Transcript - America This Week, May 24, 2024: "Life on Polarized Mars"

Walter and I discuss the Tucker Carlson freakout, the Censorship Files, artifical "voids," and Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles classic, "Night Meeting."

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

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how’s it going?

Walter Kirn: It’s going great. Those who follow my adventures via the intro to this show will know that I spent the last eight days in a lockup in the desert in California, drinking juice and doing other esoteric health practices. I’m now out. I’m in a hotel in Los Angeles and I’m drinking the first cup of caffeinated coffee that I’ve had in, I don’t know, 10 days.

Matt Taibbi: I was expecting to see you all ready, like Eric Cartman. Like blown up, 300 pounds, driving a Rascal, because now that you’re free of the juice restraints and everything you should be pounding Ho Ho’s and everything. You’re not there yet?

Walter Kirn: No. You see, the glide path of coming out of one of these things is that you attempt to be healthy for the first few days.

Matt Taibbi: I see.

Walter Kirn: So I’ve done things like eat oatmeal without any sweetener, drink green juices, and other things that give you diarrhea. And so I’m entering a period now of normalization, with this cup of coffee. But the cheeseburger boundary will be the real return to civilization.

Matt Taibbi: For sure.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. And the problem is that there’s no cheeseburger out there that’s worthy of this first cheeseburger slot that I have open. Which will it be? So it’s helping my diet that I delay that moment while I consider which gourmet burger I should have first.

Matt Taibbi: Wait, are you in LA?

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: You’ve got to go Astro Burger, don’t you think? Do they still have that?

Walter Kirn: I’m three blocks from it. I’m three blocks from Astro Burger. I’ve been-

Matt Taibbi: We used to call that Ass Blow Burger.

Walter Kirn: There’s another one right by it called Irv’s Burger. Irv’s Burger. And in LA there’s a specialty kind of burger that’s very popular. It has pastrami on it. The Tommy’s burger. So that’s an option, too, meat on meat. I think a cheeseburger with pastrami and a runny egg on it would be perfect.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah.

Walter Kirn: It’s like that Saturday Night Live skit where they have a taco. It’s like an ad for Taco Bell. We take a taco and we wrap it in a burrito, and we wrap it. And then we fold a deep dish pizza over it. So I want to go big. But until I satisfy myself that I’m having the ultimate first burger, I’m not going to have it at all. I don’t want to piddle aside, choke, run over to Wendy’s and get like a double cheese.

Matt Taibbi: No, no, no, no. When you break the seal it should be for something awesome. You know?

Walter Kirn: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Matt Taibbi: Excessive. Yeah.

Walter Kirn: Exactly.

Matt Taibbi: That’s fantastic. The taco thing, that reminds me. I used to know a pretty well-known, sort of a quasi-celebrity underground chef here in New York named Kenny Shopsin. They made a documentary about him called I Like Killing Flies. Very eccentric guy. Great cook, huge. And he had a story he used to tell about the poet, Joseph Brodsky, who used to come in his place. Brodsky would not eat anything that was not inside something else. So whatever he ate had to be some kind of taco contraption. It had to be something wrapped in something, which I always thought was interesting. It didn’t matter what it was, but yeah.

Walter Kirn: Was that for security concerns? It’s like he wanted a sealed envelope over his food or something, be able to tell if there was an intact covering or not.

Matt Taibbi: I don’t know. It was very funny stuff, though. People I guess are weird about food.

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: Well, we have a very interesting news week. Wow, what a segue. What an accidental segue. News week.

Walter Kirn: Yes.

Matt Taibbi: Lots of stuff happening. Some stuff breaking on my side also, but I think I haven’t even had a chance to talk, really, with you about this. This story about Tucker Carlson having a show is kind of amazing. It seems like a groundbreaking-

Walter Kirn: Having a show in Russia.

Matt Taibbi: Having a show in Russia. Yeah. This happened. When did this happen? Wednesday? Tuesday. Tuesday, right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah, I think so. I think that’s when I first heard about it. Yep.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. And it’s on Newsweek, which used to be one of the flagship magazines in America. When you guys were doing Spy Magazine, you were making fun of Time and Newsweek, right?

Walter Kirn: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Matt Taibbi: That was the idea, because they were that influential in American society. What came out in Time and Newsweek every week was what the news was. Now, what is Newsweek, Walter? First of all.

Walter Kirn: Well, do you ever go Macy’s or a department store and buy Perry Ellis clothing, well, Perry Ellis the designer has been dead for a long, long time, but they licensed his name to create an eternal brand. Newsweek, as far as I know, has been dead for a long, long time. I wrote for Time for quite a while, and then Newsweek later hired me to do something in 2011 or ‘12 about Mitt Romney’s run for president. And because I’m a former Mormon, they wanted to take the Mormon angle and explore Mormon culture. The Book of Mormon was on Broadway. And this is how news magazines think: Mitt Romney’s running for president. The Book of Mormon is on Broadway. There’s a Mormon thing happening. Let’s explore this.

Matt Taibbi: That’s two whole data points.

Walter Kirn: Two whole data points. Can you find a third? If you find a third, then history itself is changing. And I think they did. And so I went down to Newsweek. Newsweek at that point was housed in a temporary vacant floor of an office building down on Wall Street. It had been sold for $1, as I remember, to a guy who had had a stereo equipment fortune who bought it from its former owners because it had collapsed and gone bankrupt, for $1. And then resurrected the mark, the brand, with this kind of gorilla-style staff operating out of a dusty, empty floor in downtown New York City. Since then, I think it’s contracted even further. But it still has the August Newsweek reputation. And under that cover, they can do all kinds of things that appear to be legitimate. And what they did-

Matt Taibbi: They keep switching, also, orientations, which is really bizarre.

Walter Kirn: Well, they keep switching. Right now it seems to be coded as a somewhat conservative or conservative-curious magazine. So it’s brought in a lot of centrist types who can’t believe that a news magazine, which used to be straight down the line liberal establishment... when I worked at Time, there was a feeling that Newsweek was maybe about 5% more liberal than Time, even though they were clones of each other in every functional sense.

We often had the same covers. I remember asking at Time. I said, “Why do we and Newsweek have the same covers so many weeks of the year?” I said, “Is there a spy here at Time?” Or whatever. And they said, “No, that’s just how it works.” And I was like, “How what works?” And I thought about it for a long time, and I thought, either they coordinate or they both key off a third entity. Maybe the New York Times. I don’t know, but anyway-

Matt Taibbi: Can I interject? Because I think that works according to the same... you ever read Fast Food Nation?

Walter Kirn: Yes.

Matt Taibbi: That book?

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: Remember how they talk about how, if you have a McDonald’s by itself in a town or a Burger King by itself in another town, they sell X amount. But if they are next to each other, they actually sell more. It’s counterintuitive.

Walter Kirn: That’s why we have a Republican and a Democrat party, Matt. You just answered one of the mysteries of politics. Why do we have two parties when they all do the same thing?

Matt Taibbi: Exactly, exactly. But I think Time and Newsweek, by dog-piling the same topics, actually increased-

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: Right?

Walter Kirn: Right. So to get back to the story at hand, last week Newsweek announced a big scoop, semi-conservative Newsweek, which you’d think would be friendlier to Tucker Carlson than the old Newsweek, at least. Announces that Tucker has signed a deal with Putin’s government to launch a show in Russia. Just taking off the mask, fulfilling every paranoid accusation against him. He’s decided to be not just a tool of Putin but a dancing spotlit open tool of Putin by doing a show there.

Matt Taibbi: Right.

Walter Kirn: And within an hour of Newsweek publishing this big scoop, I knew all kinds of people, because I know Tucker Carlson and I know a lot of people in common, and that’s not because I travel in exclusive circles. He’s a guy who keeps a wide network of contacts in journalism and so on. Everybody’s writing me behind the scenes, going, “Oh my god, what has happened here? They were right about him. He is a lapdog of Putin. And now he’s a happy, yipping, open lapdog. And this is going to end his career.” And, “What are we going to do?” Said the conservative types. And the liberal types were, “Oh, I knew it all along.” And this went on and on all day until we found out that this story was completely made up. Made up.

Matt Taibbi: Right. They took an observation and turned it into a story. And I think it’s kind of instructive to look at what the original version of the story. If you take the same link that’s up now and take a look at what it looked like when it came out on Tuesday: “Tucker Carlson launches show on Russian TV.”

Walter Kirn: That’s definitive.

Matt Taibbi: “Conservative TV host Tucker Carlson has launched his own show on a Russian state television channel. The former Fox News anchor is presenting the program Tucker on the rolling News channel, Russia 24, with the first episode now available online, the Russian State Newspaper Rosiskya Gazyeta reported.” So that’s what it said.

What does it look like now? “Tucker Carlson’s Show Aired by Russian State TV.” “The CEO of the Tucker Carlson Network has rejected claims in the Russian state media that the former Fox News anchor had made a deal for shows to appear on Russian television. The claims appear to have originated with the program Tucker, which is broadcast on Russia 24 but comprises old episodes of Carlson’s shows taken from X, formerly Twitter, and YouTube.

So basically it’s the same story, except one is affirmatively saying something is true and the other one leads with a denial, which is pretty interesting that you can just do that online, so that was pretty significant. But also the number of media outlets that went completely hog wild with this as this thing was coming out of the barn is kind of amazing. Here’s Vanity Fair: “Tucker Carlson comes full circle with show on Russia State TV.” Here we go. New Republic: “Russian TV has a new propaganda star, Tucker Carlson.”