Is There a Joe Rogan for the Left?

By Roger L Simon

I saw this on a Fox chyron:  “Left is longing for a liberal version of Joe Rogan.”

At first it made me laugh because Joe appears to have lapped Fox as well, but then stopped a second to consider the question and came to this conclusion:

There can’t be one, in the short run anyway, because there is no left or, upper case, Left now.  No real there there.  Not anymore anyway.  They’re not even for the working class.  Just ask Bernie Sanders.

The Harris campaign was a good illustration.  She didn’t know what to say.   Okay, she’s not the world’s most articulate person and one wonders how she got so far in politics (well, we know the beginning, but let’s leave that alone). But she never said a word that amounted to anything or communicated a policy.

When she was confronted with the few questions she would allow during the campaign, she suffered from mind freeze, sometimes saved by complaisant media as with the sclerotic CBS (no Joe Rogan, they).  .

It never worked anyway. She wasn’t sure what she really thought because what’s left of the left is pretty dopey, the kind of things no sane person supports like men in women’s sports.

Ditto for open borders because we’ve all seen the results on our streets or in our hospital wards as our youth suffer from an epidemic of fentanyl overdoses.  And then we have umpteen thousands of missing children in our country from human trafficking, probably the greatest human tragedy of our times never mentioned by Harris, of course.

At the same time, the left has destroyed its own cities with homelessness and crime.

As for defunding the police?  We won’t even go there—the idea is too racist.  (And if you can’t figure out what I mean by that, go back to school.)

I guess what passes for leftism these days is support for illegal immigrants who don’t want to be deported.  We’re having demonstrations right now. That allies the left with the Sinaloa, Jalisco, Zeta cartels, and so forth who are in league with China and Hezbollah, not to mention the Tren de Aragua folks from Venezuelan prisons. Not sure how well that would play on a podcast, but your mileage may vary. We should consult Rogan.

The worst possible people for a left podcast would be the blue state governors who are among the least witty people on the planet, NY’s accidental governor Kathy Hochul leading the pack by a nose over New Jersey’s dyspeptic Phil Murphy who has promised to “resist.”  (That again.).

Both New York and New Jersey were perilously close to losing to MAGA forces.  The way things are going, the future does not look good for the aging Democrats in those states and the belligerent behavior of their governors does not help.  California will be next.  (Pay attention, Gavin Newsom.)

The wise man or woman does some introspection after a loss.  Not these folks.

Normally we might look to the showbiz world for a leftwing podcaster, but they, haunted by the specter of P Diddy, crashed big time during the election, costing the Harris campaign millions in performance fees they haven’t been able to cover.  Even George Clooney now insists he’s backing out of politics.

‘Woke’ is already in the rear view mirror, its disappearance hastened by the young who are rejecting its endless tedious hectoring. DEI will shortly be a footnote in obscure social history texts.

Nevertheless the Left already has a podcaster of note named Charlamagne Tha God, but even he seems to have abandoned ship.  From the Daily Mail:

Charlamagne Tha God sparked a backlash after U-turning on calling Donald Trump a ‘fascist’ and questioning how much Democrats ‘really believed’ the argument in the first place.

The radio host, 46, real name Lenard Larry McKelvey, took aim at the liberal meltdown over Trump’s victory on his show this week – despite previously making the same argument himself. 

He told CNN two weeks ago that Kamala Harris ‘should keep calling Trump a fascist’ and said he ‘couldn’t believe we’re even thinking about electing’ him to a second term. 

Are we surprised?  Self-preservation is the name of the game—not just for Deep State bureaucrats. (Charlemagne’s fine by me.  It’s the bureaucrats that have to go.)

But there is hope for a leftwing podcaster in longtime Dem strategist “Ragin’ Cajun” James Carville.

Or there might have been. He seems to be living in a distant past when there was a radically different Democratic Party compared to today’s incomprehensible version.

It’s still 1992 to Carville, those Bubba days when we were told we shouldn’t “…Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.”’

Problem is these days the man who’s thinking about tomorrow is Elon Musk—and he’s on Trump’s team.

As Fleetwood Mac put it, “Yesterday’s gone.”

So is leftism in any coherent form.

We are headed for a rather libertarian future that has fascinating similarities to our constitutional past.

To find a leftwing podcaster to rival Rogan they have to find someone who is both real and funny , who has some authenticity.

From what I’ve been seeing, that’s a big ask.

:Yes, the times they are a’changin’.  Does anyone know how Dylan voted?

Meanwhile, in Beverly Hills ….

First published in American Refugees