Bernie Sanders is running a campaign ad based on a (sort-of) endorsement by Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster.
He’s getting flak from critics who say Rogan has said at lot of racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic stuff—most recently criticizing a trans-woman who engaged in mixed martial arts fighting with a biological woman—and therefore Sanders should reject his support.
Below is Joe Rogan’s own reaction, from a podcast with stand-up comedian Mark Normand.
I don’t have any problem with Joe Rogan, but here are some links to articles by writers who think differently.
Edward Snowden was interviewed on the Joe Rogan podcast a week ago, but I only got around to viewing it the whole way through last night.
It’s an unusually long interview – 2 hours, 49 minutes – but I found it interesting throughout. However, you can get an idea of Snowden’s core message if you start at 1 hour 30 minutes and watch for 15 or 30 minutes.
Snowden is a great hero of our time, along with Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning. They’ve all been charged with violating the Espionage Act for revealing wrongdoing by the U.S.government.
Assange is in prison in Britain facing extradition to the USA. Manning served a prison term, and is in prison again for refusing to testify against Assange. Snowden is in exile in Russia, but he said he’ll return to the USA if he can get a fair trial.
By “fair trial,” he means the right to tell a jury the reason why he did what he did, Someone on trial for murder would have this right, but an accused whistleblower does not.
Snowden worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency and learned that they monitor and store virtually every electronic communication by every citizen.
Everyone has done something in their lives that is shameful or can be made to look shameful. If the FBI, CIA and NSA can know everything about you and me, and their activities are invisible to us, that comes close to having absolute power.
One interesting sidelight is that Snowden, who has a deep understanding both of the technology and of the political, legal and moral issues at stake, is a college dropout. Educational credentials are not a measure of the intellect, let alone character.
Joe Rogan also lacks credentials. He is a stand-up comedian with a love of the martial arts. But his podcasts are more illuminating than most network news shows because of his open-mindedness, intellectual curiosity and willingness to let his guests have their say. A lot of them are with guests or about topics I don’t care about, but so what?
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat from Hawaii, is more of an anti-war candidate than Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren or any other presidential candidate who has announced so far.
She opposes “regime change wars” on principle, which no other high-profile politician has been willing to say since Rep. Ron Paul left Congress. Such wars, as she pointed out in the interview, have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and enormous suffering to ordinary people in the Middle East and elsewhere without making Americans safer or better off.
Ending regime change wars would be a big change for the better, but it wouldn’t necessarily mean giving up the U.S. empire of bases and cutting back the U.S. military mission to defense of the homeland and fulfilling treaty obligations to allies. If you really want to crush Al Qaeda’s successors and imitators, the first step would be to stop arming them to so as to bring about regime change.
Most of the commentary on Gabbard’s announcement ignored all of this. Instead it focused on her opposition to gay rights moe than 15 years ago..
She is one of a number of people who was raised as a social conservative, and changed their minds over a period of years. I can understand this, because my own opinions, including on LGBT issues, have changed in the past 15 years. But some commentators think this will sink her campaign before it gets started.
Gabbard comes from an unusual background. According to her Wikipedia page, her father is part Samoan and a Catholic; her mother is a convert to Hinduism. She was elected to the Hawaii state legislature at the age of 21, then was deployed to Iraq as a member of the Hawaii National Guard. She is now serving her fourth term in Congress.
In 2016, she resigned from the Democratic National Committee in order to support Bernie Sanders’ campaign for president.
The video of of an interview with Joe Rogan gives a good overview of what she believes. It runs an hour and 43 minutes, a little long to watch on a small screen. Here are starting points of the highlights:
7mn. Why North Korea has nuclear weapons
9mn. Regime change wars (the key segment)
22mn. Authorizing war with Iran
30mn. Russian troll farms.
32mn. Why she supported Bernie Sanders
49mn. Paper ballots and electronic voting
1hr4mn Pros and cons of universal basic income
1hr13mn Affordable higher education and health care
1hr22mn Threats to civil liberties
1hr33mn Legalizing marijuana
I agree with everything she said in the Joe Rogan interview and most of her views as given on her Wikipedia page.
My main concern about her is her praise of the authoritarian nationalist government of President Narendra Modi of India and her alignment with Hindu nationalists in the Indian-American community, which is reportedly a large source of her funding. I also object to her statement in a 2014 interview that torture may be justified under certain circumstances.
Aside from this, I’m favorably impressed with her, not only because I think she is right on policy, but because of her calm, self-assured and well-informed way of answering questions. Also, that she was not afraid to say “I don’t know.”
Win or lose, she will force the Democrats to debate war and peace issues on a more fundamental level than before.
Phil Ebersole's Blog 