THE NEW YORK TIMES: There is a simple reason why there is no liberal Joe Rogan

After the 2024 elections, there was a panic among Democrats about the absence of a liberal Joe Rogan. Could one be found? Could one be created? It was an epic exercise in missing the point.

You cannot have a liberal Joe Rogan because Rogan is not particularly political. His audience cohered around conversations with comedians, MMA fighters, bodybuilders and psychonauts. That’s what made him politically influential: He could reach millions of people who were not otherwise interested in politics.

The problem Democrats actually had — one of them, anyway — was that they didn’t like Rogan and criticised others for going on his show. They tried, repeatedly, to cancel him for his comments about transgender people and his skepticism of COVID vaccines.

To the extent that he is now a right-coded figure, it’s not because he started that way. Rogan’s political views are mixed. He backed Bernie Sanders in 2020. He supports universal health care and abortion rights; he dislikes vaccine mandates and lax border control.

But it shouldn’t have been a surprise when, after years of being attacked by the left, he endorsed Donald Trump in 2024. The simplest way to tell people which side they’re on is to tell them how much your side hates them.

That brings me to a more-important-than-it-might-look controversy that has burst out over leftist streamer Hasan Piker. He had a breakout moment over the past year, as Democrats began obsessing over the absence of a liberal Joe Rogan and Piker, who mixes leftist politics with a bro-ish aesthetic, was proffered as a possible answer (a category error because, again, the whole point of Rogan’s political power is that his show mostly avoids politics).

But pick over Piker’s years of streaming, and you can find offensive things he’s said. Among them: That America “deserved 9/11,” that his favorite flag is Hezbollah’s, that a liberal Zionist is akin to a “liberal Nazi.”

“Streamer has said offensive things” isn’t really a news story. But then Abdul El-Sayed, the more DSA-ish candidate in the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, began rallying with Piker.

That led Third Way, a centrist group that previously demanded that Democrats “draw a line in the sand” and shun “Hasan Piker and his fellow Jew-haters,” to send a letter to El-Sayed demanding details about “how closely you align with his most abhorrent views.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, said Piker reflected “the dangerous normalization of antisemitism in our politics.” Politico then asked a number of possible 2028 Democratic hopefuls whether they would appear on Piker’s show: California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Rahm Emanuel said they would. Reps. Ro Khanna and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez already had. Sens. Cory Booker, Ruben Gallego and Elissa Slotkin said they wouldn’t.

I think there’s rather a lot wrapped up in this controversy, so let’s take it piece by piece.

Is Piker a “Jew hater,” as Third Way alleges? In an interview with the writer Aaron Regunberg, Piker addressed some of his worst comments. I find some of his answers compelling and others less so. The comparison of liberal Zionists to Nazis, for instance, is repugnant and not much improved by Piker clarifying that he opposes ethnostates.

Conversation is not a reward to be bestowed on those with whom we agree

What made the Nazis notable wasn’t their support for an ethnostate. Ethnostates are common. What made the Nazis notable was their effort to exterminate the Jewish people. And Piker’s assertion that his opposition is to all “reactionary ideology” is hard to square with his admiration for Hezbollah.

But to focus only on those comments is to miss much else that Piker has said and believes. He has also said: “From pogroms to the Holocaust, Jews have always been singled out by those in power as a scapegoat for the instability and economic volatility that people in power caused. A resilient, nascent antisemitism is a constant threat.”

He has called antisemitism “gross,” “immoral” and “a hate crime.” He has promoted Jon Ossoff, a Democratic senator from Georgia who is Jewish, as a 2028 presidential possibility. In previous presidential primaries, Piker supported Bernie Sanders, who is also Jewish. It is an unusual form of Jew hatred that calls out antisemitism and promotes Jewish Americans for the presidency.

I have deep disagreements with Piker, but he isn’t a “Jew hater.” He’s an anti-Zionist. And here, I think, the real stakes of this fight come into view. We are living through a rupture in both the meaning and the reality of Israel. A Gallup poll from February found, for the first time, that more Americans sympathized with the Palestinians than with the Israelis.

Among Democrats, the gap was overwhelming, with 65 per cent who sympathized more with the Palestinians and 17 per cent with the Israelis.

The difference, as I have argued, is largely generational: Older Americans still view the Israelis more sympathetically, but among Americans ages 18-34, 53 per cent sided with the Palestinians and 23 per cent with the Israelis. This is new. Before 2023, young people and Democrats were more likely to side with the Israelis.

This is not the result of an international psy-op or a profusion of memes. The Israel that young people know is not the Israel that older people remember. It responded to the savagery of Oct. 7 by flattening the Gaza Strip in a brutal campaign that killed at least 70,000 Gaza residents, taking control of more than half of the territory and herding Gaza residents — more than 2 million people — into the remainder.

Life there remains hellish. Israel has made hopes for a two-state solution fanciful by slicing the West Bank up into Israeli settlements and abetting constant settler violence and keeping a boot on the throat of the Palestinian Authority.

It has used the Iran war as an opportunity to launch an invasion of Lebanon, displacing more than 1 million people and announcing that as many as 600,000 won’t be allowed to return to their homes until Israel decides otherwise. The Knesset just voted to legalize hanging as a punishment for Palestinians who are convicted of killing Israelis in terrorist attacks.

Third Way suggests you can identify “Jew haters” by their use of “loaded words taught in social justice seminars (‘apartheid,’ ‘genocide,’ ‘settler colonialism’).” If that is the test, then a large number of American Jews now fail it. Israel, as it is behaving today, and as it is constructing itself for tomorrow, is incompatible with any normal understanding of liberal values.

“There will be no Palestinian state to the west of the Jordan River,” Benjamin Netanyahu has said. “For years I have prevented the creation of that terror state, against tremendous pressure, both domestic and from abroad. We have done this with determination, and with astute statesmanship. Moreover, we have doubled the Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria, and we will continue on this path.”

Anti-Zionism is rising as a response to what Israel is doing. It will simply not be possible to treat it as a marginal viewpoint that can be shamed or shunned into invisibility.

Yes, antisemitism often cloaks itself in anti-Zionism. So don’t do the antisemites’ work for them. If you keep telling people that if they oppose the Jewish state then they must hate the Jewish people, eventually, they will believe you.

The impulse to cut off those with whom we disagree reaches far beyond Piker or the Israel-Palestinian debate. It sits at the heart of cancellation as a political tactic.

It relies on a belief in the power of gatekeepers that might have been true in an earlier age but no longer reflects the way attention is earned and held. Tucker Carlson was ejected from Fox News and grew stronger on X and YouTube.

Nick Fuentes was banned from major social media platforms and gathered strength in the shadows. Trump went from being banned by every major social media platform to retaking the presidency.

But it’s not just that cancellation has failed to silence those it targeted; it also weakened those who used it. The Democratic Party — and the progressive movement — was ill served by the belief that it could decide the boundaries of acceptable debate. In narrowing who it could talk to, it limited what it could hear and whom it could be heard by.

I haven’t been on Rogan’s show, but I’ve been on some of the shows in that broader universe, like Andrew Schulz’s “Flagrant” and Lex Fridman’s podcast.

I was surprised by how frustrated the hosts were about their inability to book Democrats in 2024. They had said things that the broader progressive universe disliked or had conversations with people who were anathema to the left. And so Democrats largely avoided these podcasts, ceding them to the Trump campaign.

This was not only bad politics but also bad democratic practice. These shows had come from nowhere and had gained millions of loyal listeners.

They had earned their viewerships by voicing something that made millions of Americans feel seen, heard or at least interested. In avoiding those spaces, Democrats avoided contact with the kinds of voters they otherwise claimed to represent.

This is the mistake Democrats often make when they talk about what they did wrong in 2024. They realize, now, that they should try to talk to the people who listen to these shows; they are less likely to realize that they should listen to the people who talk on these shows.

Beneath this is an important principle: Conversation is not a reward to be bestowed on those with whom we agree; it’s a necessary habit in a democracy. The point is not to find agreement so much as to deepen understanding.

To talk with others is to believe in the possibility of change — theirs and your own. Whether you like everything that someone has said should be severed from the question of whether that person is worth talking to.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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