Spreading LEFTIST IDEAS is Actually a GOOD THING /// Ben Burgis on Joe Rogan

Discussion with Professor Ben Burgis, from Give them an Argument, about his recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience. A socialist message going out to millions of people is something we on the left should want. You don't have to compromise your ideals to have a conversation with people that you don't fully agree with. Effectively spreading our ideas to a wider group should be the strategy, not virtue signaling and leftist purity tests.

(from Episode 1334)

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I can’t tell you where Joe Rogan’s studio is — his “guest information sheet” specifies that I have to keep that part confidential. I can tell you that when I showed up for my interview, I was greeted by a friendly and talkative nurse who was there to give a COVID test to everyone who walks in the door. While we waited for Joe to show up, I chatted with her for a while about everything from what my book is about to how she met her husband. I also talked for a while with a couple of guys I think I’ve since seen referred to in the press as “elite security guards.” One of them told me he likes to watch Cobra Kai in the morning while he exercises.

I was fairly nervous. Just to start with, I’d been watching Rogan on screens since the late 1990s when I was a regular viewer of Newsradio. (I’m very old.) For another, it’s a massive platform and if I said anything dumb millions of people would hear it. Finally, I knew there were a good number of people on the Left who wouldn’t like that I went on his show and talked to him. They might be OK with my decision to go on the show if I was planning to yell and denounce him, but I had no interest in doing that — I wanted to have a conversation where I pushed the kind of egalitarian political agenda that I deeply care about.

When Joe did show up, the conversation was worth the wait. I got to tell his giant audience about Medicare for All, about why the better working conditions teachers unions fight for are also better learning conditions for your kids, why the US Postal Service is important, why I support Bernie Sanders’s proposal to expand the postal service by offering basic banking services at the Post Office, why I’m so sure that Bernie Sanders would have won the 2016 election, why I don’t think the United States should play imperial world policeman having a role in diplomatic standoffs everywhere from South America to Ukraine, why economic inequality is bad in principle and bad for democracy, how the Mondragon federation of worker cooperatives work, and why we’d be better off in an economy where the norm was that businesses would be organized more like Mondragon than Amazon. And we got to spend a minute paying homage to my friend Michael Brooks.

Put that together with the fact that getting to spend three hours drinking bourbon and talking politics with the dude from Newsradio is just a very good time, and it was an afternoon well spent.

It wasn’t what I would consider a perfect conversation. There were times, especially in the second half of the discussion, when it would have been productive to either question assumptions that I disagreed with or at least refocus the conversation elsewhere. When the conversation did veer for a bit to hot-button social issues, it was more of a mixed bag. But there were still some great moments — for example he seemed to enthusiastically co-sign my argument that anti–Critical Race Theory laws are an unconscionable assault on free speech.

The bottom line: millions of people got to hear me and the world’s most popular podcaster spend at least an hour talking about core socialist policies.

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