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
Clearly not. You know, I think we can go back through history and find many examples of people who've been investigated, you know, at least the DOJ has been nudged in the direction of somebody. I mean, I think that's been a feature of almost every presidential administration going back to Nixon. Am I wrong about that, Walter? I can't think of anybody who hasn't been in trouble for that.
But, you know, That whole thing that Miles Taylor, you know, he's a character, right? He was a significant character in the Twitter files. We didn't do a lot of the reports on those. Um, but I know that there was talk about investigating him even, um, even before the end of Trump's first term.
Well, when this story first came out in 2017, it's based on a single passage in a book that I co-wrote with my former co-editor in Moscow. And it's completely fictional, like almost everything else in The Exile. I mean... The Exile was a satirical newspaper where everything was basically backwards. The whole idea was an un-newspaper.
So like, for instance, the corrections always referred to things that had never actually been in the newspaper. Most of the bylines were of fake people describing fake adventures. And in one passage, Mark described something that it didn't happen. It's a massive exaggeration of something. And so all the people who were involved were eventually contacted at that time. They recanted.
There were corrections at the time. I was in litigation with some newspapers at the time. That's all been done and finished. And nobody's ever accused me of sexual harassment here or in Russia.
None of that stuff. I'm one of those people who goes straight home from work, doesn't socialize, nothing. But I knew in the hearing, as soon as she said that, I thought about the speech and debate clause, and I realized that she's allowed to say that.
And then on the way home, I saw that she was retweeting this, I think in an effort to try to get a rise out of me because she said something along the lines of, you know, my silence in the hearing was telling. But I think that the privilege is penetrated once you go outside Congress and start retweeting on X and blue sky.
And I'd had enough at that point, uh, of this thing, this thing did major damage to my life and career. And it's not true. And so, uh, you know, for her to drag this up seven years later, it's, I, I just, I just ran out of patience.
Well, I probably can't get into that publicly, but what I will say is that there was a lot of positive response about this. And part of that was from other journalists because, you know, I don't know if you agree with this, but I think there's been kind of a laissez-faire attitude toward outright libel in the last eight, nine years. People just say such crazy things online.
And there's this attitude that we don't have to back it up. We don't have to make notations when we make corrections. We don't have to leave it on the page to tell people that we made a mistake before. We can say what we want and get away with it. Most people won't sue. And I think you have to because that's the argument for not censoring is that this other system actually works.
And as somebody who's very against censorship, I think when people do that kind of thing, you have to try to hold them accountable.
Okay, moving on. From the very beginning, when I testified about the Twitter files two years ago, the Democrats treated me almost like I was worse than a Trump supporter. To them, they think of me as some kind of apostate, but I've been a lifelong supporter of the First Amendment. I've been a Democrat most of my life. I'd probably agree with them about some things if they...
wanted to open a discussion about what's appropriate for online regulation, but they decided to go completely in a different direction. And the political sense of that escapes me. I just don't understand why they do that.
We're not in the government. No, it's incredible. And it's a source of frustration for me because I think all of us in media, we often get asked to respond immediately to things that happen outside our areas of expertise. Certain kinds of issues. So if you ask me a question about digital censorship right now or, you know, First Amendment online questions, I probably answer to that.
But if but if it's about immigration law, you know, there's a huge. mountain that you have to climb to know even the basics. And there's lots of stuff that is not terribly well known, like changes in the Patriot Act to the Immigration and Naturalization Act. These are all little tiny things that you have to know about the difference between what's legal and what's not. And it takes not...
days or weeks, sometimes it takes months or years to have a clue. So for these reporters to act like they know what they're talking about, it's a huge window into the general cluelessness of the business about these things.
Well, in addition to being an honest broker and I think believing what he says and like Walter, I've been on his show and I've talked to Bill many times after the show and always enjoyed talking to him. He's also a natural comic.
And I think one thing that he really struggled with in the last eight years was the sheer quantity of laughable stuff that came out of the quote unquote left that he was told he wasn't allowed to laugh about. I think that was a big factor for him, sort of being told that there are things that are off limits.
And the not-so-veiled threat that if you even entertain the idea of calling Donald Trump sane or a normal politician in public, that your career is going to be over. Now, Bill is just big enough that he can avoid the fate that most everybody else who went there experienced.
And I think, you know, this thing that he did, I think it's a significant moment for for media, because now there might be some other people who come out of the woodwork and say, you know what, I'm just tired of saying the same stuff over and over again and not really fully believing it.
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