The left needs to “build their own Joe Rogan”. As liberal America surveys the smoking ruins of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, and the mainstream media looks on bewildered at how they were outflanked by alternative new platforms, this is one rallying cry that has gained some momentum. If elections are now being won or lost on podcasts, perhaps liberals can build their own?
The spark for this brainwave was clearly Trump and JD Vance’s appearances on Rogan in the days before the election – alongside the claim that Kamala Harris skipped the podcast for fear of a backlash from progressive activists for “amplifying” an anti-vaxxer meathead. Whether Rogan’s interview with Trump and his subsequent endorsement was that decisive in shifting the election towards Trump remains to be demonstrated. But it was certainly the jour de gloire of the Trump campaign’s media strategy of courting the disaffected young male voter via the podcast ecology, featuring appearances with Andrew Schulz, Theo Von, and Lex Fridman. In contrast, Harris splurged a lot of cash on celebrity endorsements and just did the usual established media junkets like Saturday Night Live.
The desire to make a leftist duplicate of Rogan to fight back is understandable. But it is doomed and confused. It completely misunderstands the phenomenon and attractions of Joe Rogan. This is not that he is right-wing per se. He isn’t a creature of a Republican affiliated think tank. Rather, he is an eclectic comedian with an assortment of authentic personal interests – combat sports, comedy, UFOs, conspiracies – as reflected in the guests he converses with. That is why he can traverse absurd conversations with Terrence Howard on how planets are made; explore the JFK assassination conspiracy theory with Oliver Stone; and contemplate the prospect of nuclear war with an investigative journalists like Annie Jacobsen. All as well as have in-depth, organic conversations with celebrities from Jamie Foxx to Adam Sandler. One of his most recent guests was Josh Dubin, a criminal justice reform advocate from The Innocence Project. Moreover, he is softly spoken, and allows his guests to talk, and when he disagrees with them, he doesn’t needlessly interrupt. And he likes to have a laugh.
Naturally, his listeners enjoy this, and his popularity skyrocketed because of it. So he continues to do it. There is clearly a libertarian motif to Rogan’s views – his affirmation of gun rights and drug use free from state censure – but he has no consistent politics. He isn’t an ideologue. That is why he is popular. At one moment, he can be intrigued by Bernie Sanders or Ben Burgis defending the idea of socialism, and push back against Brendan O’Neill for supporting Israel’s war in Gaza. And in another he can voice affection Peter Thiel, take voting recommendations from Elon Musk and ultimately officially endorse Trump.
Now that Rogan is exorbitantly rich and is more materially entwined with the likes of Thiel and Musk, perhaps he can be seen as “on the right”. But it is clear he wasn’t like this at the start or how he became the mammoth of the podcasting world in the first place. And a key reason why Rogan and many of the young men who listen to him have “moved right” and even become Maga-adjacent is that the Republicans, especially in their current Trumpified form, and “the right” more generally, don’t seem like the moral majority prudes or the war-mongering “neocons” they grew up with. Now, they are the party less likely to cancel you over a risqué joke or an opinion that departs from the hymn sheet. Indeed, the GOP under Trump and its periphery are perceived as the centre of rebellion against the ruling Democratic party and the censorious “woke” liberals who will cancel at the flip of a coin.
Young men like to be rebels. Comedians crave to be the ones who break taboos with a joke and risk martyrdom because of it. They are attracted to the Maga world because Trump projects an antinomianism that was once associated with the New Left radicals of the Sixties: public vulgarity and a rude defiance of official authority. Conversely, the liberal-left are the new “moral majority”, the censors, the guardians of public decency and norms. They are the ones who fret over Trump’s “unpresidential language” and clutch their pearls at Tony Hinchcliffe’s “island of garbage” joke about Puerto Rico without getting the context of the island’s ongoing landfill crisis. To people “in” on the joke, including many ethnic minorities, these hysterical reactions will always make you seem like a bore.
Many of the people who listen to Rogan are non-partisan, heterodox, swing voters who can be reached and engaged with, not calcified reactionaries. But the problem with trying to manufacture a “leftist Joe Rogan” is it will instantly feel inauthentic. People can tell when you’re not sincere and when you’re just instrumentalising something to market tendentious propaganda. Part of the problem with many liberals and leftists more broadly is they treat politics as a form of cultural affinity. Except democratic politics necessarily means you will have to engage with people who don’t share your cultural tastes to achieve political power and social transformation. The left doesn’t need their own Joe Rogan. They just need to go on platforms like Rogan and engage – and have a laugh while they’re at it.
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