Transcript - America This Week, August 2, 2024: "Pornitics"

Just like porn sites, political parties quickly identify your thing and send you to the right room. Also, "The Overcoat," by Nikolai Gogol

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

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, there are tons of things going on in the world right now. By the time this comes out, there may be major developments in the Middle East, so I guess we should just say that at the beginning we might be a few wars or other major events behind by the time this comes out, the news is now accelerating that fast. But it’s been an amazing week in what’s become kind of an incredibly bizarre presidential campaign.

Walter Kirn: The most bizarre ever, really.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, there’s nothing that even remotely compares to it, I don’t think.

Walter Kirn: No, now.

Matt Taibbi: How many weeks off are we from the assassination attempt?

Walter Kirn: Two.

Matt Taibbi: Two.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, a little over two.

Matt Taibbi: So assassination, CrowdStrike, Biden drops out, everybody embraces Kamala Harris, and then we’ve had nine different controversies in the interim, including... So we had a Republicans are weird thing come and go. Is it already gone?

Walter Kirn: I don’t know that it’s gone. I think it’s become a permanent part of the lexicon of this campaign. They hung the word around JD Vance first and then attached it to Trump as well. What it means exactly is hard to say, weird being a word that, once you’ve claimed it, you can use for almost anything because it has such a wide range of connotations. But in this case, it seems it was originally used in a junior high lunchroom fashion as a, “Ew, weird,” exclamation about a guy, Vance, who is thought to be creepy in some way or overly concerned with women’s lives, or just someone we don’t want to hang out with.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Now the DNC does put out talking points, and these are publicly available, you can see on the democrats.org page, they have releases, and they ran a couple of stories with weird in the headline, the calling Vance downright weird, Vance meets with weird billionaires. And almost immediately the entire world was using that phrase. Everybody’s, I think, seen the compilation reel by this point. But Vance did have kind of a... He had a tough week, I think, and we should probably talk about some of these things. We’re going to get to the main event of this week, which I think is one of the all times summits of unintentional comedy, which is the white dudes for Kamala Harris video. It’s been analyzed, but we want to go to some places that probably others haven’t. But just to get into the campaign a little bit, can we look at the childless cat ladies video, which has become a huge part of the meme of this campaign already.

JD Vance: ... saying is that we’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. And it’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?

Matt Taibbi: And then he doubled down on this. I mean, these are old videos. There was another one where he was giving an interview, I think shortly after Mother’s Day, and he talked about how people who don’t have kids are sad and lonely. And then he said some funny things about journalists, but this is going to become a big part of the campaign as well.

JD Vance: The best way to invest it is to ensure the next generation actually exists. So I think sending those signals via policy, but the cultural messaging and politicians is important. I also think, just to be a little stark about this, I think we have to go to war against the anti-child ideology that exists in our country. A few weeks ago, though Twitter is not real life, but I forget even what caused it, but there was this ridiculous effort by Millennial feminist writers to talk about why having kids was not a good thing, why they were glad they didn’t have kids, and even encouraging people who had had children to talk about why they regretted having children, which of course is like-

Speaker 3: The Mother’s Day hook.

JD Vance: Yeah, on Mother’s Day, which is psychologically deranged to ask mothers on Mother’s Day to talk about why they regretted having children. And what it made me realize is that so much of what drives elite culture is mediocre Millennial journalists who haven’t gotten out of their career what they thought they would.

Matt Taibbi: So that is funny because there’s probably a lot of truth to the journalist side of it, but Walter, what’s your impression? I think that tape, if you show that to 100 women, 95 are going to have a negative reaction to it, I think. There’s a vibe that he gives off, even more so maybe than Donald Trump, that women are going to react to. That’s an early impression of mine. I don’t know. I’m curious to know what you think.

Walter Kirn: Trump is an insult comedian, and everything he does is inflected with the traditions of Don Rickles and Vegas lounge acts that make fun of people in the audience and you’re never quite sure if he’s completely serious. Vance has an earnest mode that can’t be construed as joking or exaggerating or hyperbolic. I think that we’re in a new age of politics in which these people are... In some ways, I think because of the left and its ability to start classifying society in all these demographic boxes, the right’s fighting back ineptly, quite ineptly by, I don’t know, trying to make serious arguments about groups that are primed to be offended, and also it’s evoking a world in America that maybe we want to get back to according to them, but which is so far in the rear view mirror culturally, that to be earnest about it is to look like a fogey.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, this is the same... James Carville actually brought this up a little while ago and got killed for it, saying there are too many preachy females in the Democratic Party, and it was like an immune response. Every person within the Democratic Party devoured him for saying that. And I understand what he was trying to get to, but you can’t say that, you can’t speak in that language. And this whole thing is exposing some of the tone deafness that the right sometimes has with being able to speak in this language. I think they’re trying.

Walter Kirn: I don’t think that they are capable or primed yet to deal in any sophisticated fluid manner with the consequences of identity politics. There are big gaps in terms of party loyalty and voting patterns that have to do with gender and race and so on. But the Democrats have so much practice in advocating for those groups and also, frankly, demonizing certain groups, white males, et cetera, that to try to play catch up in this game, I think it’s a doomed enterprise for the Republicans to attempt to counteract this vocabulary and this worldview. I think they need to stick to their own worldview in which everybody is a citizen or something like that. But when they try to do their own version of anti-identity politics, they seem unprepared and tone deaf.

Matt Taibbi: Back in 2016, I remember Rick Wilson very early in the campaign, before other Republicans had done this, he described Trump supporters as childless single men who masturbate to anime, which was kind of a funny line, actually. But turning it around and saying that Democrats are basically childless cat ladies, that’s not going to work. It’s not as funny, frankly, or if it is funny, it’s funny in a way that you can’t just parade around in public. I don’t know. I think that’s not... I would say it won’t work, except the Democratic Party’s leaning into tropes that are themselves so ridiculous, and I think offensive is the wrong word. It is offensive, but they’re so preposterous that it overshadows the cat lady meme.