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Joe Rogan has finally endorsed Trump after his podcast with Elon, seemingly swayed by Elon’s persuasive ability in his making of “the most compelling case for Trump you’ll hear”, with Rogan agreeing him “every step of the way”. It’s interesting as a sort of demographic signal for whatever psychology you think Rogan is closest to in terms of the electorate, as most people think of him as a typology of the male base which consumes his podcast. It’s somewhat telling that he only did this at the very end after the possibility of a Kamala interview was absolutely off-the-table, as the irony is that Rogan’s male base is also similarly completely not the target of any communication from the Kamala campaign, sidelined for the young female demographic completely in terms of appealing to one principal issue (abortion) to the exclusion of anything else besides “we’re at least not Trump!”.
The latter argument would have worked better if Trump was running without the associated star-power of RFK, Elon, Gabbard, etc., all of whom Rogan has tremendous respect for individually, collectively allowing the scales to tip in terms of Trump being the figurehead bringing everyone to the finish line.
Incidentally I don’t think Rogan has voted for any Republican Presidential candidate before, and still was resistant even after the trauma of the pandemic (which changed his perspective on a lot of CW topics). The fact that the guy was a Bernie supporter not too long ago just signals how big of a shift there has been.
This probably doesn’t mean anything substantial (especially as a large chunk of Rogan’s fanbase is probably already Trump sympathetic) but it’s still an interesting development in the anxiety preceding the election tomorrow. What do you think?
I do not think most endorsements really move the needle.
But if there's anything that might goose male (especially white male) turnout just a bit, the combination of the Alpha Male Stoner in Chief and the King of the Space Geeks might do it. And that's not nothing.
This is almost literally an example of Jocks and Nerds setting aside their differences to support the same guy.
Side note, I have been consistently impressed that the Harris campaign has consistently failed in any real attempt to reach out to male voters by addressing what they care about. Every ad actually aimed at male voters has been basically "do it for the women in your life." I think the fallout if Trump wins and its CLEARLY the male turnout that pushed him over the edge is probably underrated.
What do you mean by fallout? Some extension of gendered politics like in South Korea?
Sort of.
I expect the left to QUADRUPLE down on the rhetoric against while males as the source of all evil. The states where Dems have control will probably pass some more laws to entrench current gender divides and further tilt the legal playing field towards females and minorities. They may think they've still got the numbers to win later with the migrant influx.
A very low confidence prediction is we might see active sortition of single females moving out of 'red' areas to blue areas as an act of protest.
I think the main thing will be coming from the Cathedral wanting vengeance, and if they can't take it out on Trump while Trump is in office, then regular cishet males may have to do. Males in positions of authority could come under direct attack to try and replace them with more favorable options.
Finally, expect the media to heighten female 'suspicion' of males. "Ladies, statistically speaking your husband/boyfriend probably voted for Trump, you better be careful around him!" Testable prediction: Increase in divorces between couples that lean liberal in the next year or so.
In short, in the near term certain trends will probably get worse as women process the social and cultural implications of the event. They've got to figure out how to align themselves going forward, and it is POSSIBLE that more of them will align themselves with the right if it looks like the right is ascendant.
On the flip side, I don't know how males will act in a world where it is clear that they're still politically relevant, even if they hold very little cultural power. May be they become bolder about demanding respect, maybe we actually get rumblings of a return to traditional/patriarchal norms. Very unclear.
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Even that seems based almost entirely on the idea that one of the most important things in the life of the women you care about is elective abortions. The people writing these ads don't seem to have any meaningful theory of mind for normal men.
Seriously. Nothing about improving their social status or helping them start families or boosting their career prospects.
All about (secretly) cast your ballot for Harris and you can maintain your masculinity AND help out women. Also we have no good definition of 'masculinity'.
Not even an acknowledgment of male-centric struggles.
They don't believe in these, except occasionally in the merited-impossibility sense. That is, if you do manage to temporarily convince them men are having a hard time, they'll say that's good for some reason, usually some variation of "well men were on top for thousands of years". If I had a nickel for every private-school full-ride direct-to-FAANG woman at Google who claimed male engineers had some sort of privilege over them, I'd have enough to weight my fist.
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The replacement of traditional writing with a combination of discord, streaming and 4 hour long podcasts truly is a disaster. Want to see Elon’s “most compelling” case for Trump? Just waste all your free time today listening to my podcast and it might come up at some point. At least TikTok forces some kind of pace.
ChatGPTBox will summarize yt videos
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Jesus Christ its insane.
"Wow I heard an insightful point on [podcast or 1 hour documentary]"
"Where can I find it?"
"Somewhere around the 45 minute mark, and then they go on a tangent about cat-squirrel hybrids for a bit, then they come back to the point."
In the current era we should be able to cite to any given piece of written/typed data nigh instantly, instead the content has evolved to make it more resistant to easy search.
That’s one reason why, surely? It’s much harder to get cancelled or persecuted for something you said if it’s obscured and kept behind the loyalty test of listening to 4 hours of podcast.
Easy search for everybody turned out to be a disaster, unfortunately. So interesting people retreated to hidden sanctuaries (discord, chats) and less amenable modalities (voice, video).
Didn't one of those leftist media assassination groups literally hire a group of people to listen to every Joe Rogan episode to find things they could use to get him kicked off Spotify? I definitely remember that being organized within a few days of him getting the deal, as the pressure groups collaborated with traitors in the company.
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You'd think so, but ,back in the day, Shane Gillis got cancelled exactly like that.
If your profile is lower, yeah, probably. I don't like this, because I'd hate for people to have more excuses to send endless whatsapp voice messages .
Yes to both you and @SteveKirk, but this kind of cancellation takes a lot more work than “see thing I don’t like, press retweet”. It’s much harder for it to go viral because the R number is so much lower.
Not the world I want either, I’m a very text-focused person. But I think it’s now clear that you can have too much legibility in a system.
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I don’t think it will move the needle much, but I think his interviews with Trump/Vance/Musk did by a few fractions of a percent at least.
I do think one thing that has been lost is that Kamala will probably struggle with men more than Trump struggles with women. The Kamala campaign has aggressively refused to appeal to men, with their weak attempts doing more harm than good.
On top of that, Biden was the “reasonable” choice that “reasonable” men could get behind. Now that the Biden admin is viewed as a bit of a failed hysterical clown show, the “reasonable” masculine thing to do is vote for Trump. Centrist men in my experience feel Dems had their chance and they botched it. “Go to your room and think about what you’ve done, and maybe next time we’ll vote for you” energy. They did the same to Trump last time
Kamala Harris and the Democrats think you don't have to appeal to men; the way to get men's to vote for Democrats is to tell them they should do it for women. The Gillette ad some time ago showed that, and Harris's "weak attempts" aren't much different. The idea is that voting for Trump is a betrayal of any women in their lives -- "How could you [vote for that bad orange man]?" is the idea. Problem is it might work; plenty of men are "responsible" enough to ignore their own interests in the favor of the perceived interests of women.
Maybe.
Alternately I fully radicalized my wife. She's pro abortion, and we have a daughter, and that pulls at her heart strings. However, my argument that we have to keep her from being brainwashed trans in her tender years before abortion matters in her teen/adult years got her full on the Trump Train.
Open threats from the DNC to "alter" the 1st amendment, and Biden sleep walking us to the brink of WWIII also helped.
Funnily enough, this isn't far off from the "radicalizing" argument you see a lot of women give about why they are voting Trump despite being nominally pro abortion. Bridget Phetasy straight up said becoming a mom radicalized her against all the trans stuff. Leapfrogged everything else to become her top issue over abortion.
If there was a broad-scale strategic mistake the left made, 'letting' the GOP turn trans issues into the most central culture war flashpoint has to be it.
Closing the country at all during COVID was the biggest broad-scale strategic mistake for the left. Less damage to the economy and more dead boomers is a massive win for them in the short and long term.
They made out incredibly well for themselves in all the panic spending though. Nobody's ever made a full account of all the trillions that ended up going to left wing orgs. I'm sure that more than made up for general economic damage.
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I don’t think they ‘let’ the GOP do it. The reason that trans had so much traction was because people pattern matched it to legalising homosexuality and gay marriage.
The utter terror of having your life destroyed five years later for opposing ‘trans rights’ compelled public people on both the left and right sides to become viral vectors for the ideology. I think people have forgotten how much trans was pushed by conservatives, especially in the UK but in the US too.
In short, the form of the campaign ensured that it would take centre stage regardless of what anyone rationally thought about it as an election winner.
(The pattern matching between ‘trans rights’ and ‘gay rights’ then forced interested parties to double down because if it became possible one day to criticise trans stuff without being destroyed, the same might be true of LGBT issues more broadly. The taboo would be broken. Whether that’s actually the case I don’t know.)
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Did the Gillette ad show that? My understanding was that it triggered a massive backlash and actually lowered sales for about 6 months after the ad aired.
The Gillette ad didn't show it worked, though it's pretty much impossible to measure the backlash to one ad in a consumer product like that unless it's truly massive (Bud Light is the only example I know); it did show that's what they think is a good idea.
The Bud Light boycott has already been reversed because my boomer mother-in-law doesn’t understand that Michelob Ultra is owned by the same parent company.
AB Inbev’s total sales have recovered, even as Bud Light’s have not.
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True, but this idea is fading hard, especially among the younger generation. Women are so strongly protected by the Daddy State that many men feel no obligation.
Given the relative outcomes in terms of higher educational attainment, life expectancy, suicide rates, gender-specific advocacy/scholarships/celebration, etc., I can't believe there are still men who feel compelled to give up anything to further support women in 2024.
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I'm not surprised that Rogan, specifically, endorsed Trump. He has somewhat Trumpish views, especially on vaxines and covid. He had a nice, friendly chat with Trump, while Kamala refused to go on his show (at least in his preferred format). And he's a bro who likes combat sports, and Trump was an old wrestling fan (yeah not the same, but uh... adjacent?).
Still notable because so few celebrities have publicly endorsed Trump. Until now he had um... Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan? Basically just a handful of washed-ups who have given up on having an active career. celebrities are overwhelmingly democratic. Like, it's hard for Republicans to play any pop song at their rallies because the musicians all sue them. But maybe that monopoly is starting to break.
Trump is quite pro-vaccine. He still touts Operation Warpspeed.
i've literally never heard him mention it, even though (IMO) it was one of the best things to come out of his time in office.
Also he was famously in favour of taking horse medicine, and backing RFK who's entire campaign is antivax.
Is this a comment? A question? What are you saying? I can take a guess, so can other readers, but make your point clearly and with some effort.
Comment length is only one proxy for comment thoughtfulness, respect, and consideration. Referring to Ivermectin as horse medicine is a long played-out point which will not convince anyone. Allowing it to be referred to that way is already allowing two-word "points", so you should go ahead and allow two-word "rebuttals" too.
It's like unironically referring to Trump as Drumpf; it's a useless turn of phrase which adds nothing to the discussion except signal one's team membership. There is no argument to be made against it except either mockery or a reminder to respect the norms, the latter of which you don't seem to find necessary.
I have absolutely no interest in relitigating whether Ivermectin is horse medicine, but it's a turn of phrase which should be called out. My response had no less substance than the original use of the phrase.
you know that's actually fair, i admit that calling it horse medicine was some low-effort snark on my part.
I still say that Trump has mostly run on a very heterodox approach to healthcare though. you can't say he's "pro-vaccine" when he's promising to put RFK in charge of health. But, who knows, it's always hard to tell what Trump will actually do.
You know, anti-vaccine sentiment was somewhat neutral-to-left-leaning until covid. If the lockdowns and vaccine mandates had been less heavy-handed I think it would have remained that way or even become more so.
As for his personal stance on vaccines, well, operation warp speed was truly quite effective, but I agree that putting RFK in charge would somewhat counteract that.
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https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/555247-trump-takes-credit-for-vaccine-rollout-one-of-the-greatest-miracles/
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Joe Rogan never really regained his mainstream credibility after the early 2022 COVID hitjob. That level of media scrutiny changes people. It also made it so that the highest-ranking Democrat willing to go on his show was John Fetterman. On a personal level, it’s clear which side listens to him more. That sort of social camaraderie is fundamentally what drives human political behavior.
Can you define "mainstream credibility" in this context?
Acceptable to the NPR listeners would be my definition. The idea being that left leaning outlets work to put entertainers and podcasters and news outlets into a heretical works pile where they lose advertising and support and get relegated to right leaning channels and advertising for support. Liberals generally shun such media so it hurts them to be branded as « not mainstream credible « .
I think USA Today or 60 Minutes would be closer to mainstream than NPR. I tend to think college professors (or those who envision themselves as their peers) as the prototypical NPR listener.
NPR has been a joke even among liberals for a long time. Parks and Recreation had a running gag about public radio being obscure and pretentious back in the early 2010s.
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With so much early voting, it probably would have mattered more last month, or even last week. Now it feels almost like a virtue signal, much as I hate to say.
I wouldn't be so sure. Aren't a lot of his viewers low propensity young men who are extremely unlikely to have already done anything to vote early? It might be timed to get them out on election day itself.
Yeah, supposing they're registered. Which many aren't, and don't have time to be.
How many swing states allow same day registration?
None from the looks of it, but what's the actual ballot return rate? A few of these guys might put down the bong and go find their ballots in the mail pile, or actually go to the polls on their lunch break.
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This makes sense to me. I think I saw somewhere that early voting skewed female, which makes me think men just spontaneously turn up to the polls on the day. You'd want to give them a nudge at the last minute, like the night before.
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Absolutely. It’s the safest endorsement ever made. He put absolutely nothing on the line with this one
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