America This Week, June 14, 2024: "Elections and Dragons"
2024-06-14 00:30:30
Welcome to America This Week, with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn, the national news wrap-up so true, we recommend you stow all sharp objects before reading. <br/><br/><a href="https://www.racket.news/s/america-this-week?utm_medium=podcast">www.racket.news</a>
All right, welcome to American This Week, I'm Matt Taibbi.
And I'm Walter Kern.
Walter, how, okay, where are you and how are you?
Well, it's a good question because the backdrop changes. I'm in what they call the Palouse Hills of southwest Idaho, near the Washington border. And it's a green sort of wheat growing area, very bucolic this time of year.
Speaking at a small college here, and teaching creative writing, just kind of enjoying myself. But it's one of my favorite places. Yeah, this is one of my favorite areas of the country, kind of far from the interstate, very agricultural, stable, rolling hills, mild climate.
Has it been invaded by sort of upper class LA progressives who are actually trying to escape the city?
Well, the town I'm in, Moscow, is the home of the University of Idaho. There was a terrible murder here, you might remember here, a few years ago, but a bunch of what used to be called co-eds, young female students, were murdered, and it was briefly in the news. But it's a town that's sort of divided between kind of a traditional agricultural class, and then the university class. But it doesn't have a ski area nearby or any kind of bourgeois recreational facility. So it hasn't been ruined.
like a lot of places. It's got a great balance between what a university brings to a town and what, you know, wheat growing and small commerce, little startup businesses, some retirees bring. One of the most perfectly balanced communities I've ever been to, sort of the Greek city state, 25,000 people, what they felt was the ideal size for a town or, you know, place that can rule itself. So the Californians, you know, they're coming, they're everywhere, really. I mean, it's the reverse dust bowl, you know, we could call it the gold bowl.
The gold bowl migration, their bowls are so full of gold that the rest of the country looks like a good deal to them.
The crypto bowl.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But it's not Jackson Hole yet, basically, right?
Not even close to Jackson Hole. And if anybody knows anything about Jackson Hole, you know, which is where many of the world's former tyrants hole up with their Swiss bank account funds, and, you know, where the Cheney's entertain and that type, and the Rockefellers donated a lot of land to make Grand Teton National Park. I think I've met my only third world warlord in Jackson Hole. No, honestly, I guess.
Where else would he be?
Yeah. It was a ski condo. And this guy was some kind of Haitian warlord who would go skiing in Jackson Hole.
But anyway, Jackson Hole just suffered a huge calamity because the only way into that town from the West is a steep pass down a mountain. And it just washed out in spectacular fashion, meaning that the entire working class of Jackson Hole, which can't live there and has to come from a place called Driggs, Idaho, can't reach the place. So it's a little, like, you know, a terrible movie, like a Bunuel movie, where all the rich warlords and Cheney friends and, you know, billionaires don't have anyone to clean their houses suddenly because there's no road for the servants to reach the place.
Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Whatever will they do? Right.
Polish their own silver, I suppose.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Yeah. I can. just, I can just see it. Yeah. A billionaire saying, you know, honey, when the toilet runs and keeps making noise after you flush it, what do you do?
And they go on the Internet together.
You lift the little thing in the back and you have to touch the toilet water. is the toilet water in the back dirty or is it clean?
There's probably a lot of that. Definitely. Anyway. Well, Walter, this was once again for this. for the second week in a row.
We had something very significant happen the day after we recorded the the podcast. So we had the news come out that that Steve Bannon is going to go to jail for four months, starting on July 1st, for contempt of Congress. There were some interesting reactions of the Republican strategist, Rick Wilson, sort of chortled and said, remember, Steve, you know, on your first day, you got to show dominance in jail and said that, yes, it's just four months, but, you know, it's for vital months. So there's sort of an undisguised nature to why this is happening. But I just sort of wanted to ask you about this and what you've heard from people about this event, because I'm getting a lot of, well, he broke the law, he's got to go to jail.
It is true, the contempt of Congress is a is a law, and no one doubts that they have the power to issue subpoenas. But we haven't done this since 1947..
When did we last do it and why? Who went to jail for contempt of Congress?
The Hollywood Ten, as far as I can tell, which is, you know, the Dalton Trumbo and all all those folks, you know, back back in 1947 with, you know, that was when the House Unamerican Affairs Committee was asking people to give up their friends and name names of other people involved in communist activities. And the reason, you know, later on.
That's amazing, dude. So the last people who went to jail for contempt of Congress were also political prisoners, actually. Oh, those clearly. And now considered heroes by, you know, thinking liberal types, that that would seem to have been an outrage. I don't know how it was covered at the time, but, you know, putting screenwriters in jail, or the author of Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo.
We just had a movie starring Bryan Cranston, called Trumbo, like not that long ago.
I know, it's astonishing. So I wonder what Trumbo, I mean, I wonder what Cranston thinks of this. Here, you know, here it's happening again. Oh, but it's happening to the right people, I suppose.
Yeah. And the frustrating thing about this is, yes, Congress issues subpoenas that everyone recognizes that they have the power to do that. They've been doing it since the beginning of, you know, the American Republic. Right.
And it's implied in the very beginning of the Constitution, article, one of the Constitution, that they have this authority. But the authority they have is to investigate problems for the purposes of creating legislation to fix it. And they're given wide latitude to do this. But I hear all sorts of people saying, well, you know, he's got to pay for January 6th, one way or the other.
And Steve Bannon, he caused January 6th. Is there some, has somebody decided that he has a responsibility for that happening?
He made public comments before J6 and before Stop the Steal to the effect that Trump was going to deny the election results no matter what happened. So, you know, that was one of the reasons why he was subpoenaed. And anyway, the Supreme Court has specifically said, like sort of in their one of their early cases about the HUAC, the Un-American Affairs Committee, and kind of, why we don't do this. You know, they said that Congress's power to investigate cannot be confused with any law enforcement objective. Right.
So we don't do this. We don't do congressional investigations and kind of compel people to testify in Congress as part, of, you know, getting to the bottom of a crime. Like, that's kind of not the idea behind these subpoenas.
But as yet, there is no crime here that he's been charged with in any other venue, is there?
No, no. You know, the implication is that he would be able to give evidence toward one. And, you know, who knows? Maybe that's possible. Right.
But the point is, we just don't do this. Like, there's a long list of people in both parties who don't go to jail for contempt of Congress. It's been sort of an unspoken agreement for seven decades. now that this is just not a thing that we do. And it's just like one more on the list of these things that I feel like people are just so blinded by.
They start with Steve Bannon. I can't stand him. Therefore, this is OK. Right.
So, I mean, as I remember growing up, I was sort of surprised by a guy at my high school when he told me, hey, you know, there's a gay couple that lives nearby in our little farming community. And they could put them in jail. And I said, why? He said, sodomy. I had yet to hear the word as a, you know, description of a criminal thing.
He said, oh, you could go to jail for sodomy. And I said, why? He says, oh, if you get oral sex, that's sodomy, too.
Yeah. Is he wrong about that?
No, he wasn't. Right. At that time in Minnesota.
Oh, wow.
Yeah. You know, it covered a lot. Let's just pretend my 11th grade informant, who told me so many things about Robert, you know, Rod Stewart's private sex life and things like that.
You heard that story, too.
Yeah, who was also on the ball about Minnesota sodomy law. And he probably was because he was the kind of kid who was always running some scam, you know, selling some out of the back of his trunk. So he probably knew all his downsides. But anyway, you know, here, the first thing to do when hearing about these extraordinary imprisonments and so on, is not to go back and, I think, debate the fact that there's a law, of course there is, or whether it's a good one or a bad one that exists. It's to say, what's really happening here, you know?
Right.
In other words, this whole Lawfare episode moment that we've been, you know, thrust into, I like to think of myself being somewhere in Europe with a pretty good international news show that includes, you know, 10 minutes every morning about America. And if I tuned into that over the last few weeks and I hear, well, you know, Trump was convicted for something that's very hard to explain, and he may be going to jail before the Republican convention. His former campaign manager, Steve Bannon, he'll also be going to jail here before the election for a crime that was last punished this way in 1946 during the McCarthy years. I know what was up. Right.
And so are the listeners in that fictional European country. So, you know, I don't have to start at the bottom, working my way up to figure out what the real significance of this is.
But Americans kind of uniquely do, just because we haven't been through this. So this is kind of a new thing, well, at least in this era, right? If you go back to the 40s and 50s, when, you know, they were even, I believe they even arrested Arthur Miller on a contempt of Congress charge, although I don't think he ever went to actual jail for this.
But that was clearly political witch hunts back then, you know, using this tool in a way that's not appropriate, which is completely typical of a, you know, a third world country. But America has no experience with this. And so we don't know what it is.
Right after Trump was convicted, I was hearing people, or in my scanning, of sort of conservative Republican chatter.
He's going to need a real fighter as a campaign manager. He's going to need Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon should step back into a campaign role. Well, I guess that's out the window.
Right, right. Yeah, unless he's going to do it from jail.
I actually love the idea of him going to a payphone every week, for, you know, five minutes.
running the campaign.
It would be a great reality series, you know, if they could do like an Orange is the New Black version of that, that would be really funny. But, you know, and this is the last thing. One thing, another thing that bothers me is that people continue to harp on these ideas like, well, he's guilty. He actually did it. And part of the reason I get so spun up about all these things is because I was in Russia when Putin took over.
And, you know, one of the first things that Putin did after he became president is he held a meeting with all of the oligarchs who had basically gotten instantly rich under Yeltsin through corrupt privatization schemes, like really bad ones, where, like the government, lent them the money, the money to win auctions for companies as big as Exxon, that kind of thing. And he had a meeting with all these guys and said, all right, well, the deal is, if you pledge your loyalty to me and, you know, agree to never get involved in politics, you get to keep everything.
If you, if you don't, you know, you can risk some consequences. It's exactly the scene from Casino. Remember when?
Yeah, if you don't, the next time you jaywalk will be the biggest regret of your life.
Exactly right. Yeah, it's, it's, it's the hammer or the money scene. And within a couple of days or very shortly, you know, in sort of in conjunction with this meeting, one one of them who bucked was the head of a media company called MediaMast. He ran the last TV, sort of independent TV station there. They had, like, you know, people rappelling through the windows of his office and they charged them with a 10 million dollar fraud.
And he was probably guilty. This is the point. Right. But it's clearly politicized. And then, later on, you know, there was the more famous jailing of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was the head of this thing called Bank Manitoba.
And he became a sort of a famous political prisoner in the West, despite the fact that his company, too, had gotten rich off these very, very dubious privatization schemes. And Putin threw charges on him. that were also probably true. But the whole thing was illegitimate because it was clearly political. Right.
And no, nobody in a place like Russia would mistake what that is. But we do.
Well, as I say, if I was listening to the radio about American politics in some far off country that had decent reporting and I heard the entirety of what's been going on, it wouldn't, it wouldn't be mysterious to me at all what was behind it. You know, America likes to wrap itself in its, oh, I don't know, idealism and naivety at the strangest times, usually to protect itself from rather cynical and obvious realities. So, you know, if that's how you want to deal with the fact that your country is becoming a place where, you know, parties and political mobs are using our, you know, a little bit more serious laws than our traffic laws to keep each other from, you know, running campaigns or campaigning at all, and doing it in the context, especially of a presidential election ongoing, man. I mean, if this, you know, if this was two and a half years ago and Steve Bannon was the first guy to have to actually serve time for a contempt of Congress in, you know, 70 years, that would be one thing. But this is just freaking transparent in June, a month before, you know, the first of the two political conventions, and a few months before the election.
Yeah, he's going to get out magically right as the election takes place. And he, just he, just happens to be the most influential media figure on that side. So, you know, another thing you mentioned, things that we've improved upon.
Dungeons and Dragons has a new version. And you and I have been talking about this for a week.
And secretly, because it was a secret until now.
Yeah, it really shouldn't be a secret. As it turns out, this is actually it's public. There's, there's a website. if people, you know, were looking for it, they could find it online. But in the process of kind of doing research about various projects where some of these anti-disinformation types might be preparing for new eventualities and new programs for the 2024 election, like, yeah, what are they going to do instead of the Election Integrity Partnership?
this time around? It turns out that the In-Q-Tel, which is the sort of venture capital arm of the CIA, has produced a role playing game for information professionals called Haywire. And you see that little AI there. So if you, if you've followed the news recently, you've probably noticed that there's a huge, enormous number of stories about AI deepfakes suddenly appearing in the press. And this has become like the sort of answer to, you know, the Russian menace or domestic violent extremism.
Or, you know, the new idea is that AI deepfakes are going to wreck the election. And therefore, we need, you know, what the FBI director, Christopher Wray, called a combat tempo response plan for 2024.. So this game, Haywire-.
Open up the box, Matt. Because you referred to it as Dungeons and Dragons, and I don't think it's evident yet why we called it that.
So one of the things that's amazing about it is that it's a role playing game where it's designed to train people in sort of information crisis response. And if you open up this box, you will find inside of it a 10 sided die, which anybody who's ever played D&D is familiar with goofy sided dice. And there are nine numbers on this die. The 10th thing on this die is the symbol of In-Q-Tel,
which again is the sort of VC arm of the CIA. And the point of the game is to avoid what they call a haywire, right? Like an AI induced crisis event. So there are instructions here. And let's see if I can find the...
Hang on. In gameplay, you will see it has a list of directions here, and I'm just going to have to read them to you. But the idea is that when you're given these cards with scenarios, you have to roll a dice of this die to see how your response to an incident.
ends up being judged. There's like a dungeon master. Is that what they call them in DM? A dungeon master in Dungeons and Dragons?
I forget what they call the guy. I believe, so. I don't play it myself.
So I'm just going to read to you. Roll the dice to see how well your response worked. If you roll one to seven, that means not at all. Eight to nine, partially. If you roll in QTEL, that means haywire reverted.
So, basically, if you roll CIA, you win in this game. And in life. And in life, yeah.
Or in politics.
Right. So it's kind of an amazing thing. And then if you open up this game and we'll show you, just to show you what the stack of the cards looks like. It's a whole bunch of cards. And there are incident cards.
And then there are these other cards that they're called inject cards, which basically involve complications. But just to give you an idea of what one of these incident cards looks like. Hang on a second.
Here's one called The Purple Disappeared. Swing states appear safe on the national electoral map in early polling. Later, it emerges that AI-driven election forecasts were wrong because the data scientist overlooked significant partisan differences that make swing states highly competitive. Discuss your response plan and then draw two injects. So what does that sound like to you, Walter?
Well, it sounds like, you know, here's the scenario.
Somebody wins and the polling showed that they were not going to win. And we've got to figure out how to justify it and make it seem logical in retrospect. Or somebody is going to say we stole it.
Exactly. There's no way to read that and not think, what exactly are they asking? So the idea of the game is-.
You're saying, can you come up with a way, if Trump's 10% ahead in polling in Ohio and actually loses Ohio, can you figure out a way to blame that on AI?
Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. The idea behind this is, can you find a way to credibly say that the polls that you were relying on to think that these states were safe were actually the result of AI-induced error? Bad assumption.
And so, yeah.
I want to, for the audience, contextualize this game again, briefly, because I don't know that we did it sufficiently. This isn't a game, obviously, for public use. This is a game that this venture firm of the CIA in Qutel is sending out to contractors to have them play in order to audition them or interview them for a real role as paid helpers in the election drama. So it's like, you're going to see how well you play this game. And we're going to decide whether to just give you $10 million to play it in real life when the election comes around.
Right. Yeah, you're supposed to sit there with your team and spend two minutes coming up with a plan for a response to each of these situations. And the situations are very telling. I mean, that was the one that immediately jumped out at me. But yeah, obviously, in Qutel hasn't answered any of my queries.
They never answer anybody.
In Qutel, established by the CIA, which, let's just remind us in case anybody has gotten a little too cozy with the new way, which is illegal, basically, is not supposed to.
interfere in domestic politics. They're not supposed to have a role in it. And this is explicit to me, explicit abrogation of that principle. They're literally going to train American information firms in how to spin a presidential election.
Exactly. In the example that we saw, they're talking about safe swing states.
And from which side are they talking?
Is CIA and Qutel going to jump into action on behalf of Trump?
Doubtful. Yeah, one wouldn't think so. But that's what makes this so nuts. is, you're exactly right. If this were the CIA and they put out this game to train people for domestic election response, that would be blatantly, overtly illegal to do.
Is Qutel enough of a cutout to give them a cover on that?
You know, I think so. I only talked to a handful of people about this. So my understanding is that they see this as giving them enough legal cover to do it. And you can just say, oh, it's just a game, right?
So there's that, too. I mean, they're technically a private company.
But there's all sorts of stuff in here. that's just,
well, we'll get to this in a second. So here's another one that kind of stood out. Mind games. An easy to use voice model helps create a viral video suggesting that one of the candidates may have dementia.
So discuss the response plan and then draw two injects. So remember, this card is addressed to the executives, some people at a government contractor or somebody who wants to be a government contractor. You know, they're sitting at the table in their, you know, we work rented space where they hope to get a job.
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