by stickdog99 » Sun Feb 02, 2025 6:41 pm
[ur=https://www.racket.news/p/transcript-america-this-week-jan-e1dl]Transcript - America This Week, Jan 31, 2025: "The Apostate Hearings: RFK, Warren, and Democrat-on-Democrat Crime"[/url]
Walter attends the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. hearings. We discuss highlights and (mostly) lowlights.
Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.
Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.
Matt Taibbi: How’s it going, Walter? You had an interesting day this week. Actually, we should clarify as we speak, as we’re recording, who’s hearing is going on right now? Kash’s right?
Walter Kirn: Well, there is a second hearing for RFK. It’s less important than yesterday’s before the finance committee for various reasons. There is Kash and there is Tulsi. All three are being reviewed by the esteemed members of the US Senate.
Matt Taibbi: So we’re going to maybe pause a few times during the show just to check in and see what happened. Maybe do a little look in. We’ll see. But either way, Walter, you were at the entire first day of the Kennedy hearing. You, I believe, sat at about eight o’clock to Kennedy’s rear end, right?
Walter Kirn: Yeah. I was really five feet from RFK, thank you to his family really for allowing me such a close position. There were no conditions. I live tweeted it without interruption or supervision. But it was a great chance to see the star Chamber from his point of view, frankly. I was as close to his point of view as can be, and I looked out on people in the same way he did. It feels like Shirley Jackson’s the lottery. You’ve got this semicircle of senators, all of whom want to get time because there were people lined up for the overflow at 4:00 AM yesterday. That’s how intense and widespread the interest is in this nomination. And so these senators realized that piggybacking on his fame and the interest in his nomination, they were going to get a chance probably to speak to more Americans than they will anytime this year. And they made sure they got to use it.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. So for people who don’t know how officials like this raise money, the surest way they do it now is they get a little piece of video that they mass distribute usually by email, but sometimes by Facebook and social media. And typically what they want is they want a confrontational, aggressive scene where they’re yelling at somebody and then they fundraise off that. So it’s very important for them to get the finger-wagging, sort of Jim Acosta-style confrontation. And boy, were there a lot of them with RFK yesterday. And some of them, Walter, I guess we’re going to get into this because as a former ardent admirer of somebody like Bernie Sanders, I came away a little disillusioned, more than a little yesterday. And I guess we should get into some of those scenes. So should we start with-
Walter Kirn: Before we start, Matt, may I just briefly narrate the experience of going in and sitting there? So you come into this large Senate hearing room, and it’s got a sort of 1960s feel. It feels like a big courtroom. There’s a semicircular wall and a big seal on it.
Matt Taibbi: It’s very quiz show.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, very quiz show. And then the nominee comes in and he sits down. He has his family behind him. They have what are called sherpas, people who guide them through the nomination process. I’m not sure who they are, if they’re former Senate staffers, but they’re people who somehow know how the process works. They know where the cameras are going to be. They have a practical sense of the optics and so on. He sits down, and then they give the senators a chance to just sort of unload for a few minutes. But even before his statement is made, the Chairman Crapo and the ranking member from the Democratic side, Wyden, both got to speak. Crapo was cordial and upbeat and excited to be doing this. Wyden was someone who had just raised himself from a dark crypt. He apparently had a sun aversion in his use because he has skin you can actually see through.
And he didn’t meet the eye of the nominee as he read out or performed his extraordinarily cruel and abusive, I would say, statement. Kennedy was absolutely still for all this. His back feet though, were tapping hard, his heels. You could see that he was eager to engage. But one thing I noticed about the first few minutes of it is there’s almost in a conspiracy to make it uninteresting on the part of the opposition, in this case the Democrats, because they interrupt and they do things such that you just want to turn it off. And it was-
Matt Taibbi: You mean by being so off-putting or?
Walter Kirn: By being so off-putting, by not allowing the nominee to speak. You see, one of the things that surprised me was that even though you’d think that this is a hearing, it’s actually a yelling. The Senate yelling on the Kennedy nomination, he just has to sit there and take it while they throw rocks. They don’t even have to give him time to answer a question in their five minutes. They’re allowed to simply spiel and then turn it over to the next person without him getting a word in edgewise. It’s like some kind of hazing. It really is like a hazing ritual. If you were to transport it to some other civilization or to take out the English language element and put in some foreign language that Americans don’t understand, you would see it for what it is, which is like I say, Shirley Jackson’s the lottery or a bunch of wolves going after a wounded deer. Well, not that he was wounded but they’re hoping to wound him. And they-
Matt Taibbi: Wildebeests. That’s a good one.
Walter Kirn: Imagine being sort of charged as he was right out of the gate, with killing children, being a conspiracy theorist, a money grubbing, ambulance chasing lawyer, and all these other things. And the minute you open your mouth to try to make a defense, they tell you they don’t want to hear it. It’s a debate in which only one side has the clock, has the gavel, has the ability to shut the other side up. And it’s really quite sadistic. And the side that wants to practice sadism that isn’t in support of the nominee really takes full advantage of it. And in the room, when you’re not watching through the cool medium of television, on television everything looks like a performance, even sincerity. Everything is kind of evened out. It’s a filter for emotions, it takes out the peaks and valleys. But when you’re in the room and you realize you’re kind of out of spitting range, by just barely when they scream and you feel the primal Neanderthal emotional intensity of the confrontation, it’s shocking.
And you see that these are human beings, and the idea that they’re performing is a little wrong. Maybe they’re performing when they attack and so on. Maybe they’re doing it on behalf of others and more strongly than they would otherwise. But these are people to a certain extent without selves. And so the idea that they’re faking it doesn’t make much sense because they haven’t done anything genuine for so long that faking it is sincerity for them. And just the intensity, and as I say, the dramatic emotional valence of it surprised me. It really surprised me. I thought, in no other setting... I’ve been in courtrooms over and over through my life, I’ve covered trials. This behavior would last 10 seconds in a courtroom, but in the US Senate, whoa, it just runs riot.
Matt Taibbi: Well, okay, so in a courtroom a judge actually would order the counselor, “Hey, move it along. Don’t grandstand.” The whole point of these proceedings from the point of view of the politicians is to grandstand. And although the original idea of these hearings was to have a colloquy where everyone discusses and they kind of figure out the position of the nominee, and maybe there’s a little bit of movement. Here everything’s predetermined, and basically what you’re getting, all that yelling is, I think, so that they can send out a clip later on. This is when I went through my thing with the House, I realized about a third of the way through, oh, well, they’re not actually asking me questions. They’re just using me as a backdrop to throw stuff at. And I actually relaxed because at that point there’s nothing really in play.
But what was interesting about Kennedy is that I think a lot of these players they had a script that they were going to do, and I think they thought the optics were going to go one way but they seemed to go another way in a lot of the cases. Should we start with-
Walter Kirn: Yeah, let’s get into it. But one thing I will advise people as we go along, I am going to jump in because for example, in Bernie Sanders case, I didn’t see him listen to one word Kennedy said. But you don’t see him on camera. What I was able to see of their behavior when he was speaking and when the camera was on somebody else, when some other senator was interviewing, was more revealing than almost anything. Because it’s one thing to see them when they’re performing, but when they think they’re safe then you see what’s really going on.
Matt Taibbi: Well, that’s certainly unnerving. If you’ve ever seen that performance in one of these hearings, what you’ll see is a senator say, “You, sir, are a killer of children and should not be allowed in our country.” And then as soon as they’re done with the question, they lean over and they talk to the aids and they’re joking about something. The spread in the commander’s game. That’s kind of what’s going on. And that messes with your head even more because now you’re like, well, what did I just watch exactly? But occasionally, you will see some of these figures get emotional in the middle of their delivery. And that, I think does give something away. So let’s start there because this is the easiest one, let’s start with Elizabeth Warren. And I want to preface this by saying a lot of these figures are people whose staffs I worked with regularly after the crash. So Elizabeth Warren... This is the banking committee, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie, Ron Wyden was somebody I actually spent a lot of time with him over bailout issues.
So it’s not that I so much agreed with their positions, but I had a very different sense of what their vibe was about back then. So here’s Elizabeth Warren. She starts off by asking Kennedy if he’ll promise to not take money from pharmaceutical companies.
Walter Kirn: No, from suing pharmaceutical companies.
Matt Taibbi: No, she started by asking if you would take money from pharmaceutical companies, then she-
Walter Kirn: Oh, that’s right. That was comedy as I remember. And he was saying, “I don’t think they want to give me money.”
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, he actually was thrown. He didn’t understand. He’s like, “What, me?”
Walter Kirn: Just like I was thrown just now, but now I remember. Yeah.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. So then she moved on, and then this is how it went from there. And we’ll maybe pause it in the middle, but there’s really no way to do this without rolling it all the way through.
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Walter Kirn: When he came in there yesterday, I hate to be Jimmy Stewart, but I’m just going to be, I seem like this crusty guy, cynical and can’t be shocked but actually I’m easily shocked. He gave a statement in which he cited some statistics about the amount of money that’s allegedly paid by the US government for chronic disease. He says this in his campaign speeches too. “In my uncle’s day...” Meaning JFK, “There was zero spent on this. We now spend four trillion dollars on chronic disease. Here are the rates of obesity and diabetes. They have skyrocketed.” He gave an entire list of these kinds of what you might call lifestyle diseases and other diseases that affect us chronically and now in large numbers. No one even engaged with it. They didn’t even dispute the numbers. They wouldn’t even acknowledge that the problem existed.
The whole reason RFK is there and that there’s a thing called Make America Healthy Again, and the whole reason it survived an entire campaign and was actually quite popular and drew thousands of people yesterday to this overflow hearings, is that people see the problem. But the only people who apparently don’t see the problem, can’t even acknowledge it, won’t even dispute the numbers, are the Democratic senators of the United States.
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Walter Kirn: But Matt, look at the irony here. The defense secretary goes through, he’s a Republican with ancient Christian symbols tattooed all over his body, okay? He’s a confrontational person who appears on Fox News and so on. He gets through, and without that much difficulty, really. A Democrat, a Kennedy is trying to survive the gauntlet of other Democrats for what you would think is a far more benign post, a post dedicated to the health of Americans. Now, they may have different ideas about that health, but the job of killing people, goes right through, the job of healing people when the nominee comes from your own party and the most aristocratic family in your own party, is absolute mayhem because of one thing, the pharmaceutical industry.
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Matt Taibbi: But then we got to get to Brian Schatz because... And this wasn’t at the hearing, this was at an interview outside. This is an all time really amazing smear. I didn’t believe it when I-
Walter Kirn: A grand slam. When I saw it described, I thought, “No, the video can’t possibly back up this headline, can it?”
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, you thought it was a headline whopper, basically. But let’s just listen.
Brian Schatz: That RFK Jr. wants to conduct the Tuskegee experiments on all of us. He wants to observe the disease process population wide. But I believe, I believe, don’t know. I believe the Democrats will be united, and I think we can defeat this nomination, not for partisan reasons, not because I particularly want to poke the president in the eye on this one, but because I truly believe that if he runs HHS, that millions will die.
Matt Taibbi: “He wants to perform the Tuskegee experiments on all of us.”
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Walter Kirn: May I speculate here? The only reason to make this wicked, comprehensive, absurd, overly almost slanderous charge is that there is some fear that something is coming from the same direction as the Fauci pardon over Covid. They’re afraid of something. You don’t make a charge like that unless you are trying to counter something ridiculous. I mean, you don’t make a ridiculous charge like that unless you’re trying to counter something that you fear coming in the future. And to me, that was the first shot in some truth and reconciliation process that they actually are terrified of. And you can mark my words, because what they did was they inverted the entire sense of who might be responsible for things. “No, what Kennedy might do is reveal that you ran a Tuskegee experiment with these bio-warfare agents that you kept secret and didn’t tell us where they came from, and then defiantly refined in foreign laboratories.”
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Walter Kirn: I thought that over and over during the hearing, Matt. I wanted to say, “Bernie, if you’re who you say you are and all these other people, do you think you’re going to get a better nominee? You have a liberal Democrat in many ways who has one major disagreement with you, which is he’s not sure that we should just accept at face value what pharmaceutical companies tell us about their product, and maybe we should inspect the revolving door manner in which drugs are approved.”
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Matt Taibbi: Right. And Warnock, the Georgia Senator was actually all up in a huff about, “You’re accusing the CDC of offenses. How dare you imply-
Walter Kirn: They just pardoned Anthony Fauci, the highest paid government official, and one of the highest health officials for crimes going back to 2014 that obviously cover the years in which COVID research and gain of research may have been outsourced to freaking China. And they’re acting like they’re the unimpeachable authorities on how to run a healthcare system. They made Pfizer hundreds of billions and Moderna hundreds of billions of dollars for vaccines about which there is great controversy, as to whether they even work and might even be very harmful. Meanwhile, they changed the economy of the world, and they reshuffled the social contract in all kinds of ways, violated civil rights, brought in a censorship state, all on the backs of this vast mistake, let’s say. And then these compounding policies that were... I think it’s been demonstrated now, overly restrictive and harsh, and they’re acting like they’ve done a good job.
That was the weird thing. It was as if COVID had never happened up there. It was as if nobody’s fat. It was as if nobody has diabetes. It was as if all these vast expenditures that we can see all across the budget for various health maladies and illnesses aren’t going on. I was like, “Where are you guys coming from? You’re acting like everything’s wonderful.” And it hasn’t been wonderful. That’s the reason he’s there. That’s the reason for this unprecedented unity movement between a lifelong Democrat and a Republican president. The whole reason that everybody’s watching you right now is that they know there’s a problem, and you aren’t even addressing it. It’s like they were talking about the defense budget with a war raging that they never acknowledged.
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Matt Taibbi: Bernie should have been upset about [censorship], and he’s not. And here he is years later and what is he upset about? I know it’s silly, but it’s legal speech to sell a onesie. Even if you don’t like the message, he’s asking him, “As HHS director, will you stop this?” And my question for him is he okay with that? Is Bernie Sanders okay with the Surgeon General and the CDC and all these people working to shut down critics of the pharmaceutical industry or critics of mandates or mandated medicines? It seems to me that’s exactly opposite to what he’s been about most of his career.
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From Walter Kirn: Nothing that I heard him say yesterday should have been at all controversial to the liberal mind, except maybe that he doesn’t have the reverence for the word vaccine, because I’ve actually studied RFK. I’ve written a long piece of literature recently on this topic. The idea that he is anti-vaccine is a little bit ridiculous. He doesn’t like how they’re formulated. He doesn’t like the adjuvants in them, the aluminum and all the other things. He doesn’t believe that suddenly giving 50 or 60 of them in the mid-’80s to people after they gave a few of them earlier in history was a good idea. Especially since they all land on you right after you’re born. But the idea that he doesn’t think vaccines work is not one that I think is creditable.
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