Please stop with the “we have to find a left-wing Joe Rogan” bulls--t.
For one thing, we have plenty of popular left and left-leaning voices who already fit the bill—among white dudes, Stephen Colbert, Seth Myers, and Howard Stern spring to mind. Younger, lesser-known voices like David Pakman, Destiny, and Adam Mockler are building sizable audiences on YouTube.
Second—crucially—a “left-wing Joe Rogan” is a contradiction in terms. It’s like saying we need an intellectual version of Jackass. We do not. Unless what you want is a leftie broadcaster with a confident disregard of the truth. Like me, Rogan is just a comic with a platform. (Yes, I understand his platform is approximately $200 million more valuable than my own.)
The fact that he caught fire with the right is no more complicated than the fact that, like me, he’s a cheerful idiot.
Unlike me, Rogan is willing to seriously entertain an endless parade of cranks, eccentrics, grifters, conspiracists, and weirdos. There’s nothing wrong with that—I’m also a big fan of cranks and weirdos. The difference between us, though, is that Rogan brings almost no critical thinking skills to the table. He rarely pushes back against guests’ wildest assertions—Ancient Egypt ended in a nuclear holocaust! The moon landings were faked! Hillary Clinton is a lizard person! (I made that last one up, but you wouldn’t know that unless I clarified because it’s eminently plausible that he would have on a guest who made that claim.)
What I think these advocates actually want is somebody who speaks to young, white men on their terms. The problem is that their terms suck. In my book, A Better Man: A (Mostly) Serious Letter to My Son, I wrote about how young white men are increasingly alienated from a culture that doesn’t know how to reach them. Rogan figured it out—give them laughs, dumb shit, and work-out tips. Oh, and by the way, vaccines cause autism.
Rogan is the dumb person’s version of a smart person. Somebody “unafraid” to challenge conventional wisdom. Somebody willing to “reveal the truth THEY don’t want you to know.” Somebody who can make sense of their own confusion. It’s not that the world is nuanced and complicated, Rogan tells us, it’s that shadowy forces are intent on force-feeding gender neutrality into your DNA to enact their agenda of mind control.
Or something.
Is that what we want from the left? More paranoia? More delusion? More mistrust of our every institution?
Hey, I get the appeal. I also want to understand why things are the way they are. I also want to feel like I have access to secret knowledge. I also want to be ripped at the age of 57, although I will pass on having Rogan’s weird cocktail weenie nipples.
The entire right-wing edifice, of which Rogan is now a major pillar, is predicated on lies. The lies are deliberate and calculated for maximal division. Rogan isn’t necessarily a mouthpiece for those lies, but he is a reliably sympathetic ear for them.
When those lies are disproven, the right (and Rogan) either continue to dispute the truth—to my knowledge Rogan has never backed away from his claims that Ivermectin cures COVID-19—or ignore it altogether.
Rogan can get away with being wrong as often as he is because the right-wing propaganda machine doesn’t care about truth, only controversy. As such, they continue to court him because he expects no accountability from them, either. They’re free to come on his show and spout whatever discredited nonsense they want because they know they’re going to have the easiest interview of their lives.
Does the left really want an unaccountable doofus as its spokesperson?
I don’t have a prescription for what ails the left but I know copying the right ain’t it. For all his flaws, Rogan is authentic. His audience trusts him. Not because he’s correct but because he’s real. Wrong, but real. To try to create a carbon copy of him misses the point entirely. For decades, the right has poured hundreds of millions into creating a conservative propaganda machine.
That machine has now spit out its perfect product: a white meathead with a microphone. His podcast’s foundation is an unquestioning acceptance of the right’s false premises: the media is lying to you, white people face racial discrimination, our institutions are hopelessly corrupt. He didn’t make that stuff up—he just fell for it because the “do your own research” guy failed to do his own research.
