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Joe Rogan's Trump endorsement cements Bernie Bro alliance

Joe Rogan speaks to Donald Trump last month. Credit: Getty

November 5, 2024 - 4:15pm

At around the same time yesterday that Oprah Winfrey, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry were onstage for Kamala Harris, America’s most important celebrity endorsement finally came in.

“He makes the most compelling case for Trump you’ll hear, and I agree with him every step of the way,” said podcaster Joe Rogan after concluding an interview with Elon Musk. “For the record, yes, that’s an endorsement of Trump.”

This affirmation of support has been a long time coming, and comes too late to make any significant mark on the race, but it still carries a deeper meaning. Really, it is the climax of a much longer process of cultural realignment.

Back in 2020, Rogan was still playing the “disappointed Leftist” card when he endorsed Vermont’s Democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders. This was already four years after the “Bernie Bro” phenomenon first took off, who were at the core of the Rogan brand and audience. These were relatively prosperous white men, aged 18-30, who were fed up with the system and what they were being fed by the media. Like a less ardently political version of Corbynism, the movement represented a rebellion against 30 years of end-of-history politics — but one that also had safe, cuddly vibes.

In fact, the hype around Sanders could be seen as the last ride of the slightly older Occupy Wall Street tendency. Members of that generation — who grew up in the shadow of the Great Recession, and who knew that they were being screwed by property prices, labour arbitrage, and an inverted population pyramid — had found a class champion in an older style of Leftism.

But when a post-peak Bernie was finally blown out of the 2020 race by the DNC’s machinations, the Bernie Bro tendency split. Part of it was fed back into the progressive wing of the Democrats, but another part ventured into the undergrowth of conspiracies and a focus on “the media” as the subject of discourse rather than the provider of discourse.

Figures as diverse as comedian-turned-Leftist pundit Jimmy Dore, journalist Glenn Greenwald and academic Bret Weinstein have become mainstays of Rogan’s podcast. They are to this decade what Noam Chomsky was to the Nineties. What is Curtis Yarvin’s Cathedral if not the Leftist modes of analysis applied to Rightist thought? Into this milieu, the underdog don’t believe the lying media MAGA campaign fits perfectly, especially post-Covid.

Rogan endorsing Donald Trump solidifies the political power of this emerging alliance, and demonstrates that a certain cultural torch has passed. Where once the podcaster felt more at home supporting Sanders — and even two years ago was uncomfortable with having Trump on the show — today, MAGA world is a proud coalition that extends much further than the reliable base of red-state voters. It now even comprises the tribe of Red Scare, the formerly-Leftist podcast hosted by two art-hipster Brooklyn women. Not so long ago, the duo would drawl about neoliberalism and the Marxist theoretician Slavoj Žižek, but now they’re firmly behind Trump.

At the same time, all victories hold the seeds of future defeats. It was said of Franco that the reason he was so politically inactive after the Spanish Civil War was that “he understood if you use power, you eventually use it up.” Rogan has become a live player in the world of mainstream political opinion, lining up against the likes of Oprah and Beyoncé across the aisle. Now, it won’t be nearly so easy to play the ingénue. And every movement has its day: when a wave collapses, only the most wily avoid going down with the ship.

For now, it is simply impressive that Rogan got the two key members of the Republican campaign, Trump and J.D. Vance, and then the richest man in the world in Musk, all to fly to his satin-draped Texas lair and pitch to him for a combined ten hours. It reads like an Arabian fable — it’s just not clear whether it’s the end or the beginning of the story.


Gavin Haynes is a journalist and former editor-at-large at Vice.

@gavhaynes

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Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
3 hours ago

Rogan’s endorsement won’t change voting preferences at this point, but it could drive unlikely voters to the polls.

Peter B
Peter B
2 hours ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

Or have the reverse effect ! Remember Russell Brand endorsing Ed Miliband in 2015. Why did no one call it the “Brand Effect” ?
Who knows at this point. Most commentators seem to be making stuff up to fill space. And the US electoral system is quite baffling. The pundits pore over the “early voting” returns (quite why these are released before the election polls close is beyond me). Yet no one thinks to question whether the “registered Republicans” (and Democrats) will actually vote for the party they’re affiliated to this time. I’d be really interested to see how much reg R->D and reg D->R voting actually happens.
I gather the score (18:00 GMT) is currently 3-3 from Dixie Notch, NH. Yes, that’s literally 3 votes each. It’s apparently the Sunderland of the US (reports earliest – possibly even before the polls open in Hawaii). And has only 6 voters.
Anyone know if they do “horses at polling stations” in the US ? Feels like it should be a thing in Texas.

Christopher Chantrill
Christopher Chantrill
1 hour ago

Having read Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public I see all around me people saying that the world has changed.
Probably because the end of the Age of Mass Media and the rise of the Age of the Internet means that the top down Narrative monopoly and the Rule of the Experts of the good old days is over. Yahoos like Joe Rogan get a voice. I say chaps! Not really out of the top drawer, what!
Fortunately there’s a book to explain the whole procedure. Why Most Things Fail by Paul Ormerod.