Transcript - America This Week, August 8, 2024: "100th Episode Special: Oligarchy in the UK"

Sir Keir Starmer goes full Minority Report; White House Misinformation Kids caught talking shop. Plus, "The Egg" by Sherwood Anderson

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?

Walter Kirn: It’s good. We were talking before the show, and I decided that a newfound-

Matt Taibbi: It’s already out.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, a newfound authority is the way to go. Now that we’re getting a little closer to the election and we’re attempting to raise our credibility as commentators, I will be holding a pen in many of the shots. Every once in a while, you’ll see me look to the side as though I’m jotting notes, and I may be, or I may be making happy faces, but this pen is my new ticket to authority.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, this is your affectation?

Walter Kirn: Yeah. Can you match it in any way?

Matt Taibbi: I absolutely can. So I’ve been watching MSNBC. And in keeping with our newfound dedication to the broadcasting arts, I’m going to be doing what’s known affectionately in the business as the paper tap, which is like that.

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: So when I do that, I may actually be straightening my papers or I may be pausing to try to collect my thoughts or figure out what it was that I meant to say. It could be one or the other, but-

Walter Kirn: Do your papers have anything written on them, or are they just-

Matt Taibbi: In my case, they do, but a little known fact is that they often don’t have anything on them at all. I’ve actually seen an anchor who doodled cartoon penises during the show on blank pieces of paper and sat there going like this the whole time. But I actually have things on my paper, so-

Walter Kirn: Well, I have a coffee cup and I have a pen, and that’s going to be enough for me.

Matt Taibbi: Excellent. Excellent. Well, we need them. We need our professionalism. We need all of it this week because boy, things are accelerating again. We had a couple of maybe slow weeks, I guess, this year, but this sure as hell isn’t one of them. In addition to the story that came out in Racket about Tulsi Gabbard, which we’ve already talked about, we’ll talk about a little bit later if we have time, and some other things that came out online. The England story is exploding. All these things are all part of a piece, I think because they’re all connected to the general theme of using police surveillance and censorship as a club to keep the population in line. And we should just probably introduce people to the overall plot of what’s going on in England first. So if we could just look at... I think it’s 10 on our list. It’s just sort of a summation of some of the disturbances over the weekend.

Speaker 1: Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who’s been in office just a month, has promised to crack down on groups of what he called right wing thugs who’ve ignited a week of racist anti-immigrant riots in towns and cities across England. Nearly 400 people have been arrested in the past few days, and more arrests are expected. From England, Special Correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports.

Speaker 3: These are just some of the social media videos. The detectives are trawling through to identify and prosecute perpetrators participating in and stoking Britain’s worst riots since 2011.

Speaker 4: They’re in there.

Speaker 3: After days of unrest, the crisis deteriorated over the weekend when a mob attacked a hotel housing asylum seekers in the northern city of Rotherham. The government minister responsible for law and order is Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.

Speaker 2: It’s a total disgrace and there has to be a reckoning. Those individuals who are involved in the disorder need to know that they will pay a price.

Matt Taibbi: All right, we can stop that. So Yvette Cooper is actually an important person in the story, because among other things, she is a person, who at the beginning of this crisis, said that social media platforms have to be held accountable. But I guess Walter, we have to go back to the beginning and kind of recount how all this started. So you get the idea that there are disturbances across England. Even as we’re recording, they were just halted apparently.

Walter Kirn: I don’t know what that means. How do you halt them simultaneously?

Matt Taibbi: I don’t know. I’m assuming they’re probably going to break out again. Perhaps maybe not. So to give the briefest possible summary, last Monday, not this past Monday, but the one before, there was a horrific incident in which a 17-year-old British-born person who was the child of Rwandan immigrants attacked essentially a dance studio and killed three little girls, injured more. This triggered widespread anti-immigrant sentiment. There were some misleading posts online suggesting that this person had come in on a boat or was somehow an undocumented immigrant. And then there were, the next day in Southport England, which is a little town just north of Liverpool, the first of many very serious riots began, and this led to a press conference, which we’ll get to in a minute, where the new prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, promised basically to crack the whip, and then some against the counter protesters.

And we can get into what he said exactly, but this has continued through to the present. They have begun rolling out some old laws that have been on the books for a while that prohibit certain kinds of speech. Just yesterday, we’re recording on Thursday, this is the eighth, on the seventh, they were broadcasts by public officials talking about how they will use... They have police scouring the internet, not just for evidence that you participated in a riot, but for things that you might’ve said online. And we’ll show that in a second. But first of all, Walter, how did you hear about the story? And what did you think about it at first?

Walter Kirn: Well, I first heard about the crime, the murder of the girls. And the instant I heard about it, I also heard the rumors that the perpetrator was an immigrant of some sort. I think I suspected immediately that there would be unrest as the result of this, and it came pretty quickly. Now, it’s hard to imagine that there wouldn’t be, in some ways. The murder of children at a dance contest, especially little girls, is the stuff of rioting. And as I’ve watched it unfold, it’s become clear that on all sides, it’s now a political football, right? Is it right wing rioting? I’m not really fit to judge. Is it people fed up with crime or what they perceive as a relationship between immigration and crime? And is that necessarily right wing? I’m not fit to judge. I will say that having lived in England, I lived there for a few years in the 80s, I’m not surprised by the draconian nature of these information efforts.

There were still troubles with Northern Ireland going on when I lived there. And I had a friend at Oxford University who was a Irish kid who used to go play guitar at a pub where Irish people gathered, and he’d sort of sing songs of Irish national content. And one time he disappeared for a few days and came back. His name was Mick. And I said, “Mick, where are you been?” He said, “They picked me up, man, on my way home, and they took me, put me in jail, questioned me.”

Matt Taibbi: Wow.

Walter Kirn: And there were were those kinds of laws on the books and those practices already instituted. So England not having the civil rights provisions that we have and traditions, they go pretty far pretty fast. And this notion that now they’re going to please social media, not just to see if you were throwing a brick through a window, but to find out if the sentiments that you are espousing are somehow a problem isn’t completely surprising.

Matt Taibbi: So, well, let’s just show it. The new Prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, everyone’s known that this guy was going to be the prime minister for a while. He’s been ahead in the polls. And he gave up a press conference last Thursday that we wrote about it at Racket, and this is basically what he said.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer: I can announce today that following this meeting, we will establish a national capability across police forces to tackle violent disorder. These thugs are mobile, they move from community to community, and we must have a policing response that can do the same, shared intelligence, wider deployment of facial recognition technology, and preventive action, criminal behavior orders.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, preventive action, criminal behavior orders. Actually, if we could watch the second one too. So he talks about criminal behavior orders, and then we’ll get into what those are in a second. But here, he talks about how he wants to use them.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer: What about banning some of these far right groups as Sir Angela Rayner has suggested? Well, look, in relation to the inconsistency, I don’t think you’d simply measure the number of arrests and say there’s an inconsistency because that will depend event by event. But look, yes, this afternoon was an attempt and an agreement actually to pull together a national response, so that that consistency, that support is there in the sharing of intelligence and data. That’s not a criticism of any of the forces through trying to deal with difficult situations as they arise on their patch, but it is to give them the support that they need more quickly so they can react more robustly in relation to preventative measures. One of the issues that came up this morning was this afternoon, I’m sorry, is criminal behavior orders, which can be attached to convictions for these sorts of offenses, which then give the police and the authorities the ability to put their arms around and have a tighter grip of those that have already shown their true colors and being convicted.

And I would personally like to see more use of those orders in the same way that they’re used in football hooligan cases to stop people traveling, identified, prevent their patterns of behavior, because these are not people who are going to protest.

Matt Taibbi: All right, you get the idea. So there’s a lot to unpack there. The criminal behavior orders, CBOs, they call them Crimbos in England. This is the new iteration of what used to be called the Antisocial Behavior Order, or ASBO. That was instituted in the late nineties. They are injunctive forms of policing, so this is something that we don’t really have in America. You have it in civil cases where there might be a restraining order, but these are sort of like civic restraining orders. We think that they do it for really strange stuff like something called dogging, which is exhibitionist sex. You can have a Crimbo slapped on you for that. You can have a Crimbo slapped on you for being too loud in a housing complex. You can have it put on you for... If you’re a soccer hooligan, they can restrict your travel.

There’s a different legal authority for that, but it’s essentially the same concept. So what Starmer was talking about is taking something that was sort of designed for petty crime, for things that go on in housing authorities, and then now applying it to political groups. And one of the key things that he said is, “We want to be able to stop them before they get on a train.” Then he says that crimes are being committed online and we have to hold the people who run these platforms have to understand that they’re going to be held accountable, that sort of thing. So this is a sort of a clarion call for preventive crime. We’ve talked a lot about the pre-crime stuff on this show, but this kind of goes to the head of the pack of implementation of it. We’ll show you where it led to very quickly. But Walter, what was your response to... What did you think of that press conference?

Walter Kirn: I can see that he’s positioning himself as a force for order and a hardliner. I’ve also seen him reacting to America’s 2020 riots with great support for the rioters. So it seems that there’s a political consideration here that’s not just law and order. He sees these as riots fomented by his opposition, really. And so the facial recognition thing was what stuck out at me when I first heard this.