President Rogan 2024?

For those of you that have been reading my blog for the last couple of weeks, this should come as no surprise.

I recently predicted that the mainstream media was “losing the fight of its life” and would be forced into one of its largest pivots of all time on Covid, partially thanks to Joe Rogan, and I defended and argued those points in an hour-long follow up interview with former Fox newswoman Ivory Hecker about a week ago.

In the hours after my original post was published, outlets like Zero Hedge and Revolver News linked to the story and widespread discussion about how Joe Rogan was forcing a change in the media broke out.

As Rogan became a hot topic, people who blindly carry the narrative for the mainstream media and the global elite all of a sudden felt like they had to push back on this discussion head-on.

This is why last week, we saw widespread coverage of 270 “experts” and “doctors” who wrote an open letter to Spotify referring to Rogan as a “menace to public health” who spreads “false and societally harmful” Covid-19 claims.

“Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform, though the company presently has no misinformation policy,” the doctors wrote.

Rogan has a “concerning history of broadcasting misinformation, particularly regarding the COVID-19 pandemic,” they continued.

“These are fringe ideas not backed in science, and having it on a huge platform makes it seem there are two sides to this issue. And there are really not. The overwhelming evidence is the vaccine works, and it is safe,” one epidemiologist wrote.

Neuroscientist Ben Rein stated: “People who don’t have the scientific or medical background to recognize the things he’s saying are not true and are unable to distinguish fact from fiction are going to believe what [Malone is] saying, and this is the biggest podcast in the world. And that’s terrifying.”

As I noted last week on Twitter, the last time this many “experts” spoke against a story hitting the mainstream media narrative was the time that “dozens” of “senior intelligence officials” spoke out to write off Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” as “Russian disinformation” heading into the 2020 election.

And everybody knows how that story ended, about a year later in September 2021 and once, of course, the election was over.

The very same outlet that reported the laptop was Russian disinformation was forced to admit that “some of the purported Hunter Biden laptop material is genuine, including two emails at the center of last October’s controversy.”

The pushback on Rogan hit such a fever pitch that even Dana White got involved this past weekend at a UFC press conference. When asked about the “experts” pushing back on Rogan, White fired back with some Covid truth bombs of his own

“Well, how about this: ever since I came out and said what I did, it’s almost impossible to get monoclonal antibodies. They’re making it so you can’t get them. Medicine that absolutely works, they’re keeping from us,” White said.

“I don’t want to get too political and start getting into all this shit, but ivermectin and monoclonal antibodies have been around for a long time. Now all of a sudden you can’t dig them up to save your life, the doctors won’t give them to you.”

“Even when I did it here in Vegas, when I had it right before Christmas, I made one phone call and I was able to get it done,” White said. “And that’s not some rich famous guy shit. Anybody could’ve called and got it back then. Now Rogan’s been talking about it and I went crazy talking about it, you can’t get those things to save your life now, literally.”

“It’s disgusting. It’s one of the craziest things I’ve ever witnessed in my life. And we’re not talking about experimental drugs or things. This stuff’s been around. Ivermectin, the guy won a Nobel Peace Prize.”

When a reporter followed up and asked White “Are you a doctor?”, White responded: “You want to know what’s scary? I bet I could get some fuckin pain pills quicker than I can get some monoclonal antibodies. That’s a fact. They fuckin hand out pain pills like they’re Tic Tacs.”

“Monoclonal antibodies and ivermectin isn’t going to do anything to you. Pain pills kill you. Fact.”

And so, if there was doubt before, there shouldn’t be any now: Regarding the biggest issue in recent history, Rogan has landed himself in the crosshairs of those who willingly push the mainstream narrative and those who obediently and willingly obey it.

After the 270 signatories to the open letter got widespread media attention, it started to come into focus that “only around 100 of the 270+ signatories to the letter are people with qualified medical degrees,” according to an analysis by The Dossier.

Yet the letter is being peddled everywhere as being signed by “270 doctors”.

This is a bit of that pesky misinformation in and of itself.

The analysis further found that “a large chunk of that 100 or so medical doctors are MDs employed at universities who are not in fact practitioners of medicine.”

The first couple of signatures of the open letter to Spotify signed by “270 doctors” includes numerous nurse practitioners and even podcasters.

The list also includes Licensed Clinical Social Workers, a “Senior Communications Consultant”, “Public Health Advisors”, Psychiatrists, unspecified “Consultants” and “MD/PhD Candidates”.

Meanwhile, Rogan guests like Dr. Pierre Kory, who has advocated for ivermectin and Dr. Peter McCullough, are both practicing physicians. Kory is a critical care physician and McCullough is a cardiologist. Dr. Robert Malone received a medical degree in 1991 from Northwestern University.

Neither Jessica Rivera, M.S. and Ben Rein, PhD – the reported co-authors of the letter to Spotify featured by Rolling Stone – appear to hold practicing medical degrees. Rivera has a Masters degree in Emerging Infectious Diseases from the Georgetown School of Medicine and Rein is a postdoctoral fellow who works researching “cellular and synaptic mechanisms underlying social deficits in various transgenic mouse models of autism spectrum disorder” at Stanford.

The Dossier’s analysis found that the letter was, in fact, signed by “over 50 PhD academics, around 60 college professors, 29 nurses, 10 students, 4 medical residents, and even a handful of… science podcasters.”

I noticed today that Rivera and Rein are both described as “science communicators” in their respective bios. It’s a term used in Rein’s Stanford bio:

And also used in Rivera’s Rockefeller Foundation bio:

Finally, nowhere in the open letter to Spotify is there a note of who officially organized the petition and what groups or interests may have had a hand in putting it together.

What was the genesis of the letter? Who led the charge?

Putting aside the fact that many of these “experts” that have pushed back against Rogan have scattered credentials, there’s one thing their letter says without saying: Rogan is now being recognized on a countrywide stage where everybody knows his name and almost everybody has an opinion about him.

This type of prominence naturally bleeds into casual conservation about the world of politics. A friend of mine half-heartedly suggested to me a couple of weeks ago that Rogan could run for president and win – a notion that we laughed at together and I didn’t think I would ever write about.

But as I think about it more and more, the idea really isn’t that crazy. And if Joe Rogan himself doesn’t run, he’d be a great a profile of what it may take for a new presidential candidate to win in 2024: somebody who’s not afraid to challenge the official narrative, somebody who doesn’t write off the population as too stupid to hear the “other side of the story”, and somebody who approaches dialogue with open mindedness and civil discourse.

I’m not going to rehash all of the arguments I made two weeks ago about why Rogan is dominating the mainstream media, but I will bring to the table a point I haven’t yet made: Rogan represents a move toward basic common sense and earnest discussion that politicians have lacked for decades.

In many ways, he’s a centrist. He has expressed in interviews with people like Bernie Sanders that he is socially and financially very liberal. He has also spoken to people like Ted Nugent and expressed why he is conservative on issues like the second amendment. He has the skill to be able to communicate with people on both sides of the aisle and, as Bill Maher pointed out during a recent podcast with Rogan, the skill to talk to any of his guests about almost anything.

He doesn’t consider party lines when making his ideological decisions and, as much as radicals on both sides of the aisle wouldn’t want to admit, ultimately winds up somewhere toward the middle.

This is what could win an election in 2024.

There are many in the Republican party who want to move on from Donald Trump and find a less abrasive, more centrist candidate that they hope will help them being in Democratic votes.

Democrats are also trying to find the center, hoping that moving away from the far left socialist and Marxist ideologies of people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib will help them secure some of the nation’s centrist votes as well. Democrats like Joe Manchin are already starting to bleed over into the center and Republicans like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are well known as residing closer to the center than most Republicans.

And if you ask the everyday “Joe Sixpack” in America, what he’s going to tell you is that he doesn’t care about political labels – he just wants somebody that represents his interests best. How many times in casual conversation has someone said to you “I don’t vote by party, I vote by the candidate”? Someone literally said this to me, unprovoked in a bar, just two nights ago.

This is because what the majority of the country wants is the same: somebody that’s looking out for their best interest and isn’t going to make any rash decisions without talking things out.

While Rogan has no experience in politics and he’s certainly not a medical doctor – as evidenced by a major mistake that he was happy to admit he made this past week on his program – he brings to the table a willingness to explore all options and an unbiased innocence with how he approaches topics.

He also publicly admits his mistakes. When was the last time you saw a U.S. politician do that?

And if Joe Rogan doesn’t wind up being a candidate, both sides of the aisle would do well to use him as a template of the refreshing breath of air that their respective political bases desperately need heading into the 2024 election.

There’s a reason that Joe Biden’s approval rating recently hit an an atrocious 33% in a Quinnipiac poll: everybody knows he’s too old for the job, everybody is starting to understand that his left-wing base dictates his agenda and people are starting to question whether or not he is sharp enough to run through basic Presidential decision making processes.

On the right, while President Trump doesn’t seem to have any issues getting out of bed in the morning and doesn’t seem to lack energy, he often gives the impression that he doesn’t think things through and makes spur of the moment decisions.

Both parties could take a cue from how Rogan approaches current events when looking for ideas on how to plug the gaps in their respective political candidate bases.