1. IIRC, Kamala Harris was invited onto the show but ultimately declined. Supposedly, the reason was scheduling conflicts, most likely the real reason was Rogan would not agree not to ask questions like "when did you figure out that Biden is senile?" and "if it was that obvious, why did you say nothing?"
2. Concerning "podcast conservatism", the modern modern American political left and right are not coherent ideologies so much as they each represent a coalition of interest groups.
This is also an example of Freddie’s main argument. Joe would have challenged Kamala on Biden’s mental health. He would never pull up a clip of Trump losing his trail thought and saying nonsense, or saying something patently stupid (prices down by 1000%) to own someone from the trump admin. There have been many opportunities to do so.
That unspoken rules of his show dictate the political slant. In that sense it’s become similar to traditional media.
Turn on CNN and you’ll find debate, but only within the narrow parameters that mirrors CNN’s centrist worldview.
Turn on Rogan and you’ll find calm exploration of this new brand of online conservatism.
MSM once had a sense of discipline about controlling bias. But in recent years, they decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater, with the excuse that "everyone's biased" and "objectivity is impossible". As if most of the old-timers (both journalists and their audiences) were actually that naive.
To be fair, journalistic impartiality wasn't a particularly old standard. It really only came into being during the Cold War consensus period after WW2. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries the norm was to have stridently partisan newspapers and magazines.
The difference being, however, in those eras every city had multiple newspapers covering the full spectrum of political opinion. Now, with media consolidation, there's essentially two political opinions - "mainstream" and right-wing.
"The difference being, however, in those eras every city had multiple newspapers covering the full spectrum of political opinion."
No matter what power an 'independent' set of MSM once had, the difference that actually mattered was that MSM was still something like 99% of media consumption. So, it was a straightforward matter for TPTB to always be playing footsie with MSM, no matter who owned what vehicle, to work at keeping the population under control. In the mid-century emergent U.S. empire, MSM also had the bandwidth to adopt the noble public cause of impartiality. But now with its about-face, we see it was entirely disingenuous, never mind its realism. That, or TPTB have changed. Look, either journalists are interested in performing discovery *before* they make assertions -- especially discovery of their own minds -- or they aren't.
TPTB quashed labor riots in the early part of last century, and their descendants quash ideological riots today. The latter do so with idiotic slurs like "conspiracy theory", the promotion of "change" and the denigration of "hate" disembodied from context, ridicule without limit, and plenty of the other sophistic tools.
'Now ... there's essentially two political opinions - "mainstream" and right-wing."'
LOL. Sure, whatever. I'm quite familiar with your campaign, its pushers, and its long evolution. But it's now getting out of your control, as it did to other sets of gatekeepers back in the 15th-16th centuries. So, good luck putting the toothpaste back in the tube. Once trust is dead in the majority of the population, not just (roughly) half it, you'll really need to move on with a brand-new bag.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here, but if you look at say the late 19th/early 20th century, every city had a Republican and Democratic paper, and most of the larger ones probably had one or more socialist papers as well. Not to mention the various papers in languages other than English catering to the immigrant communities. All of these papers had clear biases in their reporting.
The "mainstream media" as such didn't really exist during this period, except so far as the dominant local media reflected the elite consensus. We saw the beginning of mass media with the rise of radio, but it wasn't really until the big 3 television networks started nightly news programs that Americans were getting their news from national rather than local sources.
I'm saying that mass discourse was still controlled. But "the people" could do their "real" debating more in person, back when people still could practice social connection within their organizations large and small or one-on-one, but largely outside of the prying eyes of mediation, monitoring, and/or censorship. They could then suss out bias more effectively.
Today, in the relative absence of face-to-face talk, we suffer essentially *full* mediation, monitoring, and/or censorship. And so alt media is bursting at the seams, even while participants know they are visible and that they are being messed with. We know biased promotion exists *both* explicitly *and* subliminally, as the last explicit guardrails (both legally and in professional journalism) were removed during roughly the last ten years.
"the dominant local media reflected the elite consensus"
Agreed. Even if today it's more concentrated in modern MSM, there's never an escape from the iron law of oligarchy. The only hope is noblesse oblige, which, like fraternité, was thrown in the trash in recent decades by our "betters".
As an aside re "right-wing": "Right" and "Left" today is the perfection of the dissection of what was captured c.1789 in the (still-extant) French motto "liberté, égalité, fraternité" -- the first two into intranational warring tribes (freedom vs fairness), the third discarded to bring on the wonderful world of globalism, rather than encourage the evolution of democratic diplomacy in coherent polities. The last two hundred years or so has, very arguably, been in large part the sorry result of this divide-and-conquer diplomatic failure.
What would an honest person do except to repeat it over and over and over until one gets engagement? (I've been talking about it for at least a couple of years.) Because to me it's both screamingly obvious, and I've found it's something studiously denied.
Who is Yarvin? Is this someone who came up with the same idea? (Did he copy it from me??)
I dunno. I think conservative and liberal map very well onto some aspects of the Big 5 personality traits, and twin studies suggest they're about 50% hereditary (like most traits when it comes to the mind).
Of course, what they mean varies dramatically depending upon the culture. For example, in the Soviet era, people who had tendencies towards supporting order and hierarchy became arch-communists, whereas free-thinkers became free-marketeers. Indeed, China seems to have this same breakdown even today, with the political spectrum running from pro-socialist/social conservative to pro-capitalist/social liberal, making it not look anything like the distribution on the "political compass" in a Western nation.
Of course we could even turn back the clock further, since much of the belief in free markets of the early enlightenment was because the arbitrary economic interventions of European states actually helped wealthy incumbents like nobles and made it harder for class mobility to take place.
Of course, conservativism is also ideologically incoherent, since at various times it's supported the divine right of kings, slavocracy, and "free-market" capitalism.
The TLDR is people predisposed to being "liberals" will always tend to drift in opposition to whatever the hegemonic economic ideology is. And if they manage to get into power and establish a new hegemonic identity, they'll be replaced within a generation by "conservatives" who believe that standard is now the natural and just operation of the world, and must be protected at all costs.
A way too look at it, at least in my eyes, is from a progressive v. reactionary perspective. Those who want and seek change against those who want and seek stability.
-- (re 'Big 5 personality traits, I mention further down)
"in the Soviet era, people who had tendencies towards supporting order and hierarchy became arch-communists"
-- True. Because those "communists" were not communists, but Rightists, an ever-present portion of the population. Likewise, Rightists in capitalist countries also are plenty happy with hierarchies, even rigid ones, because hierarchies are what they respect. They kid others, and often themselves, that it's the result some kind of moral-ordering quiescence in a "free" market.
"conservativism is also ideologically incoherent, since at various times it's supported the divine right of kings, slavocracy, and "free-market" capitalism."
-- As well as in "communism" in nearly every actual state realized. Again, the common thread is a dominant respect for hierarchy rather than equality (whether or not the source of the hierarchy is questioned and justified). in that sense it's coherent.
"people predisposed to being 'liberals' will always tend to drift in opposition to whatever the hegemonic economic ideology is."
-- To the extent they are naturally anti-authoritarian, I'd say they will of course be 'against' (i.e. questioning) the authority, whatever it stands for, and happy to try new things, whatever they are.
"if they manage to get into power and establish a new hegemonic identity, they'll be replaced within a generation by 'conservatives' who believe that standard is now the natural and just operation of the world"
-- Those are the non-thinking members, which are most people, really. I hold nothing moral against them, actually, but they aren't too well suited to driving things according to a ideological standard. Others who change in this way may simply be those mature into new perspectives, or are those with genuinely fluid ideology (pragmatists, for example).
---------------------
Still at the risk of oversimplifying, my points about Left and Right are more precisely:
(1) Both freedom (Right) and fairness (Left) are necessary components of healthy democratic societies, as each represents support for one side of the same coin, the individual and the social. Accordingly, prioritizing the individual implies respect (to an extent) for natural hierarchies, while prioritizing the social/collective respects (to an extent) and equality. That foundation in human nature is why each has persisted now for hundreds of years.
(2) Each side actually wants *both* freedom and fairness. The difference is that Right prioritizes freedom, while the Left prioritizes fairness.
-- If "conservative and liberal map very well onto some aspects of the Big 5 personality traits", that simply means to me there is some "permanent" distribution of relatively and naturally "lopsided" individuals. I see nothing inconsistent here, or morally amiss with it. Everyone gets their representation, across a spectrum.
(3) There is *no reason* freedom and fairness should be at permanent war with each other, but, in aggregate, simply should alternate in strength in any polity with the times.
Rogan is a bog standard vague liberal, dude. Trump got a lot of guys like him because his only real values are 'things are not good and the status quo is awful' and 'things were better in the 90s, this century has been a mistake' and guess what! Trump's a Clinton democrat.
I'd agree that Trump was a Clinton Democrat during the Clinton era. Outside of his viewpoints on trade and race, he was somewhat center-left back then.
But fundamentally, Trump doesn't have coherent political beliefs. He just wants to use the government for self-enrichment and to punish people who say bad things about him.
In a different world, if Obama didn't piss him off so much, he'd be an American Hugo Chavez. But he hitched his wagon to creepy fascists like Miller and Vought, so here we are.
I actually think bigotry is one of Trump's only ideological constants across his time as a public figure. So, in the event he ended up becoming a Democratic president, he'd still try and tamp down migration, though not as much as in reality, given he'd have to work within the Democratic political coalition.
But yeah, in an alternative timeline could have kept the trade protectionism and criticism of forever wars, not ditched his pro-choice stance on abortion, and kept to his demand from 2000 for a Canadian-style single-payer healthcare system.
His attacks on immigration are (in theory) immensely popular in a bipartisan way, people just don't like how he's managing it or the criminality of things like Alligator Alcatraz. I mean the Republicans like that stuff too, they are getting exactly what they voted for and a lot of them are thrilled, but pretty much everyone thinks the border is fucked and wants something done. Except people like our host who don't believe in borders, obviously
Similarly his desire to make America actually productive and shift our economy away from service jobs and middleman crap is widely shared, he has just completely fucked it in practice
"But fundamentally, Trump doesn't have coherent political beliefs. He just wants to use the government for self-enrichment and to punish people who say bad things about him."
So, Trump is a Clinton Democrat.
All joking aside, coherent politics simply means that they can be fit into a pre-determined framework that the observer declares coherent. One could similarly say that Bernie Sanders doesn't have coherent politics, or that George Bush's weren't coherent. To those two people, I am sure that they were. But to me, no.
My broader point though is Trump doesn't really care about politics per se - something that people who have seen him from the inside but broken away (like Chris Christie) have noted. He wants to have "wins" but doesn't care about the actual content of those wins.
One can actually argue that Trump, similar to Rogan, was a case of fan capture. Because right-wing base of the GOP embraced him, he came to embrace right-wing policy on taxes and spending. But it's not because he had a commitment to supply-side economics, or a night-watchmen state. Instead it was because he knew he had to deliver for "his fans" and that's what the people surrounding him (who cared about politics) said needed to happen.
And too your broader point, I will repeat myself: coherent politics simply means that they can be fit into a pre-determined framework that the observer declares coherent.
You might find them incoherent, I do not. I do not agree with a lot of them, but after many decades in business I do not find them incoherent in the slightest. I will, however, note that his interests lie in a strictly business orientation, with America's place in the world in relation to that paradigm, and that everything else is subordinate to that. Which, if this isn't your area of interest vis-a-vis international or national politics, could seem inconsistent.
As to fan capture, one could say that about ANY politician, from Obama to Regan. I tend to find that sort of analysis of a public figure to be trite, and an excuse to not deal with the substance of any policies that might or might not arrive.
I think Trump has been pretty consistent on tariffs since the 80s. He's also been fairly consistently xenophobic. Other than that, I'd generally agree he doesn't have any consistent politics.
he also insisted that she come to him. Trump did, Kamala wouldn't. And in Kamala's defense she is one of the worst extemporaneous speakers in modern american political history, and Rogan asking extremely basic questions would have obliterated her
I was about to say, a formally correct if kinda gotcha-ey response to this is: “Kamala Harris isn’t any of those things Freddie is saying Rogan fails to engage with: she’s an exceptionally inarticulate advocate of the few positions she does hold; she held as few as she could during the ‘24 campaign (left wing particularly, but she shied away from any policy commitments really); and even when she tried to adopt left wing positions in 2019 she was a nonsensical advocate and her policies smelled of a failure to engage with the material.”
It was also probably stupid of her campaign to snub Rogan, at least for the reasons they gave (a good reason would be that Rogan would have challenged her and she’s such a terrible on-screen interviewee that it would’ve created a lot of really bad clips of her).
Backfired is a funny word here. People would have watched it and he would have had a conversation with the man, and (unrelated to Rogan's interests) might have developed a positive or negative opinion about him. Rogan didn't actually care who won the election in the way 'backfired' implies.
How do you think it would have backfired on Rogan? I mean, even if Walz had shown up and come off very well in the interview, I don't see how it would have hurt Rogan any. Even if he had already planned to support Trump (very possible, given the attempt to cancel him from the left and the nature of Trump et al's appeal), it seems like he could have spun that out fine--for example, saying he thought Walz was a good guy but he preferred Trump/Vance because of (say) trans issues, or RFK/MAHA/vaccine skeptic stuff, or whatever.
Rogan's audience is AFAICT not especially political, so just saying "ya know, I think I trust Trump/Vance more than Harris/Walz" probably wouldn't hurt him much even if he gave no other reasons.
Look at this. Someone tries to have a conversation about the content of the guy's work, and up pops an angry obsessive screaming about parasocial acolytes with daddy issues.
I've never watched/listened to Rogan, so I've no horse in this race other than sharing De Boer's desire that the left were better at getting elected. But this sort of out-of-nowhere rant aimed at randomly selected commenters is exactly the sort of thing that pushes voters towards the right.
Kamala got caught flat-footed during an appearance on *The View*. It was the friendliest interview format. There was some kind of political malpractice in her campaign that day. I can see why no one wanted her to just talk for 2+ hours in an open format.
60 minutes had to completely re-edit her interview to make it coherent because she just rambled bizarrely and didn't address questions. They swapped things around so that something she said would be presented as a response to a question asked an hour earlier because it was the only time she even drifted towards addressing the subject.
They did the same thing in reverse to De Santis, where he had cogent answers to questions and they replaced it with incoherent babble that was actually cogent answers to different questions, or responses to things going on that made sense in context. and as with Kamala they got brutally owned by the actual evidence, in this case because he wisely records all his interactions like a paranoid maniac.'
It is wild how partisan media keeps screwing themselves and making genuinely bad people look sympathetic, but only when they don't want to.
The problem with Harris is that she came out of the California Democratic machine, and that's a place where you don't really get challenged. You could argue that before the 2020 primary, the last time she had a political campaign that was any kind of hard fight was the 2003 challenge to incumbent San Francisco DA Terence Hallinan that was her entrée into electoral politics. And even her success in becoming VP was due to playing behind-the-scenes politics with Biden, and her becoming 2024 POTUS candidate was due to Biden's incapacity. While Harris is definitely a politician - the issues she's flip-flopped on over the years reveal that much - she's never had much success outside of political appointments or safe seats and so has never really had to step up her game as a campaigner.
I think that what it really demonstrates is the impossibility of completely managing a candidate 100% of the time. If somebody isn't up to the task of answering basic questions, then no amount of micromanaging is going to be sufficient.
If your entire media ecosystem is totally friendly it becomes possible. FDR's polio comes to mind, as of course does Biden's senility. And outside of politics, Kanye's mental illness over the last two decades, covered up by interviewers and the media as much as by his own loyalists
But the story of the last twenty years in terms of the news media is the death of legacy outlets and the rise of new competitors. Those alternatives proved to be a) resistant to the party line and b) surprisingly influential in terms of the political process.
Turns out that no, it's even easier to manufacture consent when the people you're manipulating silo themselves into only consuming stuff that already agrees with them and also the entire new media ecosystem is more desperate for fleeting attention than anyone in history
That was my first thought. How much of this is Rogan screening his guests, and how much is his guests screening themselves? The progressives I see on social media generally think Rogan is a fascist. Presumably they don't want to go on a fascist podcast.
"But by now we should probably ask, who gets to be the ones answering those questions?"
That's where alt media came from in the first place, and how it rose up to the "then they fight you" level. What's the problem? Bring on the anti-Rogans!
I am curious about how many episodes people have listened to? I listen from time to time and have not been so disconcerted. Any forum that opens dialogue is a plus to me. He does talk about books a great deal.
My roommate listened to him all the time, loudly, so I overheard his show constantly, and well before he started shifting right wing during covid.
And my take way back then is this is one of the stupidest people I've ever heard, and the least funny successful stand-up comedian. I actually lost respect for him, because I liked him on News Radio and thought he was a good MMA analyst.
The dude would nonstop talk about the government engineering earthquakes and faking the moonlanding, and the only laughs to be had were from his guests. And I knew at least two people that got into him, started echoing his ketamine and DMT talk, and ended up developing severe drug problems.
I don't begrudge anyone who goes on his show. But at the same time I also don't begrudge anyone who thinks he's too stupid to spend time with.
I think at least some part of what's at work with the guest list is that Rogan, like most humans, doesn't want to look bad in front of people he cares about (i.e., his audience). And I think he knows that if he wanted to avoid looking bad in front of someone who really knows their stuff, he'd have to prep. And take ideological risks that might end up disappointing his audience. Why do that when you can book someone who won't challenge you, or, if they do, will not look very good doing so?
I think he has a free-thinking show the same way late-night dorm room discussions were free-thinking: a bunch of liberal-to-lefty college students willing to talk about anything, but all of whom agree on the basics. It may be totally free-thinking and independent, but it's also going to be dully predictable and one-dimensional to anyone who's been there.
It's a paradox of tolerance. Open, free, and productive discussion can only occur in curated spaces where everyone has enough synchronized priors to not take things too seriously (or not seriously enough).
I think one thing worth keeping in mind is that the Joe Rogan Show is a business at this point, and because of the impetus to stay successful a lot of businesses end up being captured by their customers and they find it difficult to do something different or innovate because so many of their customers just want more of what they're familiar with.
Yes, and I also later considered that part of what the podcast wants is to create compelling stories that will maintain or increase listenership, and they may feel that having people duke it out with Rogan is going to turn people off.
I don't watch Rogan regularly, but I occasionally tune in to a guest who particularly interests me. I wouldn't exactly disagree with you - I do think Rogan has become ridiculously credulous of some of the things proffered by the wilder reaches of the right wing in recent years - but I do also think there is more going on than that.
The main thing you don't mention is the reluctance of many (not all) liberals to go on Rogan in the first place. When Bernie Sanders appeared there, he got a huge amount of flack for doing so. Kamala Harris claimed to be open to it, but put a series of conditions on her appearance that she must have known Rogan would never countenance. When Rogan claimed (in the wake of the Sanders interview) that Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden would have liked to be on his show, both of them frantically denied that they had any interest in it at all. It is hardly surprising that, if the pool of high-profile left-leaning political figures narrows itself down in that way, we're going to end up with fewer left-leaning figures on his show.
The other thing to say is that Rogan is a very, very good interviewer, even though (in fact, I would say largely because) he doesn't generally challenge people or get into major arguments with them. His relaxed, jokey persona puts people at their ease and allows their ideas to be explored. And yes, this does mean that some bad people with some really awful ideas get explored there without Rogan pushing back on them in any serious way - but I still think that Rogan's skill as an interviewer is a major net positive. I utterly detest Donald Trump, who (unsurprisingly) told a huge number of falsehoods when Rogan interviewed him (and of course Rogan ended up endorsing him) - but I still think that the way Rogan drew Trump out during the interview gave a remarkable set of insights into him. I wish with all my heart that Kamala Harris had done a similar interview - to my mind, her failure to take up Rogan on his offer was the worst error she made in her campaign.
i want to support your point about liberals getting criticized for going on the show. all freddie’s points are valid, AND the left tried to cancel rogan during covid, so of course there’s not many left people who likely want to go on the show.
Yeah, I don't listen to Rogan much (not an ideological thing, just not my cup of tea), but I expect that the whole professionally produced n-word tape and coordinated attempt to end his career probably convinced him whose side he was *absolutely not* on. That likely opened the door to him supporting Trump/Vance.
I'll just add that a smart version of the Biden/Harris campaign would have seen mending some of those bridges as a very high priority.
There is a whole large set of vocal and prominent people in media who had a faction of the left in their field try very hard to make sure they'd never work again, and you have to recognize that it's going to be a long time until those folks are willing to support the faction that did that, even if the other side is visibly terrible. You can legitimately bitch at Finland for fighting on the Germans' side in WW2, but you ought to at least recognize that they had some pretty good reasons for joining whatever side was fighting the USSR.
The interesting thing is that I'd actually heard the infamous "Planet of the Apes" episode before the selective edit version came out, and while you could find plenty there that was objectionable, it also comes across as a real-time and unfiltered consciousness-raising session on Rogan's part. He ends up saying something to the effect of, "Oh, I guess that's how black people must feel all the time in a room full of white people."
If we had a better anti-racist left, the latter might be a hook to call someone in rather than calling them out for not getting it to begin with.
Yes. The left decided that Rogan was tainted, and thus by transitive property, anyone who went on the show was also a baddie, and so... there were no more liberals.
I dunno man, it feels like the flip side of Colbert getting cancelled. Liberals are so confident in their correctness that it seems they can never anticipate that their exclusionary behavior leads to .... exclusion.
The whole contagious shunning thing is bad in most contexts, but it is especially bad for journalism, where the whole f--king point is to cover everything and talk to everyone.
I'm not convinced that the Colbert cancellation was anything more than ratings. After all, CBS is not just cancelling Colbert, they're getting rid of the entire Late Show franchise that started when they got Letterman from NBC in the 90s. So CBS is getting out of the late-night talk show business altogether, and that's not surprising, given as to how that is to a now outdated medium. It will be interesting to see if NBC carries on with its long-running legacy late-night shows like the Tonight Show, Late Night, and SNL, which they've been keeping on life support for a few years now.
This is huge. Rogan is effectively Voldemort to the NYT/NPR crowd. When just showing up on his show is going to result in a twitter/blue sky freak out it’s not surprising to me that we don’t see more of those voices. Liberals still really haven’t internalized that the speech policing is losing them huge amounts of support, and the “transitive badness” of talking to people they don’t like is a prime example of it.
Bernie is held out as a counter example, but I’m not totally sure. Those same individuals I know personally bought the “Bernie bros” thing hook line and sinker and still view him skeptically/partially blame him for Hillary’s loss in 2016.
Totally agree with the final sentence. If youre to timid/owned to spar with Rogan why should people elect you? Just saying “bc the other guy is a jerk” wasn’t enough. And it was obvious it wasn’t going to be enough. Gigantic error.
As far as the chuckle headed credulity about every moonbeam idea that drifts into his head, he's Oprah, but with rainbow sprinkles, wet walnuts, and two cherries in top.
And like Oprah, he is filthy rich and incredibly influential as a result. You can put out a podcast that's basically a graduate seminar or journal club (TWIV and Probable Causation are two good examples), and that's wonderful, but you're not getting a mass-market audience with that. The bell curve has a middle, and appealing to them is a better strategy for high ratings than appealing to the people on its far right tail.
Curious here: Do YOU want to get invited on Joe Rogan's show? 😀
Never listened to the guy myself, though of course, I'm aware of who he is. (And Joe! Or Joe-Minion, whose Google Alert brought you to this page! You should definitely invite ME on your show even though I am aging & totally obscure, 'cause I am like a modern-day Cassandra, a practitioner of psychohistory, and I can tell you _everything_ that will happen in the next 100 years! 😀)
I do recall Bernie Sanders appeared on his show some years back & as Feral Finster notes, Kamala Harris was invited & declined, probably because Rogan refused to restrict the types of questions he could ask. Personally, I am tired of the Mandarin protocols surrounding politicians & other VIPs, so I support this freewheeling style. Rogan recently had James Talarico on his show, a hitherto obscure Democratic Texas state representative, best known for his attempts to reform public education. I'd love to see Rogan interview Zohran Mandami!
I suspect our host would love to be on, even to just talk football or pop culture. I would like that, though I rarely listen to any podcast. Podcasts have taken off because the media stopped being neutral.
It's partly the screeching. You would need to fund someone who can (1) represent their views and hold their own ground, (2) be interesting, and (3) refrain from outraged screeching. There are not many of those around, mainly because they are so rarely asked difficult questions by the legacy media IMO.
Yeah that's a limiting factor because going on there at all would be treated as suspicious within the mainstream left. If you went on there and did NOT performatively screech and howl at Rogan's ideas, your own side would be like "I can't believe you not only went on that show, but then you sat there politely while he said That Horrible Thing" while Rogan and his listeners would think "well there ya go, lefties just can't listen to an opposing view without going REEEEEEEEEEE and hyperventilating." A guest to challenge him from the left would have to be someone who is interesting and competent AND doesn't particularly care about his reputation with the traditional media and others in left's chattering class.
Perhaps with Rogan there's a bit of audience capture at play. And he does have a big audience, which does skew towards the "bro" center right it seems. And the "bro-sphere" these days seems to want little to do with the Dems, which isn't surprising to me as the Dem party, according to polls, is somewhat less popular than pond scum, especially with several categories of bros, e.g. Gen Z men and non-college and/or working class men. (his wheelhouse)
To me the bigger political question is how will the Dems inject some masculinity back into the party and become slightly less female coded. How do the Dems become less cringe to many men?
The D party has work to do, and if their attempt last fall: I'm a man, man political ads, Tim Walz, etc, then they have much work to do.
One aside is that there's a sizeable gender gap--men tended to favor Trump and women Harris. Rogan is very stereotypically male, his listeners are skewed young and male, so it's not a shock that stuff that appeals to men (especially young men) plays well with him.
It's both natural and inevitable that people who are curious will gradually move to the right politically. The political left already has a right/wrong position on everything and is the party of dogma, slogans, experts and "the science is settled". Rogen is probably just avoiding the ratings dip that would accompany talking to these (often) self righteous drones with their new speak vocabularies
Is that your definition of who is "political left"? If you're dividing the world into political right and left, and saying the left is consonant with those of the puritanical social justice ilk, where you do place people like Yascha Mounk, Jesse Singal, Helen Pluckrose, and many, many others? They are surely not the political right.
I was going to give an actual response, but in a moment of clarity I realized that I don't really care. I will add that another characteristic argument technique of the political left is the use of obscure "less than 1 percent" examples to form a "gotcha" example meant to discredit the remaining and overwhelming 99 percent of supporting evidence.
I was pointing out that if Rogan wanted to talk to more liberals, he could. (And indeed, he has -- pretty sure Singal has been on his show.) The choice is not between "the political right" and "self-righteous drones." If your point is he avoids the woke for that reason, I wouldn't argue.
Nate Silver's observation is that the liberals who subscribed to his newsletter were obsessed with enforcing orthodoxy and excommunicating blasphemers. The conservatives, on the other hand, were overjoyed to find common ground, even if they still had substantial disagreements in other arenas.
That said, I still follow Jesse Singal, in spite of his increasing ideological capture by the 'gender-critical' crowd. Helen Pluckrose and Iona Italia I quite like. The fact that Iona doesn't seem to have gone far as publisher of the now-defunct Areo or as a podcaster has a lot to do with the fact that she wasn't providing enough culture war red meat for the angry 'centrist' crowd. In terms of where I'd put most of those people on the right-left spectrum, I'd call most of them more or less 'centrists' or 'libertarians', but in the case of Bari Weiss and The Free Press, strongly right-of-center, especially on social issues, without really wanting to admit to it. My exact diagnosis of Weiss in particular is that she's basically an unreconstructed 90s-era 'conservative Democrat' and is desperately trying to resurrect that kind of politics in an era where that's largely disappeared.
I know I chose some obvious "heterodox" writers, but I didn't mean to suggest that all the "heterodox" writers were somehow political left. Weiss is certainly not someone I'd call political left (one reason I didn't name her); she was always something of a centrist (which is why Clinton Democrat is probably a decent label). I wouldn't consider any of them libertarians, at least not how that label is perceived in the US; Pluckrose, in particular, generally has values VERY similar to the progressive left, with one exception: she is very anti-authoritarian. That reads sometimes like libertarianism, but it's not, and it's not close. She IS political left, without any doubt, if there is to be just one division between political right and political left. I would say the same is true for Jesse Singal: he is not a centrist like Weiss; he is truly politically progressive.
It should come as no shock that the "angry centrists" as you call them happen to be very commonly the anti-authoritarian left: people with generally progressive principles, but who also feel a very strong liberal (as in freedom) bent. They are most angry at fellow liberals because they perceive their fellow liberals to have turned into an even more oppressive form of the moral majority. They are generally immune from being oppressed by the political right; they are very susceptible to it from the political left. Many of them indeed were victims of cancellation of various kinds on the left and feel betrayed. They are angry at the political left for the same reasons the political left is so angry at them: no one draws ire like an apostate.
You know who has a great podcast? Andrew Sullivan. He is a good conversationalist (although he does talk over guests at times). And he appears to seek out various points of view, although it seems some lefty invitees may decline in order to avoid being tainted by Sullivan's reputation.
His conversation with Cornell West a few years ago was the best podcast I've ever listened to... it was a joy to hear their genuine enthusiasm for the shared conversation despite political disagreements.
I don't get to listen to it nearly as often as I'd like but I also think Sullivan does a good job in the format and is in fact open to guests that present challenges to his world view. That said I also think Sullivan's show is expressly understood as political in a way I am not sure Rogan's is or wants to be. Obviously it's impossible to know for sure but I know Sullivan has complained about an unwillingness of many leftier voices to go on his show in spite of an open invitation. It would be very surprising to me if that were misdirection on Sullivan's part.
I typically enjoy his not-directly-political stuff the most, for example, I learned a ton from his discussions about Benjamin Franklin and Bill Buckley. And Mike White was a weird interview that I enjoyed a lot.
Yes I made sure to listen to the Mike White interview. I like the White Lotus so wanted to hear about that but he also seems like an all around interesting person.
I think "lefty invitees may decline in order to avoid being tainted by Sullivan's reputation" explains a great deal of the problem. If everyone on your side is afraid of speaking to mainstream people with big audiences because they'll get ideological cooties and be attacked by their allies, your side is going to have a lot less reach. Combine that with your side having overwhelming control over older media outlets that still have prestige but not so many readers/viewers, and things don't look so great.
One of the bigger take aways over the last few years should be the degree to which cancelation and ostracism beyond a certain, pretty low ceiling, ends up being self marginalizing.
I think it is all elastic, with ebbs and flows over time. Considering the inclusion of Sullivan's recent essay in the NYT, the pace of change seems to be accelerating at the moment, with more space for at least acknowledging opposing ideas.
My guess (low-confidence) is that there was an unhealthy dynamic among a lot of prominent journalists before Twitter, but that Twitter interacted with that dynamic in some really destructive ways that made enforcing ideological conformity much more effective and powerful. And this did a huge amount of damage to prestige journalistic outlets, both by getting them to beclown themselves saying nonsense that was on-message, and getting them to refuse to talk to anyone who had been excommunicated or denounced sufficiently within that Twitter bubble.
Among other things, without that very visible ideological rigidity and casting out of dissident writers from journalism (including folks like Freddie and Andrew Sullivan), Substack would be another Wordpress.
Just today, I was reminded by some 'progressive' on a Wikipedia talk page that Substack "promotes Nazis". The discourse in many left-of-center spaces is one of pure moral panic, sadly.
I was walking my dog, listening to Andrew interview Anderson Cooper last fall. When they talked about the horrors of AIDS in the 1990s, I had to sit down and catch my breath. He can be a lot, but when he's good, he's great.
Yes- that was how I first learned about Freddie! For a wild time capsule, look back at the ongoing and fascinating written conversations between Sullivan and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The internet was a different place back then.
Mixed feelings on Sullivan. He kind of lost me recently when I listened to him on The Fifth Column and he threw Taiwan completely under the bus, saying that they're losers who just need to shut up and reunite with the PRC. Which is a hell of a thing for a supposed classical liberal to say about what's probably the freest democracy in Asia (including Japan), and a nation that now aspires to independence for their small country rather than the KMT's vision of winning back the mainland.
That said, I still loathe his treatment by Jon Stewart a few years ago during the 'peak woke' era, where Stewart basically ambushed him and, alongside one of the "Race to Dinner" freaks, treated him to a public struggle session. That's permanently soured me on Jon Stewart!
I think he is the biggest example of audience capture out there. Same cycle as always. Starts out an independent voice going against the grain. Gets a following and the money starts coming in. Then the intel starts to show that certain voices bring more engagement and downloads and they just start playing the hits.
I don't listen to him but find it unsurprising it would evolve in a rightward direction, given that it was progressives that tried to get his show canceled and that any progressive that goes on the show risks a backlash from their own base. It seems the tides may be changing on that at least a little bit (thinking of some of the places Gavin Newsome has been willing to go) but from about 2016-2023 this territory was simply ceded.
I don't watch Rogan, but I've noticed in recent coverage of him he's trying to distance himself from Trump. Really criticizing him over the brutality of his immigration enforcement, along with raking him over the coals regarding the Epstein stuff.
How much of this represents his sincere beliefs versus branding (wanting to be an "anti-establishment independent voice" means he can't be seen as supporting the sitting administration openly) is of course a matter of question. But he seems to know that his market isn't looking for a nicer Ben Shapiro.
Gavin Newsom is as slippery as they come. He will espouse diametrically opposed views minutes apart, to totally avoid accountability for his past views and past/current policies.
While I do agree that it is good to interview people from across the spectrum, some people are so dishonest that platforming them is counterproductive to the goal of holding people accountable, and showing people for who they are. If Newsom went on Rogan, I predict he would do the same as he does everywhere else - when confronted on issues where he has been on the wrong side, he will admit he was wrong and that he is totally changing course - but then never actually changing course. Total pandering. Mayor Bass did the same thing in her press briefings on the LA fires - pretending permits were being zipped thru, and that all the criticisms had been responded to with changes in policy - leaving the questioner nowhere to go, and the public no wiser.
And no, refusing to platform slippery liars, is not the same as (for example) CNN refusing to air a 2 minute press briefing by Tulsi Gabbard (current DNI) on the latest proof that the CIA *knowingly* lied and over-rode the objections of CIA analysts to create false claim that Russia favored Trump to win, and lied to get FISA warrants on Trump, etc - while putting words in Tulsi's mouth for the next hour to keep listeners from knowing what she really said. Or the entire mainstream media falsely implying for *years* that Trump didn't denounce white supremacists in the same paragraph he said "fine people on both sides" - while playing the clip 1000's of times, each time editing out the key few seconds where he denounced them, as they imply he never did denounce them.
I hear you in theory but not really sure what you're getting at here. We're talking about a show that at least as I understand it is open to having people on making the case that UFO sightings are in fact extraterrestrial in origin or that widely reported mass shootings are elaborate hoaxes. If you're allowing that I don't think you can claim to be upholding some particularly principled line by not having normal elected officials, no matter how slippery they may be on whatever subject.
You're right. It is not a particularly principled objection
I am biased (like everyone else).
As a partisan, I prefer slick liars on the left not be granted more of an audience, nor more legitimacy.
And yes, there are liars on the right.
And as a public official, of course it is legitimate for a journalist to interview Newsom.
But mainstream news media once were better about holding lying politicians accountable. Biden was forced to drop out of the presidential Democratic primary in shame, back in 1988, for lying.
That would never happen now.
Now, nearly all news media are totally biased, to one side or the other - and not very concerned with truth. Maybe just avoiding lawsuits.
There are some exceptions.
But it really has come to the point where (for the most part), mainstream media is totally on the side of the left, and also on the side the corrupt establishment - of which they consider themselves a part. Mainstream news stations are funded by ads from pharmaceutical companies, and other interest groups, who have strong impact on who may / may not be criticized.
Fortunately, mainstream news lies and omissions are becoming so obvious, that fewer and fewer viewers believe them, reducing their viewership and therefore their influence.
Whether you believe Tulsi Gabbard is a "reliable source" (or not), she is the current DNI, in charge of presenting intelligence to the POTUS. If indeed she is lying about potentially criminal allegations against former POTUS and high ranking former intelligence heads (or not), her words are an incredibly important primary news source, on an important story. Any supposed news outlet who censors this, is obviously not really a news source. In fairness, you did note that CNN is not credible. I agree that all politicians should be listened to with skepticism, but I have not seen any evidence to date, that Tulsi Gabbard is lying on this issue, or any other.
Yeah, Newsom - didn't he do a podcast where he was patting himself on the back for reaching out to Charlie Kirk and the like. Just a few months after pushing through a law that basically banned parodies made using AI because he was mad about an ad that used altered footage of Kamala Harris in what was obviously a satirical context and was not an attempt to be passed off as real. That law was immediately struck down on First Amendment grounds. He made a very rapid shift from censorious culture warrior to open-minded centrist. I prefer the latter, but it was blatant as to how much he was moving with the political wind.
How do you know it's a booking problem vs progressive guests ala Kamala refusing (by not agreeing to the conditions every other guest agree to) to come on the show?
That's what I was thinking. It seems that Freddie is basing his conclusions on the results of the booking process, without accounting for survivorship biases. I don't often watch Rogan's show because they're just too long for my attention span, but I would definitely watch if he had FB on.
Much like you, Joe is running a media business and he has listeners to please. If he stops feeding people the entertainment they enjoy they will go elsewhere. The biggest question for Joe is, "What can I do to ensure my business continues to thrive?" His success based on he deep understanding of what his listeners find engaging and entertaining. And that is something independent of Joe's personal views.
1. IIRC, Kamala Harris was invited onto the show but ultimately declined. Supposedly, the reason was scheduling conflicts, most likely the real reason was Rogan would not agree not to ask questions like "when did you figure out that Biden is senile?" and "if it was that obvious, why did you say nothing?"
2. Concerning "podcast conservatism", the modern modern American political left and right are not coherent ideologies so much as they each represent a coalition of interest groups.
This is also an example of Freddie’s main argument. Joe would have challenged Kamala on Biden’s mental health. He would never pull up a clip of Trump losing his trail thought and saying nonsense, or saying something patently stupid (prices down by 1000%) to own someone from the trump admin. There have been many opportunities to do so.
That unspoken rules of his show dictate the political slant. In that sense it’s become similar to traditional media.
Turn on CNN and you’ll find debate, but only within the narrow parameters that mirrors CNN’s centrist worldview.
Turn on Rogan and you’ll find calm exploration of this new brand of online conservatism.
MSM once had a sense of discipline about controlling bias. But in recent years, they decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater, with the excuse that "everyone's biased" and "objectivity is impossible". As if most of the old-timers (both journalists and their audiences) were actually that naive.
To be fair, journalistic impartiality wasn't a particularly old standard. It really only came into being during the Cold War consensus period after WW2. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries the norm was to have stridently partisan newspapers and magazines.
The difference being, however, in those eras every city had multiple newspapers covering the full spectrum of political opinion. Now, with media consolidation, there's essentially two political opinions - "mainstream" and right-wing.
"The difference being, however, in those eras every city had multiple newspapers covering the full spectrum of political opinion."
No matter what power an 'independent' set of MSM once had, the difference that actually mattered was that MSM was still something like 99% of media consumption. So, it was a straightforward matter for TPTB to always be playing footsie with MSM, no matter who owned what vehicle, to work at keeping the population under control. In the mid-century emergent U.S. empire, MSM also had the bandwidth to adopt the noble public cause of impartiality. But now with its about-face, we see it was entirely disingenuous, never mind its realism. That, or TPTB have changed. Look, either journalists are interested in performing discovery *before* they make assertions -- especially discovery of their own minds -- or they aren't.
TPTB quashed labor riots in the early part of last century, and their descendants quash ideological riots today. The latter do so with idiotic slurs like "conspiracy theory", the promotion of "change" and the denigration of "hate" disembodied from context, ridicule without limit, and plenty of the other sophistic tools.
'Now ... there's essentially two political opinions - "mainstream" and right-wing."'
LOL. Sure, whatever. I'm quite familiar with your campaign, its pushers, and its long evolution. But it's now getting out of your control, as it did to other sets of gatekeepers back in the 15th-16th centuries. So, good luck putting the toothpaste back in the tube. Once trust is dead in the majority of the population, not just (roughly) half it, you'll really need to move on with a brand-new bag.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here, but if you look at say the late 19th/early 20th century, every city had a Republican and Democratic paper, and most of the larger ones probably had one or more socialist papers as well. Not to mention the various papers in languages other than English catering to the immigrant communities. All of these papers had clear biases in their reporting.
The "mainstream media" as such didn't really exist during this period, except so far as the dominant local media reflected the elite consensus. We saw the beginning of mass media with the rise of radio, but it wasn't really until the big 3 television networks started nightly news programs that Americans were getting their news from national rather than local sources.
"I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here"
I'm saying that mass discourse was still controlled. But "the people" could do their "real" debating more in person, back when people still could practice social connection within their organizations large and small or one-on-one, but largely outside of the prying eyes of mediation, monitoring, and/or censorship. They could then suss out bias more effectively.
Today, in the relative absence of face-to-face talk, we suffer essentially *full* mediation, monitoring, and/or censorship. And so alt media is bursting at the seams, even while participants know they are visible and that they are being messed with. We know biased promotion exists *both* explicitly *and* subliminally, as the last explicit guardrails (both legally and in professional journalism) were removed during roughly the last ten years.
"the dominant local media reflected the elite consensus"
Agreed. Even if today it's more concentrated in modern MSM, there's never an escape from the iron law of oligarchy. The only hope is noblesse oblige, which, like fraternité, was thrown in the trash in recent decades by our "betters".
Are you a member of the 'educational' class?
As an aside re "right-wing": "Right" and "Left" today is the perfection of the dissection of what was captured c.1789 in the (still-extant) French motto "liberté, égalité, fraternité" -- the first two into intranational warring tribes (freedom vs fairness), the third discarded to bring on the wonderful world of globalism, rather than encourage the evolution of democratic diplomacy in coherent polities. The last two hundred years or so has, very arguably, been in large part the sorry result of this divide-and-conquer diplomatic failure.
What would an honest person do except to repeat it over and over and over until one gets engagement? (I've been talking about it for at least a couple of years.) Because to me it's both screamingly obvious, and I've found it's something studiously denied.
Who is Yarvin? Is this someone who came up with the same idea? (Did he copy it from me??)
Offer:
(1) You either coherently tell me, or point me successfully to, what's wrong with this POV
(2) I will then cease talking about it here
(3) If clearly to me wrong, I will stop talking about it permanently. If not, I will take it elsewhere.
Deal?
I dunno. I think conservative and liberal map very well onto some aspects of the Big 5 personality traits, and twin studies suggest they're about 50% hereditary (like most traits when it comes to the mind).
Of course, what they mean varies dramatically depending upon the culture. For example, in the Soviet era, people who had tendencies towards supporting order and hierarchy became arch-communists, whereas free-thinkers became free-marketeers. Indeed, China seems to have this same breakdown even today, with the political spectrum running from pro-socialist/social conservative to pro-capitalist/social liberal, making it not look anything like the distribution on the "political compass" in a Western nation.
Of course we could even turn back the clock further, since much of the belief in free markets of the early enlightenment was because the arbitrary economic interventions of European states actually helped wealthy incumbents like nobles and made it harder for class mobility to take place.
Of course, conservativism is also ideologically incoherent, since at various times it's supported the divine right of kings, slavocracy, and "free-market" capitalism.
The TLDR is people predisposed to being "liberals" will always tend to drift in opposition to whatever the hegemonic economic ideology is. And if they manage to get into power and establish a new hegemonic identity, they'll be replaced within a generation by "conservatives" who believe that standard is now the natural and just operation of the world, and must be protected at all costs.
A way too look at it, at least in my eyes, is from a progressive v. reactionary perspective. Those who want and seek change against those who want and seek stability.
-- (re 'Big 5 personality traits, I mention further down)
"in the Soviet era, people who had tendencies towards supporting order and hierarchy became arch-communists"
-- True. Because those "communists" were not communists, but Rightists, an ever-present portion of the population. Likewise, Rightists in capitalist countries also are plenty happy with hierarchies, even rigid ones, because hierarchies are what they respect. They kid others, and often themselves, that it's the result some kind of moral-ordering quiescence in a "free" market.
"conservativism is also ideologically incoherent, since at various times it's supported the divine right of kings, slavocracy, and "free-market" capitalism."
-- As well as in "communism" in nearly every actual state realized. Again, the common thread is a dominant respect for hierarchy rather than equality (whether or not the source of the hierarchy is questioned and justified). in that sense it's coherent.
"people predisposed to being 'liberals' will always tend to drift in opposition to whatever the hegemonic economic ideology is."
-- To the extent they are naturally anti-authoritarian, I'd say they will of course be 'against' (i.e. questioning) the authority, whatever it stands for, and happy to try new things, whatever they are.
"if they manage to get into power and establish a new hegemonic identity, they'll be replaced within a generation by 'conservatives' who believe that standard is now the natural and just operation of the world"
-- Those are the non-thinking members, which are most people, really. I hold nothing moral against them, actually, but they aren't too well suited to driving things according to a ideological standard. Others who change in this way may simply be those mature into new perspectives, or are those with genuinely fluid ideology (pragmatists, for example).
---------------------
Still at the risk of oversimplifying, my points about Left and Right are more precisely:
(1) Both freedom (Right) and fairness (Left) are necessary components of healthy democratic societies, as each represents support for one side of the same coin, the individual and the social. Accordingly, prioritizing the individual implies respect (to an extent) for natural hierarchies, while prioritizing the social/collective respects (to an extent) and equality. That foundation in human nature is why each has persisted now for hundreds of years.
(2) Each side actually wants *both* freedom and fairness. The difference is that Right prioritizes freedom, while the Left prioritizes fairness.
-- If "conservative and liberal map very well onto some aspects of the Big 5 personality traits", that simply means to me there is some "permanent" distribution of relatively and naturally "lopsided" individuals. I see nothing inconsistent here, or morally amiss with it. Everyone gets their representation, across a spectrum.
(3) There is *no reason* freedom and fairness should be at permanent war with each other, but, in aggregate, simply should alternate in strength in any polity with the times.
Rogan is a bog standard vague liberal, dude. Trump got a lot of guys like him because his only real values are 'things are not good and the status quo is awful' and 'things were better in the 90s, this century has been a mistake' and guess what! Trump's a Clinton democrat.
I'd agree that Trump was a Clinton Democrat during the Clinton era. Outside of his viewpoints on trade and race, he was somewhat center-left back then.
But fundamentally, Trump doesn't have coherent political beliefs. He just wants to use the government for self-enrichment and to punish people who say bad things about him.
In a different world, if Obama didn't piss him off so much, he'd be an American Hugo Chavez. But he hitched his wagon to creepy fascists like Miller and Vought, so here we are.
I actually think bigotry is one of Trump's only ideological constants across his time as a public figure. So, in the event he ended up becoming a Democratic president, he'd still try and tamp down migration, though not as much as in reality, given he'd have to work within the Democratic political coalition.
But yeah, in an alternative timeline could have kept the trade protectionism and criticism of forever wars, not ditched his pro-choice stance on abortion, and kept to his demand from 2000 for a Canadian-style single-payer healthcare system.
His attacks on immigration are (in theory) immensely popular in a bipartisan way, people just don't like how he's managing it or the criminality of things like Alligator Alcatraz. I mean the Republicans like that stuff too, they are getting exactly what they voted for and a lot of them are thrilled, but pretty much everyone thinks the border is fucked and wants something done. Except people like our host who don't believe in borders, obviously
Similarly his desire to make America actually productive and shift our economy away from service jobs and middleman crap is widely shared, he has just completely fucked it in practice
"But fundamentally, Trump doesn't have coherent political beliefs. He just wants to use the government for self-enrichment and to punish people who say bad things about him."
So, Trump is a Clinton Democrat.
All joking aside, coherent politics simply means that they can be fit into a pre-determined framework that the observer declares coherent. One could similarly say that Bernie Sanders doesn't have coherent politics, or that George Bush's weren't coherent. To those two people, I am sure that they were. But to me, no.
My broader point though is Trump doesn't really care about politics per se - something that people who have seen him from the inside but broken away (like Chris Christie) have noted. He wants to have "wins" but doesn't care about the actual content of those wins.
One can actually argue that Trump, similar to Rogan, was a case of fan capture. Because right-wing base of the GOP embraced him, he came to embrace right-wing policy on taxes and spending. But it's not because he had a commitment to supply-side economics, or a night-watchmen state. Instead it was because he knew he had to deliver for "his fans" and that's what the people surrounding him (who cared about politics) said needed to happen.
And too your broader point, I will repeat myself: coherent politics simply means that they can be fit into a pre-determined framework that the observer declares coherent.
You might find them incoherent, I do not. I do not agree with a lot of them, but after many decades in business I do not find them incoherent in the slightest. I will, however, note that his interests lie in a strictly business orientation, with America's place in the world in relation to that paradigm, and that everything else is subordinate to that. Which, if this isn't your area of interest vis-a-vis international or national politics, could seem inconsistent.
As to fan capture, one could say that about ANY politician, from Obama to Regan. I tend to find that sort of analysis of a public figure to be trite, and an excuse to not deal with the substance of any policies that might or might not arrive.
I think Trump has been pretty consistent on tariffs since the 80s. He's also been fairly consistently xenophobic. Other than that, I'd generally agree he doesn't have any consistent politics.
Apparently Rogan had praise for Hunter Biden of all people, so I am not sure that holds up.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/07/hunter-biden-joe-rogan-democratic-collapse-kamala-harris.html
https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/joe-rogan-calls-the-epstein-case-a-line-in-the-sand-and-rips-the-trump-admin-for-gaslighting-its-supporters/
And another example. And yes, we are being gaslight.
he also insisted that she come to him. Trump did, Kamala wouldn't. And in Kamala's defense she is one of the worst extemporaneous speakers in modern american political history, and Rogan asking extremely basic questions would have obliterated her
I was about to say, a formally correct if kinda gotcha-ey response to this is: “Kamala Harris isn’t any of those things Freddie is saying Rogan fails to engage with: she’s an exceptionally inarticulate advocate of the few positions she does hold; she held as few as she could during the ‘24 campaign (left wing particularly, but she shied away from any policy commitments really); and even when she tried to adopt left wing positions in 2019 she was a nonsensical advocate and her policies smelled of a failure to engage with the material.”
It was also probably stupid of her campaign to snub Rogan, at least for the reasons they gave (a good reason would be that Rogan would have challenged her and she’s such a terrible on-screen interviewee that it would’ve created a lot of really bad clips of her).
Wasn't Walz invited, too?
Backfired is a funny word here. People would have watched it and he would have had a conversation with the man, and (unrelated to Rogan's interests) might have developed a positive or negative opinion about him. Rogan didn't actually care who won the election in the way 'backfired' implies.
How do you think it would have backfired on Rogan? I mean, even if Walz had shown up and come off very well in the interview, I don't see how it would have hurt Rogan any. Even if he had already planned to support Trump (very possible, given the attempt to cancel him from the left and the nature of Trump et al's appeal), it seems like he could have spun that out fine--for example, saying he thought Walz was a good guy but he preferred Trump/Vance because of (say) trans issues, or RFK/MAHA/vaccine skeptic stuff, or whatever.
Rogan's audience is AFAICT not especially political, so just saying "ya know, I think I trust Trump/Vance more than Harris/Walz" probably wouldn't hurt him much even if he gave no other reasons.
Look at this. Someone tries to have a conversation about the content of the guy's work, and up pops an angry obsessive screaming about parasocial acolytes with daddy issues.
I've never watched/listened to Rogan, so I've no horse in this race other than sharing De Boer's desire that the left were better at getting elected. But this sort of out-of-nowhere rant aimed at randomly selected commenters is exactly the sort of thing that pushes voters towards the right.
Kamala got caught flat-footed during an appearance on *The View*. It was the friendliest interview format. There was some kind of political malpractice in her campaign that day. I can see why no one wanted her to just talk for 2+ hours in an open format.
60 minutes had to completely re-edit her interview to make it coherent because she just rambled bizarrely and didn't address questions. They swapped things around so that something she said would be presented as a response to a question asked an hour earlier because it was the only time she even drifted towards addressing the subject.
They did the same thing in reverse to De Santis, where he had cogent answers to questions and they replaced it with incoherent babble that was actually cogent answers to different questions, or responses to things going on that made sense in context. and as with Kamala they got brutally owned by the actual evidence, in this case because he wisely records all his interactions like a paranoid maniac.'
It is wild how partisan media keeps screwing themselves and making genuinely bad people look sympathetic, but only when they don't want to.
The problem with Harris is that she came out of the California Democratic machine, and that's a place where you don't really get challenged. You could argue that before the 2020 primary, the last time she had a political campaign that was any kind of hard fight was the 2003 challenge to incumbent San Francisco DA Terence Hallinan that was her entrée into electoral politics. And even her success in becoming VP was due to playing behind-the-scenes politics with Biden, and her becoming 2024 POTUS candidate was due to Biden's incapacity. While Harris is definitely a politician - the issues she's flip-flopped on over the years reveal that much - she's never had much success outside of political appointments or safe seats and so has never really had to step up her game as a campaigner.
I think that what it really demonstrates is the impossibility of completely managing a candidate 100% of the time. If somebody isn't up to the task of answering basic questions, then no amount of micromanaging is going to be sufficient.
If your entire media ecosystem is totally friendly it becomes possible. FDR's polio comes to mind, as of course does Biden's senility. And outside of politics, Kanye's mental illness over the last two decades, covered up by interviewers and the media as much as by his own loyalists
But the story of the last twenty years in terms of the news media is the death of legacy outlets and the rise of new competitors. Those alternatives proved to be a) resistant to the party line and b) surprisingly influential in terms of the political process.
Turns out that no, it's even easier to manufacture consent when the people you're manipulating silo themselves into only consuming stuff that already agrees with them and also the entire new media ecosystem is more desperate for fleeting attention than anyone in history
That was my first thought. How much of this is Rogan screening his guests, and how much is his guests screening themselves? The progressives I see on social media generally think Rogan is a fascist. Presumably they don't want to go on a fascist podcast.
"But by now we should probably ask, who gets to be the ones answering those questions?"
That's where alt media came from in the first place, and how it rose up to the "then they fight you" level. What's the problem? Bring on the anti-Rogans!
Didn't Rogan claim to be a Sanders supporter at one time?
Yes, he did.
Rogan's certainly got his faults like everyone else, but until I see repeated and conscious disingenuousness, I'm not so bothered by them.
I don't even watch the guy, but whatever.
I am curious about how many episodes people have listened to? I listen from time to time and have not been so disconcerted. Any forum that opens dialogue is a plus to me. He does talk about books a great deal.
My roommate listened to him all the time, loudly, so I overheard his show constantly, and well before he started shifting right wing during covid.
And my take way back then is this is one of the stupidest people I've ever heard, and the least funny successful stand-up comedian. I actually lost respect for him, because I liked him on News Radio and thought he was a good MMA analyst.
The dude would nonstop talk about the government engineering earthquakes and faking the moonlanding, and the only laughs to be had were from his guests. And I knew at least two people that got into him, started echoing his ketamine and DMT talk, and ended up developing severe drug problems.
I don't begrudge anyone who goes on his show. But at the same time I also don't begrudge anyone who thinks he's too stupid to spend time with.
Yeah, I've listened to a few dozen minutes of him over the years and quickly decided he's too dumb for me.
I think at least some part of what's at work with the guest list is that Rogan, like most humans, doesn't want to look bad in front of people he cares about (i.e., his audience). And I think he knows that if he wanted to avoid looking bad in front of someone who really knows their stuff, he'd have to prep. And take ideological risks that might end up disappointing his audience. Why do that when you can book someone who won't challenge you, or, if they do, will not look very good doing so?
I think he has a free-thinking show the same way late-night dorm room discussions were free-thinking: a bunch of liberal-to-lefty college students willing to talk about anything, but all of whom agree on the basics. It may be totally free-thinking and independent, but it's also going to be dully predictable and one-dimensional to anyone who's been there.
Indeed. Pot talk is pot talk.
It's a paradox of tolerance. Open, free, and productive discussion can only occur in curated spaces where everyone has enough synchronized priors to not take things too seriously (or not seriously enough).
I think one thing worth keeping in mind is that the Joe Rogan Show is a business at this point, and because of the impetus to stay successful a lot of businesses end up being captured by their customers and they find it difficult to do something different or innovate because so many of their customers just want more of what they're familiar with.
Yes, and I also later considered that part of what the podcast wants is to create compelling stories that will maintain or increase listenership, and they may feel that having people duke it out with Rogan is going to turn people off.
I don't watch Rogan regularly, but I occasionally tune in to a guest who particularly interests me. I wouldn't exactly disagree with you - I do think Rogan has become ridiculously credulous of some of the things proffered by the wilder reaches of the right wing in recent years - but I do also think there is more going on than that.
The main thing you don't mention is the reluctance of many (not all) liberals to go on Rogan in the first place. When Bernie Sanders appeared there, he got a huge amount of flack for doing so. Kamala Harris claimed to be open to it, but put a series of conditions on her appearance that she must have known Rogan would never countenance. When Rogan claimed (in the wake of the Sanders interview) that Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden would have liked to be on his show, both of them frantically denied that they had any interest in it at all. It is hardly surprising that, if the pool of high-profile left-leaning political figures narrows itself down in that way, we're going to end up with fewer left-leaning figures on his show.
The other thing to say is that Rogan is a very, very good interviewer, even though (in fact, I would say largely because) he doesn't generally challenge people or get into major arguments with them. His relaxed, jokey persona puts people at their ease and allows their ideas to be explored. And yes, this does mean that some bad people with some really awful ideas get explored there without Rogan pushing back on them in any serious way - but I still think that Rogan's skill as an interviewer is a major net positive. I utterly detest Donald Trump, who (unsurprisingly) told a huge number of falsehoods when Rogan interviewed him (and of course Rogan ended up endorsing him) - but I still think that the way Rogan drew Trump out during the interview gave a remarkable set of insights into him. I wish with all my heart that Kamala Harris had done a similar interview - to my mind, her failure to take up Rogan on his offer was the worst error she made in her campaign.
i want to support your point about liberals getting criticized for going on the show. all freddie’s points are valid, AND the left tried to cancel rogan during covid, so of course there’s not many left people who likely want to go on the show.
Yeah, I don't listen to Rogan much (not an ideological thing, just not my cup of tea), but I expect that the whole professionally produced n-word tape and coordinated attempt to end his career probably convinced him whose side he was *absolutely not* on. That likely opened the door to him supporting Trump/Vance.
I'll just add that a smart version of the Biden/Harris campaign would have seen mending some of those bridges as a very high priority.
There is a whole large set of vocal and prominent people in media who had a faction of the left in their field try very hard to make sure they'd never work again, and you have to recognize that it's going to be a long time until those folks are willing to support the faction that did that, even if the other side is visibly terrible. You can legitimately bitch at Finland for fighting on the Germans' side in WW2, but you ought to at least recognize that they had some pretty good reasons for joining whatever side was fighting the USSR.
The interesting thing is that I'd actually heard the infamous "Planet of the Apes" episode before the selective edit version came out, and while you could find plenty there that was objectionable, it also comes across as a real-time and unfiltered consciousness-raising session on Rogan's part. He ends up saying something to the effect of, "Oh, I guess that's how black people must feel all the time in a room full of white people."
If we had a better anti-racist left, the latter might be a hook to call someone in rather than calling them out for not getting it to begin with.
Yes. The left decided that Rogan was tainted, and thus by transitive property, anyone who went on the show was also a baddie, and so... there were no more liberals.
I dunno man, it feels like the flip side of Colbert getting cancelled. Liberals are so confident in their correctness that it seems they can never anticipate that their exclusionary behavior leads to .... exclusion.
The whole contagious shunning thing is bad in most contexts, but it is especially bad for journalism, where the whole f--king point is to cover everything and talk to everyone.
I'm not convinced that the Colbert cancellation was anything more than ratings. After all, CBS is not just cancelling Colbert, they're getting rid of the entire Late Show franchise that started when they got Letterman from NBC in the 90s. So CBS is getting out of the late-night talk show business altogether, and that's not surprising, given as to how that is to a now outdated medium. It will be interesting to see if NBC carries on with its long-running legacy late-night shows like the Tonight Show, Late Night, and SNL, which they've been keeping on life support for a few years now.
Sure, but if you start turning more and more to political jokes, than your rating will fall, because you'll automatically be othering one side.
This is huge. Rogan is effectively Voldemort to the NYT/NPR crowd. When just showing up on his show is going to result in a twitter/blue sky freak out it’s not surprising to me that we don’t see more of those voices. Liberals still really haven’t internalized that the speech policing is losing them huge amounts of support, and the “transitive badness” of talking to people they don’t like is a prime example of it.
Bernie is held out as a counter example, but I’m not totally sure. Those same individuals I know personally bought the “Bernie bros” thing hook line and sinker and still view him skeptically/partially blame him for Hillary’s loss in 2016.
I still remember the whole "If you vote for Bernie over HRC, you must hate women" trope. FFS, the left-of-center can be toxic.
Totally agree with the final sentence. If youre to timid/owned to spar with Rogan why should people elect you? Just saying “bc the other guy is a jerk” wasn’t enough. And it was obvious it wasn’t going to be enough. Gigantic error.
As far as the chuckle headed credulity about every moonbeam idea that drifts into his head, he's Oprah, but with rainbow sprinkles, wet walnuts, and two cherries in top.
And like Oprah, he is filthy rich and incredibly influential as a result. You can put out a podcast that's basically a graduate seminar or journal club (TWIV and Probable Causation are two good examples), and that's wonderful, but you're not getting a mass-market audience with that. The bell curve has a middle, and appealing to them is a better strategy for high ratings than appealing to the people on its far right tail.
The correct term is "Broprah"
Curious here: Do YOU want to get invited on Joe Rogan's show? 😀
Never listened to the guy myself, though of course, I'm aware of who he is. (And Joe! Or Joe-Minion, whose Google Alert brought you to this page! You should definitely invite ME on your show even though I am aging & totally obscure, 'cause I am like a modern-day Cassandra, a practitioner of psychohistory, and I can tell you _everything_ that will happen in the next 100 years! 😀)
I do recall Bernie Sanders appeared on his show some years back & as Feral Finster notes, Kamala Harris was invited & declined, probably because Rogan refused to restrict the types of questions he could ask. Personally, I am tired of the Mandarin protocols surrounding politicians & other VIPs, so I support this freewheeling style. Rogan recently had James Talarico on his show, a hitherto obscure Democratic Texas state representative, best known for his attempts to reform public education. I'd love to see Rogan interview Zohran Mandami!
I suspect our host would love to be on, even to just talk football or pop culture. I would like that, though I rarely listen to any podcast. Podcasts have taken off because the media stopped being neutral.
It's partly the screeching. You would need to fund someone who can (1) represent their views and hold their own ground, (2) be interesting, and (3) refrain from outraged screeching. There are not many of those around, mainly because they are so rarely asked difficult questions by the legacy media IMO.
Yeah that's a limiting factor because going on there at all would be treated as suspicious within the mainstream left. If you went on there and did NOT performatively screech and howl at Rogan's ideas, your own side would be like "I can't believe you not only went on that show, but then you sat there politely while he said That Horrible Thing" while Rogan and his listeners would think "well there ya go, lefties just can't listen to an opposing view without going REEEEEEEEEEE and hyperventilating." A guest to challenge him from the left would have to be someone who is interesting and competent AND doesn't particularly care about his reputation with the traditional media and others in left's chattering class.
Perhaps with Rogan there's a bit of audience capture at play. And he does have a big audience, which does skew towards the "bro" center right it seems. And the "bro-sphere" these days seems to want little to do with the Dems, which isn't surprising to me as the Dem party, according to polls, is somewhat less popular than pond scum, especially with several categories of bros, e.g. Gen Z men and non-college and/or working class men. (his wheelhouse)
To me the bigger political question is how will the Dems inject some masculinity back into the party and become slightly less female coded. How do the Dems become less cringe to many men?
The D party has work to do, and if their attempt last fall: I'm a man, man political ads, Tim Walz, etc, then they have much work to do.
One aside is that there's a sizeable gender gap--men tended to favor Trump and women Harris. Rogan is very stereotypically male, his listeners are skewed young and male, so it's not a shock that stuff that appeals to men (especially young men) plays well with him.
It's both natural and inevitable that people who are curious will gradually move to the right politically. The political left already has a right/wrong position on everything and is the party of dogma, slogans, experts and "the science is settled". Rogen is probably just avoiding the ratings dip that would accompany talking to these (often) self righteous drones with their new speak vocabularies
Is that your definition of who is "political left"? If you're dividing the world into political right and left, and saying the left is consonant with those of the puritanical social justice ilk, where you do place people like Yascha Mounk, Jesse Singal, Helen Pluckrose, and many, many others? They are surely not the political right.
There isn't a generally accepted definition of "political left" that I know of, but much like obscenity, you'll know it when you see it.
All models lie, some models are useful.
So are or are not the writers I mentioned above political left? All of them certainly think they are.
I was going to give an actual response, but in a moment of clarity I realized that I don't really care. I will add that another characteristic argument technique of the political left is the use of obscure "less than 1 percent" examples to form a "gotcha" example meant to discredit the remaining and overwhelming 99 percent of supporting evidence.
I was pointing out that if Rogan wanted to talk to more liberals, he could. (And indeed, he has -- pretty sure Singal has been on his show.) The choice is not between "the political right" and "self-righteous drones." If your point is he avoids the woke for that reason, I wouldn't argue.
Nate Silver's observation is that the liberals who subscribed to his newsletter were obsessed with enforcing orthodoxy and excommunicating blasphemers. The conservatives, on the other hand, were overjoyed to find common ground, even if they still had substantial disagreements in other arenas.
I wonder if Nate Silver would think someone like me is a conservative.
I think he's responding to the rise of woke politics and the subsequent reversal between left and right in terms of ideological tolerance.
As a long time listener to the heterodox sphere, I have my own somewhat-jaundiced take on the heterodox milieu, which I've gone into elsewhere in the comments: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/joe-rogan-is-still-hiding/comment/141002911
That said, I still follow Jesse Singal, in spite of his increasing ideological capture by the 'gender-critical' crowd. Helen Pluckrose and Iona Italia I quite like. The fact that Iona doesn't seem to have gone far as publisher of the now-defunct Areo or as a podcaster has a lot to do with the fact that she wasn't providing enough culture war red meat for the angry 'centrist' crowd. In terms of where I'd put most of those people on the right-left spectrum, I'd call most of them more or less 'centrists' or 'libertarians', but in the case of Bari Weiss and The Free Press, strongly right-of-center, especially on social issues, without really wanting to admit to it. My exact diagnosis of Weiss in particular is that she's basically an unreconstructed 90s-era 'conservative Democrat' and is desperately trying to resurrect that kind of politics in an era where that's largely disappeared.
I know I chose some obvious "heterodox" writers, but I didn't mean to suggest that all the "heterodox" writers were somehow political left. Weiss is certainly not someone I'd call political left (one reason I didn't name her); she was always something of a centrist (which is why Clinton Democrat is probably a decent label). I wouldn't consider any of them libertarians, at least not how that label is perceived in the US; Pluckrose, in particular, generally has values VERY similar to the progressive left, with one exception: she is very anti-authoritarian. That reads sometimes like libertarianism, but it's not, and it's not close. She IS political left, without any doubt, if there is to be just one division between political right and political left. I would say the same is true for Jesse Singal: he is not a centrist like Weiss; he is truly politically progressive.
It should come as no shock that the "angry centrists" as you call them happen to be very commonly the anti-authoritarian left: people with generally progressive principles, but who also feel a very strong liberal (as in freedom) bent. They are most angry at fellow liberals because they perceive their fellow liberals to have turned into an even more oppressive form of the moral majority. They are generally immune from being oppressed by the political right; they are very susceptible to it from the political left. Many of them indeed were victims of cancellation of various kinds on the left and feel betrayed. They are angry at the political left for the same reasons the political left is so angry at them: no one draws ire like an apostate.
You know who has a great podcast? Andrew Sullivan. He is a good conversationalist (although he does talk over guests at times). And he appears to seek out various points of view, although it seems some lefty invitees may decline in order to avoid being tainted by Sullivan's reputation.
His conversation with Cornell West a few years ago was the best podcast I've ever listened to... it was a joy to hear their genuine enthusiasm for the shared conversation despite political disagreements.
I don't get to listen to it nearly as often as I'd like but I also think Sullivan does a good job in the format and is in fact open to guests that present challenges to his world view. That said I also think Sullivan's show is expressly understood as political in a way I am not sure Rogan's is or wants to be. Obviously it's impossible to know for sure but I know Sullivan has complained about an unwillingness of many leftier voices to go on his show in spite of an open invitation. It would be very surprising to me if that were misdirection on Sullivan's part.
I typically enjoy his not-directly-political stuff the most, for example, I learned a ton from his discussions about Benjamin Franklin and Bill Buckley. And Mike White was a weird interview that I enjoyed a lot.
Yes I made sure to listen to the Mike White interview. I like the White Lotus so wanted to hear about that but he also seems like an all around interesting person.
I think "lefty invitees may decline in order to avoid being tainted by Sullivan's reputation" explains a great deal of the problem. If everyone on your side is afraid of speaking to mainstream people with big audiences because they'll get ideological cooties and be attacked by their allies, your side is going to have a lot less reach. Combine that with your side having overwhelming control over older media outlets that still have prestige but not so many readers/viewers, and things don't look so great.
One of the bigger take aways over the last few years should be the degree to which cancelation and ostracism beyond a certain, pretty low ceiling, ends up being self marginalizing.
I think it is all elastic, with ebbs and flows over time. Considering the inclusion of Sullivan's recent essay in the NYT, the pace of change seems to be accelerating at the moment, with more space for at least acknowledging opposing ideas.
Yeah, that particular fever seems to be passing.
My guess (low-confidence) is that there was an unhealthy dynamic among a lot of prominent journalists before Twitter, but that Twitter interacted with that dynamic in some really destructive ways that made enforcing ideological conformity much more effective and powerful. And this did a huge amount of damage to prestige journalistic outlets, both by getting them to beclown themselves saying nonsense that was on-message, and getting them to refuse to talk to anyone who had been excommunicated or denounced sufficiently within that Twitter bubble.
Among other things, without that very visible ideological rigidity and casting out of dissident writers from journalism (including folks like Freddie and Andrew Sullivan), Substack would be another Wordpress.
Just today, I was reminded by some 'progressive' on a Wikipedia talk page that Substack "promotes Nazis". The discourse in many left-of-center spaces is one of pure moral panic, sadly.
I was walking my dog, listening to Andrew interview Anderson Cooper last fall. When they talked about the horrors of AIDS in the 1990s, I had to sit down and catch my breath. He can be a lot, but when he's good, he's great.
Did you know Freddie guest-hosted Sullivan's "Daily Dish" blog back in 2014? https://dish.andrewsullivan.com/author/freddiedeboerdish/
Yes- that was how I first learned about Freddie! For a wild time capsule, look back at the ongoing and fascinating written conversations between Sullivan and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The internet was a different place back then.
Mixed feelings on Sullivan. He kind of lost me recently when I listened to him on The Fifth Column and he threw Taiwan completely under the bus, saying that they're losers who just need to shut up and reunite with the PRC. Which is a hell of a thing for a supposed classical liberal to say about what's probably the freest democracy in Asia (including Japan), and a nation that now aspires to independence for their small country rather than the KMT's vision of winning back the mainland.
That said, I still loathe his treatment by Jon Stewart a few years ago during the 'peak woke' era, where Stewart basically ambushed him and, alongside one of the "Race to Dinner" freaks, treated him to a public struggle session. That's permanently soured me on Jon Stewart!
I think he is the biggest example of audience capture out there. Same cycle as always. Starts out an independent voice going against the grain. Gets a following and the money starts coming in. Then the intel starts to show that certain voices bring more engagement and downloads and they just start playing the hits.
I don't listen to him but find it unsurprising it would evolve in a rightward direction, given that it was progressives that tried to get his show canceled and that any progressive that goes on the show risks a backlash from their own base. It seems the tides may be changing on that at least a little bit (thinking of some of the places Gavin Newsome has been willing to go) but from about 2016-2023 this territory was simply ceded.
I don't watch Rogan, but I've noticed in recent coverage of him he's trying to distance himself from Trump. Really criticizing him over the brutality of his immigration enforcement, along with raking him over the coals regarding the Epstein stuff.
How much of this represents his sincere beliefs versus branding (wanting to be an "anti-establishment independent voice" means he can't be seen as supporting the sitting administration openly) is of course a matter of question. But he seems to know that his market isn't looking for a nicer Ben Shapiro.
Gavin Newsom is as slippery as they come. He will espouse diametrically opposed views minutes apart, to totally avoid accountability for his past views and past/current policies.
While I do agree that it is good to interview people from across the spectrum, some people are so dishonest that platforming them is counterproductive to the goal of holding people accountable, and showing people for who they are. If Newsom went on Rogan, I predict he would do the same as he does everywhere else - when confronted on issues where he has been on the wrong side, he will admit he was wrong and that he is totally changing course - but then never actually changing course. Total pandering. Mayor Bass did the same thing in her press briefings on the LA fires - pretending permits were being zipped thru, and that all the criticisms had been responded to with changes in policy - leaving the questioner nowhere to go, and the public no wiser.
And no, refusing to platform slippery liars, is not the same as (for example) CNN refusing to air a 2 minute press briefing by Tulsi Gabbard (current DNI) on the latest proof that the CIA *knowingly* lied and over-rode the objections of CIA analysts to create false claim that Russia favored Trump to win, and lied to get FISA warrants on Trump, etc - while putting words in Tulsi's mouth for the next hour to keep listeners from knowing what she really said. Or the entire mainstream media falsely implying for *years* that Trump didn't denounce white supremacists in the same paragraph he said "fine people on both sides" - while playing the clip 1000's of times, each time editing out the key few seconds where he denounced them, as they imply he never did denounce them.
I hear you in theory but not really sure what you're getting at here. We're talking about a show that at least as I understand it is open to having people on making the case that UFO sightings are in fact extraterrestrial in origin or that widely reported mass shootings are elaborate hoaxes. If you're allowing that I don't think you can claim to be upholding some particularly principled line by not having normal elected officials, no matter how slippery they may be on whatever subject.
You're right. It is not a particularly principled objection
I am biased (like everyone else).
As a partisan, I prefer slick liars on the left not be granted more of an audience, nor more legitimacy.
And yes, there are liars on the right.
And as a public official, of course it is legitimate for a journalist to interview Newsom.
But mainstream news media once were better about holding lying politicians accountable. Biden was forced to drop out of the presidential Democratic primary in shame, back in 1988, for lying.
That would never happen now.
Now, nearly all news media are totally biased, to one side or the other - and not very concerned with truth. Maybe just avoiding lawsuits.
There are some exceptions.
But it really has come to the point where (for the most part), mainstream media is totally on the side of the left, and also on the side the corrupt establishment - of which they consider themselves a part. Mainstream news stations are funded by ads from pharmaceutical companies, and other interest groups, who have strong impact on who may / may not be criticized.
Fortunately, mainstream news lies and omissions are becoming so obvious, that fewer and fewer viewers believe them, reducing their viewership and therefore their influence.
Neither CNN nor Gabbard are reliable sources of information.
On the good side, CNN is mostly talking to old folks and people stuck in hotel lobbies/elevators at this point.
Whether you believe Tulsi Gabbard is a "reliable source" (or not), she is the current DNI, in charge of presenting intelligence to the POTUS. If indeed she is lying about potentially criminal allegations against former POTUS and high ranking former intelligence heads (or not), her words are an incredibly important primary news source, on an important story. Any supposed news outlet who censors this, is obviously not really a news source. In fairness, you did note that CNN is not credible. I agree that all politicians should be listened to with skepticism, but I have not seen any evidence to date, that Tulsi Gabbard is lying on this issue, or any other.
Yeah, Newsom - didn't he do a podcast where he was patting himself on the back for reaching out to Charlie Kirk and the like. Just a few months after pushing through a law that basically banned parodies made using AI because he was mad about an ad that used altered footage of Kamala Harris in what was obviously a satirical context and was not an attempt to be passed off as real. That law was immediately struck down on First Amendment grounds. He made a very rapid shift from censorious culture warrior to open-minded centrist. I prefer the latter, but it was blatant as to how much he was moving with the political wind.
How do you know it's a booking problem vs progressive guests ala Kamala refusing (by not agreeing to the conditions every other guest agree to) to come on the show?
That's what I was thinking. It seems that Freddie is basing his conclusions on the results of the booking process, without accounting for survivorship biases. I don't often watch Rogan's show because they're just too long for my attention span, but I would definitely watch if he had FB on.
Peter Hotez? Sanjay Gupta? Douglas Murray? I don't remember the love fest.
Here's a nice video where Dr. Hotez talks about his history with Rogan, which started out well (skip to 14:23):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOENiwpTTPM
Much like you, Joe is running a media business and he has listeners to please. If he stops feeding people the entertainment they enjoy they will go elsewhere. The biggest question for Joe is, "What can I do to ensure my business continues to thrive?" His success based on he deep understanding of what his listeners find engaging and entertaining. And that is something independent of Joe's personal views.