No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - Tucker Carlson gets nightmare news about his show

Episode Date: July 9, 2023

Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson witness their demise on Twitter. Brian interviews the White House Communications Director, Ben LaBolt, about Republicans like Ron DeSantis denying the very humanity of LGBT people, the White House’s plan on climate in the wake of record heat, some tangible wins from Bidenomics, and which message they’re going with heading into 2024.Donate to the "Don't Be A Mitch" fund: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/dontbeamitchShop merch: https://briantylercohen.com/shopYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/briantylercohenTwitter: https://twitter.com/briantylercohenFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/briantylercohenInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/briantylercohenPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/briantylercohenNewsletter: https://www.briantylercohen.com/sign-upWritten by Brian Tyler CohenProduced by Sam GraberRecorded in Los Angeles, CASee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today we're going to talk about Elon and Tucker Carlson's demise on Twitter, and I interview the White House communications director, Ben LaBolt, about Republicans like Ron DeSantis denying the very humanity of LGBT people, the White House's plan on climate in the wake of record heat, some tangible wins from Bidenomics, and which message they're going with heading into 2024. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie. So a reporter at Media Matters, Matt Gertz,

he posted the total views for Tucker Carlson's new Twitter show over the last eight weeks, And I want to read you the numbers, but first off, keep in mind that the numbers are already inflated because Elon switched out views for impressions, meaning that even if you just scroll past the video, they're pretending that that counts as if someone sat down and watched Tucker Carlson's show. But irrespective of the accuracy of the views, just listen to the trajectory. So Tucker's announcement video got 137 million views. Episode one got 120 million. Episode two got 60 million.

Episode three, that's Trump's indictment, bumped up to 100. and 4 million, then the next episodes, in order, got 32 million, 17 million, 32 million, 15 million, and 8 million. First of all, again, these are not real numbers. They are the product of Elon's very blatant view count manipulation, but the point here is that Tucker is now at 5%. 5% of what he was getting before, which goes to show that it was the 8 o'clock Fox News time slot that was Tucker's biggest boon. And in the same way that no one ever thought that anybody could replace Bill O'Reilly, only for Tucker then to come in and get high. higher viewership than him. Someone else will come and replace Tucker because, again, it is not the person. It's the fact that all these nursing home TVs are set to Fox and they're going on at 8 o'clock

regardless of whether it's Bill O'Reilly or Tucker Carlson or Jesse Waters or a burning cross on a front lawn. I will concede, though, that Tucker's certainly more dangerous than O'Reilly and Jesse Waters, so I'm glad that he doesn't have that slot. But I also don't want to overstate his importance or make it seem like the whole world will just follow him wherever he goes because right now he's managed to see a 95% drop-off in views in just two months. And obviously, we can't talk about any of this without acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, Tucker putting all of his eggs in the Elon basket wasn't the most savvy business decision.

Maybe don't hit your wagon to the guy who showed so much oozing contempt for his own users that had spurred like 12 Twitter spin-offs, including one by meta, that people actually accepted. Like, not for nothing, but do you know how shitty you have to be for people to embrace a product by Mark Zucker? Bergerberg. Meta may actually be one of the worst companies there is, and yet here I am getting the Threads logo tattooed onto my forehead, because that's how much I want Elon to fail. And clearly I'm not alone, considering it hit 70 million users within like 48 hours. I searched online a bit,

and I believe that Twitter has about 350 million daily active users. If that's the case, then Threads already got like 20% of that in a day. So yeah, again, you have to be a special brand of shitty for people to run into the arms of Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, honestly, Elon wanted to punish Twitter users and pet his little fanboys and turn verification upside down so that the only people who have priority on that site are the ones calling everybody else groomers. Now he'll have exclusively those people on his platform, a $44 billion truth social, basically. And here's the thing, Elon didn't actually want a platform of groveling right-wing fanboys.

He wanted a platform where he could punish everyone else. That was the allure. He wanted power over people. And because Twitter was the only quote-unquote town hall, no one had a choice but to get fucked by him. But now, because we do have a choice, because there are alternatives, because Threads is doing well,

everyone left, and Elon's kingdom has devolved into, you know, right-wing miscreants and anti-vaxxers. Dude paid $44 billion for an advertiser's nightmare. All of which is to say, personally, I don't anticipate being on Twitter much. I'm happy to use threads instead. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg is bad, but yes, Elon is worse. And the only silver lining in all of this

is that Elon lost a boatload of money, and Tucker's numbers are going down with Elon's sinking ship. And look, yes, this is just some social media site and probably doesn't mean much. But there is value in not having a rabid right-wing provocateur in charge of the social town hall. There's value in not having a white supremacist with the biggest show on that social town hall.

Elon was doing everything in his power to elevate the voices of the worst purveyors of disinformation and hate. And because of that, he's going to be left with a platform where effectively no one listens to any of those people anymore. And that's not just good for, social media, it's good for our democracy. Next step is my interview with the White House Communications Director. Now we have the White House Communications Director, Ben, thanks for joining me today.

Happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Brian. So I want to jump into, first off, there was an ad that Ron DeSantis' campaign had aired, attacking to the right of Trump on the LGBT community, basically attacking Trump for not simply demonizing that community. Now, I know you can't respond directly to the campaign ad, but just in general, what's your reaction to these Republicans, like Ron DeSantis, positioning themselves as refusing to recognize the very humanity of the LGBT population? Yeah, you know, as you pointed out, as a government official, I can't get into the details of the campaign, but I can't point out that there have been 600 anti-LGB laws passed by

Republican governors over the past few years to take away the rights of gay people across the country. And, you know, they're completely out of step with the public. And I think they're not only pursuing cruel policies here, but they've completely misunderstood the politics as well. I mean, the vast majority of the American people support rights for LGBTQ Americans and think they should be expanded, not taken away. Most people have a gay person who's either in their friend network or in their family. And that certainly changed their perceptions over the years. I think the biggest change in public opinion, the swiftest one in my lifetime, was around marriage equality, for example. So the fact that they're trying to appease a very small part of their MAGA base with these sorts of attacks, I think, completely misjudges the politics of the situation.

And that video in particular, I mean, the notion that you have to use references to Patrick Bateman, a fictional character from American Psycho, who, you know, chopped up people with the chainsaw. to prove your masculinity just shows how out of steps some of these folks are. Yeah, I mean, just from a political expert's point of view, and this is taking off your hat as the communications director, but how do you anticipate they'll reconcile taking these like draconian positions on abortion on LGBT rights when they're trying to win in the Republican primary versus what they eventually have to do by going to the general election? I mean, these are going to be basically non-starters.

So how do you reconcile these things? I think there's a big disconnect. You know, these MAGA elected officials across the country talk often about protecting freedom. And there's a great irony behind that, because if you're a woman who cares about making her own health care decisions, if you're a parent that believes that you should be deciding what books your kids have access to not an ideological governor, if you're somebody who cares about equality and rights for all Americans, these MAGA elected officials.

officials are doing nothing but attacking your rights, attacking your freedom and trying to take that away. And so part of what the president has done, whether that was protecting marriage equality and codifying it into law after the court started coming after some of these rights as well, it's really made clear that Republicans, Republican elected officials, are not defending freedom at all. They're in fact taking it away from many people. And I think that will have significant repercussions. Yeah, I think they're happy to protect freedom so long as that freedom comports with all of their religious, theocratic, and political views. I want to switch gears a little bit to this past week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, we're all the hottest days ever recorded. To say that this is a five-alarm fire, then, is just the understatement of the century here.

I know that the White House already has the most ambitious climate agenda in the history of this country. But given how quickly things are escalating right now, has the White House changed anything to ramp up its climate efforts? Well, you know, climate at the President's direction has been a top priority that's not just siloed with a couple of advisors in the White House or across the administration. There's been an administration-wide strategy to deal with the existential threat posed by climate change since the President's first day in office when you re-entered the Paris Climate Agreement, which, you know, President Trump had tried to exit the United States from. It's been one of the top priorities for the president. He's pursuing in a few ways. One of the big bills that he passed, the Inflation Reduction Act,

actually has the largest investment in clean energy and the clean energy transition ever of all time. And that's starting to have a significant impact, both in the transition to clean energy, and creating tens of thousands of jobs across the country. The president was in South Carolina this week. He went to a factory that's building components for solar power, for example. So you're seeing that, you're seeing the promotion of the transition to electric vehicles and making sure those are built here in the United States, not in other countries.

You've seen electric vehicle adoption outpace projections from a couple of years ago. You're seeing efficiency standards for buildings. And so this is being tackled from every direction. It's certainly something that our generation is focused on. I was in San Francisco the day that the sky turned orange from wildfires. It was scary. It looked like Blade Runner 2049. And I think for the first year on the East Coast and in the Midwest,

people are starting to feel the impacts of smoke and wildfires that used to be contained to the west. And so you're seeing this compounding problem every day. You saw it with the heat this week. John Podesta is working on, and Ali Zadis is working on it. There are folks who have deep background on this issue. We're working from a public and private sector standpoint to address the problem. Our global climate team and John Kerry are focused on it. The president will talk more about that in the UK on Sunday

and trying to address the global components of this. But it's being attacked from every angle. It's being attacked every day. And it's a top priority for the president. present. Now, on this idea of all of these bills being passed, obviously a high profile element that we're seeing right now is that we have a lot of the infrastructure funding leading to projects now. And of course, a number of Republicans, Nancy Mace, Tommy Tuberville, have come forward and taken credit for it. I know that Joe Biden has pushed back against these efforts to basically

vote against legislation and then, you know, accept all the credit at their rope lines. But can I have your reaction to these Republicans who've opted to take credit for legislation that they voted against? We welcome converts to Bidenomics who are now recognizing that the infrastructure bill and other legislation they voted against is creating jobs in their districts. It's creating just as many jobs in red states and red districts as blue districts. And that's fine. The president is a president for all Americans. But the least they could do is mention that they voted against the funds as they're going to these ribbon cuttings. And the conspiracy, The conspiracy theorist in chief, Jim Comer, was actually at an airport opening in his district

in Paduca, Kentucky this week, again, you know, taking credit for allocation of funds that he voted against and called socialist. But again, if they're going to be out there supporting the bipartisan infrastructure bill and talking it up, that helps us with our communications job. So I welcome it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Jim Comer, especially, who has been completely willing to squander every American taxpayer dollar on endless investigations into Hunter Biden, and yet when he votes against actual legislation that helps people, he's still there accepting the applause at the ribbon cuttings, like you said. On Bidenomics, the White House has released its plan to counter this debunk theory of trickle-down economics. And now, so Bidenomics is this idea that the way to

grow the economy is by the bottom up and not the top down. Can you just talk about some of the economic accomplishments of this White House to prove out this idea? Absolutely. The president has had a different economic theory of the case than most elected officials have pursued for the last four years. You know, the theory, starting with President Reagan, was that if you reward the wealthiest in corporations with tax breaks, that that will somehow trickle down to the middle class and hardworking Americans. It never turned out to be the case. At the same time, we saw manufacturing in our industrial base, be offshoreed to wherever labor was cheapest around the world. in and had a devastating impact on a lot of communities across the country, like the ones that

the president comes from, Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Claymont, Delaware, and so he's had a different approach. There's a few components to that. The first is investing here in America, making sure that we're pursuing the sorts of investments that will bring manufacturing back to the United States, whether it's the semiconductor industry that powers computers, cars, smart homes. invented those in America, but they've been off-shore. The president passed legislation to make sure we're building those here in America, the clean energy industry. You're seeing an absolute revolution in clean energy across the country since we've made that public sector investment. It's allowed private sector investment to follow, just since those bills have

passed, you've seen $500 billion worth of private sector investments in manufacturing and infrastructure. In many states, you're seeing the largest investments they've ever seen. And what you're seeing is 13.2 million jobs that have been created under this president. You've seen the longest, the longest period on record of unemployment that's below 4%. And you're starting to see inflation come down. It's come down more than 50% since last year. And it was something that was the result of the pandemic, was the result of Putin's war in Russia. but now we're greatly outpacing other countries

and how quickly prices are coming down. And so all of these are components of Bidonomics and action, but it starts by putting workers at the center of it and the middle class at the center of it because that's who built the economy in the first place. Has there been any acknowledgement from the opponents of this plan, the opponents of the Inflation Reduction Act, the opponents of the infrastructure bill,

that the results of Bidomics, the results of all of this legislation, The results of growing the economy from the bottom up is actually working. I mean, these people are like we were talking about before, taking credit for all of this legislation. So clearly there is a tacit understanding, a subconscious understanding that all this stuff, you know, is beneficial to the economy. But has there been any overt concession that this stuff works?

Or even if not by Republican officials, then by voters. I mean, you've been around the country. You've been in deep red areas, West Virginia, South Carolina. Are you encountering any people who kind of recognize what you get when one party is in power versus what you get when another party is in power? Well, look, I mean, I think governors and mayors talk about it a little bit differently. You know, the governor of South Carolina put out a statement when the president was heading to the state yesterday saying the economy in South Carolina is booming.

He just didn't happen to mention President Biden or the investments that had been made in the state of South Carolina since the president passed that legislation. It just happens in a vacuum. Exactly. It just fell from the sky. So there's a grudging acknowledgement in some quarters. But look, I think people are starting to feel it. Job satisfaction is at a high. People feel like their personal economic circumstances are doing well. Wages are coming up at a faster pace than inflation. And so, you know, we'll be talking about all of this over the next year and a half. But I think people are starting to feel. steal the dividends of all the economic progress that the president has made. Yeah. You know, the flip side of Bidonics is the 2017 Trump tax cut. And in theory, a tax cut would be popular.

So what's your response to those who applaud that strategy of cutting taxes? Well, I would say, you know, who did it benefit? I mean, I think there's a big difference between a tax cut that's centered around middle class families and hardworking families like the child care tax credit. that the president advocated for that will benefit working people versus a tax cut for corporations and the wealthiest Americans that cut taxes, you know, $60,000 for the top 1% and more than $250,000 for the top 0.1%, but didn't benefit the average household, added $2 trillion to the deficit and 40% of the national debt that the average taxpayers is helping to pay off today is a result of that Trump tax cut.

And at the same time, they were cutting all these essential programs for hardworking Americans. You just saw it in the back and forth we had over the bipartisan budget agreement with House Republicans. They wanted to cut core programs for the middle class by 22%. And that was everything from health insurance under Medicaid. to any sorts of domestic programs that, you know, help kids go to college or make sure that, you know, the hungry are able to eat and survive, all just to pay for a tax cut for the wealthiest. So the Republicans are added again. They've introduced legislation to extend the Trump tax cuts permanently.

It would absolutely explode the deficit. It would cause cuts to programs for hardworking Americans. And again, it's the same sort of trickle-down economics that had been pursued for years and never had benefits for the average person. Ben, what is the White House's principal message heading into 2024 now? Is it going to be economic? Is it going to be threats to democracy? Is it going to be abortion rights?

And how are you deciding where to draw the line so that you're not just bombarding people with messaging? Certainly. Again, I can't talk in detail about the campaign, but I can talk about what the president's message we'll focus on here at the White House over the next year and a half, and I think there's several components to it. One, it will focus on the economy. It will focus on the fact that you've seen record job creation under this president. You've seen a record number of small businesses be started under this administration, more than 2.5 million businesses. The president

calls each one of those an act of hope. You've seen our economy recovered a much faster pace than any of our peer nations. And you've seen inflation come down, inflation caused by the pandemic and the supply chain crisis at a much quicker rate. And you've seen the president pursued policies that make sure that our economic policies are oriented towards creating jobs here in America, making sure that workers are empowered, making sure that their wages are up, centering things around the middle class and hardworking Americans against Republicans just advocating for more tax cuts for the wealthiest. That's one piece. The second is defending individual liberties, which are under assault from MAGA Republicans, and they're under

assaults from our court system as well. The president's attacking that from multiple angles. Again, he passed legislation to defend marriage equality when it was clear that the court might put that on the chopping block. He is nominated and confirmed 136 federal judges to lifetime appointments on the bench. He knows what an impact the courts can have as the former chairman of the Judiciary Committee and somebody who shepherded through, you know, all of the nominations you've seen on the Supreme Court under Democratic Presidents, including Justice Jackson. He's been very close to this issue for years, and so that's been a key priority for him. And he wants to finish the job on a few other fronts, like some of the pieces of the buildback better agenda, you know, getting

getting the return of that child tax credit, for example, and making sure that if you have to take care of a sick parent, for example, that we provide support for caregiving and home health care. And so there's a lot of components. We've got more progress to make on climate. And the alternative, again, is just this ideological agenda that takes away rights and liberties

that rewards the wealthiest incorporations of the expense of the middle class, and he'll continue to fight against those things. It is really amazing how the second plank of that agenda is protecting individual liberties from a Republican Party that for so long has predicated its entire identity on protecting individual liberties.

Like that, if that is not a testament to just how far the Republican Party has gone off the cliff, I don't know what is. I wanna move over to a trip that President Biden is taking. He's heading over to Europe with the recent developments in Russia at top of mind, How does what happened in Russia impact the U.S. and NATO's focus on Ukraine? Yeah, the president's heading to the NATO summit in Vilnius this week in Lithuania.

And I think there's a few things to keep in mind heading into this. First, he's spent the past two and a half years restoring our alliances around the world, which had been completely damaged during the Trump administration. Secondly, he's united the West behind Ukraine and kept NATO together. And in fact, pulled in countries like Japan, for example, to ally behind Ukraine that had traditionally, you know, not played a role in European conflicts. I think that's a testament to the decades he spent building relationships with leaders around the world and building their respect. And he took on Putin's war of aggression in Ukraine, and Putin thought he would divide the West. He hasn't.

In fact, the West has remained united, and Russia has been weakened. That's very apparent. And so more developments to come next week, but NATO is in a position of strength and certainly in testament to the president's leadership. All right. Well, let's finish with this. I was shooting an episode of a show that Tommy Vitor and I do called Liberal Tiers that's over on Pod Save America's YouTube channel.

And I was asking him for some suggestions on questions. And in passing, he mentioned that you guys were roommates. And so he was coming up with some questions that he thought might be interesting. And while he was doing this, I already had my question. And that is, you were Tommy's roommate at one point. So what is an embarrassing moment about Tommy? that you might be willing to share. He's going through all of these questions

about like international affairs that might be interesting to ask. I'm like, okay, Tommy, I think I got it. I wish I had something more interesting or damaging. I'm not sure that I do, but I will say, you know, the last time after we're working in the White House together

and we left, there's a very embarrassing TV profile of Tommy that you can find that aired on Bloomberg TV about his morning routine before you'd wake up to do cable and various interviews every day. And it gets into the details of this French press coffee routine that was very anal and over the top. Yeah. All right. Well, to any sleuths out there, go find that video. I'll even see if I can find it. But with that said, Ben, thank you so much for taking the time. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Brian. Good discussion.

Thanks again to Ben. That's it for this episode. Talk to you next week. You've been listening to No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen. Produced by Sam Graber, music by Wellesie, interviews captured and edited for YouTube and Facebook by Nicholas Nicotera, and recorded in Los Angeles, California. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on your preferred podcast app.

Feel free to leave a five-star rating and a review, and check out Brian Tyler Cohen.com for links to all of my other channels. Thank you.