Transcript - America This Week, Dec. 13, 2024: "Assassination Tales and Rubber Elephants"

The suspect in the United Health CEO murder becomes a "folk hero" through preposterous means. Also, "The Elephant" by Sławomir Mrożek

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

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, where are you? You don’t look like you’re in your familiar bear-surrounded den.

Walter Kirn: The lighting is terrible. You’ll notice, by the sort of curtains and, I don’t know, colonial patina of the paint, kind of Martha Stewart meets the Battle of Lexington behind me.

Matt Taibbi: I smell Connecticut already. Go ahead.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, yeah. I’m in Connecticut. I can’t say where, because I’m at a gathering that requires confidentiality, not that it’s some secret, intel meetup, but just a group where people like to gather and speak on backgrounds, so to be mysterious about my life of intrigue, I’ll just say it’s somewhere near the command center of the WASP headquarters of the United States

Matt Taibbi: All right, so you’re in Connecticut, and you had a lot to say on Monday about the assassination of the United Healthcare, CEO, Brian Thompson, and there was a little bit of blowback, but you purposely stayed away from the headlines in the last couple of days. Is that right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah. That’s right, because I have a thesis about this whole event, which is that it is, in some ways, a real event, and in other ways fictional, in that it is an ongoing narrative that is going to take over our lives, because there are elements of many famous crimes, many famous manhunts, many famous trials that somehow exist in it, either planned or unplanned, but planned in some way that I can’t quite put my finger on, and so, it’s going to unfold a novel. It’s kind of a made-for social media mystery, and every event in a new media age takes on a different shape because of the media that it’s intended for.

That’s a kind of Marshall McLuhan-esque conventional wisdom statement, but there’s something about this one that feels cooked, cultivated, planned, and scripted. Now, whether that was the genius of this computer-savvy, gamer, programmer who had kind of created what I call an AI crime. He said, “Dear, Grok. Based on the history of the JFK assassination, the Unabomber investigation, major school shootings, and other mysterious manhunts, give me a crime that would make me Hood and the villain a greedy capitalist target. Show me how I can use manifestos and other features of these crimes to give it a novel like texture that will last into the trial phase.” I’m not kidding.

Matt Taibbi: I know you’re not kidding, and I was exceedingly skeptical on our Monday live stream, but even if this was not scripted, the response to it has gone exactly according to script, to a point that is, I would say, beyond comical, so I think we should start, you mentioned a key word, manifesto, and there is one.

Walter Kirn: Sure.

Matt Taibbi: And it has been introduced well by, there’s a fascinating subtext, even that whole story, but let’s start with a favorite of ours, Stephen Colbert, and how he talked about this particular thing.

Stephen Colbert: Yesterday, an independent journalist posted what is reportedly Mangione’s manifesto, which is just 262 words. That’s not a manifesto. That’s a mini-festo. They could have just made a Yelp review, “American Healthcare sucks. One star.”

Matt Taibbi: All right. We can stop there.

Walter Kirn: So before we go on, a key to my thesis is that certain themes, issues, and political agendas are embedded in this crime, and in a strange way, it is a pre editorialized crime. It already contains the material and the suggestions for the commentariat to follow it. It’s like a book that also includes its own reviews, its own suggested reviews.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. The reviews right themselves, but I want to notice also one other thing that was conspicuous about that monologue. Colbert could not give credit to the actual releaser of the manifesto, Ken Klippenstein, because he is on Substack, so he’s just identified as an independent journalist, but the manifesto did appear in Klippenstein’s Substack, and we can read it because, as he says, it’s only 262 words.

Walter Kirn: Right. It’s tailored for the short attention spans of the two, top thousand Gen Z set.

Matt Taibbi: It’s a Tweet, basically. Walter, do you want to read it? I mean, I feel like this is a moment for you. This is a cinematic thing.

Walter Kirn: Well, sure. If my eyesight allows.

Matt Taibbi: Can we expand just a little?

Walter Kirn: Yeah. “To the feds,” I love how he calls them the feds in the sort of patois of the moment, “To the feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial, some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and to-do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down, because I work in engineering, so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas, but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder, US has the number one most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly number 42 in life expectancy.”