Joe Rogan, the Fear Factor host turned Right Wing podcaster? Is he know for comedy? I thought his brief failed stint of stand up comedy is why he switched to podcasting.
Per "https://www.joerogan.com/" - Joe Rogan is "A standup comedian for over 30 years, Rogan’s seventh hour long comedy special Joe Rogan: Burn the Boats premiered live on Netflix on August 3, 2024. Rogan’s previous comedy specials include..."
Joe Rogan owns a comedy club in Austin as well. [1]
Joe Rogan is a pretty busy guy.. I would imagine his professional network amongst comedians was pretty large before he blew up as a podcaster. This is not only to say that Joe Rogan has multiple comedies, but is also very likely to be very influential amongst as well.
Joe Rogan was a stand up comedian in the 80s/90s, appeared on the MTV comedy show Half-Hour Comedy Hour and was performing at The Comedy Store in Hollywood. Not that I find him funny, but that in my book at least would make him someone with a professional comedy background if he spent nearly 3 decades there..
But I was refering to was the specific idea of what has been labeled the "Rogansphere" by his critics. This refers to a loose media/comedy ecosystem orbiting Joe Rogan, his podcast, Austin (comedy) clubs, and a web of frequent guests and adjacent podcasters/comedians who cross-promote each other on YouTube and podcasts. This network rose to prominence in a push to normalize "anti-woke" and right-leaning narratives under a free-speech banner. This was a pretty popular niche to serve as the term "cancel culture" gained more traction. At the time even many otherwise (american-)left-leaning people would express frustration with liberal attempts to police language etc.
This popular niche was especially present in comedy with a discourse about what and who you could joke about and since Joe Rogan played a big role into giving that topic traction I cynically called it "Joe Rogan school of comedy". I am no alone in thinking that way, comedian Marc Maron puts it better than I could in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_N4W05eyto&t=307s
The “neutral” is part of his act. He platforms people with dangerous ideas under the guise of “just hearing what they have to say”, but he doesn’t really push back _ever_. I’ve heard people say downright factually incorrect or defamatory things on his show and his response is, largely, “oh really” or “that’s interesting”, etc.
One of many examples. Joe is outraged because he thinks Joe Biden talked about airports during the revolutionary war. He goes on to state that someone who makes such comments shouldn't have a job. When it's revealed that it's a Trump statement he pivots to "oh he just made a mistake when speaking". It's so blatantly obvious and happens constantly.
Well, fairly neutral is in the eye of the beholder. Saying Biden seemed a bit gaga was being said by most democrats at the time, and Rogan seemed to acknowledge his error when it turned out Trump talked about airports rather than Biden. "so he fucked up" was the wording.
But he considered it disqualifying out of Biden's mouth…
> December 22, 2023: "Pull him," Rogan said. "If you had any other job, and you were talking like that, they would go, 'Hey, you're done.'"
but mysteriously not when it turns out to be Trump:
> November 5, 2024: Popular podcast host Joe Rogan officially endorsed Donald Trump on the eve of the election, a move Trump’s team swiftly touted as a major win in the final hours of their campaign. (https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/04/politics/joe-rogan-trump-endo...)
Makes sense - Rogan is friends with Alex Jones, who is pretty much as far up Trump’s rump as Jones himself once said Trump was “up ISIS’s dirty **hole” - we almost had a world where jones was so mad at trump that he was going to bail, but I’m pretty sure Roger Stone and their other trump-linked associate (name escapes me, “psyops” guy) reigned him in - maybe with some push from the kremlin too.
I guess my point is: these people are all interconnected and it’s almost like when you hear about how actors all know each other and hang out, or congresspeople play golf together, but for fascism.
If "fairly neutral" includes drastically different categories for viability depending on the political party then the term means absolutely nothing at all. If the statement is disqualifying for Biden, but just a gaff by Trump, it's absolutely 100% not "fairly neutral" or "fairly" anything. It's a very clear and demonstrated bias.
Joe Rogan, the Fear Factor host turned Right Wing podcaster? Is he know for comedy? I thought his brief failed stint of stand up comedy is why he switched to podcasting.