Transcript - America This Week, Sept 26, 2025: "A Step Closer to Civil War?"

Speech controversies having moved beyond the level of ultimate ridiculousness, are we now in a war of actions instead? Also, the great literary trick in "The Fall," by Camus

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

Walter Kirn: I’m Walter Kirn. I almost forgot.

Matt Taibbi: You’re in your cabin, Walter, right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah, I’m in my cabin. You can see out behind me that there’s wilderness, but there’s also wilderness in front of me when I look past Matt. A lot of the time when I’m podcasting from the cabin, what I’m really doing is alerting to bears and intrusions of major predatory wildlife. I haven’t seen a mountain lion yet. But often I look past and I see wild turkeys, deer, elk, other critters. So it’s a great contrast because we’ve become futuristic in our podcasting, because the world has become futuristic. It’s a Philip K. Dick novel now. And the reassurance of a bear wandering by to eat berries off a tree keeps me grounded.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, I’m very glad for all the wild animals outside my house. It makes me feel happy that I’m farther away from people than I could be. Yeah, another week that just makes me never want to mix with human beings again. It’s just been absolutely atrocious, the events of the last few days. I don’t even know where to start. Let’s start with an easy place. I believe it was Tuesday, Google sent a letter in response to the House Judiciary Committee to Jim Jordan and the group of investigators he has. He has a very good group of investigators on his staff, who’ve looked into everything from the Stanford Internet Observatory to Facebook, to Twitter, to the DHS, to all kinds of things. And they had sent out subpoenas and interrogatories to Google about censorship during the COVID period. They got back, I would say an extraordinary letter. We’ve already had the Twitter file, so Twitter has already made admissions in the Elon Musk era about its censorship role. Mark Zuckerberg last year talked about Biden officials who yelled and screamed when they were pressuring them and used the word censor. So, Meta has already made admissions.

2025 09 23 Letter To Hjc

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Now Google has come out. Google is the biggest bear of all in this group. This document that came out that was sent to the House Judiciary Committee, it’s packed full of serious admissions. The biggest ones are, I think the eighth, ninth, and 10th paragraphs. You can see here before that, it says in seven, it says, “The COVID-19 pandemic was an unprecedented time in which online platforms had to reach decisions about how to balance freedom with responsibility.” All that Spider-Man stuff, with great power comes great responsibility. Then they go to eight and they say, “Senior Biden officials, including White House officials, repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the company regarding certain user-generated content related to COVID-19 that did not violate its policies. Administration officials continued to press the company to remove non-violative user-generated content.”

And then it goes farther. The next paragraph, it names the president. “As online platforms, including Alphabet, grappled with these decisions, the administration’s officials, including President Biden, created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation.” 10, “It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden administration, attempts to dictate how the company moderates content.”

Now, it goes on to say other stuff. It goes on to complain about Europe. It goes on to talk about fact checking. It goes on to talk about reinstating the thousands of people that were removed for various reasons, from COVID to electoral integrity under its policies. But the big thing is, this is a major admission. Now, why did they make this admission now? There’s some speculation that this was because they were trying to send a message to the Trump administration that lying about how it’s bad when any president does it, maybe they’re releasing it now as a way to-