On Thursday (2/27/25), Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn recorded their episode of America This Week podcast that was released on Friday morning. Note that this was before the now infamous confrontation between President Trump and Ukraine’s President Zelensky. In the course of the podcast, Walter said something that really perked up my ears:

Walter Kirn: …I’m going to call the meta-state the Luftreich-

Matt Taibbi: The Luftreich?

Walter Kirn: … meaning the kingdom of the air.

Matt Taibbi: Like it’s at the Olympus, right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah, yeah.

“Meta-state”? Luftreich? What are they talking about? This labeling was preceded by the following dialogue:

Matt Taibbi: Globalism was originally sold to us as, “Yes, we have nations, but the incredible dynamism of capitalism is itself a force bigger than countries, and it’ll be that dynamic international global trade that will be irrepressible.” Remember Thomas Friedman talking about the golden straitjacket, right? We’re going to get all these countries, they’re going to come in. They don’t want to come into the golden straitjacket, but the vast economic rewards of joining will just organically be irresistible.

But what we’re finding out is that this sort of meta-state that we did build, with NATO and other organizations like the WTO and WEF, the WHO, there were internationalist groups. It was a little bit of an issue on the left in the Battle of Seattle period, but mostly it became more of a thing on the right. This whole move toward globalism, do we like it or not?

But it was not really a capitalist thing. I think we’re going to find out it was expressly anti-capitalist, in the end. And we’re also going to find out that it was really held together by security and intelligence arrangements, and massive amounts of propaganda, and, far down the line, censorship that kept people sort of believing in the concept of it. But there was no there there that was organic. It was built, and it’s now falling apart, which-

Walter Kirn: And who would you imagine might be the ruling board of this meta-state?

Matt Taibbi: I mean, NATO, right? The Pentagon.

Walter Kirn: Is this what John Kerry is always talking about when he talks about our democracy, and we, goes to WEF, and seems to be alluding to belonging and having loyalty to a mystery group that also includes Hillary Clinton, also tends to include the British prime minister, and maybe the heads of certain big corporations. They were building a scaffolding above our heads for this meta-state. And I’ll come up with a far more colorful and vivid name for it-

Matt Taibbi: Well, it’s a good start. I mean, look, I think it’s a key idea.

Walter Kirn: But it had so many advantages as a political organization. It didn’t have to respond to people. Well, it didn’t have to respond to them, except when they didn’t act in accordance with its needs, at which point it had to find ways to vilify them, shut them up, or keep them out of politics.

Matt Taibbi: By the way, parenthetically, we have to mention this. Can we just look at this, the Georgescu article?

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: So a big part of JD Vance’s speech in Munich was calling out Europe for disallowing the election of Calin Georgescu in Romania, sort of a populist figure. And the reason that they disallowed the election had to do with this preposterous idea that 15,000 TikTok accounts somehow turn the tide unfairly. But now the mask is fully off, because in addition to canceling that first result, they haul this guy in for questioning. They arrested the winning candidate, essentially, earlier this week. Ironically, he reached out to Racket [News] last weekend. We never managed to connect, but we are hoping-

Walter Kirn: He knew they were coming for him.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, I mean, that was my impression. But we’re hoping to get the full story. But this reveals what you’re talking about fully. Here we have a result that was not in keeping with what the EU wanted. And as Thierry Breton [a French business executive, politician, writer and former Commissioner for Internal Market of the European Union from 2019 to 2024] said, “We did it in Romania, and if need be, we’ll do it in Germany too.” And so, yeah, they reserve the right to overturn… The only way they answer to the people was in elections, and they didn’t even answer to those.

Walter Kirn: Well, what they’re trying to do is train the people to answer to them. They are giving us the right to certify their authoritarianism, and we’d be smart to do it. And if we don’t, they’ll invalidate our choices and haul off the candidates that we prefer. Look at that, and realize that America had a version of that last year in Donald Trump. We, too, had a guy who’d won the presidency, claimed that he won it twice, and now he’s won it a third time, and he was being paraded through courtrooms just like this guy will be. It’s very interesting. I’ve decided, I’m going to call the meta-state the Luftreich-

When you are listening to (or reading) this dialogue cast your mind back on the problem of explaining how the hopefulness at the close of the Cold War (for us old enough to remember) has devolved into an Orwellian “democracy movement” that is patently anti-democratic and anti-freedom? Why, after Vietnam, must America continue to engage in conflicts to which there is no tangible endpoint? Why, when Russia-gate was in full swing were we hearing about British and Australian actors?

We are now discovering through the work of DOGE that, for example, George Soros obtained his Bond-villain status not by just spending his own money, but by leveraging American taxpayer dollars through a network of non-profits and NGOs influencing government spending, and producing messaging targeting Americans and foreign citizens. Money is fungible; so even if no taxpayer money was directly traceable to a political action committee, taxpayer money funding other operations freed up private money for political campaigns.

Continuing the dialogue:

Walter Kirn: Yeah, yeah. One, the Luftreich is displeased with the Romanian. They will haul him off. The Luftreich was displeased with the Ukrainian-Russian negotiations early on, it stopped them. Luftreich was displeased with Donald Trump. It ran this counterintelligence discrediting op on him in Russiagate. And now the Luftreich’s American Bureau, CIA, is saying, “Oh, we’re going to send our stuff to the Luftreich or maybe even China and Russia,” but I guess not Russia. It wouldn’t-

Matt Taibbi: No, they did talk about Russia. Yeah.

Walter Kirn: I see. Well, so they’re threatening us. The American branch of the Luftreich is threatening America. European branch is sending Romanians to jail, and they’re fighting over the spoils in an internecine way in Ukraine. While Trump says, “Down with the Luftreich, you’ve sucked enough of our” … They’re like a mothership that hovers over Europe, and the Atlantic, and America, and no more mothership state. What’s amazing is that they managed through the years to burnish their own operations such that it became the salvation of mankind, the basis for the international order, and-

Matt Taibbi: The rules-based international order. I love how they call them with the names they give themselves.

Walter Kirn: But it also, and some people may find this distasteful, it also latched on to non-local issues such as gender rights, and trans rights, and other things, because there was the conspicuous fact that the rainbow flag flew very prominently across the number components of the Luftreich. And they seemed very concerned, most of all, and even justify their existence as a battle for the environment, while they plotted their wars, and fomented their conflicts, and signed their deals for the exploitation of this or that resource.

And it does cause you to wonder if our picture of everything has been just totally constructed by what we’ve now learned with the USAID revelations, and the kind of map of NGOs that’s been exposed. They had their own department of affairs, their own propaganda bureau, and I suppose it was a very heady thing to be a paid in full member of the thing, because it was a true conspiracy, in which the people of all the places whose resources, time, and so on were necessary to the enterprise. I mean, they had to keep us bought in.

Matt Taibbi: Of course, yeah.

Walter Kirn: Who wants to pay taxes to the Luftreich?

Matt Taibbi: Well, yeah. And Europe was obviously, most of the European countries, they were deriving a benefit from this arrangement that was visible, for the most part. They didn’t have to pay for defense. It was obviously somewhat of an imposition to have 300,000 American soldiers in Europe throughout the Cold War, but nothing like that existed in the United States, where we could see every day what we were getting out of all this.

***

[Shifting to a discussion of the actions of the new Trump administration]

Walter Kirn: Yeah. We’re going to get down to brass tacks. People who owe money, people who are rats, people who haven’t been loyal, everything’s going to be settled, and it’s not going to be done through gradual and hidden processes. Horse heads will end up in beds if you don’t watch out. But going back to the idea of the Luftreich, the overstate, and you almost see that what these CIA people are saying is, “We’re all going to come in from the cold. We are stationed in Washington, but we don’t really work here. We’re stationed in whatever.” I don’t know if they can all flee to Brussels, or Lichtenstein, or wherever. They might have-

Matt Taibbi: A mail drop.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, a Luftreich hideout oasis. Maybe they have an island. And what I really wonder is how fast this thing’s all going to crumble down. Because it can’t resurrect itself now.

Matt Taibbi: No.

Walter Kirn: Not that I can see.

Matt Taibbi: Minus a coup, it can’t here.

Walter Kirn: No. Minus a coup, it can’t. And then how, even with a coup, could it resurrect itself? How, having been outed? It would have to do it in a kind of naked way, not the soft, slithery way it’s done it in the past.

Matt Taibbi: Well, at the moment, I think the country, America, is still stunned. It still doesn’t know exactly what it’s dealing with, but I think this is coming into focus rather quickly for people. On the domestic front, they’re seeing that the taxes they’ve been paying for decades have been spent on the most preposterous things, and there’s a waste that’s just mind-boggling. And it’s the reason why we don’t have any infrastructure and that we have-

Walter Kirn: Well, see that, that, Matt, there you’ve put your finger on it because the great mystery of American life over the last 25 years is why, not just being one of the richest countries on earth, but the one with the dollar that allows us to run into almost infinite debt and print our own money in far greater amounts than we can even extract by taxation, why is everything getting shittier?

Matt Taibbi: Mm-hmm.

Walter Kirn: Why are the simple things that used to be done as a matter of course by government not getting done? You can’t build rail lines. You can’t restore water systems. You can’t keep your roads up. You can’t secure cities in the way that you used to against basic crime. And you go, “Well, the energy that wasn’t going into those projects was going somewhere,” and now we know where it was going. We’re going to stop maybe the leaks, but will it, in some sense, be collected on? I think that the Ukraine mineral deal is an attempt to start collecting on this because this diverted wealth, this Luftreich treasury acquired certain assets, and we want them back.

Matt Taibbi: I think that’s a great way to think about it is that Trump is essentially saying that the wealth of the United States has been exploited by forces that aren’t by allies or by groups that are hostile to the interests of ordinary Americans, and we’re going to take it back. And look, I don’t think he thinks of Zelensky as an enemy or anything like that. He doesn’t want any part of this deal. He thinks it’s stupid. He thinks it was a negative arrangement for the United States, and he’s just putting an end to it.

Walter Kirn: And I got to say, a rather ghoulish role for Zelensky to play. How do you go from possible peace deals, which are taken away from you by the Luftreich? Boris Johnson visits? No, you can’t do that. And then you go right back to full-throated confrontation knowing it’s not necessary, knowing that this fork in the path need not be taken.

I find him a bit of a dark character now in the light of all this, because whatever his patriotic instincts about Ukraine and his devotion to the Motherland or Fatherland, or whatever they call it there, he could have called out this business in the name of his own nation’s welfare. Because now it’s just becoming de rigueur to say they’ve lost a lot of people, and so on, and so on, but they’ve lost a lot of lot of people and they’ve lost a lot of lot of a certain kind of people, which is young people and people who are the pillars of a society in terms of earning and supporting pensioners and children and so on. So, is that place even going to be able to survive…

Matt Taibbi: Well, then what the-

Walter Kirn: … in its present form, politically?

Matt Taibbi: Well, I-

Walter Kirn: We don’t know. We don’t know what his real support is. Trump and Zelensky and others have been arguing about it recently. He didn’t face the last election. And some days I go, why are we negotiating with him? Why is he still the point man for the destiny of Ukraine? Is that Ukraine’s wish that he be?

Matt Taibbi: I mean, that’s a good question, but as developments have shown this week, he’s kind of irrelevant to the whole picture. It’s all about, really, what the United States decide that it’s going to do. If it decide it’s not going to spend the money anymore, then the war is over. Right?

Walter Kirn: Well, so what is the war like these days? Are they still skirmishing?

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, my understanding is that they’re still skirmishing, but it’s not going Ukraine’s way. It hasn’t for a while. And there’s a lot of lost territory, and people are upset about that, which is totally understandable.

But from the point of view of the United States, what are we going to do? Are we going to keep doing this forever? We can’t.

Walter Kirn: Right, right.

Matt Taibbi: One aspect of this, Walter, you talk about the Luftreich, it also, I think, encompasses the media here in the United States. Right? They had-

Walter Kirn: The media in the United States, which when you examine it, has a lot of Luftreich roots. Our biggest publishers are German companies, okay, book publishers. Politico, of course, is a German company. The Economist, our premier journal of affairs, the Murdoch empire…

Matt Taibbi: It’s Australian, yeah.

Walter Kirn: … not quite American. And remember, Australia had a special seat at the Luftreich table, too. It’s a true outpost along with New Zealand. So, is American media all that American anymore, particularly in those cases? The NBCs and ABCs, of course. ABC wants to build or maintain the Disney theme parks around the world. Other entities want to entertain bringing entertainment products into China.

Maybe we didn’t really have an American media in the sense that we used to and haven’t had one for a while. That it should be loyal to the luftreich is probably common sense because its attachment to the United States, as was formerly constituted, seems to be tenuous financially and tenuous culturally.

Matt Taibbi: Very tenuous, yeah, culturally, for sure.

I know there is a lot to digest. As Matt said, ” I think the country, America, is still stunned. It still doesn’t know exactly what it’s dealing with, but I think this is coming into focus rather quickly for people.” But the Luftreich frame of opposition to President Trump, from the Deep State and our international “allies,” is both useful and credible. The Deep State is a problematic term because I do believe there are patriotic Americans serving in our government. So a better frame is the American branch of the Luftreich that includes actors who are so dedicated to globalism that they do not see the fundamental betrayal of everyday Americans in their actions. Or, if they do, the financial rewards are too great to resist.

With this Luftreich frame, how are we to process what occurred in the White House on Friday? Interestingly Matt and Walter also prefigured this in their dialogue:

Matt Taibbi: So we can stop there. That’s the headline agreement is that Zelenskyy is coming here to sign a deal that is not about peace, but really about money. And the idea is that they’re signing over rights for mineral and petroleum exploration and other things to United States companies. Not to the United States directly, but to US companies, and that’s another separate issue.

No sooner was that deal struck, and it’s reported to be worth $500 million, but that’s really in question how much this stuff is really worth. It’s being sold as that much. The European Union offered its own deal. If we could look at number five, and we don’t have a video on this, it’s just an article. So essentially, the EU came to Zelenskyy after these negotiations, which have been going on for a couple of weeks with Trump, and they’re offering their own deal for mineral exploration. The larger umbrella issue here is that the United States essentially wants to be paid back for all the weapons that it sent. And in return, it’s offering some loose guarantees of security. Although, as we’ll see, they’re not overt and it has nothing to do with NATO.

Europe is now trying to step in and offer its own deal, so it’s got its own implicit security guarantee. But as we’ve seen, Ukraine is likely going to reject the EU deal and is going to accept the American deal. And what this tells you, and this is going to almost inevitably be followed by the end of the war, is that this war really had nothing to do with Ukraine. It was between the United States and Russia. We are deciding now that it’s going to be over and we want to be paid back. I’m not sure how I feel about that, because I’m not sure how much Ukraine had agency at the beginning of this whole thing to even enter the war, but whatever.

Matt and Walter continued to talk a lot about how the European Union’s interests and those of a Trump-led America diverge. Bottom line: Zelensky’s performance in the White House was precisely what the Luftreich wanted. Within an hour of Zelensky’s ejection, certain European leaders were already posting their support for Zelensky, and key Democrat operatives were also broadcasting talking points antagonistic to a Trump-led peace deal. As Molly Hemingway asked: How much did these people know about what Zelensky was going to do beforehand?

Molly has also provided some trenchant analysis:

Yesterday, Susan Rice said of the Trump-Zelensky meeting, “There is no question this was a set up.” She revealed full knowledge of the mineral agreement, complained that it didn’t include “concrete” security agrees (meaning, apparently, commitment of US troops on the ground if conditions merit), and then mischaracterized Trump’s behavior, counting on most Americans to not have watched what transpired over the entire hour in the Oval Office.

You can look at this and dismiss it as typical Democrat talking points, but you could also view it as almost a confession, one that includes details about the current “Get Trump” effort.

Yes, Trump won the popular vote against unbelievable odds, but if you think Team Obama is being any less involved in quiet insurrections than they were during the first Trump administration (Russia collusion, Ukraine impeachment, etc.), you’re clueless. I’ll remind you that Susan Rice was in the small Jan. 5, 2017 meeting in the WH with other key Russia collusion hoax perpetrators.

Zelensky repeatedly declined opportunities to sign the deal in Kyiv and Munich, and requested the meeting at the White House. It later came out that Rice and Tony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, and Alexander Vindman may have been personally advising Zelensky to do this meeting in the way he did — that they recommended him to be hostile and to try to goad Trump into blowing up. Even though he didn’t, and even though Zelensky’s actions horrified many normal Americans, the Obama team went on the airwaves to falsely characterize what happened.

I think their goal was to have a wonderful performance by Zelensky, an angry Trump appearing to scuttle the deal, and the support of the neocon portion of the GOP to start applying pressure on Trump to have US Troop commitments as part of the “security guarantee.” It was a set-up, in Susan Rice’s interesting choice of words.

Instead, Zelensky had one of the worst stage performances of his acting career, and Trump was statesmanlike (against all odds) throughout. Zelensky followed Team Obama’s advice to be hostile to a tee, but it didn’t land how they thought it would. Surprisingly, one of the most important aspects of it not working out might have been Lindsay Graham’s reaction. Had he and other neocons thought Zelensky was being reasonable, Trump would be having to fight (even more so) the neocon portion of the GOP in addition to Team Obama’s dirty tricks. Even the “conservative” neocon pundits on TV last night were admitting Zelensky had royally messed up.

As you can see from the hostility of the bureaucracy to any Republican oversight, no matter how reasonable or minor it may be, the entrenched bureaucracy and permanent DC apparatus is quite active. That goes quadruple for the deep state in the Intelligence Community. I’d expect more and more shenanigans and to be prepared so that you don’t fall for the next information operation. The post-WWII architecture in Europe and the US needs this war to continue or be settled on “US troops on the ground” type guarantees, even though that’s not what Americans want.

Things will heat up here, and it’s a very dangerous time.

Yes, it was a “setup” — but not of President Trump’s making. The Luftreich is opposing peace in Ukraine and wants American taxpayers to continue to fund the war. It has many high-minded phrases that it has been using through the USAID-funded network to promote support for continued warfare. X.com is inhabited by many voices who are either a part of the funded influencing campaign or genuine believers who have bought into the Luftreich agenda based on how virtuous it has been made to sound.

The Trump administration knows of the Luftreich and its American branch. Luftreich operatives within the government must be fired. Funding of the Luftreich must end. But the Luftreich has been in operation now for decades so we know two things: it exists and its American branch must be removed. But how much time do we have in which to do this?