While I'm not a fan of Conover ('Adam Ruins Everything' is a comedy wasteland as far as I'm concerned), from what I've seen of him on social media he seems like a good person and I appreciate what he's done to boost our movement by promoting ContraPoints (which was one of the better bits of his JRE podcast), but while I could only get through about a third of his appearance on Joe Rogan before giving up on experiencing the sheer agony of it, as far as I could tell he was squandering the chance to do what a far-enough left guest should have done on JRE for a long time.

Maybe I missed a point where Adam did this later in the podcast, but was there ever a moment where he criticised Joe for the far-right guests he's continued to have on? I know Adam tweeted that he shared the concerns from our camp about Rogan's enabling of this shit, but to not use this very rare privilege of actually being a left-winger on The Joe Rogan Experience not to bring Rogan to account for this is very disappointing to me.

Even if Adam's strategy was just to bring left-wing ideas to the right-leaning JRE audience (Kyle Kulinski expressed a similar intent to his two appearances on Rogan's show), I don't think he seemed much up to the task of that either. He tried to push back in barely effectual fashion to Rogan's toxic 'man-up' bullshit (and from what I saw later when Natalie came up, Rogan's pure ignorance of trans issues), but ended up achieving not much more than a tap on Joe's shoulder rather than actually providing a substantial challenge to Rogan's beliefs. Hell Adam seemed happy to laugh along to Joe's jokes about men complaining about hardship being 'bitches'.

If Natalie does get a chance to go on Rogan's show (unlike Dave Rubin I actually have hope Rogan might actually be happy to platform leftists), while I do trust her more than I do Adam, she's really got to do what Conover didn't here and challenge Rogan on this shit. I hope Nat also corrects Rogan's erroneous and harmful beliefs about trans people as well, and if I have to pick between her challenging his platforming of the far-right and challenging him on trans issues I'd pick the latter since it's more socially important, but I do also really think that there needs to be a reckoning of Rogan's tolerance of guests like Shapiro, Peterson and Douglas Murray etc, and any smart leftist going on JRE really needs to be the person to do this otherwise there might never be a better opportunity to hold Rogan accountable for this.