[Peace-discuss] NYT on how Joe Rogan's endorsement can help Bernie

[Robert Naiman]

https://www.facebook.com/robert.naiman/posts/10159080146647656

Yuuuuge. This guy has four million people downloading his podcast every
week. How many divisions do the politically correct concern trolls control?
Winning elections is about voters, not about appeasing politically correct
concern trolls. This moment is like August 2013, when Obama wanted to bomb
Syria without Congressional authorization, in violation of the
Constitution, and there was a transpartisan mass uprising against it, with
the phone lines in Congress melting, with the phone calls running 99-1
against. Then-member of Congress Alan Grayson, who was a vocal populist
critic of Obama's plan to bomb Syria, went on Democracy Now with Amy
Goodman. Amy said: what about AIPAC? AIPAC is backing Obama's plan to bomb
Syria. And Alan Grayson said: AIPAC doesn't matter now. When the masses are
engaged, AIPAC doesn't matter. Nobody cares about AIPAC now. That's what
this is like. The masses are engaged. Nobody cares about the politically
correct concern trolls now.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/us/politics/bernie-sanders-endorsement-joe-rogan.html

Why a Joe Rogan Endorsement Could Help (or Backfire on) Bernie Sanders
The Sanders campaign highlighted Mr. Rogan’s supportive comments in a
video. But the podcast host has been criticized for aiding conspiracy
theorists and for remarks about transgender people.

By Matt Stevens
Jan. 24, 2020

The entrepreneur Andrew Yang
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/elections/andrew-yang.html> was
struggling in obscurity when, about a year ago, he went on Joe Rogan’s
podcast <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTsEzmFamZ8>, “The Joe Rogan
Experience.”

Almost immediately, the donations started pouring in. Senior members of Mr.
Yang’s campaign have said his two-hour interview with Mr. Rogan was responsible
for bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/us/politics/andrew-yang-campaign.html> and
significantly raising his profile.

Three months later, Representative Tulsi Gabbard
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/elections/tulsi-gabbard.html> of
Hawaii joined the podcast
<https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-joe-rogan-experience/e/60670584>;
three months after that, on came Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O-iLk1G_ng>. All of the candidates knew
just how huge an audience Mr. Rogan had developed.

This week, Mr. Rogan, the stand-up comedian, mixed martial arts commentator
and sometime actor who, through his podcast, has become an unlikely
political influencer, said he would throw his support behind Mr. Sanders in
the 2020 Democratic primary — an endorsement that could bolster the
candidate particularly among the legions of disaffected male voters who
have long been critical to his chances to win.

“I think I’ll probably vote for Bernie,” Mr. Rogan told Bari Weiss, an
editor and writer for the New York Times Opinion section, in an episode of
his podcast
<https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1415-bari-weiss/id360084272?i=1000463215370>
released
Tuesday. “Him as a human being, when I was hanging out with him, I believe
in him, I like him — I like him a lot.”

“He’s been insanely consistent his entire life,” Mr. Rogan added. “He’s
basically been saying the same thing, been for the same thing, his whole
life. And that in and of itself is a very powerful structure to operate
from.”

Perhaps in recognition of Mr. Rogan’s reach, Mr. Sanders’s campaign quickly
capitalized on the comments, posting a video of them on its Twitter account
<https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1220445820505546755> Thursday
afternoon.

[image: image.png]


But the Sanders campaign’s decision to lean into Mr. Rogan’s praise has drawn
fire <https://twitter.com/mikeyfranklin/status/1220499891471994883> from
some liberals and progressives — another group of voters at the core of Mr.
Sanders’s political base — who recalled Mr. Rogan’s history of giving voice
to conspiracy theories, making comments that some see as bigoted toward
transgender people and making a racist remark about a black neighborhood on
his podcast.

Rogan’s impact on the 2020 race

A former host of the reality competition series “Fear Factor” and an actor
who played an electrician on the NBC comedy series “NewsRadio,” Mr. Rogan has
built an expansive following of mostly men
<https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/08/my-joe-rogan-experience/594802/>
through
his podcast, appealing particularly to disaffected white men, many of whom
have proudly labeled themselves as “Bernie Bros.”

Mr. Rogan’s show is one of the most popular podcasts in America and is
downloaded millions of times each week. His long-form interviews offer a
profanity-laced mix of blunt assessment and thoughtful nudging that has won
him countless fans, many of whom share a distaste for what they see as an
overemphasis on political correctness in society.

Mr. Rogan had previously said he would vote for Ms. Gabbard
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/us/politics/tulsi-gabbard-2020-presidential-race.html>.
And Mr. Yang’s advisers have long acknowledged that being on Mr. Rogan’s
show helped their candidate break out. In some retellings, Mr. Yang’s
appearance on the podcast was perhaps the single biggest turning point in
his campaign, an event that vaulted the businessman onto voters’ radars.

Like Mr. Sanders, both Ms. Gabbard and Mr. Yang stand somewhat outside the
Democratic mainstream and have been praised by supporters as truth tellers
directly confronting America’s problems. In fact, the three candidates have
won support among such a similar share of young, male voters who lean
Republican, Libertarian or independent that Ms. Gabbard and Mr. Yang could
potentially peel away critical support from Mr. Sanders
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/us/politics/bernie-sanders-andrew-yang-tulsi-gabbard.html>
as
he seeks to win early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Conspiracy theories and controversial comments

Mr. Rogan and his podcast are immensely popular, but he is also a
controversial figure.

Through his podcast, Mr. Rogan twice gave a platform to the Infowars
founder and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html>,
who spread the false narrative that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was
a hoax and that the parents of the children killed were “crisis actors.”
(Mr. Jones has been sued for defamation
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/31/us/Alex-Jones-sandy-hook.html> by the
father of one of the shooting victims.)

“I go back and forth with conspiracies. I have a love-hate relationship
with conspiracies,” Mr. Rogan said last April
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEu5mSP-Krs> on his podcast.


He has come under scrutiny for comments and jokes he has reportedly made about
M.M.A. fighters
<https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2595713-joe-rogans-comedy-rears-its-head-once-again>
and
about male and female bodies
<https://twitter.com/joerogan/status/531562806605119488> that some say are
harmful to transgender people; he has also ridiculed gender-neutral pronouns
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbT2sQ1GmgY>.

“One thing we can do is keep women from getting beaten up by men — and men
who transition to being women,” he said in 2018
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQpQmNhya14>when discussing a transgender
M.M.A. fighter. “If you think that’s fair,” he added, using an expletive,
“you’re crazy.”

“The arguments for it,” he continued, are “riddled with progressive speak.”

In the wake of his endorsement of Mr. Sanders, Mr. Rogan has also faced
social media condemnation for a remark he made
<https://www.mediaite.com/politics/joe-rogans-bernie-endorsement-draws-outrage-as-clip-surfaces-comparing-black-neighborhood-to-planet-of-the-apes/>
several
years ago in which he compared going into a black neighborhood to see a
movie with the movie itself, “Planet of the Apes.”

“We get out, we’re giggling, ‘We’re going to go see Planet of the Apes.’ We
walk into Planet of the Apes. We walked into Africa,” he said on his
podcast in 2013 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qan_d3GyIY8>.

“We walked into the blackest neighborhood we could find,” Mr. Rogan
continued, noting that he had said a “racist thing.”

An attempt to reach Mr. Rogan and his representatives was not successful.
Blowback for Sanders

The Sanders campaign came under fire this week from critics who said it
should not have highlighted Mr. Rogan’s endorsement.

“Rogan is an incredibly influential bigot and Democrats should be
marginalizing him,” Carlos Maza, a video producer and media critic, wrote
on Twitter <https://twitter.com/gaywonk/status/1220554118034608128> after
criticizing the Sanders campaign’s decision to make and post the Rogan
video.


“Rogan’s transphobia harm a community whose rights are actively under
attack right now,” added Alexis Goldstein
<https://twitter.com/alexisgoldstein/status/1220558717663444994>, a writer,
organizer and co-host of the “Humorless Queers” podcast. “This isn’t good
for a Dem candidate to boost with an official campaign video.”

Late Friday, the Human Rights Campaign, the largest national lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender and queer civil rights organization, released a
statement praising Mr. Sanders’s support for “the rights of L.G.B.T.Q.
people” but condemning what it said was Mr. Rogan’s “vicious rhetoric” that
“has dehumanized transgender people.”

“Given Rogan’s comments, it is disappointing that the Sanders campaign has
accepted and promoted the endorsement,” Alphonso David, the organization’s
president, said in the statement. “The Sanders campaign must reconsider
this endorsement and the decision to publicize the views of someone who has
consistently attacked and dehumanized marginalized people.”

In its own statement, the Sanders campaign said its goal was “to build a
multiracial, multigenerational movement that is large enough to defeat
Donald Trump and the powerful special interests whose greed and corruption
is the root cause of the outrageous inequality in America.”

“Sharing a big tent requires including those who do not share every one of
our beliefs, while always making clear that we will never compromise our
values,” Briahna Joy Gray, a spokeswoman for the campaign, said in the
statement. “The truth is that by standing together in solidarity, we share
the values of love and respect that will move us in the direction of a more
humane, more equal world.”

Earlier this month, Ms. Gray sent and then deleted a tweet expressing her
views about Mr. Rogan: “Listening to Joe Rogan and it’s better political
analysis than most stuff I hear on the MSM,” she said, in an apparent
reference to the mainstream media.
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