The Political Gamble That Could Backfire Spectacularly

I want to talk about the responsibility of our political leadership when it comes to conspiracies.

That is perhaps the biggest issue in today’s politics, with ramifications far beyond whatever benighted crap Candace, Joe Rogan, or Theo Von dump on their podcast.

“Whatever the spin is about Tyler Robinson, there’s some bullsh*t to it,” Rogan said. “I don’t know how much of it is bullsh*t, but there’s some bullsh*t.”

I like Joe personally. He’s a nice guy.

Also, this kind of stupidity ought to immediately make you question Joe’s capacity to discern truth from fiction. This is essentially the same as endorsing the theory that staring at hieroglyphics can solve your health problems.

Joe did that recently.

I’m not super shocked by this kind of stuff. Joe tends to believe pretty much every conspiracy theory that he can find, because let’s be real, conspiracies are fun. They’re chatty. You can fill five hours talking with your comedian friends about how the moon landing was fake, and underwater demons who might be aliens control our lives.

Joe’s shtick is that he is basically a caveman discovering the world by talking with everyone — which never results in any firmly held beliefs. Thus he’ll endorse James Talarico, the psychotic Left-wing Howdy Doody of Texas, but also Donald Trump within two years of each other.

But it’s fun to watch the journey. It’s just sitting with your friends in college and popping open a beer or, in Joe’s case, smoking a blunt and waxing philosophic on “whether your chair really exists, man,” or “whether when you see the color red and I see the color red, is it the same color red, bro?” Or, “Which Kardashian sister is the hottest?”

Under normal circumstances, that’s fine and fun; it’s a free country; you can listen to what you want.

But.

Two things make this kind of stuff a problem for America more generally: first, when people start treating it seriously, and second, when politicians start treating it seriously.

Part and parcel of Joe’s comedic world is black-pilling. This is very common in comedy because comedy is about making fun of the world as it is. It’s not about offering solutions. It’s not about trying to come to a consensus. Comedy is inherently black-pilled.

I’m not going to blame Joe for any of this sort of stuff. One of the things that makes Joe such a successful podcaster is that he contains multitudes, including a variety of totally conflicting viewpoints.

But a bunch of young men use Joe Rogan as a sort of political litmus test. It turns out that young men will follow pretty much anybody — even using the alleged sex-trafficking Tate brothers as a moral litmus test.

Following these people is stupid. If you’re not doing it for fun, if you’re using them as political guides rather than gossipy buddies, there’s a problem.

But the more dangerous problem is when our political leaders decide to follow this group.

Which brings us to the modern GOP.

Top members of the GOP, most prominently the vice president, think the path to political victory lies in winning over the Rogan bros. And the vice president has made this pretty clear — over and over and over.

The New York Times reported: “Vance made clear to colleagues he feared losing some of the so-called low-propensity voters, the young men who were not traditional Republicans, but who had voted for the Trump-Vance ticket in 2024. This was an audience tuned into the ‘manosphere’ podcasters like Joe Rogan, and it was worrisome that the podcast hosts themselves were now rebelling.”

And of course, the vice president has recommended that everyone ought to listen to the benighted musings of Theo Von, a double-digit IQ comedian whose discernment is on par with that of a brick.

Vance said a few months ago, “You know, I think if you want a good laugh, I love Theo Von, like he’s one of my favorite — He’s just incredible. He’s got one of these senses of humor where like 30% of the time it goes completely over my head and 70% of the time he’s the funniest person imaginable. But I think Theo has a good heart. And that’s one of the reasons why I really like listening to his show.”

So, so, so much great stuff in Theo Von. Here’s Theo Von with Joe Rogan, rapping on the conspiracy theories:

People are like, we’ll elect the Democrats next time. It’s like, but it’s all the same sh*t that has been happening forever. They haven’t been helping anybody forever. They’re letting politicians slurp on kids. All of our f*cking money goes to Israel and they’re using it f*cking genocide people. It’s like everybody is scared out of their wits right now. It’s like our religious leaders are afraid to speak out. And it’s like a time where it’s like Satan is amongst us and our religious leaders are talking about bullshit. It’s just like, I don’t know, man.

The black-pilling. This is what you need more of. You need more of the black-pilling, more of the conspiracies. Here’s more of his drivel:

But I think that this starts to happen. News stories get created, right?  Whether they’re fictional. Whatever goes on, you don’t even know a lot of times what’s news stories. You can send actors out to create a scene. You see a video; you believe it … then you see movies and stuff come out later about it. So it’s like you’re almost creating your own news to, then, make like a based on a real story. You know what I’m talking about?

This is what you need. You need a guy who tells you that news stories are actually created by actors. That’s what you really need.

Says the guy who literally acts for a living.

I can see why the vice president is recommending this genius-level talk. It is definitely edifying for the young male population of the United States to listen to people who may be borderline retarded talking about politics.

I think that Vance’s particular strategy is flawed for a couple of particular reasons.

First, you have to build your own coalition. You can’t just duplicate President Trump’s. I know the vice president of the United States thinks that if he just keeps Trump’s coalition, he wins in 2028.

This is wrong and politically stupid. No politician can duplicate the coalition built by another politician. That is not how this works. If you take Donald Trump’s coalition and you map JD Vance onto that coalition, JD Vance loses participants in literally every area of that coalition. He wins fewer women, fewer Hispanics, fewer blacks, and fewer blue-collar voters.

You can’t outcompete President Trump with blue-collar white voters; Vance does worse with the manosphere. He wins fewer of everyone.

Second, if you try to follow the people around, remember that they are fickle.

Take Joe Rogan, for example. Trump has been in three elections. Joe Rogan voted for Donald Trump once. He is now endorsing James Talarico for Senate in Texas. The notion that if you go on Joe Rogan’s show and you mirror his conspiratorial musings and black-pill super-hard the way that JD Vance actually did on Joe Rogan’s show, that all the “Joe Rogan voters” will end up with you is silly. People can change their minds.

Joe Rogan is fickle. Theo Von is fickle. All these people are fickle because they don’t have any consistent worldview.

Thus, if you just try to follow them around, there’s a very good shot they will run away from you, just on a pragmatic level.

Third, successful leaders lead, and the coalitions follow in their wake. Politicians who tend to pander and chase the crowd do not work.

This is where President Trump is unique. President Trump doesn’t go on Joe Rogan and mirror what Joe Rogan is saying. President Trump says whatever President Trump wants to say, and then whoever follows him wants to follow him. That’s how it works.

Trump is the same dude everywhere. He doesn’t change what he is saying whether he’s on Joe Rogan, Theo Von, my show, or anyone else’s.

Fourth, and most importantly, it is immoral and wrong as a leader to forego truth in favor of popularity. I know sticking to the truth has fallen out of favor. We’re supposed to just believe that our politicians’  job is to chase the people around with a butterfly net.

That is wrong. It is politically stupid, and it is also morally wrong.

There are a bunch of people purportedly on the Right now who say things like “vox populi,” meaning the voice of the people is the voice of God.

That is stupid and nonsense. It actually comes from an eighth-century letter to Charlemagne, in which the author called that idea and crowds following crowds around “madness.”

It turns out that people are often wrong. This is why we have a Constitution. You wouldn’t need a Constitution if the people were awesome all the time.

Our founders feared and despised the mob. They wanted a Constitution because they knew certain rights had to be off-limits, so the people could not run roughshod over them.

That’s why checks and balances exist. That is why they’re still there today, after the last century and a half.

But we, in all our great wisdom, decided to dismantle many of those checks and balances in pursuit of a far more activist and centralized government that does things, but then has some pretty bad side effects.

I believe that the truth always wins eventually, because reality always wins.

But the key word there is “eventually.” I get the logic as to why politicians pander and why they lie, and why they always follow the people around with the butterfly net — why they’re always chasing the parade.

This has always been true. There is nothing new about this. This is what demagoguery is.

But if you try to follow the people, you likely won’t catch up with them, especially if what you’re doing as a Republican is just pitching a softer version of what Democrats are hard-selling.

Even if you do win on that platform, you’ll lose the country, because running that car toward the cliff at 60 mph is only marginally better than running that car at the cliff at 90 mph.