Rogan really is like the median swing voter if what you’re saying here is true. If you look at the polls of what swing voters believe, it’ll probably be someone with a mix of Bernie Sanders’ economic views, Trump’s anti-foreign views, and the right’s anti-woke views (but to a mild extent where they like feel good terms like “diversity.”)
The thing to understand about Rogan is that he has been moved to tears multiple times just by watching MMA fights. This is not a guy who is a calculating political operative, he just gets carried away by whatever (or whoever) is in front of him.
Severely disagree with crying to MMA fights (or other sporting events) suggesting something negative about your character, or that you are dumb (if thats what your implying)
I don't see the connection between being moved to tears by an MMA fight and not being a calculating political operative. Would you say the same about someone who's moved to tears by a concert?
I am a passionate sports fan and have never heard of anyone crying because of MMA.
Also, for the record, I would not associate crying at a concert or a sporting event with any recent president or other prominent politician. Maybe Nixon, but he was just an all around weird guy.
I don't keep up with JRE these days but I get the sense there are only a few major things Rogan disagrees with liberals on:
-Free speech being good
-Gun rights being good
-Trans in sports and child transition being bad
-Political correctness in comedy and culture being bad
-Vaccine mandates and lockdowns being bad
Am I missing anything there? It looks to me that with the exception of gun rights, not so long ago the average liberal or Democrat would've agreed with all of those things. I don't think it's accurate to say people like Rogan haven't moved right at all, but I do think it's true that their journey right begins with simply not wanting to move left from their original positions which were already pretty liberal and which they often still hold. If Dems want a "leftist/liberal Joe Rogan," I think that could easily be Joe Rogan, all they need to do is signal that those views are acceptable to hold within the Democratic coalition.
I don't want to say they have to adopt those views themselves or cease all criticism of them, but what they can do is say, well, you can hold those views and we can disagree but you should understand that there are still good reasons for you to vote left/liberal, and we're not going to treat you like persona non grata for holding those positions. Just go on JRE and in not so many words say these things.
Agree that free speech is important and pivot to discussing ways Republicans are attacking it. Agree that social contagion probably has played a role in the explosion of weird gender identities, but say that most of these kids aren't getting medical interventions and are just going by weird pronouns, which might be silly but isn't really a big deal. Admit there are valid concerns about transpeople in sports, but suggest the advantage after medical transition might not be as large as expected and talk about how, regardless, we can all agree attacks on the right of adults to transition are bad. Lay out the pro-dude case for abortion, and how much Republican attacks on it could screw them over. Laugh that political correctness does go too far sometimes and drop a couple "retards" into your speech. Criticise the excesses of progressive movements circa 2020 and talk about how, rather than symbolic changes, they should've aimed more for Bernie-style class-based material interventions. Agree that police abolition is absurd, but emphasise the need for accountability and try to frame criticism of cops in a way that can appeal to more classic American libertarian sensibilities. Talk up free healthcare and legal weed or whatever.
These are all excellent ideas, but are totally radioactive to today's American left. The purity contest is the fundamental aspect of the ideology, all policy and philosophy comes second to that. They will and have flip-flopped on their most cherished ideals in support of ostricising the villain-of-the-month. Hunting witches is about burning women, not combatting sorcery.
I came into politics during the early GWOT years, when the left-wing standard-bearers were people like Edward Snowden and Bernie Sanders and John Stewart. Causes like protection of free speech, the overreach of the surveilance state, and rampant militarism were central to the culture. Now all of those have switched, sacrificed at the altar of purging the unclean simple for its own sake.
I think this is largely correct. Rogan is, despite his machismo, an overly agreeable guy who just wants to have a nice conversation, and to make it all flow he'll usually just believe everything his guests say. I think it's both a personality type and (exactly as you say) a level of disinterest in the coherence and consistency of ideas. However, I think there are some areas where he truly has drifted into becoming more of an ideological force himself. It's been many years since he endorsed Bernie, and while he still occasionally have left/liberal guests, my impression is that after covid his vaccine stances and the criticisms he faced for them has unfortunately pushed him further into right-wing-conspiracy territory. I still think left-leaning people should go on Rogan when they have the opportunity.
And this is the core issue. He is very willing to have left-wing guests on, but they refuse to participate. He's been declared persona non grata by one arm of the political culture and as such his pool of available guests leans heavily towards the other. He invited Harris and Walz onto the show, but they declined. Trump and Vance did not, so their message was communicated and Rogan appeared to have a right-wing bias.
Understand that while politics “matters”, tax rates aren’t really going to change your life. Even war is something a small % of people have to deal with directly.
But Covid, that was every single person every fucking day all day long for two years.
What was it specifically about Covid that radicalized you?
Follow-up, without the knowledge that you have now, what were the right calls to make at the time and what downsides would you accept from those differences?
1) In politics we sometimes don't get our way, even on substantive matters. However, there is a sense that as Americans (or simply free citizens) we have certain inalienable rights that can't be violated. I felt that COVID restrictions cross the line from "things that politicians can do" to "things politician's can't do". It was a fundamental violation of the social contract.
I think that caution was forgivable in Spring 2020. I myself was cautious during that time. By Summer 2020 I think all restrictions outside nursing homes and hospitals should have been immediately ended. All of them.
On big lesson I learned is that while a real plague (like x10+ more deadly then COVID) would have justified lockdowns, my sense that "let's all go on vacation for two weeks to stop the spread" was wrong. Once you give the politicians power to lockdown for two weeks, they can do it for two years.
I don't watch youtube videos, so I'm not going to comment on the link.
The thing I find most frustrating about the aftermath of COVID is that people seem to unwilling to do the hard work of deciding how we intend to handle future pandemics.
I didn't personally experience anything that made me feel like my inalienable rights were violated, but I understand that people feel that the restrictions on commerce were too far.
That said, I think your example of something that is 10x deadlier is important. We need a process to determine which restrictions are acceptable under which circumstances. I think that work will be really hard, but humanity will face another pandemic that will require a violation of some peoples rights. I think that's a reality that we should work towards. And learning which things were OK based on the knowledge we had, is super important.
I think that are far too many people who walked away from COVID thinking no restrictions in future pandemics will be acceptable, and that is an unreasonable position to me.
It’s a video of a crying toddler being muzzled against his will over and over.
People did think about how to handle future pandemics. There were plans in place of what to do.
They were immediately thrown out in favor of politics and hysteria. In fact they were thrown out most quickly by “the experts”. Fauci and the CDC openly lied on purpose. The “experts” literally decided things like “racism is a worse pandemic than covid so mass demonstrations over Floyd are ok but everyone else should stay locked in their homes.”
We also ran an experiment where we got a vaccine that reduced the risk of the disease by 90% and we still went through (in blue states) an entire extra year of restrictions. The lower risk did nothing to change policy, only electoral reversals in Nov 2021 combined with Omicron causing everyone to get infected that winter did.
What I learned from all this is that rationale debate on these matters is not possible. While greater restrictions would be warranted by a disease x10 as deadly, who’s to say that those restrictions would themselves be correctly calibrated. Should you lock down your entire society for years? Would you go through what China did? What if the disease IFR never went down over time, would you just go on with restrictions forever?
My take after Covid is that the risks of government restriction are massively larger than the risks of future pandemics. I would strongly lean towards private action only even if some theoretical case for technocratic public action could be made. I trust people to act in their own interests more than the government to act for them.
Median voters, I believe, prefer narratives over abstractions. Narratives with good guys and bad guys. The woke narrative places most of them as the bad guys in that narrative. Therefore, they reject it. Anecdotally, I’ve heard people describe the story arc of RFK Jr moving from Democratic stalwart, to Independent, to pro-Trump. It’s a yarn to follow and be a part of.
“Median voters, I believe, prefer narratives over abstractions.”
While this may indeed be true, young woke leftists who believe in DIE [sic] oppressor-oppressed ideology at least as much prefer narratives over abstractions as well.
Rogan it’s far less clear. You might be correct. But once Trump went on his podcast and he saw that Trump was mostly real, given the realities of Dem policies and pronouncements I think even outreach by team Kamala would not have made a difference.
If she had gone on his podcast, and not been a disaster (that is the much bigger ask, probably impossible), then he probably wouldn't have endorsed anyone (people might read between the lines, but it wouldn't be official).
100% agree. When I was like 19 used to have to listen to Joe Rogan driving around for work because my manager loved him. My manager was 23, blue collar, dropped out of college, grew up in Milwaukee, and totally politically variable. I could never get a bead on his politics, because it seemed like they could genuinely be massaged or changed over the course of a conversation. I’d just about guarantee that this year he voted for trump though. I think the democrats have complete lost people since the pandemic, and calling moderates like Rogan “far right” only pushes them away.
<< The Democrats treated the set of beliefs of the median voter as wildly outside the overton window—making the median voter out to be an extremist rather than a moderate.>>
The median voter does have some appalling beliefs. This is even worse in developing countries where the electorate are even less educated and/or informed.
Democracy has always sucked. It’s just the West was relatively immune to its excesses due to its strong institutions and rule of law.
I think you're being a little hard on Rogan here. Remember that a podcast by its nature is an off-the-cuff medium. You're listening to a *conversation*, not a manuscript. I like Rogan *because* he doesn't try to dogmatically maintain any sort of consistent ideology. There's nothing wrong with saying "all the premises of this argument seem plausible, but the conclusion seems iffy; let me think about that". Hardly anyone has the time to carefully investigate every political issue. Hardly anyone cares enough to carefully check over all their political beliefs for possible inconsistencies.
Literally all Rogan asked for is to have a “genuine” conversation. Whatever you think of Trump, he’s “genuinely Trump”. There is no “genuine Kamala”, and indeed the entire Democratic machine lacks anything genuine about them.
I suspect that next cycle they will try their best to find/engineer someone “genuine”, we’ll see if they can.
The DLC hasn’t controlled the Dem party for a long time, the leftist activists do.
Edit: although the did control Biden getting out of the race in ‘24, and getting everyone else but Warren out of the race in ‘20, so that Biden could beat Bernie. So you’re not entirely wrong. But their power is a lot less than it used to be.
“If the Democrats want to win, they need to regain the Rogan vote. Rogan is just a normal dude—one who happened to be famous and influential. If you treat him as the enemy, you treat America as the enemy.”
Excellent piece.
Chances that Dems will follow this advice over the next 4-6 years?
First you have to show that a simulation is possible, that you have a design for one derivable from the world we have measured and know and that it doesn't require more energy than that world. There is no known feasible plan for creating a simulation. It's not like It's 50/50 just because you can imagine it. Just like you can't assume interstellar travel is ever feasible just because you believe technology is always economically advancing to wherever you would like to imagine. Our culture has absolutely fallen head over heals in love with tech. We ascribe to it any godlike powers you wish for.
As a solipsist I would assume it more likely than not that all the people around me are simulations of 'something'. That they are more or less imposter's actually
Rogan really is like the median swing voter if what you’re saying here is true. If you look at the polls of what swing voters believe, it’ll probably be someone with a mix of Bernie Sanders’ economic views, Trump’s anti-foreign views, and the right’s anti-woke views (but to a mild extent where they like feel good terms like “diversity.”)
But they also like JFK conspiracies.
The thing to understand about Rogan is that he has been moved to tears multiple times just by watching MMA fights. This is not a guy who is a calculating political operative, he just gets carried away by whatever (or whoever) is in front of him.
Severely disagree with crying to MMA fights (or other sporting events) suggesting something negative about your character, or that you are dumb (if thats what your implying)
I don't see the connection between being moved to tears by an MMA fight and not being a calculating political operative. Would you say the same about someone who's moved to tears by a concert?
Normies cry for sports all the time.
I am a passionate sports fan and have never heard of anyone crying because of MMA.
Also, for the record, I would not associate crying at a concert or a sporting event with any recent president or other prominent politician. Maybe Nixon, but he was just an all around weird guy.
I don't keep up with JRE these days but I get the sense there are only a few major things Rogan disagrees with liberals on:
-Free speech being good
-Gun rights being good
-Trans in sports and child transition being bad
-Political correctness in comedy and culture being bad
-Vaccine mandates and lockdowns being bad
Am I missing anything there? It looks to me that with the exception of gun rights, not so long ago the average liberal or Democrat would've agreed with all of those things. I don't think it's accurate to say people like Rogan haven't moved right at all, but I do think it's true that their journey right begins with simply not wanting to move left from their original positions which were already pretty liberal and which they often still hold. If Dems want a "leftist/liberal Joe Rogan," I think that could easily be Joe Rogan, all they need to do is signal that those views are acceptable to hold within the Democratic coalition.
I don't want to say they have to adopt those views themselves or cease all criticism of them, but what they can do is say, well, you can hold those views and we can disagree but you should understand that there are still good reasons for you to vote left/liberal, and we're not going to treat you like persona non grata for holding those positions. Just go on JRE and in not so many words say these things.
Agree that free speech is important and pivot to discussing ways Republicans are attacking it. Agree that social contagion probably has played a role in the explosion of weird gender identities, but say that most of these kids aren't getting medical interventions and are just going by weird pronouns, which might be silly but isn't really a big deal. Admit there are valid concerns about transpeople in sports, but suggest the advantage after medical transition might not be as large as expected and talk about how, regardless, we can all agree attacks on the right of adults to transition are bad. Lay out the pro-dude case for abortion, and how much Republican attacks on it could screw them over. Laugh that political correctness does go too far sometimes and drop a couple "retards" into your speech. Criticise the excesses of progressive movements circa 2020 and talk about how, rather than symbolic changes, they should've aimed more for Bernie-style class-based material interventions. Agree that police abolition is absurd, but emphasise the need for accountability and try to frame criticism of cops in a way that can appeal to more classic American libertarian sensibilities. Talk up free healthcare and legal weed or whatever.
Just ideas idk.
These are all excellent ideas, but are totally radioactive to today's American left. The purity contest is the fundamental aspect of the ideology, all policy and philosophy comes second to that. They will and have flip-flopped on their most cherished ideals in support of ostricising the villain-of-the-month. Hunting witches is about burning women, not combatting sorcery.
I came into politics during the early GWOT years, when the left-wing standard-bearers were people like Edward Snowden and Bernie Sanders and John Stewart. Causes like protection of free speech, the overreach of the surveilance state, and rampant militarism were central to the culture. Now all of those have switched, sacrificed at the altar of purging the unclean simple for its own sake.
Literally every single person in the r Trump team including Trump is a 1990s liberal.
I think this is largely correct. Rogan is, despite his machismo, an overly agreeable guy who just wants to have a nice conversation, and to make it all flow he'll usually just believe everything his guests say. I think it's both a personality type and (exactly as you say) a level of disinterest in the coherence and consistency of ideas. However, I think there are some areas where he truly has drifted into becoming more of an ideological force himself. It's been many years since he endorsed Bernie, and while he still occasionally have left/liberal guests, my impression is that after covid his vaccine stances and the criticisms he faced for them has unfortunately pushed him further into right-wing-conspiracy territory. I still think left-leaning people should go on Rogan when they have the opportunity.
And this is the core issue. He is very willing to have left-wing guests on, but they refuse to participate. He's been declared persona non grata by one arm of the political culture and as such his pool of available guests leans heavily towards the other. He invited Harris and Walz onto the show, but they declined. Trump and Vance did not, so their message was communicated and Rogan appeared to have a right-wing bias.
Covid radicalized a lot of people, including me.
Understand that while politics “matters”, tax rates aren’t really going to change your life. Even war is something a small % of people have to deal with directly.
But Covid, that was every single person every fucking day all day long for two years.
What was it specifically about Covid that radicalized you?
Follow-up, without the knowledge that you have now, what were the right calls to make at the time and what downsides would you accept from those differences?
1) In politics we sometimes don't get our way, even on substantive matters. However, there is a sense that as Americans (or simply free citizens) we have certain inalienable rights that can't be violated. I felt that COVID restrictions cross the line from "things that politicians can do" to "things politician's can't do". It was a fundamental violation of the social contract.
In less abstract terms:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hPxawPNeN8&t=1s
I think that caution was forgivable in Spring 2020. I myself was cautious during that time. By Summer 2020 I think all restrictions outside nursing homes and hospitals should have been immediately ended. All of them.
On big lesson I learned is that while a real plague (like x10+ more deadly then COVID) would have justified lockdowns, my sense that "let's all go on vacation for two weeks to stop the spread" was wrong. Once you give the politicians power to lockdown for two weeks, they can do it for two years.
I don't watch youtube videos, so I'm not going to comment on the link.
The thing I find most frustrating about the aftermath of COVID is that people seem to unwilling to do the hard work of deciding how we intend to handle future pandemics.
I didn't personally experience anything that made me feel like my inalienable rights were violated, but I understand that people feel that the restrictions on commerce were too far.
That said, I think your example of something that is 10x deadlier is important. We need a process to determine which restrictions are acceptable under which circumstances. I think that work will be really hard, but humanity will face another pandemic that will require a violation of some peoples rights. I think that's a reality that we should work towards. And learning which things were OK based on the knowledge we had, is super important.
I think that are far too many people who walked away from COVID thinking no restrictions in future pandemics will be acceptable, and that is an unreasonable position to me.
It’s a video of a crying toddler being muzzled against his will over and over.
People did think about how to handle future pandemics. There were plans in place of what to do.
They were immediately thrown out in favor of politics and hysteria. In fact they were thrown out most quickly by “the experts”. Fauci and the CDC openly lied on purpose. The “experts” literally decided things like “racism is a worse pandemic than covid so mass demonstrations over Floyd are ok but everyone else should stay locked in their homes.”
We also ran an experiment where we got a vaccine that reduced the risk of the disease by 90% and we still went through (in blue states) an entire extra year of restrictions. The lower risk did nothing to change policy, only electoral reversals in Nov 2021 combined with Omicron causing everyone to get infected that winter did.
What I learned from all this is that rationale debate on these matters is not possible. While greater restrictions would be warranted by a disease x10 as deadly, who’s to say that those restrictions would themselves be correctly calibrated. Should you lock down your entire society for years? Would you go through what China did? What if the disease IFR never went down over time, would you just go on with restrictions forever?
My take after Covid is that the risks of government restriction are massively larger than the risks of future pandemics. I would strongly lean towards private action only even if some theoretical case for technocratic public action could be made. I trust people to act in their own interests more than the government to act for them.
Median voters, I believe, prefer narratives over abstractions. Narratives with good guys and bad guys. The woke narrative places most of them as the bad guys in that narrative. Therefore, they reject it. Anecdotally, I’ve heard people describe the story arc of RFK Jr moving from Democratic stalwart, to Independent, to pro-Trump. It’s a yarn to follow and be a part of.
“Median voters, I believe, prefer narratives over abstractions.”
While this may indeed be true, young woke leftists who believe in DIE [sic] oppressor-oppressed ideology at least as much prefer narratives over abstractions as well.
Rfk, like Rogan, probably wouldn’t have endorsed Trump if even the slightest degree of outreach and empathy had been expressed by the Kamala camp.
RKK I agree with you 100%.
Rogan it’s far less clear. You might be correct. But once Trump went on his podcast and he saw that Trump was mostly real, given the realities of Dem policies and pronouncements I think even outreach by team Kamala would not have made a difference.
If she had gone on his podcast, and not been a disaster (that is the much bigger ask, probably impossible), then he probably wouldn't have endorsed anyone (people might read between the lines, but it wouldn't be official).
100% agree. When I was like 19 used to have to listen to Joe Rogan driving around for work because my manager loved him. My manager was 23, blue collar, dropped out of college, grew up in Milwaukee, and totally politically variable. I could never get a bead on his politics, because it seemed like they could genuinely be massaged or changed over the course of a conversation. I’d just about guarantee that this year he voted for trump though. I think the democrats have complete lost people since the pandemic, and calling moderates like Rogan “far right” only pushes them away.
<< The Democrats treated the set of beliefs of the median voter as wildly outside the overton window—making the median voter out to be an extremist rather than a moderate.>>
The median voter does have some appalling beliefs. This is even worse in developing countries where the electorate are even less educated and/or informed.
Democracy has always sucked. It’s just the West was relatively immune to its excesses due to its strong institutions and rule of law.
I think you're being a little hard on Rogan here. Remember that a podcast by its nature is an off-the-cuff medium. You're listening to a *conversation*, not a manuscript. I like Rogan *because* he doesn't try to dogmatically maintain any sort of consistent ideology. There's nothing wrong with saying "all the premises of this argument seem plausible, but the conclusion seems iffy; let me think about that". Hardly anyone has the time to carefully investigate every political issue. Hardly anyone cares enough to carefully check over all their political beliefs for possible inconsistencies.
Literally all Rogan asked for is to have a “genuine” conversation. Whatever you think of Trump, he’s “genuinely Trump”. There is no “genuine Kamala”, and indeed the entire Democratic machine lacks anything genuine about them.
I suspect that next cycle they will try their best to find/engineer someone “genuine”, we’ll see if they can.
Strongly agree with your first paragraph.
Happy to bet you that your second one is wrong.
The DLC hasn’t controlled the Dem party for a long time, the leftist activists do.
Edit: although the did control Biden getting out of the race in ‘24, and getting everyone else but Warren out of the race in ‘20, so that Biden could beat Bernie. So you’re not entirely wrong. But their power is a lot less than it used to be.
“If the Democrats want to win, they need to regain the Rogan vote. Rogan is just a normal dude—one who happened to be famous and influential. If you treat him as the enemy, you treat America as the enemy.”
Excellent piece.
Chances that Dems will follow this advice over the next 4-6 years?
Approximately zero.
Personally, I'm reading this blog because of your extreme good looks.
This article makes far too much sense for the current political and technological environment.
First you have to show that a simulation is possible, that you have a design for one derivable from the world we have measured and know and that it doesn't require more energy than that world. There is no known feasible plan for creating a simulation. It's not like It's 50/50 just because you can imagine it. Just like you can't assume interstellar travel is ever feasible just because you believe technology is always economically advancing to wherever you would like to imagine. Our culture has absolutely fallen head over heals in love with tech. We ascribe to it any godlike powers you wish for.
As a solipsist I would assume it more likely than not that all the people around me are simulations of 'something'. That they are more or less imposter's actually
I like it when you write about politics. But you're still wrong about chickens.