Excerpts from America This Week, October 7, 2022, with Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi. To hear the full audio of the podcast, click here. What follows are transcript excerpts of yesterday’s show:

On U.S. officials blaming Ukraine for the assassination of Russian nationalist Daria Dugina:

All’s not fair at the warfare Expo, where taxpayer-funded arms merchants hobnob with military types by invitation only. “Aggressive” journalists not allowed. Persona non grata Callum Foote reports on Land Forces 2022, Australia’s biggest War Fair.

Land Forces is the annual exposition for the defence industry, or the most profitable corporate welfare exercise in the country. 

In the old detective series Dragnet, the protagonist Sgt. Joe Friday became famous for his phrase, “Just the facts, ma’am!”

Is it possible today to get “just the facts” about anything in the Western world? No, because the corporate media is complicit in all the crimes of their global masters of the universe and have become the propaganda arm of disinformation advancing their worldwide globalist agenda.

BY THOMAS ERTL

The vulnerability of the world, especially Europe, to importing fossil fuels from abroad was already shown by the oil crisis of the 1970s. Europe began to gradually cope with it only a decade later. In a way, the winning move at that time was to actively build nuclear power plants in order to produce high-tech energy themselves.

Given the disastrous effects of the 1970s energy crisis on European economies dependent on energy imports, it is not surprising that the United States chose this very direction to break up its main foreign policy and economic rival, Europe. And no one doubts both this and the man-made nature of the current economic crisis raging in Europe, especially no one in Europe.

BY Vladimir Odintsov

Everyone has lost their fucking mind. Propaganda has made madness look like sanity and sanity look like madness, has normalized cheerleading for nuclear world war and abnormalized calls for de-escalation and detente. It’s truly as bat shit insane as anything could possibly be.

Over and over again we’re being fed the message from the US and its proxies that this game of nuclear chicken can only escalate and never de-escalate. They are lying. They are playing games with all our lives in service of a dark god named unipolarism, and we gain nothing from it.

AUTHOR: CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

Harper’s Magazine’s Index is always a treasure trove of American wackiness.

Here’s a sample from this month: “Percentage of Democrats that Republicans believe are atheist or agnostic: 36. Percentage that are: Nine.”

And this one from July: “Proportion of Republicans who believe high-level Democrats run a child sex-trafficking ring: Half.”

Half of American Republicans think Democrat leaders are paedophiles! Good grief.

Undeterred by the social media storm that followed his peace proposal for Ukraine, billionaire Elon Musk has offered a suggestion on how to avoid conflict over Taiwan. His solution is “reasonably palatable” but would not make everyone happy, Musk revealed in a Financial Times interview published on Friday.

Musk “reckons that conflict over Taiwan is inevitable,” FT editor Roula Khalaf wrote after the magnate took her to lunch in Texas. The question about China occasioned “the longest silence”of the interview, she noted. 

‘The Great Reset’ conspiracy theories don’t seem to want to die. The theories were triggered by the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) summit last year, which had the theme ‘The Great Reset’ and argued that the COVID crisis was an opportunity to address the burning issues facing the world. According to the BBC, the term ‘Great Reset’ has received more than eight million interactions on Facebook and has been shared almost two million times on Twitter since the WEF initiative was launched.

BY Ivan Wecke

One of three Nobel Peace Prize winners has immediately called for an international tribunal to bring Russian President Vladimir Putin, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and “other war criminals to justice.”

In what amounts to deliberate slap at Russian leader Vladimir Putin, the 2022 award has been shared by jailed Belarus rights activist Ales Bialiatski, the Russian rights group Memorial and the Ukrainian Centre for Civil Liberties.

Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said the panel wanted to honour “three outstanding champions of human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence in the neighbour countries Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.”

We are but weeks into the autumn, and already the new season has something important to tell us. Its lessons this past week could scarcely be more plainly indicative of the trouble we in the West are in, as those purporting to lead us wander into a future the color of an October dusk.

A terrible clarity is suddenly upon us. We approach the end of pretend, in my read.

By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost

Last Sunday Italian voters went to the polls and backed a populist party of extreme-right persuasions, Fratelli Italia, Brothers of Italy, by a wide margin. When the Italian Senate names party leader Giorgia Meloni premier at the end of October, as is widely expected, Italy will be the first founding member of the European Union to be governed by a vigorously nationalist coalition.

During an online conference at Australia's Lowy Institute, Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky called on NATO to carry out "preventive nuclear strikes" on Russia in order to "deter" Moscow from using nukes. The Russian side has repeatedly stressed that there can be no winner in a nuclear war, and it should never be unleashed.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has urged the entire world to take note of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's call for a preventive nuclear strike on Russia.

Peskov told Sputnik that Zelensky's statements about "preventive nuclear strikes" against Russia cannot be ignored by the international community, since they are nothing short of a call to start a World War, which will entail catastrophic repercussions.

After “parties not-so-unknown” bombed the Nordstream gas pipeline, Anthony Blinken celebrated the “tremendous opportunity.” He assumed the whole Nordstream operation was out of commission. That would have given US producers the chance to make billions of dollars robbing Europe blind selling overpriced gas.

But Blinken may have celebrated too soon.

Did Uncle Sam, A.K.A. Wile E. Coyote, Blow Up the Wrong Pipeline?

And what's behind the unending parade of acts of self-destructive imperial hubris?

Alex Epstein is the director of the Center for Industrial Progress (CIP), a for-profit think tank he founded in 2011. Its mission is to “inspire Americans to embrace industrial progress as a cultural ideal.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has certainly been a naughty boy! The always unreliable and unofficial government-originating disinformation source The Hill is reporting that Moscow has spent the equivalent of $300,000,000 in an effort to “influence” world politics in its favor.

As is already well known, referendums were held in the LPR and DPR as well as in Kherson and Zaporozhye regions from September 23 to 27 on the issue of giving up belonging to Ukraine and becoming part of the Russian Federation. They were monitored by a large number of foreign observers who confirmed the free will of the inhabitants of these regions and compliance with all the norms of international law and the UN Charter. The ceremony of accepting the new territories into Russia was held on September 30 in the St George’s Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace, where Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the respective treaties with the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions with the participation of the heads of these territories and representatives of the Russian legislative and executive authorities as well as the Russian public.