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.

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

@gavhaynes

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