Wasn’t he the guy with a video of him being out on the street yelling at dog poop? I’m reasonably certain he does in fact believe his own bullshit.
As to Joe Rogan nodding along; being a softball interviewer can be good or bad. It’s bad if you just let your guest spew talking points, but it’s great if the guest just feels emboldened to say what they really think. Basically giving them rope to hang themselves with. Most of Rogan’s guests are of the latter sort.
The thing I like about Rogan is he doesn’t shy away from the crazy shit. He digs right in. So many interviewers think they’re going to lose their audience if they go deep on something.
He brings in guys like Alex Jones and lets them rant, then asks like 1 question to get him to go even deeper. Maybe you think the Democrats are pedophiles, that’s somehow grounded in plausibility, but how can anyone listen to Jones talk about inter-dimensional aliens and believe his bullshit? They’re pedophiles to harvest energy for their dark elf masters?
Joe Rogan doesn’t purport himself to be a reporter does he? He’s not required to call his guests on their bullshit. I don’t expect Howard Stern to dig deep into the emotional lives of the porn stars on his show either.
No, he pretends to be some sort of intellectual, but all he really cares about is getting high for the most part.
He believes anything people tell him and then repeats it, even when told later that it was a lie he keeps believing it.
If you signal-boost a bunch of assholes and make no attempt to call them on their bullshit, don’t be surprised when you get lumped in with those people.
Remember when he was on NewsRadio? He pretty much turned into his conspiracy lovin’, “I’m a street smart idiot,” character in real life.
In fairness to Rogan, I don’t get the impression that he believes anything that Alex Jones is saying, and is basically just having him on his show as a ridiculous dancing monkey.
Joe Rogan isn’t “for you” so to speak but he does perform a somewhat useful service for a certain demographic. There are a lot of young men whose Facebook feeds basically consist of powerlifters and gym rat miscellanea. The kind of guys who share when someone dead lifts a big amount of weight in an unexpected way. Rogan is “authentic” to guys like that.
A lot of people hate Rogan on the left because he gives time to Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro and the like, but he also gives time to (or maybe gave time) to Neil de Grasse Tyson and other more serious communicators. I’m not sure he’s doing this out of some deliberately measured “plan” about balancing one or the other but more about these are the figures that circle around his intellectual headspace and so wants to talk to them and give them time to say their piece. He usually gives people enough rope to hang themselves, but today people want to be “told” Yes this is bad or Yes this is good, and he doesn’t do that, and to many today that’s the same as support.
So you see him either genuinely engaging with characters too unpalatable for “mainstream” like Jordan Peterson, which is important because these guys have influence whether or not Rogan interviews them or whatever liberal consensus minders think them; or he’s giving another sheen of respectability to fringe positions which are best left buried and doing so dishonestly, courting the alt-fringe crowd indirectly.
It’s not that they want to be told, they need to be told. If you give someone a mic and assume they will “hang” themselves there is a very good, almost guaranteed chance there is a group that is using the fact that person has a mic as a reinforcement for their views.
It’s been a known problem since Archie Bunker and before, but that was one of the bigger ones in recent history.
Except he really doesn’t. He usually just believes whatever they tell him.
I remember a show where he had on Tom Segura and started spouting some conspiracy bullshit that some alt-Right guest told him. Segura and his wife were questioning it, so Jaime looked it up and it was 100% bullshit. Joe just gets flustered, but doesn’t back down and diverts to “well maybe that’s not exactly what happened, but it was something close to it,” or whatever.
He buys into whatever someone tells him and his circle includes some real scum bags. I mean he was openly defending Gavin McInnes because it was “just a joke, bro,” even though Gavin is a fucking crazy person who openly incites violence non-stop. Because McInnes was on his show once and was civil, so he must be a nice guy even though he obviously isn’t.
Joe is a sucker. You can tell him nearly anything and he’ll buy it, internalize it and then spread it. Thing is, I think he’s fundamentally a good person. I like the guy quite a bit, but his pandering to racists is just painful to watch. And as you say he has a massive fanbase, who are increasingly alt-Right racist fucks because he supports them. The problem with Joe is that very few people call him on his bullshit and he internalizes anything someone he thinks is “cool” tells him.
Again, I don’t hate him. Hell, I like the guy a lot, but seeing these people so easily manipulate him and him spread that to his millions of listeners is chilling and disturbing. He’s more concerned about getting high than questioning anything he’s told, which leads to him becoming a mouthpiece for the far right and racists, even though he’s fairly middle of the road himself.
I suppose that this belong here.
In 2016, things got weird. Even for a job like that. I thought the whole Donald Trump thing was just going to peter out. Then it just kept on not petering out. Cable news anchors couldn’t hide their smirks when they talked about him. But of all the people who initially thought his candidacy was a joke, I’m the one without a real excuse to have missed it. Because I got to see it play out in comment threads.
Even in the early days of the campaign, cultural conservatives, fiscal conservatives, the weirdos who talked only about chemtrails — they all had one thing in common. They wanted a president who would stick it to the liberals. They didn’t care that supporting him would mean changing their positions on any number of issues.
Voting for someone who doesn’t represent your values or interest to own the libs.
This has been the case since 2016. Trump’s supporters effectively abandoned every principle they once pretended to have.
I guess they still hate brown people and folks who have THE GAY.
There is no better illustration of this than Trumpists’ embrace of the Saudi Royal Family. It boggles the mind how many leaps in logic they have had to go through for that.
I wonder what would happen if a member of Antifa killed a “liberal” journalist.
And yet there is this huge ass fear that if we label these people the racists and bigots they are we’re crossing streams and some evil god will step through a parallel universe or… something.
Well they’re technically Caucasians, and no worries, they’d turn on them in a heartbeat if they some out run out of other targets to blame for anything and everything.
Wasn’t one of the main talking points against Clinton for the base was that she was too cozy with the Saudis?
Now the Saudis are the Best People ever, even as they act worse than normal, because reasons.
I wish we as a society could allow the exchange of ideas to be open rather than being so afraid of fringe views that we sweep them under the rug and berate anybody who even entertains them. I don’t listen to Joe Rogan’s podcast regularly, but I appreciate that he is willing to have a conversation about things that most media won’t ever touch.
It’s not for me or anyone else to decide for humanity what is acceptable and what is not. I wish we could have smarter discourse and allow anyone to have their say and then let people debate and come to their own conclusions about what is bullshit. I’m not saying Joe Rogan is running the smartest debate around, but at least he’s making an effort to communicate rather than dictate.
You think he’s having discourse or debate with them? It seems like he’s just giving them a megaphone to me. Archie Bunker, by the way, was not meant to be take seriously, except a fair amount of people decided it was a reinforcement of their views instead.
I think he’s at least trying to have a discourse, absolutely. I don’t expect you to see it that way.
I eagerly await the GOP’s utter lack of response.