There’s a gentleman on YouTube who goes by the alias Telltale. Owen (his real name) has at least two channels there, where he discusses aspects of religious cults and other high-investment groups (he is a former Jehovah’s Witness and speaks from that perspective), as well as other aspects of culture. Over the last couple of years, he has included in his focus the burgeoning QAnon movement, which he first covered under the umbrella of odd political activity but that he rather quickly realized was morphing into a religious movement. (He’s admitted to being fascinated by the whole flowering mutation, the transformation of the movement on the ground.)
One of his most recent videos concerns Joe Rogan and his reaction to the demonstration last month at the Lincoln Memorial by Patriot Front (PF), an extreme right-wing outfit with direct ties to Nazi ideology. Owen had covered PF before, so it was within his wheelhouse to revisit the topic again, this time more with an eye toward what Joe Rogan was peddling instead of drilling down directly on the rhetoric of PF itself. (He did provide a primer, though, for the audience members who previously may not have been aware of PF.)
In the clip of Joe Rogan’s show, Rogan himself plays a clip (which appears to be silent) of PF marching on the monument. For context, the group members are all wearing the same style of clothing, very middle-class, khakis and polo shirts; for this march, they wore white nylon face coverings, not necessarily due to Covid protocol.
Rogan, who has Matt Taibbi on his show as a guest, asks his producer to play the clip, then replay it. (This starts at 1:40.) “Do that again,” he says.
“What the fuck is this? Have you ever seen anything that looks more like feds?” Rogan gestures toward the screenclip with his full open hand. Matt Taibbi laughs, in a way that seems uncomfortable. (If I had to put a finger on it, I would say he laughed in that almost-embarassed way when someone you know and like says something at a dinner party that you know isn’t true but you don’t want to embarass them in a social setting. I’ll let you watch the clip and be the judge. To me, he laughs in that nervous way people do when they’re caught or are suddenly placed under discernible scrutiny.)
So, Taibbi laughs; Rogan goes on: “Tell me that doesn’t look like feds. Right?”
“It looks like the 101st Airborne,” Taibbi responds.
“Bro, look at this! These guys are all runners!” Rogan exclaims. “These guys look like they just got out of BUD/S.”
“I mean—“ Taibbi begins.
“The fuck out of here,” Rogan says.
“—they could be real?” Taibbi finishes, with a genuine inquisitory inflection.
“Right.”
“They could. They could be real.”
“Listen, Matt Taibbi. I’m an unreliable source. I’m a comedian. But looking at that, I’m calling bullshit.”
So let’s see what just happened here.
The main effect of what Rogan does is minimize to the audience any sense of danger or urgency toward Patriot Front as an organization. He has shown a very brief clip in order to focus on the outward appearance of the group, not to plumb their ideology. He judges the book by the cover; this is done explicitly.
Comcomitant, he denigrates the men by transferring the derision that the audience, were they made up of a random cross-section of the public, would hold against a racist separatist group and he redirects that derision onto the amorphous but real entity of federal agents. His language (“the feds”) is shortened into an abbreviation, which allows Rogan in his choice of rhetoric to be global in its application and also to bring in other allusions (the “deep state” is evoked here, probably, in Rogan’s true target audience). So there is an emotional deflection from a group despised by the wider society (white supremacists) to an specific hated target of the true in-group (sympathizers of these hate groups, or the people that this media corridor is actively attempting to recruit).
Then, curiously, Rogan switches to praising the physiques of “the feds”. This criticism, leveled not only by Rogan but others such as Lauren Boebert, ostensibly looks and feels like a teasing of how slovenly white supremacists are, but that is not what is accomplished here. What Rogan does is use a fulcrum to rhetorically cast a false image of white supremacists as being guys with stereotypical dad bods who thus are helpless and ineffectual, when in reality—on the very screen in front of us—we see white supremacists who have been trained and disciplined in arenas that probably highly stress the maintenance of one’s physical strength.
On the other side of that fulcrum, as I stated before, this at the same time operates as a compliment toward the people on the screen, as they are necessarily contrasted in the viewer’s mind (physically fit) against Rogan’s false description (slovenly, out-of-shape). They are necessarily elevated, by simple contrast. It’s the halo effect.
Taibbi, for his part, does himself no favors. The clip is damning. He does not stand up in the face of obvious false casting. He’s supposed to be a journalist. He knows better, which would go a long way in explaining his mannerisms.
Taibbi, with his half-hearted remonstration of Rogan and his similarly weak demand not for the truth but the mere consideration of the possibility of the truth, actually reinforces Rogan’s performance. He reinforces to the viewer that the clip is up for interpretation. (Reference the Asch experiment, if you’re not already familiar.)
Rogan returns with his neutralizing statement: “I’m an unreliable source. I’m a comedian.” With these words, Rogan inoculates himself against any criticism against his use of his platform to mislead his viewers. Simultaneously, he makes himself invisible to the audience rhetorically, and the opinion he then leaves is free-floating and thus can be absorbed without testing for accuracy. The audience is already primed to be entertained. They are not in the frame of mind to think critically.
All of this is accomplished in about fifteen seconds.
Just last month, the Washington Post had an article by Philip Bump that took a very incisive look at one of Tucker Carlson’s broadcasts. Tucker Carlson is in the same media corridor, from what I can tell, as Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, Steven Crowder, et cetera. Carlson himself comes across—have you ever noticed this?—as a racist Andy Rooney. (The more I think about it, the more I’m pretty sure that’s the angle he’s going for.) Joe Rogan has that same kind of kitsch, but he comes across as the everyday “average” guy, in the “dumb guy” archetype occupied culturally by Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin. (Yes, I’m calling Rogan a cartoon. He’s an intentional buffoon.)
Bump’s article was lengthy, and he finished by remarking that the unpacking takes far longer than the implementation of the rhetoric in the first place. Dismantling takes time:
And it’s this every night. Every night. This cascade of accusations and world-ending conspiracies, of a democracy on the brink or already gone at the hands of the left. It’s unending and unchallenged. It’s unchallengeable, given how long it takes just to walk through those 10 minutes.
But we must take the time. It is only by circumventing their message at the source will we be able to break the transmission between the nerve center of this fascist movement and the people they mean to recruit. We must highlight how they are effecting their message. We must examine the mechanisms.
