Reading Joe Rogan Wrong

There are so many horrible Joe Rogan (and to a lesser extent Theo Von and Andrew Shultz) takes floating around that always act as though Rogan is the tip of the spear for access to young men and as a curious blank slate who only fell victim to right wing messaging, lest his pure wittle heawt become a tool of fascism.

That's hyperbole, but it describes a whole Rogan-of-the-left discourse. Still yet though, I don't see a lot of people looking at how Rogan benefits from conscious (albeit stupid) decisions that he has made and makes actively.

1. Rogan has an ideology. **He's a reactionary centrist misogynist.** He talks all the time about how he used to be liberal and then rattles off his list of policy preferences as though it's a flex that he agreed with the Democratic platform in 2006. You know who else has always agrees with the liberal party's platform from twenty years ago? Conservatives. 2. His bookings indicate that **he is afraid of everyone who he disagrees with**. That why he always talks about how curious he is. It's him coping with the way he has sealed himself away from anyone who might challenge him. 3. It benefits him for news articles online to say he "breaks with Trump" on the most unpopular issues. He never actually assigns blame to Donald Trump himself. He says it's "unfortunate" or a "bad look". This is not heterodoxy. **It's a strategic retreat** and people should recognize the difference. (Republicans do this all the time in order to signal ethics, when they are reserving the right to be horrible.) 4. **He "used to be a Bernie guy" is the most beneficial lie he tells**. That part of him only ever surfaces when he is complaining about Democrats. He was never a Bernie guy. He hated Hillary Clinton. There are a lot of people like that, who never actually agreed with what Bernie Sanders stands for. 5. **Rogan is a paid propagandist**. This was comically clear when he was interviewing Theo Von and had to steer the genuinely confused doofus away from criticizing Peter Thiel. He started pushing AI products when Perplexity started sponsoring him. The whole charade of having Jamie there to build some kind of respectability shield for him on behalf of Spotify is a running joke on other podcasts. 6. **Rogan is afraid of criticizing Nazis.** He's captured. He has to bend himself all over the place to make sure he stays in the good graces of the whole right wing universe of podcasts. 7. **They're all like this.** The whole scene. They are turning out worse and more desperate material based on punching down. What seemed transgressive in an era of so-called cancel culture now is just tedious. The specials are doing worse and the audience for all of these podcasts are just being plundered by online sports betting ads. Welcome to hell, guys.