politics

Here's What A Left-Wing Joe Rogan Might Sound Like

The idea of a Rogan-style podcaster sympathetic to liberal causes betrays a misunderstanding of Rogan himself

In the span of forty minutes, I recently watched Joe Rogan and currently teamless NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers tell Rogan’s 50 million listeners that Elon Musk is a national hero who has made great personal sacrifices to head the DOGE government-destruction machine, tiny robots were implanted in the COVID vaccine, and doctors who have offered experimental cancer treatments have been “raided” and black bagged by shadowy government forces.

“When you actually heal people, you become a pariah,” Rodgers said during his recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience in his well-practiced hushed tone, sounding like a man trading government secrets with a trusted co-conspirator who happens to be the living definition of a lughead. It might have been the least crazy thing he said in the entire show.

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Almost nothing Rogan and Rodgers talked about during their excruciating three-hour chat was explicitly right-wing in nature (beyond Rodgers agreeing with Rogan that they would never allow a “socialist” doctor to operate on them, and that trans women are “hurting” women’s sports, as if these two care at all about women’s sports). It was all just loony shit that used to reside on the fringes of the internet, and is now blasted straight into the brains of tens of millions of men who see Rogan as a life coach and the ultimate authority on science, politics, culture, and anything else he’s read about for the first time on the internet that week.

Here’s Aaron Rodgers talking about vaccines causing “turbo-cancer” and killing children. Rodgers then wonders about the nanobots implanted inside the Covid vaccines.
— Denny Carter (@dennycarter.bsky.social) 2025-05-24T15:13:40.115Z

BFT interns are looking into whether turbo-cancer is worse than regular cancer.

They did not repeat Republican Party talking points. They didn’t hammer home propaganda handed to them by fascist think tanks. They were just two guys with worms burrowing deep into their brains chatting about the topics of the day like they were on an AM radio talk show at three in the morning. That Rogan and Rodgers reinforced right-wing political messaging was so natural it was hardly noticeable. It's what they consume all day, every day: To spread this democracy-killing filth is second nature for guys like this.

The brightest brains of the Democratic Party are once again talking about finding a Rogan for the left in their years-too-late effort to counter the right’s total domination of American media. The plan is to invest millions to create an infrastructure that brings people – young men, in particular – into the Democratic Party fold after liberals watched in horror as Gen Z bros turned enthusiastically toward fascism in 2024.

There is a genuine misunderstanding of how Rogan has become such a valuable weapon for the American right. The idea among those looking to replicate his success with some sort of forced left-wing Rogan psyop is that Rogan sets the agenda for Republicans and independents too embarrassed to call themselves Republicans. They see him as the head of the right-wing media snake, which has slithered into every crevice of American culture through our carefully-crafted social media algorithms.

This is all wrong. Rogan exists way downstream of the well-oiled far-right propaganda machine that has bullied the independent press into repeating their lies while flooding the zone with misinformation that surgically destroys truth and objectivity. Rogan is not a thought leader. He's anything but. He sits behind a laptop or on his phone and he absorbs the poison being pumped out of that far-right propaganda machine. He then uses his gigantic platform to spread that hate and fear and confusion and unfounded skepticism to an audience that might never be exposed to it without Rogan’s show. He is a megaphone for society's worst ideas.

Joe Rogan is just a guy. That’s his whole shtick, and the reason he’s gained such appeal among young guys who have been told since birth that nothing matters and good and bad things are the same. Rogan is not a mad genius expertly manipulating public opinion with every utterance. He is a guy who talks about the right-wing propaganda he’s seen online. This is interpreted by his otherwise skeptical audience as the Truth as passed down from their roided-up god.

Rogan's listeners don't know they're being propagandized, and maybe he doesn't know he's propagandizing them, which of course is the key to good propaganda. That kind of model is tough to replicate. Maybe it's impossible.

The tortured discourse around the possibility of repeating Rogan’s success as a vector of far-right misinformation that boosts fascists and degrades pro-democracy forces might not be worth having at all considering research has shown that Republicans are worse “at teasing apart true and false information” than people who support Democrats. Republicans, according to this 2024 research, “know that they are worse at discerning the news” and are often not at all confident about the validity of information before they post it online or share it with friends and family. That researchers were thrilled that self-identified Republicans were at least vaguely aware that they could be spreading false information with strangers and loved ones alike tells you how intractable this problem could be.

Those in the study who identified as Democrats were less likely to share information if they had major questions about its validity. So if you have a major media personality sitting around absorbing the dregs of the left-wing conspiracy industrial complex and blasting those narratives out to a sympathetic audience of mad-as-hell liberals, can that really work? Can that kind of audience grow if the people watching and listening are unlikely to endorse and spread information they believe to be false, or at least iffy? Are we sure those prone to left-wing politics and values would flock to such a character the way right wingers have rallied behind Rogan since Chili’s was closed for a week in March 2020?

The answer, I think, is self-evident.

The Alt-Rogan

Let’s do a Bad Faith Times thought experiment about what, exactly, a left-wing Rogan might sound like. This person would need to engage with the most emphatically fringe ideas on the anti-Trump American left (this excludes the slice of the left that engages in the bad faith of Trump as a system disruptor and a working class defender): Maybe that Trump, with Elon Musk’s help, stole the 2024 election by fucking around with voting machines in swing states; or that the regime has issued death threats to congressional Republicans who won’t fall in line and back the regime’s agenda; or that the attempt on Trump’s life in August was carefully staged by a campaign seeking a late-summer jolt.

This left-wing Rogan would need to present wild-eyed social media conspiracy theorists as legit experts in their field of study if this left-wing Rogan is to support his claims. Just as some ex-nurse with far-right politics might go on Rogan’s show and talk for hours about the COVID vaccine secretly killing thousands of people and leaving thousands more with life-altering injuries, along with the doctors and hospital officials who work tirelessly to cover it up, the left Rogan might platform a prolific social media poster who has some background in computers to tell the audience how easy it would be for Musk – the world’s richest man – to single handedly hack into voting machine databases in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Arizona and wherever else Trump might have lost in 2024 without a little help.

Perhaps a left Rogan amplifies one of those hilariously stupid social media videos breaking down every frame of the assassination attempt against Trump last summer. Maybe this Rogan goes frame by frame and shows his massive audience how the whole thing was an elaborate show meant to distract voters and the media from the campaign’s faltering messaging in the weeks after Kamala Harris re-energized the Democratic base. See how that Secret Service agent is standing? See the position of her head and her hand? Now watch the next frame as she apparently looks toward the shooter but does nothing. Why would she do such a thing? What are they hiding?

Things of that nature.

I doubt Democratic Party funders who pour resources into this lefty media venture would be OK with this kind of bottom-barrel political content – the kind that drives people insane with enough exposure. That people could see through this Alt Rogan as a paid propagandist for one of the country's two major political parties would undercut the central appeal of Rogan himself: That he is not beholden to any one political party, or even one ideology. To his audience, he is an unapologetic truth teller. His truth just always – always – happens to fit perfectly with right-wing narratives. Dig just a little bit into the facade of an Independent Thinker and you will almost always find a dyed-in-the-wool Republican. So it goes with Rogan.

I took this Bad Faith Times thought experiment a step further and did a short segment of what a left-wing Rogan might act and sound like if, like Rogan, this alternate version presumably interested in real economic populism and strengthening democracy and seeking justice for marginalized groups were to amplify unverified information that runs rampant in fervently pro-Democratic social media circles.

I did 42 pushups but was not able to get properly jacked in time for this recording. My apologies.