Transcript- America This Week, September 5, 2025: "The Arrest of Graham Linehan, Heretic to the Civic Religion"

Linehan is punished, Malcolm Gladwell rewarded, and world politics has become contests of dueling faiths. Plus, a classic novel by a childhood favorite of Walt and Matt

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: Well, I mean, I’m off schedule because we didn’t record our live stream Monday, and so I melted back into the normal non-podcasting population and forgot to have an opinion on everything last week.

Matt Taibbi: It’s good. You need to take a vacation. It’s like What About Bob. Take a vacation from your podcasting.

Walter Kirn: Right, exactly. Exactly. And so I live like normal people do, doing household chores and taking walks and so on. And then a couple of days ago I said, “Wait a second. I have to have a take on everything that’s going on, and all I’ve been doing is bird watching.”

Matt Taibbi: Are you a bird watcher? I didn’t know that.

Walter Kirn: No, I’m not in any way a programmatic bird watcher.

Matt Taibbi: Oh, okay.

Walter Kirn: I just like seeing birds. I have a specific interest in them as omens and portents. Different kind of birds mean different things will happen. What other people use astrology for, I use the apparition of the ornithological animal, and so if I see crows, if I see woodpeckers. Woodpeckers, just as we’ve said many times in the show-

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, no, we just want to shoot all of them.

Walter Kirn: ... yeah, yeah. And they are really, really smart. That’s what you learn once you become the enemy of a woodpecker. It can see your ill will and fly away far before your shotgun, if you happen to have one, is able to be aimed.

Matt Taibbi: It’s a little bit like how only a very close relative knows the exact moment when you will be annoyed by a certain word or sound or interruption.

Walter Kirn: Yes.

Matt Taibbi: The woodpecker that is familiar with your house knows just how long it takes to drive you to verbal rage. It gives you enough time to settle down. And as soon as you’ve calmed down, it comes right back and starts pecking again at your house. yeah, we’ve discussed this.

Walter Kirn: My chimney is sited in cedar shingles and it is systematically dismantling that thing. And once it’s done that it will move on to other parts of the house as it has in the past. And there’s really nothing I can do. It forces a certain humility on you. They’re like trolls on Twitter actually, woodpeckers.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, exactly. They probably are trolls. That’s probably where they’re flying to is Twitter and Instagram in between. In my town we have the Pileated Woodpecker.

Walter Kirn: A beautiful animal.

Matt Taibbi: A beautiful gigantic woodpecker. Only seen them a few times, but God help us if they actually discover my house. They have not yet. But we do have the other varieties. We have the Northern Flicker outside our house. We have some other. We have the Red-Headed Woodpecker. And they all seem to enjoy eating my house even after we resided it. Anyway, we’ve discussed this.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, yeah. We’ll devote a whole show to it someday.

Matt Taibbi: Yes.

Walter Kirn: Someday they’ll get in the news. They’ll take down a celebrity or something like that, and we’ll have our chance to pile on and flood the zone on the woodpecker issue.

Matt Taibbi: In America This Week: The Movie, or America This Week: Private Parts, the next scene would us doing this, but woodpeckers actually on our heads-

Walter Kirn: Yes.

Matt Taibbi: ... in the shot.

I wouldn’t say it’s a slow news week, but it was a fascinating news week. Last week obviously we had a tragedy, this Minnesota shooting by this figure, Robin née Robert Westman, this gunman. There’s been an ancillary controversy about that and we’ll get to some of that. I think somewhat coincidentally, or maybe not coincidentally, the week let off with the arrest of someone I think we both know, Graham Linehan.

Walter Kirn: Well, I don’t know him personally, but I have a friend in common with him, a comedian who knows him and works with him and assures me that he really is one of the most gifted comedy writers in the English-speaking world. I mean, he talks about him in the highest way in terms of his talent and his gift.

Matt Taibbi: Have you watched Father Ted?

Walter Kirn: No.

Matt Taibbi: He’s famous for being the writer on an Irish sitcom called Father Ted. It’s twisted and hilarious. It’s one of those rare shows that gets on TV that sort of blows beyond the usual boundaries of what the sitcom is. Reminds me vaguely of The Young Ones. Remember that, the show that was on MTV-

Walter Kirn: Yep.

Matt Taibbi: ... where it had a little bit of the flavor of Monty Python mixed in with sort of traditional sitcom format? Very funny, very strange, and also I would say apolitical show. It just kind of takes the piss in all directions. It’s classically like that. Very popular in its time. And what’s happened is that since the trans issue became a thing internationally, along with J. K. Rowling who is the most famous villain in transgender lore, Graham became infamous for being outspoken and refusing to accept the idea that these sort of biological men are women or trans women or women or any of these things. We might remember, Walter, that a couple of years ago there was a writer named Jonathan Katz who was on Substack who tried to get Graham and some other people bounced from Substack for being hate speech. I believe it was Jonathan Katz, if I’m not mistaken. It might’ve been in the other group. He might’ve been going after the neo-Nazis. There was an effort to get him off; it failed. Substack stood up and being the free speech platform that it has been consistently refused to bend.

But on Monday while returning to Heathrow Airport from the United States, Graham was arrested on the basis of a 1986 law. I believe it was the Public Safety Act; I’m not sure. It’s the public something act. But these are the three tweets that got him arrested. The top one is a picture of a trans protest and it just says, “A photo you can smell.” The next one-

Walter Kirn: Didn’t Peter Strzok say that of Trump supporters in a Walmart in Virginia? But it wasn’t a tweet, it was a text to his lovely.

Matt Taibbi: .... the first of the tweets is just a photo, an aerial photo. Look, there’s that sign in there that says Homesense. I don’t know what that is. Maybe that’s a British store. I have no idea. But it just says, “A photo you can smell.” So is he saying trans activists smell bad? I have no idea. Who cares? The next tweet, “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck them.”

Walter Kirn: Aren’t we supposed to hate those people? We’re supposed to hate misogynists.

Matt Taibbi: No, no, no. Oh, misogynists and homophobes? Generally, yes, but he’s calling trans activists misogynists and homophobes, so therefore we’re not supposed to hate them.

Walter Kirn: Oh, I see. Okay. I see.

Matt Taibbi: Right? Remember, there are feminists who believe that transgender activists are misogynistic among other things.

Walter Kirn: Yes, you’re right. Sure. Got it.

Matt Taibbi: That’s the trans exclusionary radical feminism. That’s what a TERF is. And then the third one where it says, “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops, and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

Walter Kirn: So right there he’s asking that we appeal to the authorities before taking vigilante action.

Matt Taibbi: Yes.

Walter Kirn: Is that not civic minded of him?

Matt Taibbi: Well, let’s see what he says about it, because he makes a very obvious point. Just to read from Graham’s statement, and this was after his arrest. He wrote about this. “The officer conducting the interrogation asked about each of the terrible tweets in turn with the sort of earnest intensity usually reserved for discussing something serious like, oh, I don’t know, crime? I explained that the punch tweet was a serious point made with a joke. Men who enter women’s spaces are abusers and they need to be challenged every time. The punch in the bollocks was about the height difference between men and women, the bollocks being closer to the punch level for a woman defending her rights and certainly not a call to violence. Not one of my best, as one of the female officers said, ‘We’re not that small.’“

“He mentioned trans people. I asked him what he meant by the phrase.” The quote is, “‘People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth.’ I said, ‘Assigned at birth? Our sex isn’t assigned.’ He called it semantics. I told him he was using activist language.”

This is what we call a debate, which is the kind of thing that happens in a free speech society. I would contend that Graham is factually correct on this one. But the important thing here is that he’s being arrested. Yes, there is the suggestion about punching somebody in the balls. But I’m not sure that it’s inappropriate for a woman to punch a man who’s in their bathroom in the balls. I would expect that if I walked into a bathroom. Now, I don’t identify as female, so there’s that. But this is what this argument is about.