Media Pile-On Over Trump Win And Joe Rogan Effect Is A Demand For Surrender Dems Should Reject

The media pile-on in the aftermath of President-elect Donald Trump’s crushing victory over Vice President Kamala Harris has turned into a demand that Democrats surrender the very thing that underpins their reason for existing. It is a demand they should roundly reject.

The story of the morning Monday, and likely the story of the week, is the loud rejection among some Democratic talkers of a facet of Democratic politics that goes by many names: wokeness, cultural issues, identity, politics — all cheered on by a political media establishment, eager to jump on the losing side with both feet.

On CNN, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) was presented as the poster child for an overzealous enforcement of language policing, and influential CNN anchor Dana Bash accused Democrats of “intolerance” for trying to make Joe Rogan a toxic figure by criticizing politicians who went on his podcast.

Joe Scarborough spent Monday morning reading the entirety of a Maureen Dowd column bashing Democrats over the aforementioned “identity politics.”

In a similar vein, albeit a less nauseating one, MSNBC host and former White House press secretary Jen Psaki recommended that future Democratic candidates consider appearing on Rogan‘s show instead of rejecting it.

These examples form an excellent illustration of a broader discourse about Democrats needing to retreat from these sorts of issues in favor of more Clintonian “It’s the economy stupid”/triangulation on social issues-type politics.

Let’s take Moulton first.

Moulton told The New York Times, “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Over the weekend, Moulton did several interviews in which he addressed the comments, as he did when he told CNN’s Jessica Dean he was just “being authentic”:

Look, I was just speaking authentically as a parent about one of many issues where Democrats are just out of touch with the majority of Americans. And I stand by my position, even though I may not have used exactly the right words. And I’m willing to have this debate as I’ve been having with LGBTQ advocates and others. Some of whom agree with me and others who don’t, but we’re engaging in a thoughtful debate.

On the other hand, some of the people like you mentioned are just more interested in shaming fellow Democrats, shaming the majority of voters when they simply don’t meet their ideological purity test.

The congressman’s mistake is his premise that using the “not exactly right words” as some sort of meaningless technical infraction. But in this case and many others, the words being used matter more than anything.

Without Cohen conducting a clinic on proper transgender nomenclature, it is terms like “biological male” and “boys running over girls” that swim the same current as the misgendering and hateful language that others use that create an atmosphere of hostility that is unsafe for trans people. If you can’t speak about making your own children safe in a manner that also ensures that trans people are safe, maybe you’re just not that good at talking.

Moulton is a good entry point for the Rogan discourse because among the many things that make the Fear Factor host-turned-massively influential podcaster toxic to Democrats and liberals is his anti-trans rhetoric, which is often pegged to issues about sports.

Without turning this into a treatise about trans people in sports, there are legitimate issues about trans women competing in women’s sports that most liberals will acknowledge, and which most responsible athletic organizations have successfully navigated. But people who oppose trans women participating in women’s sports seem to have tremendous difficulty finding ways to express themselves without using lies and slurs and language they know to be transphobic.

It was a big part of Trump’s campaign and his stump speeches, and it’s a big part of Rogan’s catalog.

But Rogan also has a history of other bigoted comments, like the time he compared a Black neighborhood to Planet of the Apes:

Or as Dana Bash put it, “not great things.”

Trump and a host of unlikely allies that include Bill Maher and Charlamagne Tha God have spent a couple of years lending credence to the idea that Democrats lean too heavily into wokeness and identity politics without a clear and forceful rebuttal — and with lots of help from the media.

Part of the problem is that in order to call these euphemisms – identity politics, cultural issues, wokeness — what they are, Democrats need to be comfortable with telling an uncomfortable truth to 52% of the country. These terms are stand-ins for bigotry. That’s not a mystery to anyone, but to say it out loud is to court a shrinking chorus of “deplorables” coverage.

Does that suck? Yes. Does getting angry about it accomplish anything? So far, it has not. I am sympathetic to anyone who would say fuck Joe Rogan and the horse he rode in on, and I cannot imagine trying to say with a straight face that, calling a black neighborhood Planet of the Apes constitutes “not great things.”

But there needs to be a messenger to tell CNN anchors that slurring people who are subjected to outsize threat of violence and calling Black people apes are not trivial matters of nomenclature, and that the people at whom these words are directed should not be abandoned just because of an election loss that – while being characterized as a landslide is actually representative of a pretty even 51 and change to 48 and change split. But even if it had been much more overwhelming landslide, all Americans would still deserve protection, and would still deserve strong voices in power speaking up for them.

The problem that Democrats have had all along, since the civil rights realignment, is that they always end up running against human nature. That’s a tough thing for people to grapple with because it means alienating their constituents, their voters, or their audience., By focusing on protecting rights and pursuing equality, they are asking human beings to help someone that they view as other than themselves. Often that’s not even the case.

Often when rights are threatened or lost, the very people who supported the party that threatens those rights find out that the rights being protected, that they didn’t think affected them, actually do affect them. You saw that in the fight over abortion when people who voted for Trump found themselves in situations where they needed abortion and couldn’t get it. You see it now in people with migrant family members who are convinced that Trump won’t deport their loved ones even though he has promised to do so.

It is a difficult and abstract argument to make, especially when every other message people receive run counter to it. The media were relentless and covering the border as a hair-on-fire crisis, and the economy as the only issue that mattered — and within that inflation as the only economic metric that mattered.

Democrats are desperate for some ray of hope. Abandoning “wokeness” is an appealingly simple panacea — the very phraseology of which betrays everything Democrats are supposed to stand for. The right wing has turned the term into a derisive slur rather than a crucial watchword in the fight against bigotry and for equality. Be awake to threats like police brutality, assaults on rights, encroaching bigoted violence — against Black people, against trans people, against Jews, against Palestinians. Be awake to movements that erase Black history and glorify pro-slavery figures.

But as we often say, facts don’t care about your feelings, and the fact is there isn’t much of a ray of hope to be had at this point. Trump will likely appoint Supreme Court justices who will cement a Trump majority for at least a generation. He will control the Senate and very likely the House of Representatives and will be able to force through whatever he wants. And if you think a national abortion ban is off the table, think again. The Supreme Court he engineered has also given him near complete immunity.

The only thing we can do now is essentially make noise. We can’t stop anything he wants to do. And if the media has their way, the first noise we will be make will be to tell everyone who supports us to “drop dead.”

So what should Democrats do? I think Psaki is on the right track when she says they should “listen” — although I think her premise also illustrates what’s wrong with the media — it’s not that they don’t listen, it’s to whom they listen.

The media spent four years obsessively quizzing every Trump voter they could get their hands on, while the number of Biden or Harris voters that ever got interviewed could fit around the table on CNN‘s morning show. It doesn’t look like this is going to change much.

But if any of you are reading this, 48% and change of this country voted for Harris. They didn’t deserve to be completely ignored for the last four years, and they don’t deserve to be ignored for the next four.

We in the media shouldn’t just be listening to people like Rep. Moulton who may have supported Harris, but feel the tug of the anti-woke crowd. We should listen to the people who feel threatened by a Trump presidency.

And Democrats should continue to speak up for people. But we are also not getting anywhere by ignoring all the Seth Moultons out there and we cannot expect people with legitimate fears to try not to be so scoldy when they fight for their rights.

The best thing Democrats can do is try to be an intermediary between those people and people like Moulton who don’t understand what they are facing. We should be welcoming to Moulton. We should try to explain that most schools enact policies that protect student safety while following laws against discrimination, we should also explain that eligibility requirements for sports leagues are not the purview of the federal government. These are local, state, and private business decisions. We need Moulton on our side.

And Jen is also right, we do need to consider the value of going into spaces like the Joe Rogan podcast or Fox News. There is nothing to prevent our next candidate from confronting Rogan about his past comments in a way that makes clear we don’t cosign.

But we can also expose his audience, and the Fox News audience, to a more persuasive vision of inclusion and equality and justice, and to the facts that they have been so thoroughly denied.

It’s not going to be easy, and it might not even work, but we are long past the days when Democrats could afford to triangulate and count on their coalition to hold. And it’s the right thing to do.

Watch above via CNN.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.