Transcript - America This Week, Nov 21, 2025: “From the Epstein Circus to Civil War Threats?”

Another moral mania goes off the rails. Plus, the darkly apropos end of Lord of the Flies

Matt Taibbi: Welcome to America This week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn. Are you tired of being Matt Taibbi? You sounded like you were tired a bit.

Matt Taibbi: I am. I am genuinely tired of being Matt Taibbi. It just doesn’t get any better.

Walter Kirn: I’m tired of being myself. Yeah, me too.

Matt Taibbi: Okay, go ahead.

Walter Kirn: Oh, no, I just said that I want an AI avatar who holds the opposite views and speaks in a completely different way and is authorized by me. But anyway.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, I want a Max Headroom version of myself, so if there’s anybody out there who’s a video animator, who can make that happen, I’m willing to pay real money for that. So if you can arrange it, please let me know. I’ve seen some pretty impressive AIs lately. I actually watched a sportscast that I thought was narrated by a real person, and it was an AI. I was fooled.

Walter Kirn: Of a game that was made up or a game that actually happened?

Matt Taibbi: No, it was a sportscaster talking.

Walter Kirn: Oh, I see. Okay. Okay. Well, I mean, why not? As I said the other week, I think there should be a robot newscaster who reads the exact same words that the regular ones do, just to show us how very robotic they are, essentially. And we’ll have AI news. Of course, we will soon.

Matt Taibbi: No, we already do.

Walter Kirn: I haven’t seen it yet.

Matt Taibbi: Well, no, we don’t have the AI broadcast news. It’s not being sold to us yet, but certainly AI written news is everywhere. And then there’s quasi-official AI broadcast news that’s all over the place on YouTube and other places. Anyway, we’re veering off track. Why are we both exhausted? Why do we both hate being ourselves currently? Because we’re in the middle of another freaking moral mania and not going along, again, sucks. Being hated for this kind of shit gets exhausting.

Walter Kirn: I told my wife the other day that I resented having been left on a psyop island while everybody else parties down. I like to think that it’s a virtue that I’m not immune, but immunologically resistant to these things. I mean, I’ll sign on if I find one I can really get behind because I want friends. But so far it hasn’t happened, and as I watch the good time that everybody else is having, it is a little bit like having to work in a toll booth while people go to Woodstock. Oh, you’re going too? While I’ll be in the toll booth.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, exactly. Everybody’s already whacked out and having anonymous sex on the grass and everything, and what are we doing? We’re counting change in the booth.

Walter Kirn: Sitting here with one 10th the audience of Candace Owens, as our friend on the live cast pointed out the other day

Matt Taibbi: Not to besmirch our excellent viewers, though. No, we love you.

Walter Kirn: Each one of them is worth 10 of hers. That’s my answer.

Matt Taibbi: Oh, man. Yeah, so we’ll get to what we’re talking about in a second, but I just want to set up... The end of the show we’re going to talk about the ending of the Lord of the Flies, and I was actually deeply affected in kind of a negative way by the end of this book, because there’s a part of the book that’s sort of about what happens when people don’t have religion. They will turn to something like an anti-religion, right? They will. And that’s kind of what we’re in now. People are moving from mania to mania, and it’s a succession of enthusiasms and hatreds that it’s just unceasing, right? I think it’s what happens to people when they don’t have any inner metaphysics. There’s just the whatever the fleeting thing is that arouses their disgust, and that’s all that’s left. Anyway, so I’m complaining. Let’s go to SOT one, which is CNN telling the story about the bill signing ceremony, about the glorious disclosure of Epstein Transparency Act of 2025, or whatever the fuck it’s called.