LC#30: Partisan Podcasters

On the recent US election and comedians making waves in political discourse.

Hello folks, given my most recent post about JRE and its cultural role within platformisation, I needed to chase the US election with an updated take on the comedian that perhaps more than any other has captured the attention of this newsletter. Beyond the world of comedy, Joe Rogan has become a key interlocutor with an increasingly overt political role, which is necessary to look into in a wider context. Scroll down, as you do.

Single link, but a good one: a strong argument that we are now in the “golden era of comedy” (we are not).

I think the Beeple image above pretty much sums it up. In the very unlikely case you missed it: Donald Trump was elected once again as the future President of the United States. What is important for this newsletter is this turn of events was strongly facilitated by Elon Musk and, to a smaller but contextually significant extent, Joe Rogan. While not entirely unpredictable, Rogan’s endorsement of Trump on election eve represents a very important shift. Let’s establish a bit of a timeline.

In terms of party politics, it is worth remembering that, before the first Trump government, Rogan had endorsed Bernie Sanders. In the following years, as I discuss at length in my paper about JRE and platformisation, the comedian’s engagement with the right had primarily been based on sympathy over the free speech cause, a theme resonant with his own status as an “edgy comedian” and also a key area of common ground with platform capitalist Elon Musk, whose Twitter takeover the comedian has always praised highly. After Sanders lost the Democratic primaries in 2020, Rogan had already said publicly he would rather vote Trump than Biden, but it would still take quite a long time for the endorsement, or even a JRE talk.

Whether we decide to take Rogan’s brand of authenticity and his public statements on the matter at face value or not, his radicalisation definitely matured during and after the pandemic. First, the lockdowns motivated the comedian’s ushering over of his cohort from LA to Austin, TX; then, his skepticism over vaccines and liberal media backlash over his ivermectin use pushed him further into the supportive arms of MAGA fans. This process was not entirely smooth: as recently as this August, after the comedian publicly praised his then-competitor RFK Jr. at the Republican primaries, Trump himself attacked Rogan on his own platform Truth Social, along with slews of JRE-listening MAGA supporters. A few months later (on 26 October 2024), Rogan’s interview with Trump finally came out.

Predictably, the three-hour conversation on JRE was not long enough to touch on any challenging issues. Instead, Rogan bonded with Trump over liberal media ostracism, UFC fandom, and even identified with him as a comedian to the point of praising his comedic timing (which, to be fair, is strong). Another point of contact was, of course, old buddy Elon. Surely enough, after the interview was allegedly penalised by YouTube’s algorithm, Musk came to the rescue and hosted the video on X as well - a move that furthered both the narrative of Rogan being an edgy voice in need of fair platformisation and the platform owner’s own agenda of pivoting the website further towards video.

Given the stakes, this last detail seems like a minor one. Nonetheless, it is conceivable Musk’s long-term strategy of turning X into an everything-app might benefit from getting Rogan and his cohort of highly-successful comedians on the platform. While imagining the whole ecology of podcasting comedians on what used to be Twitter still seems like a far-fetched scenario, the process might have already started.

Apart from Rogan, in fact, one of the figures that seemed to dominate the US media cycle ahead of the election was Tony Hinchcliffe, a committed roaster and faithful Roganite most known for his live podcast Kill Tony. Hinchcliffe has been an overt Trump supporter for a while; unlike Rogan, however, he has never veered outside of comedy circles before, focusing in fact on a specific brand of roast comedy (his comedic ethos could be described aptly as “Make Comedy 2005 Again”). While the infamous Puerto Rico joke above made headlines, it would have been ordinary business at any Comedy Central roast in the early 2000s. What was unusual here, however, was the partisan affiliation that Hinchcliffe expressed at a non-comedy event - a full-blown Trump rally (whole set here, for context). In a way there is nothing new in comedians showing their political colours, as many have done for years in the various late night shows on the liberal side, but the cultural role of podcasting comedians has wider influence in terms of both public discourse (e.g. perception of “woke” and cancel culture) and, potentially, the political economy of platforms.

After the risk of alienating a significant portion of the Trump electorate just hours before the vote was averted (he was mildly criticised even by papa Rogan), Tony milked the controversy into a sort of victory lap 30-minute special that was published - you don’t say - on X. Titled Garbage, the set explains the comedian’s own experience of the controversy, significantly also complaining about YouTube and their increasingly censorious content policies. Seasoned critics have been dismissing Hinchcliffe’s claims, but it’s been clear for a while that the censorship/cancellation rhetoric IS the branding.

The cultural (and, more recently, political) shift ushered in by podcasting comedians within the world of US comedy has generated a lot of opinions, mostly warning against the conflation of comedy as an art form and comedy as a tool for ideological propaganda. Jon Stewart, a seasoned and committed leftie, notably defended Hinchcliffe’s Puerto Rico remark as a typical roast joke, while in a recent newsletter publicising the release of Adrienne Iapalucci’s recent Netflix special, Louis CK praised her for “not trying to sway an election or perform a moral correctitude”, but merely pointing out how “we are all full of shit”. Anthony Jezelnik, a younger proponent of a similar philosophy, also recently came out, guns ablaze, and attacked the whole podcasting comedian class on ontological grounds. He did so in podcasts - where he said he does not believe someone having a politician on without “fucking with them” can call themselves a comedian - and in his own new stand-up hour on Netflix - in which he more or less says lazy comedians complaining about cancel culture should just “do their job”.

As an Italian who became interested in US comedy almost two decades ago, not least because of its edgy connotation, I can’t help but think about what started happening to Italian politics back when I was just starting to discover stand-up via Internet. At the time, a former comedian named Beppe Grillo used a blog and meet-ups to start a political party drawing from different populist ideologies, tied together by his own credibility as a contrarian public figure, technical solutionism, and anti-establishment sentiment. A little over a decade later, that party had won over 30 percent of the popular vote and acted as the biggest political force in the country.

I do not seriously think Rogan’s endorsement of Trump amounts to his “Grillo moment”, but the ideological alignment of free-speech-obsessed podcasting comedians and platform capitalists like Elon Musk is becoming increasingly consequential. Whether his change of mind was earnest, cynically convenient, or he was played like a fiddle by his smarter buddy Elon, it is undeniable Rogan is now, more or less willingly, an "embedded skeptic" of a different kind than he was before. In his pursuit of "becoming platform", the comedian has found himself enlisted as the cultural-communicative appendage to a techno-political alliance built on money and fascism. For someone whose cultural allegiance would be to countercultural satirists, a more shameful fate I cannot imagine.