Joe Rogan Experience: Is Bari Weiss really taking Rogan to Israel?

Let me blow your mind right now: that thing with the kids wearing the MAGA hats and the Native American activist and the Black Israelites during the March for Life? That was more than 18 months ago.

How is that possible? Forced to guess, I would have told you that that happened like last Fall.

How else are you going to blow my mind? Are you going to try and tell me that people don’t like that song “Blurred Lines” any more?

The MAGA-kid flap realization hit me listening to Episode #1228 of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, posted on January 21, 2019, then opinion page editor Bari Weiss comes on just as everyone is obsessed with that encounter between the 16-year old southern Catholic kid and the Native American activist, at the March for Life in Washington, D.C.

A.K.A. “Bored writers discuss one photo.”

Weiss and Rogan open there, but she mostly ends up talking to Rogan a lot about the special case of discrimination against and hostility to Jewish people, what makes it unique and why she focuses on it. Even that probably represents less than 25% of their total three hour conversation, but I bring it up at the top here because she asked Rogan to go to Israel with her and he says he’s game to do it.

Besides a global pandemic: Ms. Weiss, Mr. Rogan, why have you two not gone to Israel together yet?

Just in case you don’t know about the two: Joe Rogan is the biggest podcaster in the world and Bari Weiss has been an opinion writer for a long time. She recently left The New York Times, which is a point I will circle back to.

Rogan and Weiss bond over the fact that they have been called gateway drugs to the crazy town of American ideology, despite the fact that both of them espouse a lot of pretty liberal-to-progressive viewpoints.

Gateway kids

What they both have in common is that they are both hard to put in an ideological bucket. With most Americans, if you get their answer to almost any political question you can reliably guess their answer on almost every other political question.

Like even something ridiculous like: “What do you think of Kansas City’s electric trolley?” The answer to that question, just the tone of it, will clue you in to who they will vote for in the next election.

Weiss and Rogan though, neither of them are like that. Most members of the current commentariat like to take reliably predictable stances. Not these two.

Which freaks the broader commentariat out, so both of them are treated as enemies.

Now one of the most vilified opinion writers might get to bend the ear of the world’s most popular talker over a very long weekend on the most controversial hunk of land on Earth. What an alliance that could become.

And why? Because they started chatting about the Middle East on a podcast.

Resignation letter

So a major theme of Weiss and Rogan’s conversation is people’s unwillingness to deal honestly with ideas, to confront complicated questions and edge cases and to maintain relationships with people that they otherwise have disagreements about. It gets into all sorts of contemporary philosophical questions about the experiment of America and what it means to be a citizen of this country.

It’s three hours long, go listen to it.

It’s worth listening to now though because Weiss just very publicly exited from The New York Times over precisely all of these issues.