Transcript - America This Week, June 21, 2024: "Cheap Fakes and Real Mind Games"

Walter and Matt discuss Karine Jean-Pierre, Joe Biden, and the slow death of objective reality. Plus, "The Door," by E.B. White

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

Walter Kirn:  And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, are you home now?

Walter Kirn:  Yeah, I’m back in home. Back at home base, I mean. I see that the rest of the country, according to cable news, is experiencing a heat dome, dangerous heat wave, but I want the country to know that all that heat is being actually sucked out of Montana and replaced on the east coast, because it’s been in the ‘30s here at night.

Matt Taibbi: Really?

Walter Kirn:  Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: That’s crazy.

Walter Kirn:  Six of one, half dozen of the other. And as you reminded me just a few moments ago, climate change activists have been screwing with Stonehenge, defacing Stonehenge. And that explains to me all big wobbles in climate statistics, because the Druid gods will not be mocked. They’re the ones who control the climate. It’s not Jehovah. Jehovah is hands off as far as that goes, but-

Matt Taibbi: Do these people not watch horror movies like Poltergeist? How many ancient burial ground movies are there where you disturb the sacred whatever and you’re cursed for all... The Mummy? I don’t know. Raiders of the Lost Ark. There’s like 9,000 of these, aren’t there? You don’t do this.

Walter Kirn:  Yeah. Their lack of piety toward traditional Abrahamic religion is one thing. That’s very fashionable now. But going up against pagan deities, especially when you’re trying to deal with nature, is bad juju. And I think these kids need to lay off.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Right. I didn’t think we necessarily had to go into this, but we might as well just look at a few seconds of this just, because it was so crazy.

Speaker 1: Hey!

Speaker 3: No!

Matt Taibbi: Okay. We get it, we get it.

Walter Kirn:  Hollywood has done a lot to configure our image of insanity. People, their eyes bugging out, and then they see triple and everything. But that was about as insane a set of images as I’ve ever seen. Some old dude with a skull on his T-shirt using orange smoke to try to deface a druid neolithic structure. Don’t.

Matt Taibbi: To do what exactly? See, this is the thing. It’s actually kind of an interesting question. Do protest movements have to convince or persuade to be effective? And there’s this new belief that they don’t have to. And I’m not sure I understand where that comes from.

Walter Kirn:  Well, when they go into the Louvre and they hit the Mona Lisa or they go to Holland and deface a Rembrandt, I can sort of trace their logic. They’re going back to the, “Old white dudes,” who are part of the European hegemonic anti-nature drive that has gotten us all in this mess, according to them. But Stonehenge-

Matt Taibbi: They were living pretty simply. The carbon emissions, I’m guessing, were kind of low back at that time.

Walter Kirn:  Aren’t those people their ideal? They danced around in the moonlight, and they’re naked, polyamorous, not particularly materialistic. Shouldn’t they be forming a human chain around Stonehenge instead of-

Matt Taibbi: Right. They should be spray-painting outward on everything else.

Walter Kirn:  Exactly.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah.

Walter Kirn:  Hands off our Stonehenge. Instead, they’re going to the heart of their cosmic support and biting the hand that feeds them. This is Lovecraftian horror in the making. I know it.