Joe Rogan Just Showed Us Who He's Really Been All Along

Inside every young male MAGA dipshit there are two very stupid wolves. (It’s basic science, people.) One wolf is Donald Trump, who tells young men that they, like him, should be able to do and say whatever they want without ever suffering any consequences. The other wolf is Joe Rogan, who tells them that their parents were wrong to scold them for calling Pope Francis a “cuck.” There is probably also a third wolf, too, one that stages elaborate trick-shot stunts on YouTube or dispenses disgusting dating advice on Twitch or something, but I am over 40 and can only keep track of so many wolves. The first two wolves are the only ones we need to worry about today.

There has been a lot of commentary over the past few months about how and why so many young American men seem to be embracing the political right. While I suspect there are fewer hard-core young MAGA bros than the think-piece industrial complex would have you believe, I’d also bet that the guys who do fit that description are probably also big fans of Joe Rogan’s podcast. On Monday, Rogan endorsed Trump’s presidential bid, about a week after the candidate sat for a rambling and fatuous interview with the podcaster in which the two men flattered each other’s biases and said very little of substance over the course of a three-hour race to the bottom. If any of this surprises you, then you clearly haven’t been paying attention to Rogan’s show or its trajectory over the past several years.

Five and a half years ago, when I profiled Rogan for Slate after listening to hundreds of hours of his podcasts, I deemed his show “the factory where red pills get sugarcoated.” While many of his guests were intellectual dark-web types who had axes to grind about “cultural Marxism” and “shadowbanning” and “cancel culture” and other amorphous reactionary boogeymen, Rogan himself continued to insist that he was himself a liberal who agreed with most left-of-center political positions. This self-identification clearly didn’t last, and Rogan’s own trajectory illuminates the pathway by which young men might end up on the MAGA side of the fence.

Molly Olmstead

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These days, The Joe Rogan Experience is for all intents and purposes a right-wing podcast that also sometimes interviews people like Adam Sandler. On the show, the stand-up comic and MMA commentator hosts a variety of guests from the worlds of arts, business, academia, and politics. Many of these guests are also the sorts of people who might unironically use phrases like “the woke mind virus”; many of them have made a cottage industry of disparaging our top cultural and academic institutions as diversity-brained indoctrination centers in which elitist cultural commissars conspire to stop white men from getting a fair shake. Rogan coats this reactionary commentary in a veneer of inquisitive good humor, always insisting that he’s “just asking questions,” rarely acknowledging that the questions he’s asking are very, very stupid.

Rogan’s bailiwick, in other words, is not dissimilar to Donald Trump’s. Both men enjoy speculating about conspiracies and disparaging the woke left; both men like to ask bad questions while refusing to listen to complex answers; both men privilege plain, inarticulate talk and performative masculinity; both men are fond of endorsing products of dubious merit. They are the twin wolves of the young male MAGA soul, and if Trump is the cool older rich guy whom these young men want to be like when they grow up, then Rogan is the funny cousin who’ll smoke them up while encouraging them to drop out of college and instead sign up for a Jordan Peterson seminar. They all deserve each other, and the rest of us deserve better than them.