Transcript - America This Week, June 14, 2024 "Elections and Dragons"

Matt and Walter play a new election preparedness role-playing game produced by the CIA's venture capital arm (Racket story to come), and discuss Guy De Maupassant's "The Necklace"

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

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, okay. Where are you and how are you?

Walter Kirn: Well, it’s a good question, because the backdrop changes. I’m in what they call the Palouse Hills of Southwest Idaho near the Washington border, and it’s a green sort of wheat-growing area. Very bucolic this time of year.

And speaking at a small college here, and teaching creative writing. Just kind of enjoying myself. But it’s one of my favorite places.

Matt Taibbi: That’s cool.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. This is one of my favorite areas of the country. Kind of far from the interstate, very agricultural, stable, rolling hills, mild climate.

Matt Taibbi: Has it been invaded by sort of upper-class LA progressives who are actually trying to escape the city?

Walter Kirn: Well, the town I’m in, Moscow, is the home of the University of Idaho. And there was a terrible murder here, you might remember, a few years ago, but a bunch of what used to be called coeds, young female students, were murdered, and it was briefly in the news.

But it’s a town that’s sort of divided between kind of a traditional agricultural class and then the university class, but it doesn’t have a ski area nearby or any kind of bourgeois recreational facility, so it hasn’t been ruined like a lot of places. It’s got a great balance between what a university brings to a town, and what wheat-growing, and small commerce, and little startup businesses, and some retirees bring.

One of the most perfectly balanced communities I’ve ever been to, sort of the Greek city state, 25,000 people, what they felt was the ideal size for a town or a place that could-

Matt Taibbi: Excellent.

Walter Kirn: ... rule itself. Yeah. So the Californians, they’re coming. They’re everywhere, really. I mean, it’s the reverse Dust Bowl. We could call it the Gold Bowl. The Gold Bowl migration. Their bowls are so full of gold that the rest of the country looks like a good deal to them, and-

Matt Taibbi: The Crypto Bowl?

Walter Kirn: Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. But it’s not Jackson Hole yet, basically, right?

Walter Kirn: Not even close to Jackson Hole. And if anybody knows anything about Jackson Hole, which is where many of the world’s former tyrants hole up with their Swiss bank account funds, and where the Cheneys entertain and that type, and the Rockefellers donated a lot of land to make Grand Teton National Park. I think I’ve met my only third-world warlord in Jackson Hole. No, honestly. Ski-

Matt Taibbi: Where else would he be?

Walter Kirn: Yeah. He has a ski condo. And this guy was some kind of Haitian warlord who would go skiing in Jackson Hole.

But anyway, Jackson Hole just suffered a huge calamity because the only way into that town from the west is a steep pass down a mountain, and it just washed out in spectacular fashion, meaning that the entire working class of Jackson Hole, which can’t live there and has to come from a place called Driggs, Idaho, can’t reach the place.

So it’s a little like a terrible movie, like a Buñuel movie, where all the rich warlords and Cheney friends and billionaires don’t have anyone to clean their houses suddenly because there’s no road for the servants to reach the place.

Matt Taibbi: Oh, my goodness. Whatever will they do, right?

Walter Kirn: Polish their own silver, I suppose.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. I can just see it. Yeah, yeah. A billionaire saying, “Honey, when the toilet runs and keeps making noise after you flush it, what do you do?” And they go on the internet together.

Matt Taibbi: You lift the little thing in the back, and yeah.

Walter Kirn: But do you have to touch the toilet water? Is the toilet water in the back dirty, or is it clean?

Matt Taibbi: There’s probably a lot of that. Definitely.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. Anyway.

Matt Taibbi: Well, Walter, this was once again, for the second week in a row, we had something very significant happen the day after we recorded the podcast. So we had the news come out that Steve Bannon is going to go to jail for four months starting on July 1st for contempt of Congress.

There were some interesting reactions. The Republican strategist, Rick Wilson, sort of chortled and said, “Remember, Steve, on your first day, you got to show dominance in jail,” and said that, “Yes, it’s just four months, but it’s four vital months.”

So there’s sort of an undisguised nature to why this is happening. But I just sort of wanted to ask you about this and what you’ve heard from people about this event, because I’m getting a lot of, “Well, he broke the law. He’s got to go to jail.”

It is true that contempt of Congress is a law, and no one doubts that they have the power to issue subpoenas. But we haven’t done this since 1947-

Walter Kirn: When did we last do it and why? Who went to jail for contempt of Congress?

Matt Taibbi: The Hollywood Ten, as far as I can tell, which is the Dalton Trumbo and all those folks back in 1947. That was when the House Un-American Affairs Committee was asking people to give up their friends and name names of other people involved in communist activities. And the reason-

Walter Kirn: Wow. That’s-

Matt Taibbi: ... later on-

Walter Kirn: That’s amazing, dude. So the last people who went to jail for contempt of Congress were also political prisoners, actually.

Matt Taibbi: Oh. Those clearly. Yeah.

Walter Kirn: And now considered heroes by thinking liberal types. That would seem to have been an outrage. I don’t know how it was covered at the time, but putting screenwriters in jail or the author of Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo. Wow. Just-

Matt Taibbi: We just had a movie starring Bryan Cranston called Trumbo not that long ago.

Walter Kirn: I know. Astonishing. So I wonder what Trumbo... I mean, I wonder what Cranston thinks of this. Here, it’s happening again, but it’s happening to the right people, I suppose.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. And the frustrating thing about this is, yes, Congress issues subpoenas that everyone recognizes that they have the power to do that. They’ve been doing it since the beginning of the American Republic, right?

And that it’s implied in the very beginning of the Constitution, Article I of the Constitution, that they have this authority, but the authority they have is to investigate problems for the purposes of creating legislation to fix it. And they’re given wide latitude to do this. But I hear all sorts of people saying, “Well, he’s got to pay for January 6th one way or the other,” and-

Walter Kirn: Steve Bannon?

Matt Taibbi: ... that is what-

Walter Kirn: That he caused January-

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Bannon.

Walter Kirn: ... 6th? Is there some-

Matt Taibbi: Yeah.

Walter Kirn: Has some body decided that he has a responsibility for that happening?

Matt Taibbi: He made public comments before J6 and before Stop the Steal to the effect that Trump was going to deny the election results no matter what happened. And that was one of the reasons why he was subpoenaed.

And anyway, the Supreme Court has specifically said, sort of in one of their early cases about the HUAC, the Un-American Affairs Committee, and kind of why we don’t do this, you know? They said that Congress’s power to investigate cannot be confused with any law enforcement objective, right?

So we don’t do this, we don’t do congressional investigations and kind compel people to testify in Congress as part of getting to the bottom of a crime. That’s kind of not the idea behind these subpoenas.

Walter Kirn: But as yet, there is no crime here that he’s been charged with in any other venue, is there?

Matt Taibbi: No. No. The implication is that he would be able to give evidence toward one. And who knows? Maybe that’s possible, right?

But the point is we just don’t do this. There’s a long list of people in both parties who don’t go to jail for contempt of Congress. It’s been sort of an unspoken agreement for seven decades now that this is just not a thing that we do.

And it’s just one more on the list of these things that I feel like people are just so blinded by. They start with Steve Bannon. “I can’t stand him. Therefore, this is okay.”

Walter Kirn: Right. Well-

Matt Taibbi: So I don’t know.

Walter Kirn: ... I mean, as I remember growing up, I was sort of surprised by a guy at my high school when he told me, “Hey. There’s a gay couple that lives nearby in our little farming community, and they could put them in jail.” And I said, “Why?” He said, “Sodomy.”

I had yet to hear the word as a description of a criminal thing. He said, “Oh, you could go to jail for sodomy.” And I said, “Why?” He says, “Oh, if you get oral sex, that’s sodomy too.” Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: Is he wrong about that? I think?

Walter Kirn: No, he wasn’t, right? At that time in Minnesota-

Matt Taibbi: Oh, wow.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. It covered a lot. Let’s just pretend my 11th-grade informant who told me so many things about Rod Stewart’s private sex life and things like that was all-

Matt Taibbi: You heard that story, too?

Walter Kirn: Yeah. Who was also on the ball about Minnesota sodomy law. And he probably was because he was the kind of kid who was always running some scam, selling something out of the back of trunk, so he probably knew all his downside.

But anyway, the first thing to do when hearing about these extraordinary imprisonments and so on is not to go back and, I think, debate the fact that there’s a law, of course there is, or whether it’s a good one or a bad one that exists. It’s to say, “What’s really happening here?”

In other words, this whole lawfare episode moment that we’ve been thrust into, I like to think of myself being somewhere in Europe with a pretty good international news show that includes 10 minutes every morning about America. And if I tuned into that over the last few weeks, and I hear, “Well, Trump was convicted for something that’s very hard to explain, and he may be going to jail before the Republican Convention. And his former campaign manager, Steve Bannon, he’ll also be going to jail here before the election for a crime that was last punished this way in 1946 during the McCarthy years.”

I know what was up, and so are the listeners in that fictional European country. So I don’t have to start at the bottom working my way up to figure out what the real significance of this is.