Transcript - America This Week, August 29, 2025: "Everyone in Minnesota Has Gone Crazy"

Mass murder is one thing, but misgendering is apparently the real crime. Plus, wrapping up "That Hideous Strength" by C.S. Lewis

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

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how crazy is this country?

Walter Kirn: Getting crazier. Going from a very high baseline to something that I can barely tolerate day to day. I mean for the sake of my own sanity,

Matt Taibbi: It’s becoming more and more difficult. So we used to have mass shooters, and the rest of the country would sort of circle around and gape and wonder about the hidden problem in American society that was causing these issues, but now the insanity is no longer hidden. It’s now part of the reaction to these stories. It’s out in the open. You don’t know who’s crazier, the shooter or some of the people who are talking about the shooter. So we had the situation in Minnesota. Do we have just a basic TV account of what happened, or maybe the 911 video or something like that?

Andy Mac: Welcome back in here to LiveNOW from FOX. I am Andy Mac. Thank you so much for joining us. It’s a dark day in Minneapolis after this senseless shooting at a Catholic school that had children sitting in pews going to mass during their first week of school. And we’re learning more information right now about this tragedy that unfolded earlier on this morning as Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara said the shooter, armed with a rifle, shotgun, and pistol, approached the side of the church and shot through the windows toward the children sitting in the pews there at Annunciation Catholic School. And for the first time, our FOX 9 team, Nathan O’Neal, gathering some of these 911 calls to the dispatch there as this all went down around 8:30 local time.

Speaker 1: Minneapolis has a possible active shooter, 509 West 54th Street, Minneapolis.

Speaker 2: The first calls came in around 8:30 in the morning.

Speaker 1: All units, you’re heading to Minneapolis Mutual Aid on a shooting.

Speaker 2: An active shooter in South Minneapolis at the Annunciation Church and School.

Dr. Tom Wyatt: We first received a page that we were going to have a mass casualty incident at 8:46 AM.

Speaker 2: First responders from all over the region, rushing to the scene.

Speaker 3: Any troopers arriving, we just need medical. Bring all the guys that you have.

Speaker 2: Dispatch audio reveals the scope of the emergency response and the casualties after police say the shooter opened fire through a church window.

Speaker 3: We’ve got at least four criticals in the inside, the rest outside of the church. Couple DOAs, but at least 20 other patients.

Brian O’Hara: Two young children, ages eight and 10, were killed where they sat in the pews.

Speaker 1: We have two gunshot wounds, two patients with gunshot wounds to their head in front.

Matt Taibbi: I can’t even watch this stuff. So it’s horrible. So it’s another mass shooting. We have them just constantly in this country, and they’re always heavily politicized, but this one turns out to be sort of a new variety of horrible.

Walter Kirn: Well, first of all, it’s not a school shooting in the sense that we are now sadly used to, meaning that it’s not a student. It was an assassination of children from outside a building by an adult. And that’s a different kind of murder than some allegedly bullied student coming in, fed up, and killing his peers. This was an adult hunting schoolchildren.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. And very quickly, it emerges that the killer, whose name is Robin Westman, left behind quite a lot of material. There was a YouTube video. There’s an awful lot of stuff in the YouTube video. There’s a manifesto. He’s writing in English and Cyrillic in the manifesto. He’s writing things like, “I’m a nightmare,” and, “Kill Trump,” on his weapons, among other things. And we’re going to get to a key detail in a moment, but my initial impression watching the video... And he’s talking about how disturbed he is, “I’m not well.” He’s loading the magazines and singing, “Tomorrow, tomorrow.” The vibe with him-

Walter Kirn: Do we see him in that video, or do we just hear him?

Matt Taibbi: We see his thumb, yeah. So I got kind of a Dylan Klebold sociopath vibe from him. This is someone who talks repeatedly about bad thoughts that he has, or she has now. And we have to get to that. Robin Westman used to be Robert Westman. And there were early warnings all over social media in the first blush. There are right wing efforts to try to paint this person as transgender. Don’t fall for it, blah, blah, blah. And I was one of those people. I was very cautious about that news initially. And then gradually, it comes out that there’s a legal name change. The New York Times even puts it in that there’s a document on file that his mother signed changing his name from Robert to Robin, because the person identifies as female. So apparently, if I’m getting this correctly, Walter, it’s a man who identifies as female, not actually a transsexual, not a post-op person.

Walter Kirn: I don’t know all the flavors of trans identity, and I don’t know if he received hormone therapy. I’ve known trans people who don’t get surgery, but only use drugs or hormones. Maybe he didn’t use those. I’m unsure, but it does seem legitimate to note these facts. He does seem to have changed his appearance over the years and, as you say, changed his name legally, and made quite an effort to identify as the other gender. How that worked out medically is, I guess, not something that we’re going to get information on right away.

The interesting thing to me was in this abundance of evidence in this manifesto, this video, these pictures of guns with your mottos on them, there was a sense of a kind of potpourri of past crimes. We’re building up a kind of folklore with these shooters. They learn from each other. They build on one another’s past behavior. And this one had everything, as I say: all the social media, the manifesto, the drawings, the drawing of him looking in the mirror and seeing a devil or a demon staring back at him, the writing on the guns. Remember, with the Luigi shooting, we had writing on the bullets and-

Matt Taibbi: What did it say on Luigi’s bullets?

Walter Kirn: I don’t remember, but I think it had to do with the healthcare job of the victim, the UnitedHealthcare position. UHC kills maybe, or something like that. My memory is fuzzy on that. But in the totality of all these documents and videos and so on, you get a pretty clear sense of motive. They always, after these things, come out and say, “The motive is unclear. We’re studying it,” and so on. Well, I don’t know that you can have any more information from the first-hand source than you’re getting in this case. And the motive seems to be he wanted to commit murder, and he wanted the power and the feelings that come with committing murder, and he wanted particularly to hurt children.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. He talks about being... “I’m sorry, Mom and Dad, but you’re the only people I’m sorry to. Fuck those kids.” It’s very cold-blooded, the video. It’ll send chills up your spine watching it. And if we could put up the manifesto again for a second... Because this was posted before the shooting, so everybody had this. And it talks about... It’s a little hard to decipher, because he’s writing it in English. Could we blow it up just a little bit? All right. I can’t see that, but anyway.

Walter Kirn: But let’s concentrate on the sticker on the left here, which is a collage of disturbing and somewhat contradictory, I guess, images, one a devil, then an AR over a pride flag. Defend equality. I don’t know if that’s a slogan that’s widely used. But altogether, it portrays some form of militarized grievance over gender and sexuality.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, there’s another page where he writes, “I’m sick of my life. I’m tired of the charade of being trans. I’m tired of being trans.”

Walter Kirn: What does that mean? I’m tired of being trans. Hmm.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. So you can see, again, it’s in Cyrillic, but...

Walter Kirn: So how well does Cyrillic map onto the English alphabet?

Matt Taibbi: It’s really hard to read. I guess it’s a way to keep your parents from reading it-

Walter Kirn: I see.

Matt Taibbi: ... but it’s frustrating. There are indications that this person does know Russian a little bit, because he uses the letters correctly, and uses some of the little signs. But right here, at the underlined person, says, “Charade of being trans,” basically. And then in the next line is, “I’m tired of being trans.” So there’s a bunch of stuff in there about this, but mainly, it’s a series of grievances. And see at the top, it says, “Kill myself,” or, “Kill me,” at the top. “Death. I will kill.” And some of those things are in Russian, some of those are in English. And so the fact that this person is trans and identifies as female, it’s relevant for a bunch of reasons, but one of them is just maybe it’s a contributing factor to the unhappiness of this person, right?

Walter Kirn: Well, he seems to think it is.

Matt Taibbi: Right. But immediately, there was this onslaught of reaction to even looking at the issue. And the worst example of this was from Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, who gave an interview that’s just mind-blowing. In this video, the CNN anchor has already heard Frey say a certain thing and is trying to give him room, Frey room-

Walter Kirn: To improve his statement in terms of political acceptability for the CNN audience.

Matt Taibbi: And even signals to the interviewee that, “You fucked up a little bit. Maybe redo it. Maybe try again,” and he doesn’t. So let’s listen.

Speaker 4: When you talk about compassion, I don’t want to tiptoe around the edge of this, but the shooter’s name was in question, the gender of the shooter. No one’s really sure what’s going on there. Five years ago, was Robert, then a name change to Robin. Okay. This is being seized in all corners, as you can imagine, in all sorts of ways. And you know that, Mayor, and perhaps that’s why when you spoke about this so profoundly and powerfully, as you are even here now... But when you spoke about this today publicly, you voiced concern for the transgender community, for the community overall. And obviously, you chose to do that in that moment because you thought it was important, and I wanted to give you a chance to say why, to say why you felt it was important to do that in that moment.

Jacob Frey: Obviously, I’ve heard about the rhetoric and the narrative that is being pushed out, but here’s the thing. Anybody that is going to use this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community, or any community, has lost touch with a common humanity. We got to be operating not out of hate for any group, but out of a love for our children. That’s where the focus needs to be right now, a love for our kids, seeing these kids not just as somebody else’s kids. This horrific thing happened. But what if it was our own? How would we feel then? So look, we need to be standing up for every community out there. A Catholic community too, by the way. Any community that suffers this kind of blow, a Minneapolis community, you got to stand up for them. But I feel oftentimes in these instances, there’s this desire to villainize a group.

Matt Taibbi: Okay.

Walter Kirn: He’s all over the place.

Matt Taibbi: He’s all over the place. I was keeping it together until he said, “Yeah, even the Catholic community.” What? So his priority is to make sure that nobody goes over the line and thinks negatively about the trans community. Now, I understand that, but in the moment, to go there and then parenthetically afterwards say, “Yeah, we even have to care about the Catholic community,” there’s an issue that you have to get over some kind of psychological barrier to sympathize with the Catholic community?

Walter Kirn: But Matt, this is the same guy, and I’m on solid ground here, who afterwards at another press event said, “I don’t want to hear about prayer. I don’t want to hear about thoughts and prayers. Those little kids were praying when they were killed.” Now, what was the point of that-

Matt Taibbi: Prayer doesn’t work.

Walter Kirn: ... that duality of prayer? How could you rely on this guy saying that? That’s what’s weird about this. None of these reactions are emotional. They all are political. He struggles to say, “Think about if they were your kids.” Well, okay. If they were my kids, right now, I’d be on a fucking rampage, guy. And you would be included in that rampage with your namby-pamby, strange set theory about the community of Minneapolis, which contains the community of trans, which contains the community of Catholics. Dude, when you’re done with all the communities and, how can I put it, redeeming them and declaring their innocence, what do you got left?

Matt Taibbi: He’s making an intersectional list at a moment when we should be thinking, “Okay, what are we doing wrong?”

Walter Kirn: Their brains are rewired. I mean, my God. I’ll tell you about... They have been rewired by rhetoric. They have been rewired by fear of offense. They’ve been rewired by the intersexual... intersectional intersexual classification of humanity. The only result that I would feel emotionally after this was desperate, upset, depression, anger, and despair. Instead, it’s this game of 4D intersectional positioning about where the sympathy should go, where the blame should go, where it shouldn’t go, da, da, da, da. And I’m going to say something in general about these crimes, because on our last show, I said I was tired of bills, laws, being named after crime victims. The power that mass shootings have to alter the national discourse on all kinds of issues is profound. And because it’s profound, people are now prepared to move straight to the power reflex. They move past the human reflex very quickly into this debate society about who and who shouldn’t be blamed.

And I am loathe to comment at all on these things in some ways, because I’m starting to feel that I’m being manipulated. I’m being manipulated, first of all, by these shooters. They have discerned their power. This guy obviously knows that his guns will be examined, that his manifestos and social media will be inspected and scrutinized, that his pronouncements will be amplified. And in a strange way, Frey or Frye, or whatever his name is, play into this by deconstructing and reconstructing the crimes in this political fashion. If we could have just a couple of days of condemnation or of despair, or what used to be called mourning, mourning, then it would not be that these would-be shooters or murderers... I hate calling them shooters. It sounds like I’m part of a video game chat or something. These murderers would not feel that they are somehow participating in a national discussion, that they’ve made themselves into figures for debate and leverage. They realize they have leverage, and we give it to them.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. And maybe we’re participating in that now. I hope not, but-

Walter Kirn: I don’t think we are, in the sense that we’re not taking off in an agenda-driven, partisan way to get something to happen as the result of this. We’re looking into it and, I think, finding the language of it in a way that might help us get out of this trap we’ve found ourselves in.

Matt Taibbi: And this has been a cliche in American media for quite a long time, but I think it really started with Columbine. And obviously, there was a famous movie, Bowling for Columbine. You talk about the power to impact the culture. This was one of the last documentaries that did big box office, and this was Michael Moore’s movie about the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado. And we remember the sort of liberal America seized on the fact that local authorities blamed Marilyn Manson for the Columbine shooting, and you remember he interviews Marilyn Manson in the movie.

And then there’s this very striking scene where he interviews a local Lockheed Martin executive against the backdrop of a giant missile, and says, “Can you think of any other things that might contribute to violent thoughts,” or whatever it was, “in the local culture,” and the guy from Lockheed is totally stumped. He can’t think of anything. And that was interesting, but when you actually got down to Columbine, it was a very nuanced and disturbing story about somebody who was more like a serial killer, was likely to kill for any reason, no matter what happened, and it just happened to come out this way. It wasn’t about bullying. Sorry, go ahead.

Walter Kirn: Let me tell you a quick story. I didn’t watch the movie, mostly because Michael Moore came to a community near mine here in Livingston, Montana, completely misrepresented what he was doing and what sort of documentary he was making, and went into this small town and exploited its trust in order to get them to talk about things that they didn’t realize were the subject of the documentary.

Matt Taibbi: Oh, it was probably the same movie, wasn’t it?

Walter Kirn: Yeah, it was. It was. So Michael Moore’s techniques don’t sit well with me as a reporter who announces what kind of story he’s on when he goes into interview people. Anyway, I covered the shooting in Aurora, Colorado, which involved a perpetrator named James Holmes, who did not kill himself, who’s in jail now. At a midnight screening of a Batman movie, people remember, he came into a movie theater, went into the front row between the screen and the audience, and killed many people, I think almost 20. I was there by the morning, by 9:00 the next morning. It happened at a midnight screening.

And the movie theater was outside a mall, and there was a kind of berm around the movie theater, around the parking lot. And there were dozens, scores of teenagers who were related to the victims sitting there while the police went about the business of cleaning up the parking lot, or taking pictures, and so on. In this parking lot, there was blood, visible blood. There was trails of spilled popcorn and cups from the fleeing audience. And as I was sitting next to some kids, I noticed that a bunch of them were wearing t-shirts that said, “My Bloody Valentine.” It’s the name of a band. It’s the name of a band that had just come through Aurora, Colorado, or nearby. And Aurora is very near Columbine.

Matt Taibbi: Right. I think I just got that mixed up, but yeah, go ahead.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. And anyway, I forget what the image on the t-shirt was, but it was a gory image. And I said, “Hey, man, do you feel weird wearing that t-shirt here this morning where your friends from school were just killed and wounded?” The kid looked down and he said, “What do you mean?” And I thought... I wrote this piece for The New Republic, and you can look it up. I wrote it with my wife. And over the course of my reporting that day and the next day and the next day, I realized that these kids were so saturated in the culture and the world of violent imagery in music, in games, in terms of news. Because Aurora is actually in the kind of heartland of school shootings. There’ve been a couple of shootings there. There’s been a couple in Columbine, which is a nearby community, and I thought to untangle this at this point is almost impossible.

There’s also a big air force base right there, by the way. And I thought they live in an aquarium and swim in blood, to some extent, as the American moment would have it. And so parceling out blame is a thing we can do forever, untangling the threads of culture and motivation, I suppose, but that we don’t allow mourning anymore and move quickly to plugging this into some matrix of political issues is astonishing to me. And I think part of the reason that these grandiose individuals... Luigi, this guy, whatever, they always believe that they’re, despite their own unhappiness, part of some kind of crusade.

Matt Taibbi: Well, yes, and in a long-winded way, that’s sort of what I was trying to say about the Michael Moore thing, is that what happened was there was an initial rush of public opinion that went out to blame shoot ‘em up video games. Then it was Marilyn Manson, and then Bowling for Columbine came out, and the point of that movie was to blame it on the military industrial complex. And then when you really get down to it, it turns out not really to be about any of those things. It wasn’t about bullying. It wasn’t about Blink 182. It wasn’t about any of the things that they described. It was about this screwed-up relationship between a deeply... one guy who was extremely disturbed and one person who was sort of a hanger on.

But my issue with this is that the politicians, and then we’ve also seen this with England last year with the knife attack, people who are in the anti-disinformation space or whatever it is in media, they are now so keyed in to the possibility of a media reaction to this that they want to suppress facts, or they want to nudge the public in one direction or the other from the first minutes of the story. Because that’s what’s important to them, is making sure-

Walter Kirn: Well, they’re harnessing the emotion.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Exactly.

Walter Kirn: They’re harnessing the power, the primal power of violence to advance their agendas. In some ways, they are as ghoulish as the people themselves, because they are capitalizing, in a way that the dead shooter can’t anymore, capitalizing on the dynamic hydraulic potency of terrible acts.

Matt Taibbi: Right. And you’re going to end up actually making the problem worse by suppressing things. That’s my interpretation of these things. For instance, the knife attack in England last year, where... And look, there was misinformation that was spread about that. There was some, anyway. They misidentified when the person came to the country, what country the person came from. And this was the murder of a bunch of young children also. But if you suppress that, if the government suppresses that the attack even happened, now you’re going to get... The people you claim to be worried about, now you’re going to get them even angrier.

Walter Kirn: Why is it that this didn’t happen when I was a kid, and yet we didn’t have hate speech laws? What is it about the convergence of hate speech legislation with hate that is not healthy in some fashion? If making speech illegal, if drawing circles around statements and sentiments and delegitimizing them worked, then why is this happening? In fact, it’s strangely a dysfunctional and weirdly parasitic relationship, I think now, between these things. And I saw this reported as a hate crime, because it appears to be anti-religious in some way, obviously. And I thought, don’t play into their discourse, into their paradigm. We don’t need to add the murder of children at church into the hate crime bin to make it appear more serious.

Matt Taibbi: It’s already as serious as it can possibly get.

Walter Kirn: And in some ways... This is the most controversial thing I’ll allow myself to say, but in some ways, the circumscription of discourse caused by these hate speech provisions keeps and protects certain people from criticism. In other words, you saw yesterday the absolute timidity with which this trans identity was approached in the media. They didn’t want to talk about it. They hinted at it. They used the name change stuff.

Matt Taibbi: They tiptoed.

Walter Kirn: He uses it in his own damn diary, apparently. But our inability to discuss things straightforwardly, as you just mentioned, is to some degree a measure of how we have ruled out the use of words, the use of ideas, the use of other things, and so it hasn’t worked. It hasn’t suppressed the actions that are supposedly the target of these laws, but what it has done is caused us all to inch back further and further from, I would hazard to say, our common sense approach to social life, in which people who appear to be maybe violent, disturbed or whatever are let go because they might overlap with some other group or identity that we don’t want to screw with.

Because at a certain point, let’s say this kid, or he’s not a kid, he’s 23 years old, he’s a full adult, is showing signs of disturbance, showing signs of anger, frustration with his trans identity and so on. Who wants to wade into that situation as a counselor, as a neighbor, as a friend? Because I can promise you that in some cases saying, “Hey, I think so-and-so screwed up,” might seem like the thing I think is screwed up about him is that he’s transgender, and it might come back at you. We’ve overwhelmed our instincts with this verbiage and this legislative superstructure that we’ve placed around everything, and it hasn’t done any good.

Matt Taibbi: No, and it prevents discussion about things you have to talk about, right?

Walter Kirn: Yes.

Matt Taibbi: Remember Abigail Shrier wrote that book about the surge in young girls who were identifying as transgender, and she had all these problems? Amazon was suppressing advertising of the book. She was roundly criticized for even taking up the subject. It was denounced as misinformation, no, there is no rise. And then it turns out that there is a statistical anomaly. Irreversible Damage is the name of the book.

Look, it’s not a comfortable topic for people to talk about. Why is a phenomenon that has traditionally been seen more in one direction suddenly being seen in another direction? Does it have to do with things that are going on online? Does it have to do with things the way people are being taught about gender? I don’t know the answer to those questions, but you got to talk about it, right?

Walter Kirn: Well, but there are so many tripwires, landmines and machine gun nests in this area of conversation that anyone who values his own freedom is loath to go in there and talk about it in any kind of frank way. It was a staple of my youth in terms of movies that psycho killers, as they used to call them, or as the Talking Heads famously dubbed them-

Matt Taibbi: Well, it came from the original movie, Psycho.

Walter Kirn: Right. We’re often confused in terms of their sexual identities. That was a staple of movies like Psycho where he wears a dress and thinks he’s his mother. Going back to Strangers on a Train, another Hitchcock film that was about-

Matt Taibbi: Dressed to Kill.

Walter Kirn: Dressed to kill, and so on, this was a stereotype at that point. Now, was it an anti-trans stereotype or was it a observation that was made about unstable personalities, or was it just something that worked well in movies because you could visually portray someone as crazy if you had them have signs of the other gender? I don’t know.

Matt Taibbi: Psycho was based on a true story of Ed Gein.

Walter Kirn: Oh, that’s right. A Wisconsin nurse or a killer of nurses. Now when I was a kid, I’ll never forget hearing on the radio the story of, not Ed Gein, but John Wayne Gacy.

Matt Taibbi: John Wayne Gacy, and I think you were thinking of Richard Speck, by the way-

Walter Kirn: Yeah, yeah, I was. You’re right.

Matt Taibbi: There’s so many of them.

Walter Kirn: Those were the days of serial killers rather than mass shooters. Serial killers were not known for their weaponry necessarily. They were people who lured their victims into private situations and killed them one after another. The first thing you heard after a serial killer was caught was not a bunch of political morals. You got a creepy, terrible feeling about maybe the sinfulness of humanity or the freakishness of certain psyches, but it didn’t have-

Matt Taibbi: Political component.

Walter Kirn: ... a policy element. Once it became identified with gun control and schools and so on, it suddenly became a monolithic argument for some that it was gun violence, and that was what these things all had in common, and there was a solution that would across the board help. That’s what Frey is talking about when he’s saying don’t pray and don’t have thoughts.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, thoughts and prayers. We need-

Walter Kirn: We need gun control.

Matt Taibbi: ... to outlaw guns.

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: Mm-hmm, we need gun control.

Walter Kirn: We need gun control. As a kid who grew up in Minnesota and had guns falling out of the closet when I opened the door to get my raincoat for school, because there was a shotgun, there was a deer rifle, there was this, there was that, it would never have occurred to me that they were the cause of people going crazy or of people murdering others, but it is now almost doctrine and orthodoxy for people like Frey. I’ve got to say, hate speech hasn’t worked as a deterrent, policing speech. Gun control so far has not worked as a deterrent, some would say.

Matt Taibbi: Minnesota has pretty tough gun laws now, doesn’t it?

Walter Kirn: Well, it’s a largely rural state. Minnesota is a schizophrenic state, and to go off-topic for a sec, what’s happening there is the most heartbreaking deterioration of a working society that I’ve ever seen. It was a place that had all kinds of people, all kinds of interest groups, political agendas. You had labor in the north and the iron mines, good old, almost communist-style union organizing. You had prairie-style populism among farmers that hearkens back to William Jennings Bryan. And then you had urban Fortune 500 company Republicanism and liberal Democrat politics of a more national sort in the big cities. Everybody managed to adjust. All these groups balanced their interests. They had fights, but it was a society that was incredibly civil. Almost to a cliched level, Minnesota nice.

Now the place is a kind of cauldron of the worst sort of politics, of interest group and identity group war, and I hate to see it, and I hate to see this get sucked into it. But I will say the shocking level of cruelty shown here, premeditated crime against little children at a church, while they pray, is not going to leave America unchanged. These things tend to go into the hopper and down the conveyor belt, and the one side remembers them as another instance of why we need gun control and the other side maybe remembers them as another instance of why we got to come back to God or traditional values or whatever, but in this case, it’s not going to dissolve into the mix in quite the same way. The place where people feel and would like to feel safest, at school and at church combined, the people that we would feel we are sworn to protect the society, little kids, all have been failed.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, and we saw before that Sandy Hook, when Sandy Hook happened, that ultimately led, one could argue that that led and contributed as much as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the anti-disinformation, content moderation movement. The first big person to get kicked off the internet because there was a perception that libel laws weren’t working fast enough was Alex Jones, right? Because of the public condemnation of Jones, the numerous reforms that came around about removing people from the internet before there was any kind of case against them or without proof or anything like that, they were swallowed sort of wholesale by everybody in society because there was so much horror about what happened at Sandy Hook.

Walter Kirn: I never understood that in some fashion, because as I know it, and I’m sure there are all sorts of nuances here that I’m missing, Alex Jones came out with a conspiracy theory of some kind that either it hadn’t happened or had been planned or-

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, crisis actors or something.

Walter Kirn: ... there were crisis actors involved or whatever. Now, that’s strange, that’s untoward, but why it should become the basis for policing of our conversation, I never quite understood. Yes, it’s painful for the families to think, I guess, that somebody saying their kids didn’t die or were part of some conspiracy-

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, they were conspiratorial actors.

Walter Kirn: But that used to just be called crazy thought. It didn’t become-

Matt Taibbi: And libel.

Walter Kirn: And libel, but it didn’t become the basis for algorithmic policing of talk and speech. That last mile that they took that thing always bothered me, to be honest.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, and then look what happened. We remember when it happened, there were four people in the media who said like, “Hey, maybe this isn’t a good idea because this might lead to a place or two.” Before you knew it, they were taking people left and right off the internet for all kinds of things. That’s what I worry about with something like this. I was watching some of the MSNBC coverage, and right away, another thing that happens is we start hearing calls for more surveillance of online activity, so let’s listen to intelligence analyst Christopher O’Leary talking about what some of the solutions might be.

Walter Kirn: Can we pause for one second? It is a feature of these crimes, and has been for a while now, that we find out later they were often under surveillance, that they were known to the FBI or known to law enforcement. Apparently, this guy was known to law enforcement at some minimal level, they’re saying, but nevertheless, yet they continue to argue for greater surveillance as though it’s always ever worked in the past, and I want to know the cases in which it has in which they’ve disrupted. They don’t have to name names, but please describe them in detail for us.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, and listen to what they argue for, too, because it’s not just about going after, threatening people. It’s about going after people who are spreading ideas that lead to this.

Chris Jansing: ... the word radicalized, we tend to think of terror, a more traditional terrorist, something that people came, especially in this country, to seem to be familiar with in the post-911 era, right? So when you talk about radicalization, you talk about writings that reference suicide, extremely violent thoughts and ideas, and those multiple videos that are posted online. What do these groups do when you say they radicalize?

Christopher O’Leary: Whether it’s a terrorist organization or the variety of ideologies that different people follow, they’re following them because they have susceptibility. There’s various push-pull factors. Maybe it’s some kind of mental break, maybe their life has gone down the toilet and they have no hope, maybe they have bed parenting. A variety of things. The effects of COVID and the isolation and what’s called the gamification influence, where young men are growing up, being raised by video games, all of those things are involved in really people mobilizing towards violence more routinely in these things.

But you will also see people get radicalized solely on these video games through headsets. They may never go on the internet otherwise. There’s a variety of things that threat professionals look at now, and trends, but we’re seeing this repeated. That he’s had some engagement with law enforcement, if it was because of his mental state, then the question’s going to be, well, how did he have access to weapons? Did he buy them legally? Did he buy them illegally? Did a family member allow him to use those? All of those things are...

Walter Kirn: Okay.

Matt Taibbi: I think we missed the beginning of that, but anyway, at another juncture, O’Leary also talks about monitoring Reddit and seeing who was radicalized. Now, O’Leary works for The Soufan group. That’s Ali Soufan’s company.

Walter Kirn: What do they do?

Matt Taibbi: Ali Soufan is the famous FBI agent who lives not far from me here in New Jersey, who was at the center of the Lawrence Wright Looming Tower book who helped untangle the 911 knot. He was one of the only Arab-speaking FBI agents and he’s considered kind of a hero in the law enforcement community. Because of that, has a terrific reputation, but he has a threat assessment group now. He’s left the FBI, and there’s a lot of ex-FBI folk at the group.

So, okay, now we have FBI people on TV afterwards suggesting, okay, well, we have to monitor who’s radicalizing whom, what some of the radicalizing influences are, we got to look at the games, we got to look at Reddit, we got to look at this or that. We’ve seen this in other mass shootings. We’ve seen this with Christchurch. There have been other instances where the kind of national intelligence services start looking at various groups after outbreaks of violence, and this leads to more of the hate speech-type enforcement with content moderation. That stuff just makes me incredibly nervous because, as you say, they’re already known to law enforcement, right?

Walter Kirn: Okay, I’m going to stake out of position here. It might not be my final one, but it’s my provisional one. Just as 911 led to the Patriot Act, just as it became the excuse and the rationale for mass surveillance of all kinds that would not have been acceptable before socially, they’re using these as that pretext.

Number one, what groups is he talking about? Were there groups involved in this killing? I haven’t yet heard about any groups. Number two, say one of these groups is a trans identity positivity group. Will that group by virtue of its civil rights protections be one that can be penetrated by the FBI? Or will certain groups, maybe the KKK, be allowed to be infiltrated, but infiltrating these trans groups won’t be allowed? In other words, what is this groupification of violence? Maybe using it as a lever for basically political subdivision and targeted, but not targeted, but group infiltration is not a great idea. Maybe we’re going down the entirely wrong road here.

Second of all, she mentioned 911 and that this was a new form of terrorism. The way the old form of terrorism was used in our society hasn’t sat well with me. The way the new form of terrorism is going to be used is not going to sit well with me. Now also, this is the third in recent history shooting that’s been kind of grouped with the mass shootings of old Columbine, which really isn’t. Luigi was an assassination. The thing that happened in New York in Midtown Manhattan a month ago, in which the guy went into a office building supposedly mad at the NFL for-

Matt Taibbi: Oh, right. Yeah.

Walter Kirn: ... concussion policy or whatever it was, that big muddy thing, that was some kind of assassination, too.

This was an assassination of children. It seems strange to use that word in the context of school kids, but that’s what it was. He aimed specifically, deliberately at people of a certain type and carried it out in a premeditated fashion. We’re not dealing anymore with the mass shootings of old, quite. We’re dealing with... that we understood as these frustrated expressions of pressure. We’re dealing with semi-politicized violence. I don’t know if going at kids is necessarily political, but it does have this Roman Catholic element and it’s happening in a church. Now, these ghouls are already on fucking TV telling us how they want their security companies and their policy centers and their agencies and so on to react, and asking for power.

Matt Taibbi: Right, yeah. We should have learned our lesson after 911, right? 911 happens, John Ashcroft asks for a draft of the Patriot Act on a Wednesday, and it’s done on a Friday, and it’s this radical new approach to information, to law enforcement, to everything, right? Now, nothing is sacred. FBI has access to grand jury material. They can listen to things they could never listen to before. We get the FISA Enhancement Act later, which is they soup up the old law, it becomes incredibly easy for everybody to listen to everybody else, but this was all directed, theoretically, overseas.

One of the things that they developed after 911 was monitoring of speech abroad, and that was the genesis of the stuff that we saw on the Twitter files, right? When we actually had to go backwards and say, well, what are these agencies? Where did they come from? If you trace them all the way back, they’re counterterrorism agents, groups that were originally doing things like monitoring the conversations between people in Arab-language countries, and then occasionally they would stimulate discord between them or get them angry so that they would pop up somewhere and use a cellphone so they could be assassinated, that kind of stuff. But it was surveillance of speech abroad, and what happens is that it gradually starts to turn inward. Wo when I hear MSNBC talking about how that was one kind of terrorism, now we have a new kind of terrorism and it’s-

Walter Kirn: Right. Putting an equal sign between them.

Matt Taibbi: It’s wholly domestic. Let’s 911-ize everything. Right?

Walter Kirn: We’re moving into what I might call a traumocracy. Traumocracy. Legislation through trauma. Trauma becoming now the origin of all initiatives, which otherwise might be debated to death or might be thought untoward or unhelpful, but in the wake of trauma can find passage and acceptance.

Let’s assume a statistical distribution of violence across political groups that in any five-year period, you’re going to have a certain number of violent acts that come from this group, a certain number that can be associated with this ideology, can be associated with that, can be associated with that. Every group loves to legislate against what it sees as its adversary in one of these things. Right now, I’m just going to use plain English, right now, if the right wing sees this as somehow trans-inspired violence, it is all for what that guy’s talking about in some way. Tomorrow, if a guy wearing a MAGA hat does something, will get the left all into it.

Across any period of time, you will have gotten every group, every segment, every piece of the spectrum on board with this policy, a policy that hasn’t worked, that in some ways I could argue has pressurized and contaminated society with suspicion, inhibition, lack of candor in a way that doesn’t help, and which has also created for these unstable individuals a sense of possible stardom in ongoing debates that they see as more prestigious than their own sad lives.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, that’s true, right? They imagine themselves to be celebrities when they might not even be that in their own households in real life, and that’s how these things happen. In some ways, it’s incredibly sad, but you’re right. What will end up happening is everyone will argue for increased surveillance and monitoring of the groups that they don’t like, and because there’s always going to be violence by certain kinds of people, you end up with a society that’s sort of fully under surveillance all the time.

Walter Kirn: And already is. What is that guy talking about? Let’s get real, Matt. Reddit forums, in which potential extreme action might be discussed, are already completely penetrated and monitored. You and I both know that in a way they’re just arguing for the sanctification of what already goes on.

Matt Taibbi: Right. We want increased ability to go in there and do certain things. We had a graphic illustration just this week, I think just today, of how this has all come full circle. Not long ago, we were talking about the raid on John Bolton, and I think even before that, we were talking about unmasking at one point, right? John Bolton, when he was up for confirmation as Bush’s nominee to be the ambassador of the United Nations, there was a huge issue at the time that he had once requested unmasking of people on FISA. He had done it 10 times over the course of four years, and Joe Biden was really mad about it, and Chris Dodd was really mad about it.

Bolton was one of the first people to be held up as a violator of the FISA unmasking rules for domestic intelligence reasons. Lo and behold, there’s a story out in the New York Times today that says the leak investigation into John Bolton originated from Five Eyes surveillance by other countries, so this is going to end up being basically like a FISA-type technique, and that US intelligence officials got Bolton’s communications passed back to them in the Biden era, by the way, and now it’s been enhanced for the Trump era.

Walter Kirn: So I guess we could just never mind our whole week of Bernie saying, “I don’t agree with John Bolton, but vengeance is never good.” I guess we’re in the post-Trump’s vengeance period of the John Bolton case, right?

Matt Taibbi: Right. Yeah. Apparently this was being investigated by not only our intelligence services, but our quote, unquote, “Five Eyes partners.” For those who don’t know, those are the Anglophile countries who are considered our closest intelligence allies.

Walter Kirn: By the way, it should be 10 Eyes. It’s always bothered me.

Matt Taibbi: That’s right, yeah.

Walter Kirn: I guess they’re talking about each country having one all-seeing eye rather than a pair of human eyes that always come in pairs, but that it’s Five Eyes I guess is the eye on the pyramid rather than the two eyes on our faces.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, five Masonic eyes or something like that, right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: That’s Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and us. Those are the Five Eyes, and I guess each of us only has one eye. But as we’ve learned in a number of different stories in recent years, the whole thing about foreign countries collecting intelligence and sending it back to us is a little bit of a canard, because what happens is our guys ask their guys to listen, they listen and send it back to us, and it’s really just domestic intelligence gathering.

Walter Kirn: Matt, as I understand it, it’s not even that complicated sometimes. What I understand happens sometimes is that there is a terminal at the NSA or wherever it might be, and there’s an American posted at that terminal, and he gets up out of the chair and a Brit sits down in the chair. I’m not kidding.

Matt Taibbi: It wouldn’t be surprising.

Walter Kirn: I’ve read stories of that happening. I challenge someone to come back at me on that.

Matt Taibbi: Look, put it this way: if it isn’t true, who cares? Because it might as well be. They can do things as easy as that, right?

Walter Kirn: Well, they can be on a split screen like we are right now and one guy’s looking into a terminal and the other guy isn’t.

Matt Taibbi: Right, and then by virtue of a request, it comes back this way and, look, it results in a domestic criminal probe, right?

Now, here I want to reveal something that has been troubling me for weeks that I haven’t been able to talk about. I got this in background conversations basically with former law enforcement folks. For a long time, I’ve been doing interviews with people like the former FBI whistleblower, Coleen Rowley. There are a few others. Steve Friend, who just got reinstated, was another FBI whistleblower. A consistent refrain that I heard from some kind of career FBI people, particularly those who works criminal cases and had criminal beats is the transformation of the FBI from a law enforcement agency that worked cases, gathered evidence for court, prosecuted bank robbers, criminals, child molesters, all those things. Transformation from that into the post-9/11 reality where it became much more of a domestic intelligence agency. So it always had a counterintelligence function. But in the last 20, 25 years or so, it has become much more of a gathering information agency.

Walter Kirn: And let’s just map that onto what we just talked about. One of the reasons it’s been able to become a domestic intelligence gathering agency is because of the terrorism word and all these theories of group guilt and radicalization and so on. We’re increasingly treating our own society like a hotbed of foreign radicalism and we’re using the same pretext that we used abroad here. But go on, sorry.

Matt Taibbi: No, no. And you’re absolutely right. We started to see... In the Biden years, they started to use language about DVEs, right? Domestic violent extremism. And this was going to be a focus. I mean, the quote I always got from somebody was CT to CP, counterterrorism and counter-populism, right? So it’s this move from outward to inward. And I’d always talked to former FBI folks who were critics of this, right?

You don’t get to talk to FBI people who are still in the bureau that much, who complain. They’re not going to do it on the record very much. So there are a lot of formers who will come out and say, “You know what? I used to love my job. We caught bad guys. That’s it. I could sleep at night and I don’t like what we’ve become because we’re just rolling up on people and listening to them, or we’re not building cases. And what is that?”

I started to hear from people who aren’t upset at that work in that community and don’t think it’s a bad thing. And that’s totally new. The first time I heard that was six months ago, and it was just kind of randomly came up when I was interviewing somebody about something else. But I wonder if there’s been a sea change in the way Americans think in the post-9/11 era. Maybe it’s a generational thing, Walter. You and I just aren’t in touch with it, but there are people who want all this surveillance and think it’s a good thing, or they’re so inordinate to it that doesn’t even register as something negative anymore.

Walter Kirn: We are the enemy. We’ve met the enemy, and he is us. Now, let’s be frank, this has been true for a long time in America. The ‘60s anti-war movement was heavily penetrated. Before that, with the Red Scare and other internal witch hunts, there was, under Hoover, the FBI’s czar for how many decades that hunt for internal dissension. “Martin Luther King, here’s a letter, go kill yourself. We know all about your affairs.” That was a letter sent by the FBI to Martin Luther King.

In a way it’s always been thus. It’s just that it takes on new mantles of respectability and it develops new tools and new arguments for itself. And it’s also in the age of the internet got absolute. I mean, they used to have to do all kinds of kooky things to get into a communist meeting or into students for a Democratic society meeting, and they had to grow beards and smoke dope.

Matt Taibbi: That shoot dope. Yeah, exactly.

Walter Kirn: Whatever. Now they just click and they’re everywhere. And they’re everywhere all the time. And as I say, sometimes I think what we’re seeing is the seizing on every act of violence as yet another brick in the wall for them. Here’s another excuse for why you should increase our budgets, accept our presence, not dispute our findings, be a fan of secret courts, be a fan of secret warrants, be a fan of... Now what did we get with all these things? Russiagate.

I mean, in some way, the... what I will now call the operation against the Trump presidency that happened, and the Trump campaign, used the tools that have been developed in this anti-terror regime for domestic political power struggle.

Matt Taibbi: Dirty tricks, yeah.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. That’s where they end up. That’s where they end up. They don’t seem to stop somebody from shooting into the window of a Catholic church at little children, but they seem to be very helpful when you want to stop the presidential campaign or hamper the presidency, or chase away the office holders under that president or get them arrested or whatever. That seems to be very useful and very desired on the part of politicians. But does it stop anybody from shooting into a church? Apparently not.

Matt Taibbi: No, it doesn’t, but it does work in some other areas, and it’s a modern version of the old Operation Mockingbird. Again, people roll their eyes about this and they say, “This is conspiratorial.” But as you say, this was a true thing under Hoover. You can go look at the documents. They had policies about... Disruption was a major aspect of what the FBI did back then. So that thing about sending letters to Martin Luther King, trying to waste the time of various groups or get them to do something counterproductive, all kinds of actions that didn’t have to do with charging people criminally was the normal activity of the FBI, the political wing of it once upon a time.

And the point I was trying to make is that after the church committee and all this all came out, there was supposed to be this come to Jesus moment that we don’t do that anymore.

Walter Kirn: That’s 1975. Exactly 50 fricking years ago. And one of the reasons the young folk don’t want to hear about this stuff, and it makes them uncomfortable and sounds like conspiracy thinking is that we really haven’t done much for 50 years to look into this.

Matt Taibbi: Right, right, exactly. We had one big peek into it, and then we were done with it. We didn’t really revisit the subject, some of the people who reported on it. I mean, Sey Hersh during the church committee stuff, when he was doing stories about the CIA’s domestic surveillance program, the family jewel story, he was roundly criticized within the press community for which said essentially, “Okay, that’s enough. We’ve gone too far with this. Let’s back off.”

He was in the wilderness for a few years at the end of the ‘70s. But anyway, this has all come back. Disruption is now a thing that we don’t just do domestically. We do it internationally. And there was a great example of this a few years ago involving somebody we both know, Tucker Carlson when he was trying to set up an interview with Vladimir Putin, and lo and behold, what happened? Can we show the Axios story?

So this comes out in Axios scoop. Tucker Carlson sought Putin interview at time of spying claim. So Tucker had been warned that the NSA was listening or monitoring some of his communications or had monitored communications that he was part of. So look at the sourcing on this. Tucker Carlson was talking to US-based Kremlin intermediaries about sending up an interview with Vladimir Putin shortly before the Fox News host accused the National Security Agency of spying on him.

Sources familiar with the conversations, tell Axios sources familiar with the conversations, wonder who that could be. Right? And it came out about a month later. There was a quasi-admission that this had taken place, but it had been incidental. They weren’t listening to Tucker. They were listening to whoever was on the other end of the line. But why did this story leak out?

If you asked Tucker, I got in touch with him this week, he said they were trying to delay my interview with Putin and they succeeded. It stopped it for a year. And that’s classic disruption. I know we’ve gotten far afield, but this surveillance thing that we’re in now, this is what it’s come to. It’s this thing where we’re listening to everything. It leads to stuff like this and or cases like the John Bolton case or whatever it is. But it’s not going to stop a screwed up kid in Minnesota from... Not kid. A screwed up young man. Right? Surveillance isn’t the answer to those problems. You know what I’m saying?

Walter Kirn: The American secret police, more powerful than ever with more sophisticated tools and greater buy-in from their former adversaries on the left frankly who used to be almost programmatically skeptical about the use of these powers. And somehow, I don’t know when they were used against Trump, learned to love them. The American Secret Police have done the following, in my book, failed to stop domestic outbreaks of terror, as far as I know, caused an outburst of paranoia and suspicion and conspiracy thinking, unlike any I have ever witnessed in my lifetime.

When you have a secret police, you are to have people wondering what they’re fucking doing, suspecting that they are their targets, being uncomfortable with various situations that they think might have been instigated by them. In other words, they have caused a kind of toxic brew of political suspicion and discomfort and worry among the general population while not demonstrating value in terms of crime stoppage. Worse, they have created a set of tools, techniques, strategies, laws, and protocols that have been used politically in an underground fight that is hard for us as journalists to even penetrate because it occurs at a level that almost didn’t use to exist, and which we only can unpack and deconstruct years later, after all kinds of declassifications, freedom of information act filings, whistleblower, confessions, and so on.

We’re getting to a point where most of America’s political life is happening in this subterranean compartment that was created supposedly to stop terrorism.

Matt Taibbi: And it hasn’t, right? Well, it certainly hasn’t stopped us from becoming-

Walter Kirn: I would think that they would be out there every week telling us about something that they have frustrated foiled or whatever, but I haven’t seen it. If you guys have this huge argument for the cost benefit analysis in your favor, let’s see it. Because at this point, I’m looking at a world of QAnon, people wondering about things like false flags, people on the internet in the wake of a shooting like we just had saying was that witness a crisis actor and so on?

That’s not Alex Jones’s fault at the end of the day. That is the fault of an American system, which is going on in the shadows. And if we don’t bring it out of the shadows at least every 50 years for some kind of anniversary inspection of the apparatus, then we’re going to go down the rat hole into nightmare land and political Machiavellian fights using these tools that never even rise to the level that people can analyze them.

Matt Taibbi: And then how do they use the tools domestically? They keep trumpeting the idea that a combination of the surveillance with new deamplification and suppression tools, maybe by adding some hate speech type enforcements here or there, that we can affect the behavior. This is much more graphic overseas with what we’re seeing in England.

Walter Kirn: Now, they’re going to throw artificial intelligence into the mix. Remember when Tulsi was put into this Quiet Skies Program, the surveillance program for air travelers, it was said by some that the rationale was her travel behavior had triggered AI programs. And no human was really at fault for targeting her. It’s just that the series of trips she’d made went into some formula and automatically caused dog teams to follow her through airports.

Matt Taibbi: And people have lost their ability to be upset by that. It doesn’t bother them when journalists are listened to. It doesn’t bother them when politicians are listened to. It came out in the leak investigations that even Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff were being monitored. And you didn’t hear any outrage from the Democrats about that. So we’re in an era where I think people are increasingly, they just assume that they’re being listened to and monitored on some level, either by a machine or by a person all the time.

Walter Kirn: They’re absolutely right to assume it. I mean, I wrote about this in 2014. The old Atlantic before its present editor and its present ownership ran a cover story called, If You’re Not Paranoid, You’re Crazy by me. And of course, they subverted my point by having the cover image being a guy covered in tinfoil as though this was the kookiest assertion never made by a journalist. But I studied the state of the art in terms of surveillance at that point. Not in legal terms, but in technical terms and so on.

What I found was ridiculous. I started the story by saying that one day, I had mentioned to my wife that we should buy walnuts because I wanted them for pancakes or something. And then I started getting these weird ads that used the word wanting to sell them to me. And at that point, my assertion that your phone was listening to you was thought to be fucking crazy, dude like, “What is Walter up against?” Have you ever by accident turned on the microphone on your phone and realized that you just dictated three paragraphs of a text?

Matt Taibbi: Oh, yeah.

Walter Kirn: Okay. That’s because your phone is always listening. That capacity is always there, believe me. Just pushing that little microphone button doesn’t bring it into existence. It’s there. And so what I’m saying is that anybody who is assuming this, should be absolutely confident that they’re assuming correctly. In the Luisi case, I don’t know if you remember, he supposedly went down from wherever he was starting with his phone in an anti-radiation case that would conceal its pinging of cellphone towers and thus his location. If the criminals are hiding, the criminals know, okay?

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. What is it all for? What is all that surveillance for? I mean, the easy answer is mostly it’s commercial, right? They want to know what things you care about. They want to know what to sell you. That makes sense. But it’s so easy to just shift it over a little bit this way and start to analyze the same data. And then we find out things like the FBI is buying information from commercial sites as an end around the Fourth Amendment. So you’re a Muslim and you go to Muslim Pro to find out which way to pray to Mecca, and you don’t realize that you’ve just sent the FBI your location. How many different types of data like that are being sold to government agencies? Who the hell knows, right?

Walter Kirn: Let me tell you a story. Apocryphal. Warning, apocryphal. A former CIA agent, they have different denominations of agenthood. He was an actual field operator, a guy who went out and would pose as a mujahideen and so on. He wrote a book about it, which is why I can be confident that his identity was as he portrayed, told me, and this may or may not be true, that Bin Laden’s location was found by commercial satellites, not intelligent satellites.

Matt Taibbi: This is when he was in Iran, supposedly, or in Pakistan?

Walter Kirn: Pakistan. The big secret was that the acuity of these commercial surveillance platforms was greater than that of the government in this case. And he said that anyone who paid attention to them, proper attention would’ve been able to find Bin Laden himself.

Matt Taibbi: Well, and what’s so freaky about that is what was the official version of that story is that they only got it because they were allowed to waterboard a whole shitload of people. That’s terrifying. So just to bring it full circle, another person who was a major proponent of all these content moderation slash speech control measures is Amy Klobuchar, who, Minnesota Senator. She came out after this and her instruction was to make sure that we don’t blame it on the right people, if we can watch that.

Amy Klobuchar: These kids did extraordinary things, but they never should have been put in that position in the first place. This was a madman. He was an all-purpose hater, by the way, hated groups, left, right, you name it. There’s no way to pin an ideology on this. And I think people should remember this as the facts come out about this manifesto. But what I learned from this, once again, is that guns... And we’re proud hunting state. There’s a lot of law abiding gun owners in Minnesota, but there’s got to be more we can...

Matt Taibbi: Okay. So she just said, “We shouldn’t blame it on any ideology, but we got to stop the gun.” So don’t make a political statement, but make a political statement right away.

Walter Kirn: Amy Klobuchar is the daughter of a famous Minnesota journalist named Jim Klobuchar who was a columnist in the newspapers when I was a kid. And he was a kind of classic Minnesota liberal, just good government, everybody. Let’s pull together for the big object.

Matt Taibbi: For the big win.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. And my dad, who was a Republican, but also an environmentalist, a strong environmentalist, he was a political type that kind of doesn’t exist anymore, frankly, went on Jim Klobuchar’s show once. He had a TV show, almost public access style, but it was on the network affiliate. I was so proud. Jim seemed such a sensible guy. And Amy Klobuchar personally is one of my least favorite politicians in America.

Matt Taibbi: Oh, God.

Walter Kirn: She seems to be on the side of every military adventure. She’s on the side of every kind of intrusion-

Matt Taibbi: Censorship.

Walter Kirn: ... on civil liberties. She represents, to me personally, the fall of the liberal Democrat in American society and politics from what her father was to this. And I can tell you that if the ideology that had been espoused were at all hateful to Amy Klobuchar, she would be pounding the drum about them right now. But she learned that it’s about gun violence. She didn’t learn that. She knew it. It’s programmed in her fucking brain. And the idea that... How can I put it? The idea that these things are political is abhorrent in the sense that they’re always used when they are usable by whatever side.

The idea that they’re apolitical is abhorrent too because we do have a certain control over the discourse in this country. And I am afraid to say that there are indications that if this guy did identify with trans rights, there’s a lot of talk of genocide against trans people in America, and thus of the need to defend themselves. And we saw that in that notebook where he had the AR superimposed on the pride flag. So everybody needs to back off a second and look at their contribution to things. And that nauseated me. That nauseated me.

Matt Taibbi: That’s a really good way of putting it that she represents the downfall of the liberal Democrat in America. I remember watching her in, I think it’s Winterset, Iowa where John Wayne was born, and the thing that really bothered me, so she’s giving her speech in a local diner, and it’s just the usual DNC pablum or whatever, and I was covering it for Rolling Stone. That didn’t worry me, but as soon as one of the reporters said to me... It wasn’t a reporter, it was actually a cameraman. He said to me, “You know what I love about Amy Klobuchar? She’s so funny.” And I thought, I could not imagine a person who was less funny than Amy Klobuchar.

There you go, Winterset. Yeah, Winterset, Iowa. So I was there that day. And that to me is what we’re talking about. Once upon a time, the liberals in America, they were funny. They were the funny people. They would never have said an unfunny politician was funny, right? You would’ve had the press busting her chops in the back of the speech. But then on top of that, it’s the militarism, the surveillance, the censorship, all that stuff. It’s all been turned around.

And this thing that they now do, which is instant political instruction. So a thing happens. Here’s what you shouldn’t think. Here’s what you should think. Don’t draw conclusions about. So my first reaction to this was, “Yeah, I might be mad if I were a 23-year-old pretending to be a girl and not getting any love and attention. Who’s going to go out with me?” He seems like an unhappy person for a variety of reasons, probably deeply sick on some other levels too, but it’s worth it the question like was that a lifestyle choice that was suggested to him?

Walter Kirn: Matt, Matt-

Matt Taibbi: You can’t even think in that direction. So we’re told, “Don’t think about this. Focus on the guns. That’s it.”

Walter Kirn: Just like Erin Burnett coaching the mayor of Minneapolis. And by the way, is he going to be the mayor of Minneapolis again? Because wasn’t his opponent just ruled out of the race?

Matt Taibbi: Omar Fateh? Yeah. I don’t know. Did that happen? I’m not sure.

Walter Kirn: It seems like... In any case... I’ll tell you my first reaction to this thing yesterday. My God, I’m glad my kids weren’t there. I’m glad I don’t have little kids anymore. I’m glad I don’t have to worry about this kind of thing. My next was, my friend in a nearby western city who just two days ago put his little girl into Catholic school, wrote me, and told me about what’s going on at that school as a result.

The terror, the absolute vigilance that they’re now going to require in every drop off and interaction with the school. Those are the things that affect me. I feel like I’m looking into a kaleidoscopic dreamland when I see these politicians talking. Are any of you going to talk about kids getting killed?

Matt Taibbi: No, no. We have to worry more about this other thing that really, nobody was even really going there, I think. Well, there were people. Some that are talking.

Walter Kirn: And I’m going to tell you what, if you want to get the guns... The other thing I hate that she just did is they always talk about hunters and hunting. Remember the fricking Tim Waltz campaign last fall? It was practically a hymn to the Great American shotgun. I mean, he went … He had his truck. He was just a regular guy. We saw... Didn’t we see people... Well, we didn’t see any white men for comma with guns, but we saw Tim Walters, the healthy the all-American.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, but he almost blew a scrotum off, didn’t he?

Walter Kirn: Yeah. It almost blew his scrotum off either loading or unloading his shotgun with the butt of it in his freaking crotch as he couldn’t eject it or load it. I can’t remember which. But in any case, they always do this sort of hymn to hunters and the great American field and stream traditions. But as though these other guns are the only problem, I can promise you that if all we have is shotguns and people want to go shoot kids, they’ll use shotguns.

Whether the gun control issue is at the center of this or not, I can promise you that in the next two months, it will not affect people’s fears about their kids being at school. Nothing can be done on that score in that short of time.

Matt Taibbi: That’s true. That’s true. I should add too, I was a thousand percent on board with all gun control measures until this era happened, and now I worry. Now, the original justification for the Second Amendment feels a little bit justified to me. It’s all this overweening surveillance and control and all this other stuff makes me afraid of my own government. And so I wonder-

Walter Kirn: I actually thought-

Matt Taibbi: ... if it’s counterproductive, is what I’m saying.

Walter Kirn: Of course it is. If you were to be a cold-blooded reptilian observer of the American economy, you would notice that gun sales and ammunition sales rise in direct proportion to political talk about confiscation or prohibition, or whatever. I saw recently, and I think maybe our producer can check that gun sales in America as of about a month ago had fallen to a modern low. And it probably, in my experience might be related to the fact that there aren’t a lot of calls for gun control. People tend to hoard that which they think is going to become scarce. That’s called economic reality. And especially if they think that thing is going to be made illegal. And so yeah, there you go.

Matt Taibbi: There you go. Yeah. Well, everybody was buying guns in the pandemic. Peaceniks were buying guns during the pandemic. It was bizarre. I feel like I’m the only person who hasn’t yet bought a gun in this country.

Walter Kirn: It’s a bad idea to buy one if you don’t know how to use one. And it’s a bad idea to have them around if the people who might access them don’t know how to use them and aren’t properly aware of their danger. But luckily, I was raised by a son of a bitch gun guy who basically told me “Every gun is loaded. If I ever see you pick that thing up, and if the barrel comes in my direction, I will take it out of your hand and hit you with it.” That kind of boyhood discipline around firearms was common and still is in places like where I live now, but I’ve never been swayed by the gun control arguments that come around these shootings. But I did write an article once in which I said that the romanticization of the AR-15 is something that bothers me. It has a iconic and frightening power in its silhouette.

Matt Taibbi: No, I know.

Walter Kirn: We just saw in that notebook how the clip, the scope, the whole silhouette of that particular firearm has become magnetic for a certain kind of people. And I don’t know what I would do about that, but it bothers me that this focus on this particular firearm as the image of potency in America has gotten this far. You don’t see the Remington 12 gauge pump superimposed on a flag as a declaration of violent intention.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. It’s kind of not a surprise that it’s a military weapon that has gotten the big boost online. But anyway, very disturbing stuff.

Walter Kirn: But you know why it’s there, Matt? Because of the great war on fucking terror.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Exactly.

Walter Kirn: I’m sorry. America better deal with the fact that it has sent off hundreds and hundreds of thousands of young men. And because it no longer has a draft that sort of socioeconomically distributes that there are young men from small towns, from underprivileged cities who are looking to better themselves often in search of benefits from the VA and so on, and they come back familiar with these weapons, having intimately bonded with them as a thing that protects them and they buy them and they shoot them and they talk about them and they’re good gun owners, almost universally. But when you militarize your population for something like the Great War on Terror, just as when you make surveillance and secret policing an everyday occurrence, you’re going to get a more violent society.

Matt Taibbi: It’s true. It’s true. All right, let’s take a break and then we’ll finish up with C.S. Lewis in a moment. All right, so that idea of strength we talked about... So almost to the end in the last episode. We’re now at the end. My conclusion is it’s a happy ending sort of. Walter, what are your thoughts on the end of that idea?

Walter Kirn: So the end that idio strength is not its strength because it goes on forever and ever and you realize that he’s ending a trilogy. You really don’t need to read the first two books of the trilogy to appreciate this novel. But as you get to the end, you realize he’s wrapping up character arcs that he started three books-

Matt Taibbi: Two books ago.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, two books ago. So it just ends and ends and ends a lot like movies these days. But essentially what happens is this, the traditionalists, the people who harken back to the Old England, to the old gods, to Christianity, to Merlin, to the Arthurian greatness, and the natural world that is Fair Britain win out over the WEF/Bill Gates/Elon Musk/whatever they are-

Matt Taibbi: Slash NSA, whatever, yeah.

Walter Kirn: NSA and over the disembodied AI head basically. And there is a lot of gore and there is a lot of mayhem. C.S. Lewis, this quiet Oxford Don who’s hanging out smoking pipes with the Inklings C.S. Lewis and other theologians and so on in the quads of Maudlin college gets to really go for his video game ultraviolet side in the end. What happens basically is that the group of Malefactors, the evil ones, the anti-human demon channeling technocrats, are at a dinner and all of a sudden under the influence of Merlin, a bear, an elephant, a snake, a frickin tiger, and all of the great bloodthirsty creatures of the animal world come pouring into the room and rip them to shreds.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, just eat their faces off. It’s awesome.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, it is awesome. It makes me really want to see a movie of this book done, and I’m shocked that when it hasn’t been, but the natural world, I guess, as well as the Arthurian past and the Christian God and the angels. And angels in this book are sort of not necessarily fluffy beings. They’re kind of just as tough as demons, but they’re on the good side. They all come pouring in and they rip these freaking people to shreds, but they only do so after something else happens, which is that as all of the conventioneers, all of the nice technocrats are gathered to give speeches, they start losing the ability to speak and to understand each other in a direct allusion to the curse of Babel. If you’ll remember your Bible stories-

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, we talked about it at the beginning, actually.

Walter Kirn: Yes. The Tower of Babel, which was an attempt to rival heaven, to build a human structure that would go all the way up to heaven and somehow displace God was ruined, not just physically, but linguistically when God made everyone who was working on it unable to understand each other. The confusion of the languages. And that happens at this dinner too. They start babbling nonsense. And Lewis, who is a linguist and a scholar of English and medieval literature, does a really good job of describing this descent into gibberish. Some of the sentences they come out with and the nonsense words that pass their lips are very entertaining. So yes, good wins. The elephant finally... I love when the elephant breaks through the door and just starts smashing people and stomping them after they lose the ability to speak and understand each other.

Good wins as you knew it would. The couple that has been separated, the woman on the good side and the ambitious man who wants only to join secret societies, his chief motive in the whole book is just to penetrate inner circles. He’s like a guy who says, oh, there’s a deep state. How do I get inside it and how do I get to the deepest level of it? Well, they’re reunited at the end. And in great Shakespearean terms, I think they go to bed together, they’re going to have a baby. And this all goes on for like 50, 60 pages.

Matt Taibbi: The end is like 50 pages too long, I think. Yeah, but the Babel thing is amazing and it allows me to use the movie reference that I’ve been dying this whole book to use. Can we get the Wayne’s World Clip?

Speaker 5: Careful. Hey.

Speaker 6: No stairway. Denied.

Matt Taibbi: So Tower of Babel, people forget, that was the original Stairway to Heaven. They were trying to actually get there and the whole idea is it doesn’t work. You can’t build a stairway to heaven. And that comes out in this book, not with Wayne being told not to play on his guitar, but by elephants stomping on your face and tigers eating you and stuff, and you lose the ability to understand the evil plotters you’ve been communicating with. But it is kind of a fun ending. I think it’s more cinematic. You’re right though. I have this image of C.S. Lewis because of the movie Shadowlands you ever seen with-

Walter Kirn: I haven’t seen it, but I know what it’s about.

Matt Taibbi: It’s about C.S. Lewis played by Anthony Hopkins at the end, and it’s about his friendship with this woman who had cancer and her child. And it’s a very affecting movie, but it depicts him as a sort of kindly the cardigan-wearing Christian who has almost no sexual aura at all, but is this almost a Santa Claus-like figure. You see inside his mind in this book, and it’s something less than cuddly and cute. There’s an awful lot of things tearing each other to bits in this book and a lot of blood. So whoever has only gotten an image of C.S. Lewis through the Chronicles of Narnia may be a little surprised by the denouement in this book, I think. Is that safe to say?

Walter Kirn: Yes. And I mean, in some ways it’s fitting because what this book has really been about is blood versus bloodlessness, the incarnate human in the body living a life of emotion and faith and pain and struggle versus the utopian technocrat who thinks we’re going to transcend the physical move into the cosmic, live forever, achieve immortality through science, through the severing of our heads and the attachment of them to some kind of breathing apparatus. And it reminds me of also the competition between the Huxleys, Aldous Huxley and Thomas Huxley. People forget that Aldous Huxley, who was the dystopian painter of a society in which babies would be born in factories and everybody would be on drugs that kept them passive. He was related to Thomas Huxley who was a geneticist or an evolutionary theorist who kind of believed in what nice believes in and-

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, distantly eugenicist kind of-

Walter Kirn: Right, exactly. And so this is a kind of British intellectual civil war that has been going on and went on at various levels for a long time back into Darwin’s time really, and the utilitarians. And that Lewis takes such carnal pleasure in seeing the enemies defeated and killed. And he even has talk among his heroes about how they won’t mind dying. They’re kind of ready for glorious death and pain in the final battle.

Matt Taibbi: So yeah, the first time I heard that I thought, “Okay, that’s cool.” But the fourth or fifth time I heard it sounded a little bit jihadist. But anyway, go on.

Walter Kirn: Right. Yeah, it is a little jihadist. I mean, he really bears his fangs and pulls his sword out and comes out for the party of saber tooth tigers, Arthurian storms, snakes biting people and tigers fangs cutting into the flesh of professors. See, he spent his whole life in the academy, in the university system, and I, as a student at Oxford can tell you it is a very cloistered world of men in robes having Sherry together in these special rooms. But his inner Freudian death wish side probably always wanted to see a tiger come into one of those senior common rooms and rip everybody’s face off. And in this book, he gives free rein to that fantasy.

Matt Taibbi: I used to have an idea about something called Instant leather face where you would be able to press a button on your TV and the guy from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre would go in and just start severing the heads of the people you can’t stand watching on television. But I think that’s what’s going on with him is that he is looking at these sort of uptight technocratic intellectuals talking, and he just wants to have them all fed to wild animals. And I totally understand that. It’s got a little bit of fear and loathing imagery in there, actually. But there is one passage in there at the end that I really liked, which is about what you were talking about, the sort of blood versus bloodless and why the quest for absolute perfection and utopia falls short, and it’s a dialogue between two of the people on the victorious side at the end.

And it goes like this. It says, “Shakespeare never breaks the real laws of poetry put in Dimple, but by following them, he breaks every now and then the little regularities, which critics mistake for the real laws. Then the little critics call it a license, but there’s nothing less centious about it to Shakespeare. And that,” said Denniston, “is why nothing in nature is quite regular. There are always exceptions, a good average uniformity but not complete.”

And this is an idea that I believe, which is that it’s the things that you can’t solve for and decipher and conquer scientifically in nature that are meaningful, right? It’s never quite perfect. It’s the imperfections in art that make them beautiful. It’s that side of life that we love and this quest by groups to use material power or computing power or whatever it is to conquer and flatten out those little wrinkles is a kind of evil. It’s a failure to recognize something essential about what nature is and what’s beautiful about it. And I don’t know. I think they’re right about that.

Walter Kirn: I completely agree. In my lifetime, at one point, popular music became this very sanitized, overproduced stadium rock with wild guitar solos and incredible drum solos, and so on, and then came along guys who could barely play their damn instruments, sex pistols and so on. It was all reverb and false notes and smashing around because an appetite for the imperfect is built into all of us because it’s our nature that we are imperfect.

And I live in a town, and I grew up in small towns, and one of the things I love about small town America is that far from being the place of bigotry and perfectionism that many think it is where there is absolutely no tolerance for variation. It’s always been, in my experience, a place where there’s enough space and enough ease that people can allow for each other’s eccentricities and failings. You used to see it on the old Andy Griffiths show, the town drunk, they’d put him in jail when he needs to sleep it off and let him out. And Lewis has that same point of view in this book. He almost makes a defense of criminality at various points. He makes an actually specific defense of petty criminality saying, “An honest criminal knows they did wrong and goes to jail and gets out is a far better human than one of these Star Trek visionary, eugenicist crusaders.”

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, committing big crimes and trying to sacrifice them. Yes. And yeah, it’s an interesting distinction, but it’s totally true, and it’s in line with what we’ve been talking about too. It’s the thing that bothers us about all of these people who get on television with their sanctimonious expressions, talking about how they need enhanced power to do this or that. It’s the sanctimony that bothers us. It’s even more so than the-

Walter Kirn: Well, and we often find ourselves as press critics on this show, or media critics. And one of my overarching criticisms of the media anymore is that in the old days, reporters knew that they were partly scurrilous near criminals who loved digging through trash and hearing vile gossip and hanging out with fringe characters and bars and alleys and so on. We kind of knew the original sin in our makeup and had found a way to marginally make it positive and constructive and helpful to society. Nowadays, media figures go around like they were hatched from a computer and a virtue machine.

Matt Taibbi: With the glow. Yeah.

Walter Kirn: Aaron Burnett on the CNN that we just saw doing the hygiene and sanitary controls on this other politicians pronouncements. Louis is a very forgiving student of humankind. For him, the only real sin is to think that you can leave behind the human condition and become God. For him, that’s far worse than if you’re stealing your neighbor’s milk or whatever they would’ve had to steal in the villages of England.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Yeah. He has very strong feelings about that. One other point, I don’t know, I wanted to talk about the aesthetics of this book. There’s a moment in here where he talks about how it’s a preview of the book, everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten or something like that. He talks about how all of the books that he used to console himself after he was 10 years old or so were not needed, or were essentially that he had misunderstood them, that the essential truths that he learned, he learned as a child.

One of the characters talks about that. And what’s interesting about that is that Louis, when he’s writing for children in the Narnia series, he writes, I think very conventional fiction that is kind of taught story arc up, down. And this is kind of a highly intellectualized book that’s kind of all over the place. I don’t know. I still enjoyed this book a lot. I’m just saying that it’s an interesting thing for me. He was aiming for, I think, a different kind of audience with this book and wrote it in a different way than he might have.

Walter Kirn: He calls it in something I read by him, maybe it was an introduction to a physical edition of the book. I started reading this book on Kindle because I needed to get it right away. And then I purchased a copy, or my wife did, and I read the last part in print, and there was an introduction and he said, “It’s a folktale. It’s a fairy tale.” That’s how he situated it. And he was a medievalist. And I think in every way, this is a medieval story. It includes the supernatural, it includes ridiculous and absurd coincidences. Everything happens just in time. It is-

Matt Taibbi: Baroque complications.

Walter Kirn: Right. And so it’s really a kind of portmanteau or a collage of medieval storytelling techniques from fairy tales and epics and those kind of narratives. But it’s put into a modern setting, and the issues are extremely modern, if not futuristic. And the compote, the whole is rather unexpected. And I think at times you have trouble going from one level of storytelling to the other. Oh, we’ve just been having a debate about the perfectability of mankind through technology. And in the next part, an elephant is stomping through a door, and-

Matt Taibbi: Then there’s space visitors afterwards, and-

Walter Kirn: Then there’s space visitors, and then the severed head falls off its pedestal and somebody cuts off another dude’s head to maybe replace it. And you’re sort of going like, is this Star Wars plus the Princess Bride plus a campus comedy, plus science fiction play.

Matt Taibbi: It’s a lot.

Walter Kirn: ... what they called in kindergarten stone soup.

Matt Taibbi: But fun. It’s fun. It’s intellectually fun. And I think for our purposes also, this whole transhumanist theme that he is on here, I can’t think of another book that more directly addresses this weird kick that we’re in the middle of right now with AI. Do you? I mean-

Walter Kirn: No, because you see, Orwell’s concern was with mind control, okay? It was with surveillance, language, policing, censorship, and so on. Aldous Huxley’s concern in Brave New World was we should probably complete the trio and do Brave World.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Brave New World.

Walter Kirn: Was with the suppression of the biological and emotional self. In other words, the automation of reproduction, emotion, the suppression of what you might call the primal self by drugs and all sorts of technologies. Lewis’s concern is almost with the spiritual self, the abolition of the spiritual self, and its replacement by a technical travesty of soulfulness, which is of course, not soulful in the least. So they each had their visions of what was most important about life and what a nightmare of its removal might look like. So far in the competition, I would say Orwell worked out his thesis most thoroughly and realistically. There are a few times in this book where you go, “If that could happen.”

Matt Taibbi: Right. Right. Yeah. Well, yes, Orwell-

Walter Kirn: Except in the largest sense you go, “It can happen in an allegorical sense,” but Orwell, you can feel yourself trudging those streets, inhaling that bad air, drinking the crappy gin, smoking the cigarettes that fall apart, wondering if that person’s a policeman hiding in the dingy apartment building to have your love affair. With Lewis, really, it’s like being in the middle of a circus.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Orwell, the mood is really important to that book, and it’s kind of consistent all the way throughout. The same way when you’re reading a Sherlock Holmes book, you immediately feel everything is lit by gas, a Gene Globes, and you feel the cobblestones when you walk and all that stuff. It’s part of the DNA of the story. Here you do definitely get a sense of the academic environment at Oxford, but you’re taking a trip internally with it. But you know what? I feel like he worked a little harder on the tautness of it with the line in which an order, which was sort of similar, right? It’s like you go into a portal inside your house and there’s a whole world in there. This is just the academic version of it.

Walter Kirn: And I would recommend to those who read the book, or those who are at least interested in our discussion of it, an essay by Lewis called The Abolition of Man, which is a more-

Matt Taibbi: It’s very related.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. More intellectual and less medieval and giant populated tiger riddled version of his argument.

Matt Taibbi: Absolutely. All right, well, that was fun to read. Thank you very much, and we’ll move on to something new next week and we’ll see you then. Thank you, Walter. Talk to you soon.