I’ve seen the clip of Rogan speaking passionately about the child separation issue and I’m aware he has a lot of left viewpoints.
That makes it all the more pathetic that you are 100x more likely in any random episode to hear him rant about SJWs/feminists etc… He has enough of a heart to see the evil of the right and of course realizes they have power to impact people’s lives in all sorts of ways, yet is more concerned with a blue-haired teenage girl on Twitter saying there are 15 genders.
If someone on the left has the chance to go on his show and spread their message, I’m not saying they shouldn’t. I would say that there are reasons he is such a popular go-to platform for the far-right and less useful for the left.
A conversation between a gullible moron and a far-right grifter plays right into the hands of the grifter. They can spread whatever part of their message is palatable to the audience without having to answer to what they truly are. For them it helps that Joe Rogan is “actually mostly liberal” or whatever as it builds credibility.
Meanwhile, a conversation between a genuine intellectual and someone like Rogan is in many ways just a waste of time.
Yeah I dunno this is a derail and I have soapboxed it before but if we were building from scratch a new coalition of “the left” I would not hesitate to include Rogan over, you know, I hardly need give names. Chuck Schumer, Neera Tanden, Dianne Feinstein, etc etc etc. Rogan is definitely a dumbass and has loud and annoying opinions on some stuff but my lawnmower goes into considerably higher orbit when someone says “yo universal healthcare is just unrealistic unfortunately” than it does on basically anything anyone could conceivably say about SJWs or blue-haired girls on Twitter, and I feel like the reverse is just flat out the wrong take. Like at the end of the day, who cares.
Also the problem with saying he has all right-wing guests is that it seems to me that a lot of the reason for that is that more right-wingers and apolitical weirdos are willing to go on the show. I mean is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez going to go on Rogan, for example? Obviously not. I bet he’d love to have her on, but it would just be too politically damaging for her. That is the Left rejecting Rogan and not vice versa.
Edit, in fact I had no idea about this before I wrote the first bit of this post and googled afterwards out of curiosity. Here is a report about AOC backing away from the Sanders campaign after Sanders tweeted the Rogan endorsement.
But the progressive New York representative disagreed with the campaign over its decision to promote the endorsement of Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster who has been criticized by LGBT activists for opposing puberty blockers for gender-confused children. He has also spoken out against the participation of biological males competing in women’s sports.
Why won’t Rogan have cool young progressives on his show? It’s a mystery.
This works if Rogan was Johnny Carson and it was 1980. There are a million podcasts out there. Yes, Rogan has the biggest audience. But we just saw AOC get 500k ppl watching her play on twitch. It did nothing for Bernie. We don’t have to fight and fawn over the audience of one person when there have never been more platforms, shows etc.
If someone wants to go on Rogan it makes sense. But we should not be actively trying to court him. He is fine with Trump. He’s not Tucker, but we should really fucking remember everyone with a large platform that encouraged Trump or the worst of his allies, who Alex Jones definitely is.
Every single thing you’ve said about Rogan could be said about Tucker Carlson. At least Tucker says it eloquently.
Like, you’re just falling for a con if in 5 minutes of the thousands of on air hours Rogan has he’s put brief praise for leftist policies, only to vote for people on the other side, frequently platform those on the other side and not monetarily support these causes.
I can put multiple paragraphs on here about Tucker Carlson decrying capitalism, praising Liz Warren, but I know that doesn’t mean fuck all and he is evil and has been a gigantic negative to our society.
Joe Rogan fucking sucks and LOL to anyone here defending that knuckle dragging imbecile. He’s done about as much for anti intellectualism and fake news as Facebook.
I don’t doubt that Rogan has sincere support for some leftist policies but, as I often stress, narrative matters more than policy. Rogan’s primary worldview is one that embraces toxic masculinity and decries “cancel culture”. He’s drawn to those he sees as anti-PC.
Rogan is the sort of guy who may be mostly liberal except for political correctness, but anti-PC is the gateway drug for him to slowly adopt more conservative attitudes over time while clinging to a few liberal positions so that he can claim to be independent and that the left abandoned him rather than that he abandoned the left.
Joe has no political convictions. He’s a multi-millionaire no matter who’s in office. Guys like him don’t give a fuck about foreign policy and bombings in Yemen.
He has guests from different parts of the political spectrum because of the number of people who get bitchy for having too many left wing or right wing guests is quite high. His decisions are exclusively based on maintaining the fan base he currently has and potentially expanding it, not furthering some political movement.
He just wants to talk to people that interest him and his fans. Not everything is done for political reasons. If he was political, he wouldn’t have signed an exclusive deal with Spotify
This is insane, Carlson will thrive if Biden wins. Maddow is the one who’s fucked if Trump loses. Rogan will obviously be fine either way, and the only people actually mad at Rogan are like 2000 people on twitter and 10 people on Unstuck Politics.
Rogan didn’t vote for Trump last time and said in the Greenwald podcast he isn’t voting for Trump this time. I think the anti-mask nonsense is from his show with Bill Burr where he joked that “masks are for bitches”. After which Bill Burr called him a moron and Rogan said that he does wear masks and people should wear masks.
Rogan is definitely a dumbass and has loud and annoying opinions on some stuff but my lawnmower goes into considerably higher orbit when someone says “yo universal healthcare is just unrealistic unfortunately” than it does on basically anything anyone could conceivably say about SJWs or blue-haired girls on Twitter, and I feel like the reverse is just flat out the wrong take. Like at the end of the day, who cares.
We aren’t evaluating him as a politician or as a person, we’re evaluating his podcast. For people with malleable politics I don’t think its in dispute which direction they’re far more likely to be influenced towards by getting into his show.
Saying that is the fault of progressives for not going on his show strikes me as nonsense. Rogan is a human being, yes, an astoundingly gullible and stupid one, but he is capable of making choices and controlling who he allows on the show and what he says on the show.
“He just lets anyone come on his show blah blah blah”
Well gee whiz, as someone who grew up with and spends too much time on the internet, I can’t tell you how shocked I am that such a policy would result in it becoming a right-wing grift-a-thon flavored by massive doses of misogyny and transphobia. Just shocking.
Should AOC go on Rogan given the opportunity? I don’t know. She’s a politician and he has a huge audience. I’d personally rather see her clown him on Twitter, but I wouldn’t judge her if she felt going on his show and being cordial as a net positive.