If you don’t listen to Joe Rogan’s podcasts, I get it. Many of you have completely disconnected from any form of media that might be characterized as “news,” other than a few selected blogs like this one and possibly Tucker Carlson or “The Five” or some talk radio here and there. Listening to a 3-4 hour podcast like Rogan’s is an investment of time and energy and you’re trying to disconnect from all the unpleasantness around you.
I get it. In fact, I’m right there with you. I consume my daily dose of news in a completely different way than I did just two years ago, and haven’t watched a full hour of any cable news show or actually purchased a newspaper in a very long time. And once we lost Rush Limbaugh, my talk radio listening got limited to sports very quickly.
But Rogan’s show is different. It’s 3 hours of long-form discussion, actual discussion, not people yelling at each other or one guy or woman offering views on the passing scene. Three hours - sometimes 4 - of in-depth exploration of specific issues and individuals, most of whom are making a difference in our society. People like Elon Musk, Alex Berenson, and this past week, Michael Shellenberger.
Shellenberger is a very interesting guy to me. He’s done a lot of great writing on energy and climate change, and has even appeared about a ten months ago on In The Oil Patch Radio, a show I co-host with Kym Bolado, the publisher of Shale Magazine. It was a terrific hour of actual, fact-based discussion about his book “Apocalypse Never,” in which he lays out the real science behind climate change and dissects the abject nonsense we are bombarded with every day by the climate alarmist lobby and its supporting media.
Shellenberger is a liberal, a real liberal, an actual liberal who actually loves and cares about people and America. He’s not some woke nitwit who wants to destroy this country and the world. He’s a former climate radical, in fact, who has in recent years come to understand the frankly evil turn the Democrat Party and progressivism have taken in this century. As a result of this realization, he has more recently turned his focus to the incredible damage and chaos Democrats have been producing in America’s major cities, and recently published a book titled “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities,” which focuses on that subject and was the main topic of his discussion with Rogan. It’s one of the best investments of time I’ve made in recent years.
I raise all of this not just as a means to plug my radio show, Rogan’s podcast and Shellenberger’s books, but to point out that Michael - and Rogan himself, for that matter - is a part of a growing trend of real, actual, patriotic liberals who are waking up now to the evils of progressivism and have the guts to get out in public and talk about it. Bill Maher, to a lesser extent, is another example of this phenomenon, with his occasional lurching off into monologues in which he slams progressives and woke culture. Dave Chapelle is another.
Make no mistake about it: This takes courage. Doing this exposes these people to the attacks from the woke cancel culture, and no one has been subjected to a more fierce series of assaults than Rogan has over the past few years as his podcast’s popularity has skyrocketed. The woke nitwits see him, Shellenberger and the others as threats, and want to destroy them. But their willingness to speak out is important if our society is going to survive this woke assault on our institutions and norms. Because the more high profile individuals are willing to put themselves at risk, the more ordinary people are going to be willing to do the same.
Leadership matters.