The Charlie Kirk shooting changes political media forever

0:01Brian Tyler Cohen:Today, we're going to talk about why the Charlie Kirk shooting hit so close to home. And I've got two interviews. I'm joined by Pod Save America's Jon Favreau to discuss Fox's response to the shooting and climate activist and former British government official Johan Eliasch about how he's buying up portions of the rainforest to protect them from deforestation. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen and you're listening to No Lie. So, you know by now that a political commentator, Charlie Kirk, was shot and killed this past week. I've seen all the hot takes. I'm not here to give mine. I also don't think that all of my opinions fit neatly into one category.

0:35Brian Tyler Cohen:I believe that his political views were utterly reprehensible. I believe that he spent years dehumanizing people of color, LGBT people, and any other marginalized community. I agree that he used the same violent rhetoric that his critics are now using to justify the violence against him. I agree that it's stunning to watch the right shrug off the senseless school shootings that happened all the time, including on the literal same day as the Kirk shooting, but suddenly recognized the tragedy of gun violence when a Republican operative is the victim of it. I agree that no one deserves to be killed for their political beliefs.

1:07Brian Tyler Cohen:I agree that it is heartbreaking for his children. I agree that the shooting makes everyone left, right and center less safe. I'm sure there's something in there to piss everybody off. And that's kind of what I want to talk about here. I want to discuss a little bit of my experience in all of this, since I'm a political commentator in a world where another political commentator just got shot and killed. I am terminally online. My daily screen time on my phone is about 10 hours a day. That's not including my laptop, which I'm also on all day. I've experienced firsthand the degrading effects of staring at and consuming political content every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

1:46Brian Tyler Cohen:I'm not saying that it's not justified. It's my job. I have to be online. But I felt how it's chipped away at my mental health. I've seen how the internet is a place where nuance and moderation go to die. And most importantly, I see how hatred pervades these spaces, how that's what goes viral and how kindness and positivity disappears like a fart in hurricane. I also know that there are people who will say that I'm guilty of this too, that I exploit the same phenomenon, that I spend all day railing against Trump and Republicans. And to a degree, it's true. I think that Donald Trump is one of the most evil men in the history of the United States, and I feel the same way about the people that he surrounds himself with.

2:25Brian Tyler Cohen:I try to give leeway to his voters, who in many cases I feel have been manipulated by some combination of a really sophisticated right-wing media machine and the time-tested tradition of demagoguery. My North Star in politics is to preserve democracy, to combat climate change, to usher in universal health care, and to ensure that every American has a basic minimum standard of living. I think the people who stand in the way of that, of which I included Charlie Kirk, are dangerous, are selfish, and are anti-democracy. I have always and will always use my platform to fight against the people who seek to weaken this country in deference to Trump and the oligarchs that he surrounds himself with.

3:06Brian Tyler Cohen:I don't think that makes me the liberal equivalent of Charlie Kirk, who has advocated for brand sponsored televised executions, who's called the Civil Rights Act a mistake, and has said things about black people that should have him peacefully excommunicated from civil society. But still, there are plenty of people who think that I am the same as him, just on the left. Which brings me to this moment. This is a much more dangerous world for someone like me today than it was last week. I don't know how it's going to affect my willingness to spend 14 hours a day making content. I don't know how it's going to affect my willingness to go anywhere in public.

3:41Brian Tyler Cohen:I don't know how it's going to affect my willingness to engage with the other side on social media. I don't know what anything is going to look like tomorrow or the next week or the next month, but I can say with absolute certainty that these online spaces are breaking people's brains. To be clear, that in no way negates the effect that Kirk's own rhetoric played and the effect that our insanely weak gun laws play. But the sad reality is that A, while Republicans are in power, nothing will change the ease with which guns are available. And B, social media incentivizes extreme and divisive rhetoric.

4:14Brian Tyler Cohen:So there is no incentive to tamp anything down. We can't do anything about those two things. But I do think that we do have some agency in terms of being online and exposing ourselves to the worst that humanity has to offer, which, to be clear, includes the kind of rhetoric that Kirk himself espoused. I know that this all is kind of freewheeling. And the truth is that I'm having a lot of trouble processing a lot of what's happened over the last few days. But I suppose the only way that I can be helpful right now is to offer a warning about the exposure that we all have to a certain type of dangerous rhetoric that is ushering in an era of violence that portends really poorly for the future of this country.

4:54Brian Tyler Cohen:I legitimately hope that we can find our way out of this. Next up are my interviews with Jon Favreau and Johan Elias. No Lie is brought to you by Everyday Dose. Now, for those of us who are looking to take care of ourselves, there are plenty of supplements on the market to be able to do that. But supplement stacks are expensive and they're hard to keep up with. Everyday Dose is affordable and covers all of your bases in a cup of coffee. It takes 30 seconds to make and you get coffee plus a bunch of supplements with vitamins, minerals and amino acids. Everyday Dose is coffee plus benefits. It combines 100 % Arabica coffee with powerful ingredients like lion's mane and chaga, collagen protein and nootropics to fuel your brain, boost focus and give you clean, sustained energy all day long.

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6:18Brian Tyler Cohen:You'll also get free gifts throughout the year. That's everydaydose.com slash BTC for 45 % off your first order. I'm joined now by the host of Pod Save America, Jon Favreau. Favreau, thanks for joining me. Always a pleasure. So we are right now in the aftermath of the shooting by Charlie Kirk. As of this morning, they have found the suspect, the person responsible for the shooting. Prior to that, though, prior to that update, there was a slew of right wing commentators, right wing officials, Republicans who had come out and said stuff like this. The Democrats just killed Charlie Kirk today. They're desperate.

6:54They're losing. They want to intimidate you and me and everybody else. Charlie Kirk's a casualty of war. We're in this country. When is the Democrats going to stand up and apologize for the hatred and the lies that they have fed their base that's led to these actions? They are at war with us. Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us.

7:18Brian Tyler Cohen:As of this moment, there is, you know, there are some indications of what we know about the shooter has two Republican parents steeped in online culture. I think like the one thing above all else is that this guy is just terminally online, as is the case with a lot of these shooters that we see. There isn't some cogent political ideology in a lot of these cases. It's just somebody who is fucked up enough to be able to do this in the first place. Right. And yet that hasn't stopped, I think, a lot of what we're seeing from these figures, which is to kind of use an already violent moment to further inflame tensions.

7:54Brian Tyler Cohen:We saw the same thing from Trump himself, who came out in a recorded address and basically said that we're at war with leftism. Right. So how are you thinking about how are you thinking about like what the the practical impacts of of that kind of that kind of rhetoric are going to be? I mean, I certainly don't think it's going to turn the temperature down or lead us to a better place in any way. I mean, you know, I think the Wall Street Journal ran that story about like maybe there's markings that are trans ideology. I don't know what the fuck that is or or anti-fascist. And so my takeaway is that yesterday, Thursday, everyone jumped to conclusions about the shooter's motive with very incomplete information.

8:38And now we have a little bit more information, but it's still incomplete. So I don't really want to jump to the shooter's motives either. We're like because they caught him alive and he's got a family and apparently and I believe they said he's talked to his family about some of this stuff. So it sounds like we're going to find out. But I do think whether the shooter was a left-wing guy, a right-wing guy, someone with, and I said this on the pod yesterday, someone with complicated, weird ideological beliefs that could be conflicting. What matters is that, for all we know, one person pulled the trigger here.

9:14And to Jesse Waters and Donald Trump and all those people that we just saw saying the Democrats were at war and Democrats hated. We're not at war. we don't we want you to lose in the next election yeah um i i don't like what you say i think it's uh it's insightful i think that uh donald trump is um an authoritarian who is trying to consolidate power right now but i think that we uh approach that with non-violence opposition non-violent opposition and i believe strongly in that so i and the reason i just bring that up because it sounds kind of obvious is like, I do think the best way to contrast with that is to show everyone in this country, we're not the people looking for war.

9:58We are not the people, we are not in this country who want violence. We don't. And if you want to keep making up this fantasy that there is this war in this country, that the left is hateful and wants to tear people down and ruin this country like you can do that but that's not what we stand for is there some concern though given

10:22Brian Tyler Cohen:like how bifurcated our media ecosystems are that if you're watching fox news if you're consuming you know a lot of concern donald trump's addresses where he's saying this megan kelly saying the same thing jesse water saying the same thing these republican lawmakers saying the same thing uh that that still the takeaway for a lot of the people consuming all of this content is going to be the polar opposite of what you just said. Yes. Yeah. I have a lot of concern about that. And I don't know what to do about that. Yeah. Because I mean, it's like this, it's this massive asymmetry here where, where one side is saying that the other side is, is advocating for something.

10:56Brian Tyler Cohen:But the problem is that those people are not consuming the other side's views and commentary and beliefs. And so it's, they are, their takeaway is just that is, is only based on basically how the right paints the left and not what the left is actually saying. Yeah. And that obviously that's This is a magnified example of this, but this has been our concern forever with the right-wing media ecosystem. I do think the only thing we can do is show up in some of those places and be out there publicly on whatever platforms we're on, letting people know what our values and principles are and that they're not violence.

11:33Brian Tyler Cohen:I want to throw to a clip of what Trump said in the aftermath of being asked about Charlie Kirk and how he's holding up.

11:48I think very good. And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years. And it's going to be a beauty. It'll be an absolute magnificent construction. And I just see all the trucks. We just started. So it'll get done very nicely. and it'll be one of the best anywhere in the world, actually. Look, we all grieve differently. You know, Obama, in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting,

12:23Brian Tyler Cohen:I think Obama had a reaction that I think spoke to the vast majority of this country, virtually all of the country, and then you have this reaction from Trump in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's shooting. I'm just curious, you know, having written for Obama, like I can't even ask you to get into Trump's head because that is like the the level of sociopathy and malignant narcissism that you have to be capable of displaying to be asked about somebody who you purportedly care a lot about and to respond with how great the construction of your ballroom is going is is like you know next level but just curious you know having having worked with Obama hearing that response to a horrific, tragic shooting like the one we saw in Sandy Hook to today, you know, a decade and a half later, Trump's response, just your general reaction.

13:18I know everyone thinks that everything in politics is like planned for public consumption. And just on the Obama thing, obviously, the nation saw him tear up. But when it first happened, and I brought him the initial statement that he did, not the speech at the eulogy, but I quickly rushed out a statement and I brought it up. I sent it up to him and then he called me up to the Oval so he could give me his edits. And it was the first time I saw him. It was just me and him. And when he handed me the edits, he couldn't even look up from the desk because he was, you know, it was very emotional. and so when that showed in public that's just who he is you know and sometimes you don't control the things that the public sees uh when you're a politician as much as either you might like or your advisors might like or whatever that's just something that happens i say this because for for trump trump could have had a a very close relationship with charlie kirk and cared about him very much um it could be that trump trump doesn't really have that trump is sociopathic and you know plenty of evidence of that and um it also could be i was thinking that like he knows you're never ever supposed to show any kind of weakness or vulnerability or emotion because everything is about strength with him and so maybe he was like i'm just gonna start talking about that or maybe he just was really cared about that because his brain bounces around as fast as the fucking social media feeds that are all uh that are ruining our lives so exactly it's hard to get in his head yeah couple options i gave you this for work what it could be

14:56Brian Tyler Cohen:So I wanted to talk to you especially because, you know, you host a show offline that I think is really important, especially in moments like this. And a big part of the shooting that we saw has been social media's reaction to it. I took all day Wednesday and all day Thursday and didn't post anything because I felt like I had reached a breaking point in the broader discourse. and you know like I have to also kind of to a degree take care of my mental health and not kind of get consumed by a really a really I don't know just generally disgusting and and and and a hostile and acrimonious news cycle I want to I want to put on the screen here the Utah Governor Spencer Cox offering a few words and then talk to you about kind of a little bit of what you've you've spoken about on offline.

15:55We are not wired as human beings biologically historically we have not evolved in a way that we are capable of processing those types of violent imagery and by the way we've seen another one with a gruesome stabbing very recently that went viral this is not good for us it is not good to consume social media is a cancer on our society right now and i would encourage again i would encourage people to log off turn off touch grass hug a

16:29Brian Tyler Cohen:family member go out and do good in your community so um so i'm joined by social media's john favreau it's um how are you thinking about this because you are as as online as anybody can be um but you also host a show called offline about the virtues of doing exactly what the Utah governor said, which is to take time, you know, to touch grass and actually surround yourself with regular human beings. And I remember about a year ago, I had asked you, maybe even longer than that, I had asked you if anything that you'd heard while doing offline, if any guest you'd spoken to while doing offline, if there was any evidence to point to the fact that it was beneficial to your health or whatever it may be, that there was any virtue to being online even more?

17:18Brian Tyler Cohen:And the answer was no. Like nobody that you'd spoken with said that there is in any way a positive relationship between being online and like having any semblance of mental health. But I'm curious, Given the response that we've seen from this shooting, which is for a lot of people to just kind of devolve further into their corners and use it basically to defend their prior beliefs or whatever it may be, how you're thinking about just the broader state of social media? Social media is a cancer. Governor Cox is correct. it it promises the um it promises connection it gives you the illusion of connection um you are not really connecting with human beings the way that you connect with human beings in real life but it is hard to see that which is why people keep going back to it so it is also the temptation of connection for example and i think part of this is the way that the media environment has broken down.

18:26I mean, I was in a family where if there were big events, something happened in the country. Like there was some almost solace in gathering around the television together and knowing that the whole country was watching, whether it's an election, whether it was a tragedy, whether it was whatever it may be, that the whole country was watching that too. And you sort of felt this connection there. And I think that's an important sort of human need and human impulse. And I think, I mean, for me, I am still on social media, despite hosting the show. And everyone, you know, I know a lot of our subscribers are like, oh, his brain's broken.

19:04What does he do? He's, he's like a hypocrite. He talks about it and he doesn't get off. But it's like, I, first of all, I am fallible. I'm just, I am as vulnerable to these temptations as anyone else. I also do it for my job. But I do think in like, I've been online the last couple of days and I've been not posting too much, but I've been online. And the reason is this was a sort of a scary thing that happened, a tragedy. And I wanted to be, I wanted to see what other people were saying. And I wanted to be around other people who were also dealing with it. So that's why people go on. The challenge is the algorithms will show you, first of all, it's a self-selecting population, right?

19:46So the people who are on social media are already more partisan and more ideological than the rest of the country. Right. And then once you're on, it's not like you're all just in a room talking to each other. It's that the algorithm is showing you the most extreme views on either side. And it's also showing you, like Governor Cox was saying, violence, incredible violence, like the video of Charlie Kirk, and to the point where it desensitizes you to violence. It also dehumanizes people. If you are yelling at someone online, if you are arguing with someone online, and you are not seeing their face, you don't know who they are, you're not sitting across the table from them like you and I are right now, then it is easier to not see them as a full person and a full human being.

20:31And I think whether this is the case for this killer or plenty of other troubled killers, sorry, plenty of other troubled young people who either go on to be mass shooters or just go on to have all kinds of mental health challenges. If you're home all day and your community and you think you have friends, but your community is people who you do not see in person and who are only online in terms of their media accounts and you're interacting with them that way. If that's all, you are not going to have an accurate portrayal of what humanity is, the good that can come from humanity and not just the bad.

21:08And that's going to, I think it hurts our souls. I really do. So it's tough because I do think that we need places to meet people and interact with people that we may not meet in person. you know and i do think we need places to find good information especially information that's that's breaking quickly right i mean for us we do this for a job but the commentary the fights all that kind of shit it's just um it's it's a cancer yeah i mean i i was looking at all this stuff and

21:41Brian Tyler Cohen:i was seeing the way that things were going very quickly and just kind of like step back and i was like they're they're it kind of just feels like we're through the looking glass you know like it feels like like this is like I don't know because because it can always it can always get worse but like watching the ways in which all of the commentary was just it was so hostile so acrimonious and um and I just I I don't know how you come back from a point where where there is no humanity left in in any of this and so other than just stepping away which of course if you have like some nuanced, if you have some nuanced perspective on this, you know, I think, I think the way, like all of the incentive, all of the incentives for posting online are completely antithetical to that.

22:28Brian Tyler Cohen:But, but, um, really the only stuff that's going to bubble to the top is the, you know, is the most, uh, the most hostile takes and the most partisan takes. And so I like, isn't there some concern that like, that you don't like, how do you come back from this in a world where anybody with a nuanced take is going to be either so disgusted with what's going on that they're not going to want to weigh in, or that even if they do weigh in, it's not going to bubble up in the algorithm because that's not what works online. And so this is like now the new normal, which is like if you, five years ago, if you looked at a response to a shooting, if you looked today, you'd be like, holy, I mean, this is just, it's a deeply broken, it's a deeply broken society.

23:13Brian Tyler Cohen:um and so like i guess my worry here is that is that this is the best it's gonna be like it like it can only devolve even further from from here because it's not like the incentives are going to be any better it's not like elon musk is going to suddenly say like hey let's uh let's start rewarding nuance and let's start like you know burying uh burying the most hostile takes that you can get i do think that a backlash to social media has been brewing now like a real one not just, you know, people who come on offline and talk about it. You can see it in the polls. You can see it in polls of people who support banning phones in schools and including a majority of young people, by the way.

23:55Brian Tyler Cohen:Is that true? Yes. Young people are in favor of, like, for themselves? It's obviously, yeah, it's obviously closer. In fact, when you actually talk to young people, they've done a few studies of this, even the ones who think that they want to keep the phones, they say, oh, if everyone else gave up the phone, I'd be great. I don't want it, but I just want it because I can't not have it. I want to unilaterally disarm. Right, which I understand that point of view for sure. And so people don't want this. I think that in, I was just saying this on a group chat, much better than on social media. A candidate who runs in 2028 against social media and against the phones, and I'm saying phone restraint.

24:35I'm not saying ban the phones completely like some people think I do. but a a candidate who runs on that too late it's too late the soundbites gonna get a candidate who runs on that i think we do really well because i also think it's an issue that um you have some people maybe on the in the center center right who also feel the same way about that people don't want this and i think even campaigning in politics i mean zoran mamdani and his uh social media strategy is very interesting right which is instead of uh direct-to-camera stuff that he's doing so it's just like a relationship with the voter.

25:08Yeah. He's doing grassroots in-person organizing and meeting people and then broadcasting that to people, which is different, right? Because I think campaigns are going to return to the point that they can. If we're going to get out of this, it'll be in-person and not necessarily just like knocking on strangers' doors, but holding meetings of like-minded people and talking about politics. Like, I just think we have to mediate some of our conversations in person. And I say that knowing that I will go back online and have fights because that is what we have right now. Yeah. But I know that I am always looking for ways to meet in person and have debates about politics that way.

25:49Brian Tyler Cohen:You know, right when I was graduating from college, when I was graduating from Lehigh, I remember I remember like smartphones were just coming out. This was in 2011. I think I had like one, one of my buddies was the first one to get like an Android. I had a flip phone in college. Like it feels, it feels so prehistoric now, but like I had flip phone in college and I remember being so jealous. I remember like on, on graduation day watching, you know, I was there and I saw, I saw like some of the, you know, people getting ready to leave and some of the, you know, siblings of, of graduates coming and they're like, I'm going to, I'm going to be here.

26:25Brian Tyler Cohen:And I was like, man, I'm so jealous because these kids are going to have such a different college career because they're so much more connected than we were. And they'll have the internet and they'll have like Instagram and social media and they can talk to each other. And like we missed out on all of that. And for years, that was how I thought about this was I was so jealous because these kids are going to be so much more, so much better connected to the world and to even people like on our own campus. And recently I started thinking what a fucking blessing it was that everything we did, not just the stupid shit that I did in my frat house, But like just that everything that we did was not broadcast to the entire world and that we got to have like real like intimate experiences with other human beings without feeling like you're performing for the whole world.