In the winter of January 2020, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), a member of the party’s informal left-wing House bloc dubbed “The Squad,” temporarily backed away from the campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses, after enthusiastically supporting him.
Among the reasons she reportedly “grew less interested in helping Sanders’ campaign” was Joe Rogan.
Sanders’ campaign had touted a quasi-endorsement from the wildly popular podcaster, who has a record of inviting controversial guests on to spew conspiracies and bigotry while dabbling in both himself, apparently unnerving Ocasio-Cortez and her team in the process.
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Four years later, the Democratic nominee for president, Vice President Kamala Harris, who has Ocasio Cortez’s fervent backing, is in discussions to appear on Rogan’s The Joe Rogan Experience.
It marks a dramatic 180 from the Democratic movement’s response to Sanders merely noting Rogan’s praise four years ago.
Reuters reported Monday that Harris campaign officials were in talks with Rogan’s team about having her on the show, which former president Donald Trump has said he plans to appear on before election day.
The arguments for and against appearing on Rogan remain little changed.
First, there’s the baggage.
Rogan falsely claimed “activists” were behind California wildfires and touted a conspiracy theory associated with climate change denial that claims shifts in the earth’s magnetic poles bring about natural, apocalyptic catastrophes like the flood in the biblical story of Noah’s Ark.
Nearly 300 doctors, physicians and science educators wrote to Rogan's distributor, Spotify, when he spread Covid-19 information, including claiming young people didn’t need to get vaccinated and promoting the taking of veterinary drug ivermectin to treat the disease.
In 2022, he apologized after a compilation of clips of him repeatedly saying the N-word went viral.
Among his past guests are Gavin McInnes, founder of the far-right neo-fascist group Proud Boys, and Alex Jones, the malicious conspiracist who waged a years-long campaign against parents whose children were murdered in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre.
It could be pointed out that Howard Stern, the reformed shock jock whose show Harris appeared on last week, has a decades long archive of sexist and racist broadcasts. But Stern has backed away from his past antics in recent years—though he’s also paid his way into the Democratic fold, attending top dollar fundraisers.
But, unlike Stern, one need not reach years into the past to find Rogan’s controversies. Earlier this year, his Netflix standup special Burn the Boats was criticized for his mocking trans people and preaching vaccine skepticism—and, arguably more important for a standup special, it was also unfunny, reviewers agreed.
But then there is the case for Rogan, for which the Sanders campaign made a compelling argument in 2020.
Rogan has a giant audience—tens of millions of subscribers across Spotify, YouTube, Instagram and X. That audience skews heavily male (81%) and young (56% between 18 and 34), demographics relatively immune to legacy media (only 12% of Rogan’s audience says they trust newspapers).
The best way to reach them—agree or disagree with all of their views—is on their turf. If some of them join the Democratic fold and help defeat Donald Trump, great.
Sanders, in fact, had already appeared on Rogan’s show months before the endorsement controversy. In his interview, he took advantage of Rogan’s deferential interview style—part of the reason why right-wing guests on the show frequently make crazed claims without being challenged—to hammer home his message of economic justice directly to the host’s massive digital congregation.
“The goal of our campaign is to build a multi-racial, multi-generational 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,” the Sanders campaign told Vanity Fair in 2020. “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.”
Sanders was pilloried by Democratic aligned organizations like MoveOn and the Human Rights Campaign. They may yet issue similar reprisals if Harris does ultimately agree to appear on Rogan.
