Transcript: America This Week, Episode 81,"Swimming in the Deep State is Kind of Awesome"

Walter and Matt go full Mystery Science Theater on the year's most unintentionally funny video editorial. Also, John Cheever's "The Swimmer"

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

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, good to see you again. We saw each other actually in the flesh, in the Bay City, a few days ago. Where are you now?

Walter Kirn: For the third home time in history, we met in person. I’m back in Montana, after having been in Silicon Valley and then San Francisco. I didn’t realize until I did this show every week how much I travel, but I guess I do and had a good time-

Matt Taibbi: You do. You’re always on the road. It’s like perpetually.

Walter Kirn: I know. I thought I was a homebody and now it’s been revealed that I’m not. San Francisco was interesting because I, and by happenstance, you, both stayed right on Fisherman’s Wharf, perhaps the jolliest part of San Francisco these days, which is, indeed, having some sort of social problems and crime problems and so on.

Matt Taibbi: I didn’t have one person chase me with an aluminum bat this time.

Walter Kirn: Really? I had two people, not chase me with an aluminum bat, but really get in my face, frankly.

Matt Taibbi: Really?

Walter Kirn: Yeah. One of them was... I went out early in the morning, from our hotel, and some young woman just started abusing me basically out of nowhere because I wasn’t able to give her cash at that point.

Matt Taibbi: Wow.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, but I always enjoy San Francisco. The rumors of its demise, I think, are slightly exaggerated, but maybe not too much.

Matt Taibbi: No, it’s certainly... I don’t think it’s as bad as it was last year, although maybe I got the wrong impression, but the whole time I was doing the Twitter Files, it was a weird little subtext to the project because just traveling back and forth from the hotel to the Twitter office, I was like, what’s going on? Is this like a Mad Max movie or something like that? I thought maybe I should stop and do this story instead. I wasn’t sure what to do, but yeah, no, it seems better now.

Walter Kirn: Right, right. We were on the non-decade side of the city and I was able to go to North Beach, which is my pilgrimage site in San Francisco because it has City Lights bookstore and the remnants of the Beat literary movement. And it seems to have passed away almost entirely now, though. A few years ago you could still feel it, but not so much.

Matt Taibbi: The Beat movement?

Walter Kirn: Yeah. Yeah, you could a little. Yeah, but anyway, now I’m back in Montana and it’s snowing hard, and so...

Matt Taibbi: Right. That’s good.

Walter Kirn: Here we go.

Matt Taibbi: That’s good. This was a big week. In a lot of areas, there were some significant developments with issues that we spend a lot of time talking about. There was a Supreme Court case that didn’t go so great, I don’t think, listening to it, although who knows? You never know how judges are going to rule. We’ll talk a little bit about that, but I think, Walter, we should do the Mystery Science Theater thing a little bit with maybe one of the more extraordinary video editorials that I’ve seen, and you brought this to my attention, it is a New York Times editorial that came out a little bit sort of serendipitously after the seeming victory in the Supreme Court over the challenge to the censorship regime, and the title of it is, It Turns Out That The Deep State Is Actually Kind Of Awesome.

Now, we’ll get to that, but I want to first back up and talk about the term deep state because there are a lot of misconceptions about this word, as if it were invented out of thin air by Donald Trump himself. I wanted to share a little bit about some memories of how we used to use this term not that long ago. Here is 2014, and this is Bill Moyers, one of the archpriests of Liberal America, interviewing Mike Lofgren in an episode entitled The Deep State is Hiding in Plain Sight.

Bill Moyers: This week, on Moyers & Company, longtime insider, Mike Lofgren, on what he calls the big story of our times, the deep state.

Mike Lofgren: It is, I would say, the red thread that runs through the history of the last three decades. It’s how we had deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion of our civil liberties and perpetual war.

Bill Moyers: Funding is provided by Anne Gumowitz.

Matt Taibbi: I’m sorry, but is that not hilarious?

Walter Kirn: It’s a Saturday Night Live touch if there ever was one.

Matt Taibbi: Right? Okay. That’s how sort of liberal America used to talk about the deep state. Oddly enough, we used to think of it as the progenitor of perpetual war and repression and all sorts of other things and now it’s kind of awesome, as the New York Times is telling us, and we should only make maybe a few stops in this video, but let’s just play a little bit of this editorial. There’s almost no text to this, so there’s no way to get the essence of it without actually watching the video. We’ll speed through it. We’re not going to do the whole six minutes, but let’s just start.

Donald Trump: I will totally obliterate the deep state. I will fire...

Speaker 1: Donald Trump is obsessed with the deep state,

Donald Trump: The deep state. Deep state. The deep state is destroying our nation. Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state.

Speaker 1:And many Republicans are widening his paranoia.

Speaker 2: These unelected bureaucrats ruining this country.

Speaker 1:From a cabal of security agents to...

Donald Trump:The sick political class that hates our country.

Speaker 1:If elected, Trump’s vowed to gut the federal government.

Speaker 3:Reinstate the Schedule F executive order and “fire rogue bureaucrats.”

Matt Taibbi: Wait, I want to go back just for a second here because this is a key point they’re going to gloss over. While they’re giving a little voiceover, note number two. Overhaul federal departments and agencies, firing all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus. Right? That’s what he’s actually saying. But watch what they go ahead and argue.

Speaker 1:...these bureaucrats and what makes them so dangerous. We needed answers, so we took a trip across America.

Speaker 4:In 100 yards, take the exit.

Speaker 1: In search of the people behind this threatening entity.

Matt Taibbi: Okay. First of all, Walter, on an A to F scale, how do you grade that filmic convention of, oh, my God, it’s so funny that we’re the deep state lead in to this whole thing.

Walter Kirn: F minus. What can I say?

Matt Taibbi: There’s more, but... Sorry.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, yeah. Okay. Let’s keep going for a second.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, okay. Here we go.

Speaker 1: First stop: Huntsville, Alabama. Sure looks like some nefarious government activity happens around here.

Speaker 4: You have reached your destination.

Walter Kirn: Actually, it does.

Speaker 1: Meet Scott Bellamy.

Scott Bellamy: I am a mission manager in the Planetarium Missions program office.

Speaker 1: He drives a Nissan Titan 4X4. He’s loved Star Trek since he was a kid.

Scott Bellamy: Of course, I have a favorite character. It’s either Captain Kirk or Mr. Spock.

Speaker 1: And he may have quite literally saved the planet from annihilation.

Scott Bellamy: Potentially.

Speaker 1: You see, Scott managed a mission called-

Scott Bellamy: The Double Asteroid Redirection Test.

Speaker 1: And back in 2022, his team used your tax dollars to pull off something kind of incredible.

Scott Bellamy: You have an asteroid and you have a spacecraft, and you fly the spacecraft into the asteroid and try to change the trajectory of that asteroid. It’s like playing pool in space. Everybody was holding their breath. This is the moment of truth. Did we hit it?

Speaker 5: We got it? And we have impact.

Speaker 1: They knocked an asteroid off its course proving something that had previously only been done in movies.

Scott Bellamy: Saving the world from an Armageddon scenario. Potentially.

Matt Taibbi: Let’s just pause for a moment. So far, the deep state is basically Armageddon, the movie, and-

Walter Kirn: Except crossed with Office Space, the movie.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Yes. Right.

Walter Kirn: Because who knew, in that scene of high-fiving NASA people, that our greatest planetary saviors look like they belong in Office Space.

Matt Taibbi: It’s Initech.

Walter Kirn: Right, right. By the way-

Matt Taibbi: Did you finish... Yeah, go ahead.

Walter Kirn: When they first showed the mirrored glass of that building in Huntsville, Alabama and said, does this look like the sinister place? I was like, yeah.

Matt Taibbi: I know. With the little music. Yeah.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. I was like, yeah. It does kind of. And then I thought back to Operation Paperclip, which filled Huntsville, Alabama with former Nazi rocket scientists, and I thought we were going to get something else, but instead we got a roly-poly Star Trek fan who once did an experiment with an asteroid for which we should all thank him, I guess, because someday that might save us. They really oversold his role in planetary salvation, but-

Matt Taibbi: No. Look, I dig it. Look, shooting asteroids that might be coming at Earth, I’m all for it. You want to spend some of my tax dollars on that? That is cool. I’m fine with that.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, exactly.

Matt Taibbi: Not all of them, but I would say I’m happy to chip in.

Walter Kirn: But so far, the facetiousness of this New York Times produced thing rivals anything that we ever joke about.

Matt Taibbi: Oh, yeah.

Walter Kirn: They’ve really caught on to the new tone here. Let’s see more, Matt.

Matt Taibbi: Yes. Let’s keep going. Here we go. Here’s the next entrant in the deep state sweepstakes.

Speaker 1: This is Radhika Fox.

Radhika Fox: I am the assistant Administrator for Water at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Speaker 1: She loves Pilates, making salads and watching the Taylor Swift Eras Tour on TV with her family.

Radhika Fox: I think we’re all pretty 1989.

Speaker 1: Oh, and she led an operation to make our drinking water lead-free in 10 years.

Radhika Fox: That’s the dream.

Speaker 6: Worried and angry about lead contamination, residents of Newark New Jersey are demanding bottled water and answers.

Radhika Fox: Lead is a neurotoxin that can cause irreversible brain damage. Folks are drinking out of these pipes right now.

Joe Biden: Every single American child will soon be able to turn on that faucet, and their moms and dads know that water they’re drinking is clean.

Speaker 1: When President Biden announced-

Matt Taibbi: Sorry, I just have to interrupt. Was it mandatory for them to have the shot of Joe Biden in there or do you see that as a little bit gratuitous? Do you think the actual makers of this video would’ve liked to have done it without the Biden shot?

Walter Kirn: Since the intention of this video is to scramble your brain while inserting certain memes and catchphrases, I can’t pick apart what’s going on very well. It wasn’t mandatory. At this point, though, they could insert almost any image.

Matt Taibbi: That’s true. That’s true.

Walter Kirn: Like a kapow like in the old Batman show or something. Wham, kapow. Take that lead in the water.

Matt Taibbi: I just thought there are probably a couple of video editors sitting there and one of them was saying, man, do we really need... This is going a little far.

Walter Kirn: What I love is that the voiceover is a sarcastic satirical version of a usual Times video. You know what I mean? They’re doing a mockumentary style voiceover here because they’re so dripping with sarcasm and contempt for anybody who would question the deep state.

Matt Taibbi: This is their sarcastic investigation into the deep state.

Walter Kirn: Never mind that they’ve switched out what everyone thinks of as the deep state with...

Matt Taibbi: Oh, I know. Yeah.

Walter Kirn: With these people.

Matt Taibbi: I want to get to that, but yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Okay, let’s just keep going for a little bit here.

Speaker 1: It’s the nationwide plan to remove lead water pipes. Radhika’s team made it happen.

Radhika Fox: Yep. That’s right.

Speaker 1: Water utilities would be legally required to replace all remaining lead pipes,

Radhika Fox: Nine million in 10 years or less.

Speaker 1: It’s an expensive bet.

Radhika Fox: $50 billion. But those benefits are truly priceless. It’s the well-being of this nation that’s at stake.

Speaker 1: You want to replace your own water pipes? You got the skills to launch an asteroid deflecting spacecraft? No. That’s why your tax dollars, pay experts like Radhika and Scott. Important work like this is happening all over America, from helping two million victims of the opioid crisis, to engineering major breakthroughs in new-

Walter Kirn: Okay. Does this remind you of the narrator in Star Trek Troopers?

Matt Taibbi: Oh, Starship Troopers? Yeah. Would you like to know more?

Walter Kirn: Starship Troopers, I mean. Do you want to know more? They’re fighting the bugs across America.

Matt Taibbi: I’m doing my part. We should find that. Actually, hang on a second. But let’s keep going.

Speaker 1: ...clear fusion and helping make hearing aids affordable for 30 million people. Yep. The deep state is hard at work making America great. Just because we don’t know about it doesn’t make it suspicious.

Speaker 4: You have arrived.

Speaker 1: Our final stop: Chicago, Illinois. Meet Nancy Alcantara.

Nancy Alcantara: I am the acting director of enforcement for the wage and hour division for the Midwest Regional Office for the US Department of Labor. I had to take a breath. Yes.

Speaker 1: She still eats Lucky Charms for breakfast, trains for marathons and loves Latin dancing.

Nancy Alcantara: Cumbia, Bachata, Cha-cha-cha. You name it, I did it.

Speaker 1: And she uses your tax dollars to get kids out of working in dangerous slaughterhouses.

Nancy Alcantara: 13, 14, fifteen-year-olds working on the kill floor cleaning body parts, animal carcasses. They’re working with machinery such as skull splitters, bone splitters.

Speaker 1: Nancy and her colleagues raided slaughterhouses in several states and found more than 100 children working illegally. Last year, their employer, Packers Sanitation was fined $1.5 million. One of the largest child labor cases in American history.

Nancy Alcantara: Kids would die, kids would get limbs amputated. I don’t even want to imagine what would happen if no one did this job.

Speaker 1: These guys work for you, but Trump wants them working for him.

Speaker 7: Trump wants to fire at least thousands of these people that he calls, pejoratively, the deep state.

Speaker 3: Schedule F would allow Trump to fire up to 50,000 of them and replace them with like-minded people.

Radhika Fox: Sometimes it’s really hard to read the newspaper where you feel like we, as public servants, are being attacked.

Speaker 1: Now, this doesn’t mean that Americans can’t have different ideas about how big the federal government should be. After all, there’s no shortage of examples of real government overreach and overspend, but Trump’s teaching us to expect the worst from people in government, when the truth is they’re actually some of our best.

Walter Kirn: Where do we start?

Matt Taibbi: Do you have any quick comments? I want to start with, can you change your own lead pipes? Can you shoot an asteroid out of the sky? No. Fuck you. You don’t know anything. We’re the experts. You try it.

Walter Kirn: There’s part of me that wants to take this point by point seriously and suggest that, for example, the meat processing industry, let’s say, as exemplified by Tyson Foods, has been guaranteed, by our federal government, all sorts of monopolistic privileges which allow it to do just the things that they’re trying to prevent it from doing, chop off kids’ hands and so on. But rather than get into the actual meat of this video, which-

Matt Taibbi: We could.

Walter Kirn: Which would take forever. Let me suggest that...

Matt Taibbi: First of all, while the impression is still fresh, let’s, indeed, do a little Starship Troopers and see how it compares.

Speaker 9: Young people from all over the globe are joining up to fight for the future.

Speaker 8: I’m doing my part. I’m doing my part. I’m doing my part. I’m doing my part too.

Speaker 9: They’re doing their part. Are you?

Walter Kirn: Stop the asteroids.

Speaker 9: Join the mobile infantry and save the world. Service guarantees citizenship.

Matt Taibbi: Here it is.

Speaker 9: The bugs send another meteor our way, but this time we are ready. Planetary defenses are better than ever.

Klendathu, source of the bug meteor attacks orbits. A twin star system whose brutal gravitational forces produce an unlimited supply of bug meteorites in the form of this asteroid belt. To ensure the safety of our solar system, Klendathu must be eliminated.

Walter Kirn: Thank you, deep state.

Speaker 9: We take you live to Klendathu, where the invasion has begun.

Matt Taibbi: Few more seconds of this.

Speaker 8: We’ve just landed here in what cap troopers are calling Big K with the Sixth Mobile Infantry Division. It’s an ugly planet, a bug planet, a planet hostile to life...

Matt Taibbi: All right, all right, all right. Yeah. Okay, okay.

Walter Kirn: We went a little far with that, but how could we help it after hitting the nail absolutely on the head when we compared it, off the top of our heads, to Starship Troopers, little did we know that the same asteroid-destroying bureaucrats would be celebrated in both videos.

Matt Taibbi: It’s absolutely unbelievable and the movie had the same sarcasm, but that’s part of the suspense of the movie is that you have to work your way through the sarcasm of the presentation of the entire movie. But the New York Times is blissfully unaware that they’re actually part of this whole thing and it’s unbelievable that they made this thing and, just to be serious for a second, I don’t think anybody thinks of any of those offices as the deep state. Right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah. Let’s remember that the deep state that was being referred to in the Moyers video is the deep state that plans wars, carries out surveillance, plots international overthrows of government. It’s closer to the intelligence and the defense establishment. It used to be called the system. It used to be called the man, sometimes, but it was never confused with offices that do things like...

Matt Taibbi: Department of Water Safety or whatever it is, right?

Walter Kirn: Clear up our water. And so, this was a propaganda video. It was labeled as an op-ed, so I guess there’s no deception there, but it was deceptive in that it switched out a number of feel-good bureaucrats... It should have just featured kindergarten teachers, right?

Matt Taibbi: They’re not federal, unfortunately, I guess is the problem.

Walter Kirn: Right, right, right. Deep state is more like Deep Throat. It’s people inside the security law enforcement and kind of deep apparatus. It is not do-gooders who help us every day deliver the mail.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. I’ve got the list here of the 17 major intelligence agencies, the official members of the intelligence community, and most of these are probably familiar to people. Office of the-

Walter Kirn: The weird thing also about the video was that it held out the nightmarish possibility that Donald Trump would, even on its own terms, replace the people we were seeing with people he likes better and/or fire them. It conceded that government could be shrunken, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it was saying in the end. Was it saying that asteroids are going to hit, our water’s going to be terrible and there’s going to be no patrolling of the floors of our meat processing plants for child workers or was it saying that Trump partisans will be doing all that? It was unclear to me, but-

Matt Taibbi: Is he going to replace the Star Trek dude with somebody who’s going to not shoot the asteroid? Is he going to shoot something else?

Walter Kirn: Right, right. We’re going to have Republican asteroid shooters rather than Democrat asteroid shooters. I guess what I’m saying is that I wasn’t clear on what I’m supposed to be scared of. That society’s going to disintegrate and asteroids are going hit with impunity or that Republicans will take credit for those roles?

Matt Taibbi: And not to put too fine a point on it, Walter, but I think a lot of the frustration, in recent years anyway, with the rampant spending on the defense and intelligence complex has been from people who would like to see more money spent on things like replacing our piping system or our electrical grid or whatever it is, as opposed to sending handheld drones to Ukraine or God knows what else, right? It’s this whole idea that-

Walter Kirn: Exactly. And I could make a video, if I wanted to put on the hat of a rival newspaper, and say the deep state just closed our schools for a couple of years and is responsible for a drop in test scores. The deep state did this and did that. This was a rather one-sided celebration of some of the potential wins. Notice that all of them were potential, though. They didn’t even suggest that all of the pipes have been replaced. There’s just a 10-year goal to do it. They kind of confuse the tenses there. A future asteroid might be intercepted.

Matt Taibbi: Again, not to be too rough on these folks, but when you’re looking at, for instance, an agency like the CIA, there’s a rational question to ask. What exactly can they claim to have done for us? What can they come to us and say, we did this. I guess they can take some of the credit for things like finding Bin Laden, ISIS being less of an issue.

Walter Kirn: Can I tell one of my very best stories from my life as a person in answer to this question? Years ago, I was going on the Stephen Colbert show in the mid... 2006 or seven or something, maybe a little before that. And I was in Brooks Brothers because I’d flown in from Montana and didn’t have a suit to wear and I needed one quickly. And as I was shopping for a suit in Brooks Brothers, George Tenet, the head of the CIA at the time of 911, was right there in the Brooks Brothers men’s suiting, but he was quite a ways away from me, many yards away, and I said something on my cell phone. Oh, my gosh, George Tenet is here in Brooks Brothers. And he looked up. Okay, Walter is not... He’s paranoid, but he looked up. Maybe he’s used to hearing his name. Maybe he could just tell I was looking at him, but it was a little startling. Okay?

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, absolutely.

Walter Kirn: We’ll just leave it at that. In a movie, it would’ve been a little odd, and he looked at me and sort of winked or smiled and said, I didn’t do it.

Matt Taibbi: Do what?

Walter Kirn: I don’t know.

Matt Taibbi: The yellow cake thing?

Walter Kirn: I don’t know what he referred to, but this must have been his party line or his joke when people notice him in public. He looks over and says, I didn’t do it. Playing on the legendary paranoia of people who see CIA directors in the wild.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Yes. Yeah, that commonplace occurrence.

Walter Kirn: I guess, in answer to your question, I didn’t hear him brag of anything that he had done, but I did hear him defend himself against not having or say he hadn’t done something. Though, I’m not sure what it was.

Matt Taibbi: Right, right. Yeah. Just a blanket denial. Whatever it is, I didn’t do it.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. He didn’t say, I helped overthrow Guatemala back then or something.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. When we talk about the deep state, we’re talking about agencies that do... This is part of the problem. We don’t always know. Right? The defense intelligence agency, that is a huge organization-

Walter Kirn: Matt, and here’s the basic flaw in the New York Times video. The real members of the deep state don’t go on video.

Matt Taibbi: Exactly. Exactly. Are you going to get somebody from SOCOM or AFRICOM to come on and say we assassinated a couple of warlords, our CIA-run drone base in Djibouti ran 48 missions last month, and we only accidentally murdered nine people and...

Walter Kirn: See, when the video first came up and I saw they were going on a road trip to Huntsville, Alabama, which is a high security place, it’s home of NASA and some various space research, I thought we were going to get clips of people in shadow with their voices altered saying, I am the deep state. I actually shot down... I have worked on anti-satellite technology. You don’t know it, but we took down an Iranian satellite last year in the past.

Matt Taibbi: You sound like the cancer survivor commercial guy.

Walter Kirn: And then it’s people with cups that say, I love meetings, who eat Lucky Charms. They really overdid it with the Lucky Charms and the Nissan Titan. It reminded me of that magazine In Touch, where the stars are just like you and me. See, here’s Leonardo DiCaprio shopping at Ralph’s for a frozen pizza.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Walter Kirn: You think they’re Hollywood stars, but really they eat frozen pizzas and jalapeno poppers.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Yeah, let’s talk about, instead of a Nissan, what they actually drive. Hang on a second, because I feel like that has some relevance. Right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah. I pilot a Predator drone.

Matt Taibbi: And ARC... Oh, and I’m sorry. It has an ARC 210 radio. Yeah, or let’s say a striker armored vehicle or God knows what else, right? This is what people really worry about when they worry about the deep state. We don’t know half the stuff that they’re doing. And then we do-

Walter Kirn: Helicopters with Sting Ray cell phone interceptors on them, and license plate readers, and so on. But what would be funny is to take actual Deep State people like those that we just described to do fly, and talk about what they eat for breakfast, right?