Transcript - America This Week, Jan 24, 2025: Walter and Matt Review Donald Trump’s Executive Orders
Undoing the Great American Cluster$&%k? Also, “Alyosha the Pot” by Lev Tolstoy
Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America this week. I’m Matt Taibbi.
Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.
Matt Taibbi: Walter, how are you? You’re still in Washington, I can tell by that distinctly non-distinctive background.
Walter Kirn: Well, that’s the Grand Hyatt patented paint color that’s meant to cause you to forget what time it is and where you are and how you feel. The Washington freeze is real. I mean, it’s really colder here than I’ve ever felt it.
Matt Taibbi: You see that I’m actually home, but this is not where I’m sleeping currently because I’m in a hotel because our pipes are frozen.
Walter Kirn: You’re kidding me?
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Yeah, we made a mistake. But anyway, yeah, no, it’s Mongolian cold here, I would say, this is a familiar type of chill.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, and it’s kind of flipped my hibernation switch. It’s made it hard to get out of my hotel room. I don’t even want to go to the airport. And plus I found a place where you can eat oysters down the street at one of these old school lobbyist bars where all the bad deals are made, the Old Ebbets Grill, I think it’s called, with the big Irish bartenders.
Matt Taibbi: A lot of deals go down in Irish bars in Washington.
Walter Kirn: I feel great when I’m there, I feel great when I’m there. I feel like when I’m on my barstool, I’m making a senator wait.
Matt Taibbi: Excellent. You’re doing that when you’re in a bathroom stall in East Union Station too, but that’s a different subject altogether. All right, lots to talk, in fact there, there’s too much to talk about this week for us to really narrow it down to one thing. Well, let’s just say it was a tough task to do that.
So we’re going to just focus on one slice of the news this week, and that was the executive orders that were signed by Donald Trump right after he took office. I guess most of them were signed Monday, right? There were 100 executive orders that he let fly. Some were weirder than others, some were more controversial than others, but we want to go through them. There’s a couple of features to these that I think are interesting. I think it’s unique that executive orders are written that are clearly responses to investigative reporting, and there are a bunch of them in this batch, including some that you and I took part in, and most of those I like actually. There’s some others that are a little out there, but we can go over that. But I think, Walter, you and I should do something that we haven’t really done on this show a lot, which is take a bow a little bit and our viewers should as well, because they played a part in this.
Walter Kirn: Well, really they played the entire part because we’re just two people and there are numerous people and everybody knows our rap at home, but they go home maybe with a slightly new rap, thanks to attentive listening and parsing our arguments and maybe agreeing with a little bit of it, and that causes change. So I do give all credit to them. It’s like baseball has been very, very good to me, thank you to the fans, but I mean it, yeah.
Matt Taibbi: This is a unique thing in my experience. I’ve been doing this job forever. I don’t know if you’ve ever had this happen to you as well.
Walter Kirn: No, never.
Matt Taibbi: But when I read the Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship Executive Order, now with all the caveats that it’s going to face legal challenges, we don’t know how effective it’s going to be or how effective they want it to be or any of these things, just the fact that it happened is kind of amazing, I think. And if you look at the-
Walter Kirn: I’ll tell you, Matt, this doesn’t completely surprise me. I was told last summer by someone high up in the campaign, or I guess now in office, that this would be a priority. I was assured when I expressed skepticism that it would be a priority. And here it is, day three or four.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, there are several things in here that I was also told that were going to happen and that were kind of remarkably specific promises so I was very shocked to see it actually turn up in print. But just to look at the first paragraph, anybody who’s followed America this week or Racket will recognize a lot of the themes in this crucial first paragraph. And I’ll just read from some of it. He starts off saying, “The First Amendment to the United States Constitution enshrines the right of the American people to speak freely. Over the last four years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring American speech on online platforms,” and then here’s a key phrase, “Often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties such as social media companies to moderate, de-platform or otherwise suppress speech that the federal government did not approve.”
And then here we go, here’s a line that we could have written, Walter, “Under the guise of combating misinformation, disinformation and malinformation, the federal government infringed on the constitutionally protected rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the government’s preferred narrative in significant matters.”
And so this is multiple areas where that we highlighted, number one, that they were using these terms, misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, I testified about that. The fact that this was narrative guided, that what they were doing essentially was policing narrative, not fact. And that they were doing it through third parties, that this was a coercive end around to work around the First Amendment. I don’t know, I felt a chill a little bit when I read this. What was your reaction?
Walter Kirn: Well, I would like to know who wrote it and I can inquire and find out, I suppose, because they did not only make the order, they substantiated it with these very good points so that it can be understood and then discussed. And they are points that we’ve been making, others have been making, but we’ve made them consistently and valiantly, I like to think, and creatively. So it is incredibly gratifying. A moment ago I said I was assured that this would be a priority and I, for some reason, anonymized my source, it was Vice President Vance. I’m sure he doesn’t care to be kept anonymous in this regard. He went over and over as I anxiously said, “No, really? No, really?” And he said, “Yes, yes, yes.” He made it part of his speeches toward the end of the campaign. He really introduced the issue explicitly into the campaign. I don’t remember exactly-
Matt Taibbi: He did, he did. I mean, that was actually one of the key things that I think Vance did during the campaign is he made this a public issue.
Walter Kirn: Yes, yeah. And I was kind of wondering when Trump would, and I wasn’t hearing it quite. And of course I wasn’t expecting to hear it from the Biden administration or its sort of vassal proxy successor, Vice President Harris. But when I heard it from Vance and I wondered whether it was rhetoric or just meant to cement a coalition with that fringe of us that cares most about this, I was assured, no, it’s real.
Matt Taibbi: And let’s give some shouts out to people who also were involved in this front for the last three to four years, but particularly the last two years, everybody from Barry Lee Fong, Michael Shellenberger, Jim Jordan’s committee, Rand Paul is another person.
Walter Kirn: Alex Berenson.
Matt Taibbi: Alex Berenson, who has, by the way, a very important free speech case that’s working its way through the courts, which I think is likely to have an impact. Jay Bhattacharya, obviously all the people who litigated the Murthy v. Missouri case.
Walter Kirn: Martin Kulldorff. Who were the others there? Because I know Jay, I often tend to cite him first or exclusively, but there were three people in that suit as I remember. No, no, no, Aaron Kheriarty.
Matt Taibbi: Aaron Kheriarty, yeah, exactly. Martin Kulldorff. Obviously The Federalist, right? Consortium News, there were so many people who have been kind of sticking their neck out in this whole thing. And we got to give Elon Musk credit because if he doesn’t open up those Twitter files, I don’t think any of this happens. So the fact that they unveiled this whole thing really started the ball rolling on reporting on what was actually going on. And then there were a whole bunch of people who were sympathetic because they themselves had been censored and they made it a big deal as well. So I think this is a great thing, but we have to see-
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Racket News to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.