Transcript - America This Week, Oct 31, 2025: "The Great Mass Media Panic, and History Betrays Orwell Again"

Lawrence O'Donnell goes full wanker, and "Animal Farm" is reimagined as a critique of capitalism

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

Walter Kirn: And I’m not just an exhausted Walter Kirn. I’m daft to use the British term. So, Walter Kirn just got, who’s speaking of himself in the third person. I’d speak of myself in the fourth person if it was possible, because I’m that detached from my own being.

Matt Taibbi: You are the Ricky Henderson of novelists right now.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. So, yeah, I got back from my cabin yesterday after three weeks of no human contact other than over the internet and on speakerphone. I was speaking to everybody in real life as though I were on speakerphone very loudly and not really looking them in the eye. Also, I had lost track of my own level of fatigue, and it turns out that you are able to be tired beyond tired without knowing it until you get back and have to do normal things. Also, I was writing many thousands of words a day, and so the normal speed at which people spoke to me wasn’t enough. And I went into several stores hoping to conclude really complicated transactions like shopping for clothes within three minutes. And when that couldn’t be done and there were other customers, I made myself one of the most unwelcome people on earth. So, how I’ll behave here, I really have no idea. I might be uncharacteristically quiet and monosyllabic.

Matt Taibbi: We both might be for different reasons.

Walter Kirn: But this is all in the service of a book for people who haven’t kept up with the sad narrative. And the book is within a quarter of a chapter of being finished.

Matt Taibbi: You’re in the Zeno’s paradox stage of the book being done.

Walter Kirn: Yes.

Matt Taibbi: Which is where the ending is so close that you can’t even measure the distance to it. But no matter how hard you work, you never get closer than half the distance to finishing it in a day.

Walter Kirn: And the thing about endings, I should tell future reviewers of the book so that they can pretend to discern something themselves that I actually told them. The thing about endings is they grow more and more important as you approach them. So, every word becomes double, triple, quadruple important. And that puts more pressure on your completely exhausted mind. And not only is it hard to finish, you’re afraid to finish. The last word of a book, I remember when James Joyce was taught to me and they said the last word of Ulysses, after all those words, after all that complexity is yes. And that-

Matt Taibbi: That’s right.

Walter Kirn: That affirms life, and it affirms mankind’s spirit and saying yes to destiny and so on. Because remember, he comes home and he finds out his wife has been fooling around, but he doesn’t care. It’s still a yes. And I thought, wow, that really puts a lot of pressure on the rest of us. They used one of the main words, actually, not a word that you would ever put at the end of a book and never really, except in dialogue or something. Now what’s going to be my yes, what are we down to?

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, how do you get to yes, also, right?

Walter Kirn: Well, I think we’re down to salamander and other rather esoteric and uncommon words as our last words, but which will mine be, I don’t know.

Matt Taibbi: You don’t know yet. Yeah, it’s funny. So, I was actually spared this agony that you’re going through now with the book, The Divide. I had a hard deadline for that book, and my wife was due to give birth a week after it, but went into labor on the day. So, we get to the hospital and we’re trying to get her comfortable and get the anesthesia going and everything, and the phone rings and they’re like, “We need it now.” I’m like, “I’m a little busy.” And that wasn’t an exception. This is Random House. So, I had to finish the book on my phone and while my wife waited to go into labor with my first child, for her first child.

Walter Kirn: These are the war stories of literature that need to be told to young people. First of all-

Matt Taibbi: You have to be willing to, yes.

Walter Kirn: To do that, you have to be willing to finish your book on your phone while your wife is giving birth otherwise-

Matt Taibbi: And glaring at you.

Walter Kirn: And glaring, yeah. And hating you, of course.

Matt Taibbi: I’ll be right with you.

Walter Kirn: Otherwise, dentistry, always an option.

Matt Taibbi: Oh, man.

Walter Kirn: Okay.

Matt Taibbi: All right. So, you’ve been going down the home stretch of writing a book. I’m still recovering from a brain injury and ill on top of that. And it’s been kind of a difficult week as you say, you learn that you can build up exhaustion and not realize it until-

Walter Kirn: Yes.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. And so when I had the thing happen with my head, I slept for five days now. I guess that must’ve been the deficit I was operating under.

Walter Kirn: Right, exactly.

Matt Taibbi: I’m still a little fuzzy, but a lot of stuff happened in this week, and a lot of it is the kind of stuff that I normally love, like arcane sort of …

Walter Kirn: Corruption.

Matt Taibbi: Minutiae in documents. I love those kinds of stories, but now I’m having a little trouble with it. But let’s start with a couple of, and also there’s some things with, we’re reading Animal Farm and we’ll get to this later, but there is a new movie of this book that has an interesting twist on …

Walter Kirn: On Marxism, that it’s really capitalism.

Matt Taibbi: It’s so funny. I can’t wait to get to that. But let’s start with something petty because why not? I believe it’s eight. This is Lawrence O’Donnell up in arms, up in arms, angry that CNN continues to hire keep in its employee ... Well, let’s just watch.