The Squad by Ryan Grim

Author:Ryan Grim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Ocasio-Cortez, watching the fracas unfold, considered it handled poorly, though she supported the idea of reaching Rogan’s audience. “I thought the campaign making a video and amplifying [the endorsement] was not smart. Bernie going on was fine. But to make a whole video on an ‘endorsement’ that wasn’t really an endorsement when [Joe Rogan] alienates so many people and platforms alt right figures was just signing up for an insane amount of blowback. And then the ‘big tent’ response made things worse instead of actually responding to the grievance,” she texted. Twitter, AOC noted, was “probably the worst place to amplify that.”

Rogan faced weeks of attacks for transphobia and vowed he would never again endorse a political candidate. His guest lineup already leaned toward the right, but after the Sanders fight, his political guests were nearly all conservative. By the end of the campaign, he told his audience that, unlike in 2016, he’d be voting for Trump.

The appearance on Rogan’s show in August had been a revelation for Sanders. In April, he had appeared at a Fox News town hall in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, an old steel town, where the mostly white and aging blue-collar audience gave him raucous applause for his socialist agenda, startling even the network’s hosts. In mainstream coverage of the town hall, the takeaway had been the scandal of Sanders saying he supported the right of felons to vote—even, he said when pressed, the Boston Marathon bomber. But the event also demonstrated the appeal of Sanders and his agenda. The Rogan interview, though, had far more reach than the Fox town hall event.

Wherever Sanders went for the next several months after that, people would approach him and say they had heard him on Joe Rogan’s show and been intrigued by this or that point he had made. He was used to young people treating him like a rock star at rallies—“I’m like Mick Jagger,” he told his aide Ari Rabin-Havt once, half-joking, as young people swarmed his car outside the Capitol—but this was different. He traveled to Miami a few days after the interview for the National Association of Black Journalists conference and ate with Rabin-Havt that evening at a small Cuban restaurant. The owner, a Cuban American immigrant, told him she had heard the Rogan interview. Because of his self-description as a socialist, and her lifelong hostility to Castro, she had never liked Sanders, she said. But what he had said made sense, and she was going to take a closer look. “These conversations happened over and over again,” Rabin-Havt said.

The decision to post the video of Rogan’s endorsement had been made at a low level by Sanders’s social media team, but it’s likely the controversy would have raged whether Sanders promoted the clip on Twitter or not. The interview and the controversy, though, were a significant net positive for the campaign, and their internal polling showed his audience moving his way after the interview. Sanders had been hit in the fall by the Working Families Party controversy—including the letter denouncing racism in his ranks.

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