Transcript - America This Week, May 30, 2025: "The Great American Fascism Panic"

Walter and Matt on another hilarious propaganda scare and few chuckles over Jake Tapper's "Original Sin." Plus, the thrilling end of "The Quiet American," by Graham Greene.

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

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: And we have an amusing show. We’re probably going to have some fiery responses about this material. Walter, you’re in Vegas, right? You relocated last night?

Walter Kirn: Yeah, late last night I left the East Coast. Which is leaving a pressure cooker at this point. I mean, I can’t tell you how many conversations of ultimate fear about the coming fascist regime that I had in New York. I talked to three people who were seriously concerned that they might go to camps at some point. What’s so funny is that I had those same conversations back in 2016. However, when you fly to Vegas where there’s a huge Bitcoin conference going on, and you look at Twitter and you look at your friends’ feeds from the Bitcoin conference and read your emails, it’s a completely different country. It’s a country that’s really excited about a reset of our currency using Bitcoin and so on. The freedom that’s going to come from the blockchain, the Trump administration’s embrace of tech and Silicon Valley, and it really is split screen America.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, it’s two completely different realities. And my feeling on this is that the truth is somewhere in between and maybe leaning a little bit more in one direction, but certainly the paranoia level. And we saw this, and we’ll get to this later because this was the theme right after Trump got elected the first time in 2016, this idea that there was going to be a mass exodus out of the United States.

Walter Kirn: Remember all the journalists who thought they were going to end up in prison or somehow silenced and so on. And yet they have been the most vocal anti-establishment, anti-Trump journalists in our history. No one has criticized the presidency and the President more than this crop of journalists. And yet there they are publishing bestselling books, not in camps yet.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, I mean, the big... Well, the real blow to the press in the first Trump administration was Julian Assange, but-

Walter Kirn: They all bailed on too.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, they all bailed on too. But the other thing that everybody actually remembers is Jim Acosta losing his gesticulating privileges at the White House, which again, I have a hard time working up the sympathy for that. But the reason we’re giddy in advance is because we watch... Every now and then, the New York Times gives us a gift in the form of something so nuts that-

Walter Kirn: The last time was their road show of deep staters when they interviewed-

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, the deep state’s awesome.

Walter Kirn: Went down to Huntsville, Alabama and interviewed a guy from the deep state who had basically saved us and was going to save us from asteroid strikes. Unless he gets fired. Maybe that guy got fired by Doge and we’re about to have a big one, a lake of fire in the middle of the East Coast. But now, they-

Matt Taibbi: And wouldn’t that be a big joke on us? We laughed and now look at that asteroid about to hit us right in the middle of this broadcast.

Walter Kirn: Could have been stopped. If not for Elon and what’s the guy?

Matt Taibbi: Doge.

Walter Kirn: Doge. We might’ve lived another 10,000 years on this planet, but in any case, they have topped themselves. That was funny. But this is through the sound and speed of light barrier. Funny. It’s Christopher Guest funny. It’s spinal tap for academics.

Matt Taibbi: It is, yeah. So essentially it’s three Yale professors, and there’s a punchline buried in this who are declaring that they’ve fled the country because of imminent fascism and they’re making the case. So can we see the grandiose opening first? So this is what it looks like online, and here’s your headline, “We study fascism and we’re leaving the US.” And you can see it’s a multi-person byline and everything, and it’s a lengthy-ish for the New York Times digital video that starts out as follows.

Marci Shore: I’m a historian of totalitarianism.

Timothy Snyder: I look at fascist rhetoric.

Jason Stanley: I’ve been thinking about the sources of the worst kinds of history for a quarter of a century.

Speaker 2: Experts say the constitutional crisis is here now.

Speaker 3: The Trump administration deporting 100s of men without a trial.

Speaker 4: A massive purge at the FBI.

Speaker 5: To make people afraid of speaking out against him.

Matt Taibbi: Look at, they’re all dressed in black. Look at the plane. All right, so that’s the setup. It’s three Yale professors, Walter, Jason Stanley, Marcy Shore, and Timothy Snyder dressed in identical somber, almost like Viet Minh black talking about-

Walter Kirn: To me, he looked like he is about to start his meditation practice for today.

Matt Taibbi: That’s right. I can hear the little water feature and see the massage room with the bamboo.

Walter Kirn: And the trickle of steam coming out of the aromatherapy vaporizer.

Matt Taibbi: Yes, exactly. Exactly. And we’re going to hear from all of them that they’re all leaving the country. So let’s look at number one, that this is Stanley giving his credentials and then talking about his intentions.

Jason Stanley: I’m leaving to the University of Toronto because I want to do my work without the fear that I will be punished for my words.

Marci Shore: The lesson of 1933 is you get out sooner rather than later.

Timothy Snyder: I’ve spent a lot of time in the last decade trying to prepare people. If Trump were elected once, let alone twice,

Donald Trump: Look wh

at happened. Is this crazy?

Timothy Snyder: I have to not flee Trump. But if people are going to leave the United States or leave American universities, there are reasons for that. One thing you can definitely learn from Russians-

Speaker 1: Is that it’s essential to set up centers of resistance in places of relative safety.

Timothy Snyder: We want to make sure that if there is a political crisis in the US, that American-

Matt Taibbi: Okay. All right.

Walter Kirn:Wait a second, Matt.

Matt Taibbi: Yep.

Walter Kirn: Editing, the editing. They actually had them finishing each other’s sentences.

Matt Taibbi: Oh, I know.

Walter Kirn: Did you see that?

Matt Taibbi: Can we go back and see that again?

Timothy Snyder: But if people are going to leave the United States or leave American universities, there are reasons for that. One thing you can definitely learn from Russians-

Speaker 1: Is that it’s essential to set up centers of resistance in places of relative safety.

Timothy Snyder: We want to make sure that if there is a political crisis in the US, that America-

Walter Kirn: Talk about a hive mind. If you look at the backdrops, they weren’t in the same room. So either they agreed to have themselves edited into a multi-headed single being, or there was a script or it just got cute. But what I’m telling you here is that what we saw so far is a milestone in deceptive editing. Well, creative editing. I mean, we talked about CBS maybe fudging a Kamala Harris answer in a 60 minutes interview. But what we just saw here were we saw shots of an El Salvador prison, which wasn’t introduced as such. Could have been anywhere. Could have been in the United States.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, could have been Alabama for all we knew.