Yeah, it's worth noting that the online left was generally pretty horrible to Rogan for long before this, even when he was, broadly speaking, on the left. Rogan endorsed Bernie Sanders for president in 2020. And when that happened, a bunch of lefty activist groups and some of Bernie's rivals in the primary went ballistic condemning Rogan and the endorsement. Anyone saying "the left needs their own Joe Rogan" is a fucking idiot. The left had Joe Rogan, and they bullied him out of the coalition.
I think it's a better political strategy to be tolerant of differences of opinion and maintain a big tent coalition, as opposed to driving away the biggest media personalities in the world for not passing all your purity tests. But what do I know?
He definitely said some out-of-pocket shit about COVID, but at that point the reaction from the left was the straw that broke the camel's back. The left had already made it clear to him many times over that he was not welcome. Of course he would walk right into the open arms of the opposition.
I recall that his quasi-endorsement (he stopped short of actually endorsing him I think?) was met with feedback from the left about Rogan's anti-trans comments. I didn't actually go looking for what he had said, so I can't speak from authority, but I did hear about the backlash from friends.
You're point about a big tent is interesting. Assuming what he had said was intentional, would it have been OK to keep engaging with him, or even claim him as left? There was something similar going on with JK Rowling I think, not that she's in US politics. Maybe by engaging with him he would have changed?
From what I remember, Rogan has always been against trans women competing against non-trans women in professional sports. Honestly, it's hard to argue with that take. A person who has gone through male puberty has certain physical traits that are likely to confer a significant advantage. Study after study has shown that many of these advantages don't go away because someone has plastic surgery or goes on hormone blockers - even after years.
Anti-trans stuff aside (and there is a lot of it out there that tries to coopt this whole discussion), tt's a really tricky question to answer. Pre-puberty of course, there's no issue. Boys and girls are on a roughly level playing field. Post-puberty, boys have a variety of physiological advantages in most sport. Starting hormone treatment will limit some of these advantages, but not all. Granted, there's some variation within the sexes, but with a professional sports setting (or high level amateur like college level competitive sports) where you have already selected the top level people to compete the difference between the winner and loser can be just a percent here or there, or a few seconds here or there. That slight difference that trans women have can make the competition unfair.
Yeah, a crucial point to acknowledge is that stuff Rogan said about trans issues was all basically in alignment with the
median voter’s opinions on trans stuff. He was against trans women competing in women’s sports. He was against gender transition for minors (and probably bought into some misleading suggestions that this was much more common than it actually is. Still it does happen, there are adult “de-transitioners,” this is a small issue but that doesn’t mean it’s made up). He was generally a little bit put off by “pronoun stuff,” and probably observed out loud that disproportionate numbers of trans people seem mentally unwell… my point being, those are basically the opinions of my dad or any of my boomer uncles, who have generally voted for Democrats for 30+ years. (And for the record, these were probably also the opinions of my mom and my aunts circa 2016, though women have probably, on average, been faster than men to toe the party line and “get with the times” on trans issues.)
And if you asked Rogan, or any of my uncles, they would say, “yeah people can do what they want with their bodies, and they should be left alone.” If Democrats’ focus on trans issues was solely on securing their basic civil rights in things like employment and housing, I don’t think that would even be controversial to most people. But too much of the party and the online left went into a purity spiral trying to satisfy niche advocacy groups that were out of touch with the general public.
And I want to be clear to people in very left discourse bubbles who might be scandalized by this: what I’m saying here really isn’t controversial on the center-left these days. The consensus that Democrats went too far too fast on trans stuff is in the New York Times, it’s in The Atlantic. Ezra Klein can say it out loud on his podcast and no one is cancelling him.
This isn’t really a question of what the optimal amount of trans rights is. It’s a question of winning or losing elections. And Democrats winning and progressing slowly is much better for trans people than Republicans winning and actively doing harm.
Joe Rogan was never a raging anti-trans extremist. He was a normal dude being a normal dude, expressing normal dude opinions. Saying those opinions were beyond the pale was harmful to the Democratic coalition.
(I feel the need to add: I’m really not a Joe Rogan fan. This isn’t about defending him or his reputation. It’s just about my general frustrations with a Democratic coalition that seems insistent on constantly shooting itself in the foot by excluding more and more normal voters.)
ETA: +1 to GuitarStv above. John Stewart was never systematically bullied out of the coalition. It’s easy to “stick to your principles” when everyone with similar principles welcomes you with open arms. Imo, “principles” are largely
downstream of social tribe. If one whole tribe is nasty to you for years and years,
of course you’re going to go join the tribe that isn’t constantly nasty towards you!
I would say a
huge proportion of media personalities who went from “normal respectable left-leaning person” to “right-wing grifter” did so because the left cancelled them, and then the right welcomed them with open arms. They were 90% aligned with the left, and got kicked out of the coalition because they failed one purity test. Once the identity of “person who got cancelled” is forced upon them, they join the tribe of “people who are cancelled.”
