Walter Kirn
speaker
1,232 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 24 Nov
Walter Kirn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 2.
Appearances
I mean, there's so many things that are crazy about this that one doesn't even know where to start. Walter and I, just a couple of weeks ago, we did a segment on Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find because it was the 100th anniversary of her birth. And here's Taylor Lorenz, who is probably the most anti-literate person in media. Making a reference to a good man is hard to find.
She's someone who, if you handed her a hardcover book, would be tempted to bite it, I think. She's probably never read anything in her life. And I think if she did know that story, she misunderstood the point of it, clearly. But this idea of Luigi Mangione as a morally good man. I, I just, I don't know how that goes over and how, what, what CNN is thinking, putting that on the air. It's crazy.
Right.
Yeah, oddly, this ties back to the Taylor Loren story because she was famous, among other things, for a piece she did years ago where she sort of hit out in the new app Clubhouse and claimed to overhear Marc Andreessen using what she called the R slur. Yes, good memory.
She posted a tweet of all the people who didn't do anything when the R slur was used. Now, it turned out that it wasn't Andreessen who used the word. And it was actually a quote, a self-referential quote involving a group of Redditors who described their sort of GameStop stock ploy as like the... revolution of the retarded or something like that.
And so the question was, what do we think about this retarded revolution or something along those lines? And so the whole thing had to be kind of retracted, corrected, clarified, et cetera, et cetera. But what's interesting about that is that at the time,
There was this concerted effort to define the harm standard as even using this old word in a private setting, essentially, was somehow not even acceptable. Like the argument was we can't have apps like Clubhouse because people will be doing this all the time behind closed doors. We go from that.
to it's okay to shoot people in broad daylight if, you know, and that's a morally good person who does that. So there's harm over here, which she later described as the reaction to that is destroying her life to, you know, to this thing, which is a completely different idea about what harm is. It's mind boggling.
Oh, that was, that was me. Yeah.
Yeah, it was really an amazing thing because what they did is in response to the popularity of the Netflix show adolescence, uh, which Keir Starmer is now going to, uh, mandate that every secondary school student in the UK has to watch. Um,
The story is basically about a beatific young boy who is moved to knife crime or murder against a young girl because he listens to Andrew Tate, basically, sort of misogynistic online content. And so they regurgitated this whole interview they did two years ago.
about the dangers of that kind of content and this expert on online radicalization by the way who where do you go to get that job um expert in online radicalization anyway isis Yeah, it's so bizarre.
And the whole thing was about how the first thing you have to do is make sure is monitor your children for any signs that they are laughing at inappropriate humor or calling things that really aren't funny, funny. Like, for instance, finding Hitler's mustache.
Everything is funny. And they singled out Hitler's mustache, which Walter, I don't know, or Megan, actually both of you, I would think is one of the funniest things that's ever existed is Hitler's mustache.
Yeah, absolutely. If your eight-year-old boy doesn't think Hitler's mustache is funny, that's one I would call a psychiatrist, actually.
I love the color commentary, though. It's, you know, speaking with knowledge as if they know what this is like generally.
It's crazy. It's like, you know, when you go to get a Chevy Traverse test drive, you come out more like a family than like, you know. Somebody who just took a car. I mean, they're talking about getting in and out of a car.
Uh, they, they are, um, I was actually told, uh, at the end of that month. So they, that happened on, I think March 9th of 2023. Uh, by the end of the month, they told me that I was in the clear. They actually owed me a lot of money. Um, and the, uh, And the investigation had been started up on the same day as one of the main Twitter files reports.
And once the Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the Treasury asking basically what the deal was, they sent over a whole bunch of documents and conceded that there was nothing there and then informed me personally that I was in the clear. So I'm not being investigated anymore. And then thanks to Jim Jordan, actually, they changed the policy about personal visits to people by the IRS.
So that was actually a positive outcome to that whole thing.
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