Transcript - America This Week, July 4, 2024: "Incident in Mediaville"

Walter and Matt discuss the great post-debate panic of 2024, including attempts by the White House press to re-grow a spine. Also, "Incident in Azania," by Evelyn Waugh

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to the special 4th of July edition of America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how’s it going? Crazy week, huh?

Walter Kirn: Oh, yeah. It’s a crazy week, outside of Montana and inside. See, inside Montana, while the rest of the world goes to heck, we only have a week to capture the tourist dollar, and so we are having a 100th anniversary rodeo celebration in the town I live in. I live in Livingston, that is the Western Rocky Mountain equivalent of Mardi Gras. So I’ve got endless distractions here from the Mardi Gras that’s going on in the rest of the country, the sort of masked nonstop party and bad behavior fest that’s happening in Washington.

But let’s dip into that. I mean, I’ve had enough bucking broncs and popcorn and cotton candy. I’m ready for the-

Matt Taibbi: I mean, it sounds actually more interesting than, well, this is actually interesting. I would say this has been an interesting week, legitimately.

Walter Kirn: Oh, it’s interesting because it’s structurally such an X-ray of how things work. See, when you’re between big lies like we are now, you get to see the apparatus, and it’s fascinating. We’re between the big lie that “Joe’s okay,” and everything that shows him not to be okay is a cheap fake, and whatever the next one is going to be about the Messiah that will replace him.

So right now, I was saying before the show, the press reminds me, especially the press, of a showgirl, Las Vegas showgirl, kind of aging, who married a rich guy, and then he divorced her, and now she’s trying to get her virginity back so she can get the next rich guy.

And I’m watching journalist after journalist try to restore their stained honor or run history backwards to the point where they were before they started lying about this.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, that’s exactly the right metaphor. It’s pretty hard to imagine a situation where anyone’s going to buy it, but they’re really trying hard and some of these efforts have been, I think, kind of heroic in their gall.

Walter Kirn: Right, right.

Matt Taibbi: The first thing, and this is more of a humor thing than anything else, but I just want to talk about a certain tweet that came out yesterday, and we’re recording this on Wednesday because of the holiday, but Walter, did you see this by Brian Stelter, the in inimitable Brian Stelter?

Walter Kirn: I saw it once you brought attention to it. I laughed at least as hard as you did, probably.

Matt Taibbi: I mean, I don’t know if I can read it out without laughing. So he’s pushing back. “The sheer amount of conspiracy thinking on the Left at this moment is deeply unhealthy. Example, all the people who seem convinced that CNN and other media orgs are trying to ruin Biden and reelect Trump, in reality, news outlets are merely trying to report the news.” Which is ...

And then if you can see, he actually ends up taking lots of fire from Democrats saying, “Why are you bringing this up at all?” Which is also amazing. But my question to you, do you think he believes that or ...

Walter Kirn: Okay, so that is a great question. There’s a thing in philosophy called a theory of mind. You have to have a theory of how other minds work in order to analyze them properly; you must proceed from some basic assumptions. And having a theory of mind about a person like Brian Stelter is really hard because you just don’t know what proportion of stupidity-

Matt Taibbi: Calculation.

Walter Kirn: ... calculation, just sort of inertia where they follow orders and they’ve emptied their own minds and maybe don’t have a head of their own anymore and they’ve sort of achieved a new state.

Matt Taibbi: That’s my theory, but go ahead.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. Well, let’s go forward on that theory then, because I think it’s a good one.

Matt Taibbi: I think this is 100% the whole thing about if you see a flock, a herd of deer, they’ll stay in place until exactly 50% of them decide to move and then they all go. Right?And you can watch that phenomenon in nature over and over again. Schools of fish, whatever it is.

That is 100% what the press corps is, I think, because once they go, they all go, right, and they never go anywhere alone, which is kind of the problem.

Walter Kirn: And Stelter isn’t one of those who goes early, okay. He is the exact measure of the 50% mark. He won’t be in the last quintile. He won’t be in the first quintile. He will be at exactly that moment.

Matt Taibbi: On the 50th percentile.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. It’s like watching water-

Matt Taibbi: That makes him the deciding vote, though.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, it’s like watching water freeze. He’s one of the molecules that just absolutely measures the phase transition. But what’s amazing is to see how offended he is that others might accuse him of something other than innocent. In other words, his theory of mind or his theory of his own soul, at least, is that he’s got a lot of integrity. He completely doesn’t catch that he’s a weather vane. He thinks that ... he somehow mistakes his reactiveness for volition, and something was triggered in him a few days ago, which he thinks is integrity.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Yes.

Walter Kirn: But from the outside is obviously just a kind of completely mechanical state that is induced when 50% of things change.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, it’s like a Hasbro toy or something like that. It’s got two little gears inside. I mean, it’s so obvious what’s going on with these folks, and it’s been popping up everywhere, and we’ll get into the more serious aspects of what this all means and the post-debate fallout and everything.

But there has been a remarkable series of developments just in the first couple of days of this week. We’ve seen high profile Democrats, Lloyd Doggett being the first, I think, elected Democrat to suggest that Biden drop out. Then we had Nancy Pelosi who’s been saying for a year that experience is an advantage. And then she adds a new clause saying, “Well, but is it a condition maybe, and not just age?” So she’s now opened the door to examining the question of whether or not he’s disabled.