of my cliche beliefs about this country in a very short period of time. They’re all positive.

Walter Kirn: Oh, good. Well, I hope it’s Hungary then, the place of my ancestors, but I won’t press you. I’m in a place that has poor diplomatic relations with the United States, Washington, DC, across from the White House. I can look out the window to my left and see the construction cranes flying, American flags that will someday complete a beautiful ballroom on the side of the White House.

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Listen to Episode 165

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America this week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how’s it going? You’re still in a disaster zone, right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah, I’ve been up all night moving my wife’s office into another room because we had a big flood right before Christmas. It destroyed most of the building I live in, and that’s why I’ve been kind of cryptic about something difficult in my life. The people who come to restore the building come this morning, so I had to stay up last night clearing certain rooms, and I had great insight into my wife’s life and psyche that I might never have had because she has kept every unused cash register coupon, not just regular coupons, but the ones that come out of the cash register that are actually the receipt.

And she has kept every power bill, every receipt, everything that can be construed as a receipt, as proof of your innocence should somebody challenge you. Wow. She has kept, I saw all of them. I wondered at the end where all the stuff was, we had all the receipts, but where was the stuff? I mean, we should have been buried under things, but that kind of revisiting of your life in an unhealthy way is what happens late at night when you’re cleaning up from floods. So, I’ll be sure to bring a strange perspective to today’s show. I promise

Matt Taibbi: You definitely find a very positive spin to put on it when you talk to her about it. That’s the main lesson that you want to take away. Are you a receipt keeper, Matt? I am not. I am not. So, I went to obviously spend some time in St. Petersburg, the former linen grad, which was once the site of the famous blockade. So, the city was, for a long time, completely cut off to the outside world, and there were tons of disasters inside, and there are people who survived that period who are revered. They’re allowed to go to the front of the line. They’re called blockade, Nikki, but they will not throw anything away. If you go in the home of a person from the blockade, you’ll see that they’ve collected like napkin ends, bits of straw, stuff like that. And they’ll say to themselves, the line is always, well, that can still come in handy. And so, I’m the opposite of that. I’m not a saver. I’ve never been through

Walter Kirn: Thing those people. Just to pause a second, those people have what they feel is a rational response to having lost everything, which is to after that keep everything right.

Matt Taibbi: Yep. Yeah, exactly.

Walter Kirn: But do they not have some wisdom in that? There are periodic depressions, famines, especially in that part of the World Wars times when things get really tough and you need a napkin, right?

Matt Taibbi: Absolutely, yes. They’re never without, and no, I mean, there was one person who was a friend’s grandmother who went through that, who was a font of wisdom about all sorts of things, and went through horrors. You can’t even imagine.

Walter Kirn: Well, things are getting so weird, Matt, just to bring it back that I’m becoming that way

Matt Taibbi: Really.

Walter Kirn: Receipts could be toilet paper receipts could be made into fishing lures or something.

Matt Taibbi: Bullets.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, bullets. We might have to decorate our Christmas trees with just crumpled paper because I’m looking forward with about a 5% possibility to a Hobbesian universe in which neighbors organize, go out in one car and come back with various things from the woods.

Matt Taibbi: You know what? We’re going to be reading a brave New World, but maybe we should read the jungle at some point soon, the Hobbes one. But you’re absolutely right. Yeah, no, I have the same premonition about all against all imminent future, and I’m worried about it and would love to have a second home in Palau or someplace like that, where

Walter Kirn: The problem is getting to the second home. You have to have a warning that shit’s going to fall apart. And even the Illuminati, I don’t think get that much warning. So, you need find a pilot fuel up, file a flight plan, and hope you get out before whatever the disaster is.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. There are some friends of mine who have pilot’s licenses, and I’m beginning to become envious of them. Well, part of that is because of what we witnessed this week, and we’re going to talk in an interesting way about the developments of this week, which was yet another showdown between Donald Trump and Europe, partly over Greenland, partly over some other things. But let’s just roll the tape that everybody is wigging out about. We’ll start with that briefly before we veer into the stuff that we think is really important. So, let’s go look at, SOT one:

President Donald Trump: We never asked for anything and we never got anything. We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force where we would be frankly unstoppable. But I won’t do that. Okay, now everyone’s saying, oh, good. That’s probably the biggest statement I made because people thought I would use force. I don’t have to use force, I don’t want to use force, I won’t use force. All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland, where we already had it as a trustee, but respectfully returned it back to Denmark. Not long ago after we defeated the Germans, the Japanese, the Italians, and others in World War ii, we gave it back to them.

Walter Kirn: Trump has invented a whole new way of giving a political speech.

Matt Taibbi: What’s that?

Walter Kirn: Well, I mean, if you heard that speech that plainly put that in the language and the logic of the streets, if you heard the kind of pettiness, you rewarded us by winning World War II by taking green back, except we gave it to you out of the goodness of our heart,

Matt Taibbi: Which the New York Times fact checked to the nth degree.

Walter Kirn: Well, yeah. I’m not talking about the truth level of the Trump’s speech. I’m talking about the rhetorical level. This is a way that politicians didn’t use to talk. I mean, you maybe heard it at the club or in a warehouse with people negotiating for goods that have just come in or in some mercantile or commercial fashion. If you don’t sell me your company, something bad is going to happen. Jim, and I’m not saying you have to do it, but this is how he’s talking now. It’s straight deal making with the world, and it sounds a little goofy, but one of the reasons it sounds goofy is he’s the only one who speaks this language. The rest of them still talk about morals and norms and this and that and try to frame everything and seed it in bigger ideals. And Trump is like, you’re going to give me that because you owe me that, and then I’ll owe you this, and then will you square? Okay. And the rest of them are in some Hegelian progressive dream where the world is moving toward justice. In fact, the world has moved toward naked deal making, which it already probably was supported by, but has now come front and …

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In the meantime, check out Matt’s latest post, “Martin Luther King, Jr. is the Leader We Need.”

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Listen to Episode 163

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to American This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn, talking at twice the speed because you did. Well, we’re trying to cram a lot of content in here. We’re trying to deliver more value to people. So the news of the day is that there is another shooting, not the first one that has taken place in Minnesota. And let’s get into some video. Let’s look at the first clip.

Matt Taibbi: Okay. So there’s that. That can be interpreted in a number of ways or it can’t. Why was

Walter Kirn: She parked Crosswise on the road?

Matt Taibbi: Well, this is part of the insight that I’m going to try to impart in a moment, but

Walter Kirn: It- Then I’ll just note that she was parked Crosswise on the road. On the icy road of Minnesota, which I’ve driven all through my youth, those

Matt Taibbi: Icy roads. So we’re basically consuming this as people do on the media, on social media. We’re getting disembodied bits of things and we don’t know what lots of things mean.

Walter Kirn: But we do know there was someone there with a camera ready to film it.

Matt Taibbi: Right. That was true. Yes. But why was she parked that way? Why was she being stopped? What’s the operation? Okay. All right. Let’s look at a slowed down version, which a lot of people have done. There’s been lots of meta analyses of this.

Walter Kirn: The guy in front got hit.

Matt Taibbi: The guy in front ... So that’s one of the problems with the video is that you don’t see the whole thing now. The third one, I think, shows that.

Walter Kirn: Well, that guy got brushed off the front

Matt Taibbi: Side bumper. On that side, you can sort of see that there’s a person in front of the car, right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah, I can see it clearly.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Okay. So everybody walls up off into different camps immediately about this. Let’s look at Jacob Frey. This is the mayor of Minneapolis who has stern words to say.

Jacob Frey: There’s little I can say again that’ll make this situation better, but I do have a message for our community, for our city, and I have a message for ICE. To ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here. Your stated reason for being in this city is to create some kind of safety and you are doing exactly the opposite. People are being hurt. Families are being ripped apart. Long-term Minneapolis residents that have contributed so greatly to our city, to our culture, to our economy are being terrorized, and now somebody is dead.

Speaker 6: I’ve seen a lot of Republicans here in Washington criticizing those comments, saying that you’re escalating tensions with that. Can you respond to them? And what do you say to them tonight? People who criticize those comments.

Jacob Frey: I’m so sorry if I offended their Disney princess ears, but here’s the thing. If we’re talking about what’s inflammatory, on the one hand, you got someone who dropped an F-bomb, and on the other hand, you got someone who killed somebody else. F-bomb, killing somebody. I think the more inflammatory action is killing somebody. And so once again, let’s be real and just honest and straight up about what’s happening here. This is not okay.

Walter Kirn: This is idiocracy. That whole appeal to kind of basic locker room rhetoric, as far as I’m concerned, what an actor he is.

Matt Taibbi: Well, we’ll get to that in a second. Let’s get through all the different actors. Let’s see Kristi Noem

Kristi Noem: At 10:25 AM Central Time, immigration and customs enforcement were carrying out lawful operations here in Minneapolis. Because of the adverse weather that Minneapolis has seen in recent snow, one of the vehicles became stuck and ensnared in the snow. Law enforcement were attempting to push out this vehicle and when a mob of agitators that were harassing them all day began blocking them in, shouting at them and impeding law enforcement operations. ICE officers and agents approached the vehicle of the individual in question who was blocking the officers in with her vehicle, and she had been stalking and impeding their work all throughout the day. ICE agents repeatedly ordered her to get out of the car and to stop obstructing law enforcement, but she refused to obey their commands. She then proceeded to weaponize her vehicle, and she attempted to run a law enforcement officer over. This appears as an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents, an act of domestic terrorism.

The ICE officer fearing for his life and the other officers around him, and the safety of the public fired defensive shots. He used his training to save his own life and that of his colleagues. In fact, the very same officer who was attacked today had previously been dragged by an anti-ice rioter who had rammed him with a car and drug him back in June. He sustained injuries at that time as well. It’s very clear that this individual was harassing and impeding law enforcement operations. Our officer followed his training, did exactly what he’s been taught to do in that situation and took actions to defend himself and defend his fellow law enforcement officers. The officer was hit by the vehicle. She hit him. He went to the hospital. A doctor did treat him. He has been released, but he’s going to spend some time with his family.

Matt Taibbi: Okay. And then lastly, a tweet from Trump, I think this is number eight. This is Trump saying, “I’ve just viewed the clip of the event, which took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is a horrible thing to watch. The woman screaming was obviously a professional agitator and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer who seems to have shot her in self-defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive.”

Walter Kirn: That’s a bit of an exaggeration. He didn’t look like someone who had been maybe fatally injured.

Matt Taibbi: Yes. Right. It’s an exaggeration. It’s the President of the United States looking at a clip and responding to it. It’s to a degree, I think a lot of the other folks are doing the same thing. And I spent years of my life covering police brutality, incidents, shootings, stranglings. I don’t think there was a vehicular homicide or a vehicular attack incident, but there was such a wide range of these incidents. And the one constant in all of them is that the end picture never accords with what you think in the first moments.

Walter Kirn: What do you mean the end picture? You mean the results of an investigation never?

Matt Taibbi: When you finally get all the different facts in about what you’re looking at, which is usually a disembodied piece of video that circulates often because somebody on social media has got it, and in many cases, the actual media is only reporting on something that they’ve grabbed from social media. So you don’t always know what you’re looking at. You don’t always know what the person who filmed the scene was doing.

Walter Kirn: You don’t know what the expression on the face of the victim was, or it’s hard to know what was being screamed

Matt Taibbi: Either. What was being screamed, what was being said, what the situation was, but we’re in this world where everybody sort of goes to the mattresses immediately and takes sides and often they’re arguing about different things. So Jacob Frey talking about ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis. Now, if you want to argue about the ICE program, you can, but if you want to talk about the specific shooting, I think it’s prudent to wait a couple of days at least, or maybe even until there’s an indictment to find out all the different relevant

Walter Kirn: Matt, that’s so 1986.

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