Comedian and podcast host Joe Rogan’s endorsement of Bernie Sanders — and the subsequent outrage in gay, trans, and other communities over Sanders’s embrace of the endorsement — is one of the most intricate and multifaceted political controversies of recent months.
Rogan is known for his stints on the NBC shows NewsRadio and Fear Factor but more recently for The Joe Rogan Experience, an astonishingly popular podcast featuring hours-long interviews with comedians, politicians, journalists, and others — including an interview with Sanders that has racked up 11 million views on YouTube alone.
But Rogan’s popularity is owed in part for his vocal rejection of “political correctness,” which can take the form of transphobia (he once called trans woman mixed martial artist Fallon Fox “a fucking man”), Islamophobia (hosting guests like the far-right Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, who used his appearance to argue that Muslims are too inbred for the US to accept as…
