WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 2026
Joe Rogan, one columnist says: Our nation is in a world of hurt. It's amazing to see how many people seem to be lingering in various forms of denial.
As we noted yesterday, we thought David Brooks—a good, decent person—was lingering there, last Friday night, on the PBS NewsHour. Before we return to his puzzling conduct, Bret Stephens is attempting to help us see part of the mess we're all in.
Rather, Stephens outlines two parts of the existential mess we're all in.
Midway through his new column for the New York Times, Stephens describes the pair of titans who performed a three-hour podcast last week. No names are included in the passage posted below, though one titan will be easy to name.
For the record, Stephens is a man of the center right. This is the truth as he sees it:
Call the Veep, Agent Mulder!
[...]
The truth—that the most influential media figure in America today, with tens of millions of followers on social media, is a jocular bro with an Everyman affect who seems never to have encountered an idiotic or despicable conspiracy theory he isn’t willing to promote (moon-landing denial) or platform (Hitler revisionism). We are a nation that has moved at speed from the realm of fact colored by opinions to a kingdom of delusion infested with fear.
The truth—that the current vice president is by far the worst person ever to hold the office (move over, Aaron Burr, John C. Calhoun and Spiro T. Agnew). ...The prospect of this callow and sinister opportunist taking the place of the erratic buffoon now governing us may be the single scariest thought in world politics today.
It's easy to see who he's talking about in that second paragraph. In Stephens' opinion, JD Vance is a "callow and sinister opportunist" who is "by far the worst person ever to hold the office" of vice president.
Opinions on that will differ. Opinion will also differ on Stephens' description of President Trump as "the erratic buffoon now governing us."
Is President Trump an "erratic buffoon?" At present, opinions differ. In fact, they differ quite widely—but Vance is easy to spot in the passage we've posted.
More interesting, in our view, is the first paragraph we've posted. In that paragraph, Stephens describes "the most influential media figure in America today."
According to Stephens, who is that person? We'll give you his name:
Joe Rogan!
Is it possible that Stephens is right? Is it possible that Rogan—the former host of The Man Show—really is "the most influential media figure" in our flailing nation today?
At the time of the Vietnam War, it was widely believed that Walter Cronkite—a deeply experienced war correspondent—was the most influential such person.
(Before his work in World War II, he had served as Moscow bureau chief for CBS News.)
The deeply experienced Walter Cronkite was most influential then. Is it possible that Rogan—"a jocular bro with an Everyman affect"—holds that position today, as our flailing nation keeps starting and stopping its ongoing war with Iran?
Is it possible? Yes, it probably is. Yes, we suppose it's possible, though it would surely be hard to say.
That said, is Stephens' unflattering description of Rogan accurate? Because we've never listened to Rogan's podcasts, we can't quite tell you that.
We've never listened to Rogan! But on a daily basis, for years, we've watched the aggressive buffoonism performed on such corporate propaganda shows as The Five and Fox & Friends Weekend, mixed with the ugly aggression of the prehuman Gutfeld! program.
No serious nation can expect to survive the culture created by such undisguised garbage can "cable news" shows—or the garbage which flows, on an hourly basis, from our failing nation's assortment of deranged podcasters of both the left and the right.
What happened on last week's podcast, triggering this column by Stephens? Right at the start of his column, Stephens attempts to explain:
Call the Veep, Agent Mulder!
Somewhere around the two-hour mark in JD Vance’s nearly three-hour podcast interview last week with Joe Rogan, the pair got into a serious conversation about supernatural and extraterrestrial phenomena. By serious, I mean it in the sense that Rogan seemed to take the subject seriously while Vance cynically, or cretinously, or cravenly, or credulously or conspiratorially—or perhaps it’s all of the above—played along with him.
[...]
By this point, the two men had already propounded one conspiracy theory—that the Los Angeles mayoral election had been rigged (a claim previously debunked by a Trump-appointed federal prosecutor); followed by Vance’s accusation that Joe Biden’s staff got him to eat ice cream “in the most ridiculous, suggestive way imaginable” (a remarkable way of turning naked mendacity into adolescent prurience into another conspiracy theory); followed by an exchange about eating corn dogs in public (because, you know); followed by an argument about whether the Ten Commandments should be mandated in Texas public schools, in which neither man appeared to be aware that the commandments are not originally Christian.
We've omitted three examples of Vance's pronouncements concerning demons and the like. Regarding Vance's claim about the way Joe Biden ate ice cream, we'll tell you something Stephens probably doesn't know:
Back in the day, the brain-numbing stupidity about Joe Biden's eating of ice cream sprang full-blown from the empty head of Jesse Watters on a regular basis (along with so much more). On The Five, the other children would titter and chuckle, pretending that this inane behavior made sense.
(After that, it would often be time to over-talk Tarlov again.)
Watters co-hosts The Five each day, then hosts his own program, Jesse Watters Primetime. They're the two most-watched programs in the American "cable news" firmament—and Watters, the most-watched person in cable news, is a gender buffoon and undisguised tribal clown well past all the way down.
Out of madness of this sort, very bad politics grows. But on Friday evening's PBS NewsHour, David Brooks seemed blissfully unaware of the mess we're all in:
What, us worry? he said.
David Brooks is a good, decent person. Also, he's very bright. Tomorrow, we'll return to an ongoing mystery:
Why is the world—why on earth—did David Brooks say what he said?
Tomorrow: Jonathan Capehart's concern
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