DEMOCRATS DON’T NEED THEIR OWN JOE ROGAN:
One of the new cliches of American politics is that progressives need their own Joe Rogan. The comedian turned podcaster has an audience that is four-fifths male and 51 per cent aged 18-34, and it has not escaped the Democrats’ notice that, while women aged 18 to 29 voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris, men in the same age group went narrowly for Donald Trump. This tracks with pre-election research which showed a majority of Rogan listeners, regardless of sex or age, planned to vote Republican while only a quarter intended to back the Democrats. Rogan himself endorsed Trump, crediting Elon Musk for making ‘the most compelling case for Trump you’ll hear’. Since Rogan is America’s most popular podcaster, with 14.5 million followers on Spotify, surely it makes sense that Democrats would want their own Pied Piper to the himbos and gymbros of Gen-Z.
Well, his name was Joe Rogan. Rogan is a supporter of abortion rights, socialised healthcare, gay and lesbian rights, and drug legalisation, a critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, and endorsed Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democrat primaries. But he is also a believer in freedom of expression, which has led him to interview the likes of Alex Jones and Stefan Molyneux, a disbeliever in gender identity ideology, and he discouraged young people from taking the Covid shot while talking up his self-prescribed use of anti-parasitic drug ivermectin. These heresies caused progressive activists in politics, journalism, academia and civil society to mount a campaign to get Rogan fired by Spotify. Oddly enough, Rogan didn’t take well to this attempt to destroy him professionally and financially and while it’s difficult to prove that this nudged him Trumpwards, it’s hardly a leap to guess that it probably helped.
In some ways, progressive handwringing over Rogan is just a 2020s re-run of liberal handwringing over talk radio in the 1990s. Until the 1994 ‘Republican revolution’, which ended four decades of Democrat control of the House of Representatives, liberals dismissed talk radio as a forum for obnoxious shock jocks, low-information listeners and bored truckers. Then Rush Limbaugh and his 20 million weekly listeners were identified as the culprits behind the Democrats’ congressional defeat, and talk radio became a liberal bogeyman, a production line of ‘angry white men’. There were even attempts to blame its ‘rhetoric’ for the Oklahoma City bombing. When liberals couldn’t beat conservative-dominated AM radio, they tried to mimic it and many a Democrat was hailed in newspaper puff pieces as the next ‘Limbaugh of the left’, among them Al Franken, Jim Hightower, Mario Cuomo and Bill Press. But none could compete with Limbaugh, and even liberal talk’s breakout star, Rachel Maddow, only did so by switching to television.
The problem was one identified by Marshall McLuhan three decades earlier. As a medium, AM radio was ill-suited to a liberal message shaped by elite preoccupations with minority rights, political correctness, social justice, and scepticism towards American global leadership. Liberals were trying to use a format for Archie Bunker to sell the politics of Maude Findlay. They had misunderstood Limbaugh’s talent, which was not for converting his overwhelmingly white, male audience into conservatives but for drawing out the innate conservatism of this audience. Today’s progressives misunderstand Rogan in much the same way: he’s not making young men anti-woke, sceptical of experts and fixated on physical fitness – young men are, broadly speaking, anti-woke, sceptical of experts and fixated on physical fitness.
Leftists don’t need their own Rogan – but they do need a candidate with the ability to talk for three hours with him: Harris Lost Not Because She Didn’t Do Joe Rogan’s Show, but Because She Couldn’t Do Rogan’s Show.
Harris’s campaign staff are now at great pains to embarrass themselves by trying to come up with retrospective explanations that avoid the elephant in the room. Emhoff adviser Jennifer Palmieri put herself out there this week to explain to the Financial Times that Harris ditched the Rogan appearance because she feared the reaction of her own young staffers. “There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it, and how there would be a backlash [if she did it].”
I weep tears of utter joy to read this. Watching Harris’s campaign crippled from within by unruly, upjumped, spoiled brat Zoomers who think they have a right to dictate the candidate’s political decision-making is like watching the glorious climax to a black political comedy. All I can say, after having written my piece about The Nation’s interns going to war with The Nation (over their endorsement of Zionist pig sellout Harris), is that I believe staffers on a presidential campaign have as much right to pilot the ship as the galley slaves of Ben-Hur. (You want to make campaign decisions, kid? Get a job as a campaign strategist. Otherwise shut up and get back to door-knocking.)
Even funnier, Palmieri later then tried to clean up the mess she’d made in saying this — suggesting a campaign so pulled around on a nose-ring by its own staff as to yield to their utterly irrelevant idle gripes — and went on to Twitter to claim, “VP didn’t appear on Rogan because of schedule (hard to get to TX twice in a 107 day campaign).” Is it really that hard to get to Austin, Texas? It’s not like trying to drive to Juneau, after all, and especially when Harris otherwise spent the day she would have taped the show doing no events in Washington, D.C.
Of course, the reason Harris’s people are falling back upon these explanations — the one humiliating, the other laughably false — is because they simply cannot (at least so soon after the election) admit the real reason Kamala Harris was never going to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast: because Harris would have given the most disastrously bombing performance in the history of campaign appearances. We all saw just how poorly her CNN town hall went. Now imagine her having to try and appear human and relatable to the Joe Rogan fanbase, for God’s sake; imagine how long it would take her to simply halt and catch fire the moment she’s asked an unusual or difficult question. (Which, given Harris’s talent level, would probably have been immediately — now imagine two hours and 55 minutes more of the interview.)
Harris’s campaign budget was one the largest in history; “Harris’ campaign blew $2.6M on private jets in final weeks of campaign,” the New York Post reports today. But there’s no way they could aim one towards Austin, because the candidate within it lacked the ability to talk fluently about her campaign’s goals in a podcast studio for three hours.
(Oh, and of course: Left-wing climate groups silent after Harris campaign drops millions on private jet flights since July.)
