During Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, some Democrats warned the presidential nominee about her messaging to voters, with others urging her to tell the “progressive left” to “fuck off.” On “Offline with Jon Favreau,” host Jon Favreau asked Johnson why he believes the image of the Democratic Party has shifted, noting that Democrats were once seen as “cool.”

“When I was growing up, if anybody was going to get mad at something that was said on a comedy special or on Saturday Night Live, it was going to be a Republican. It was the moral majority. It was when Christian conservatism was such an enormous force in American politics, even more so than it is today,” Johnson said.

“Something has switched where we all know this, that if something gets said on Saturday night live that is off-color or offensive or outrageous or whatever today, it’s going to be Democrats getting mad at it. I think part of this is it’s not the party itself,” Johnson added. “It’s not Nancy Pelosi necessarily doing this or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, but there’s kind of this blob. There’s kind of this progressive blob of activists and academics and nonprofit workers and journalists. They do a lot of scolding and shaming and, and lecturing about all kinds of topics. This is what colors people’s perceptions of Democrats.”

Johnson went on to say that because Harris didn’t campaign on progressive issues like “DEI” or “niche trans issues,” he didn’t blame her for the party’s progress, noting that he doesn’t believe there will be progressive cultural influences like Rogan.

“I don’t blame Kamala Harris for this individually. I don’t think this is her personal fault because I didn’t see her going out and campaigning on like DEI or saying ‘Latinx’ or niche trans issues or whatever the culture war is right now. But it’s these kind of stand in Democrats, these people who cement the view in the public eye of what a Democrat is, but who have no formal allegiance to the party,” Johnson continued.

“This ultimately is one of the reasons that I think the whole conversation about, you know, can there be a progressive Joe Rogan? I don’t think that it’s possible because I don’t think that Joe Rogan, you know, decided to leave and become a right winger of his own accord,” Johnson said. “I think we pushed him out. I think this was an active choice that a lot of people made that we don’t want or need Joe Rogan because, as has been observed by many people, if you want to — kind of a Democratic Joe Rogan, a Joe Rogan character who is sympathetic to Democratic ideas, we already had one, and his name was Joe Rogan.”

Just over a week before Election Day, Rogan released a nearly three-hour episode with President-elect Donald Trump, discussing his plans for a second administration and reflecting on his first years in the White House. The night before the election, the popular podcast host endorsed the former president, stating that billionaire Elon Musk had made a strong case on his behalf.

Since the election, Democrats have struggled to understand how the vice president lost both the Electoral College and popular vote to Trump, with MSNBC’s Jen Psaki on Sunday stating that the party is in the “wilderness” with “no clear leader.”

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The Harris campaign had explored the possibility of appearing on Rogan’s podcast in an attempt to increase her support among male voters, Reuters reported on Oct. 15. Rogan, on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” said he accepted the “restrictions,” but made it clear that there would be no editing of the interview.

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“There was a few restrictions of things they didn’t want to talk about, but I said, ‘I don’t give a fuck.’ I go, ‘Get her in here, like whatever you want to talk about.’ And they want to know if I edit,” Rogan said. “I’m like, ‘There’s not going to be any editing, there’s no editing. We’re not going to edit.’”

“Yeah, that’s the same thing they asked us. ‘Is there an edit?’” fellow podcast host Theo Von responded.

Rogan posted on X on Oct. 29 that the Harris campaign had wanted him to “travel to her” to record an interview, but that he deeply believed it would be better for the vice president to appear in his Austin, Texas studio. He also said on an Oct. 30 episode of his podcast that he extended an “open invitation” to the Harris campaign while she was in Texas for an Oct. 25 rally, but that she did not take him up on it.

“She had an opportunity to come … You could look at this and you could say, ‘Oh, you’re being a diva,’ but she had an opportunity to come here when she was in Texas. And I literally gave them an open invitation,” he asserted at the time. “I said, ‘Anytime.’ I said, ‘If she’s done at 10:00, we’ll come back here at 10:00.’ I go, ‘I’ll do it at 9:00 in the morning, I’ll do it at 10:00 p.m., I’ll do it at midnight if she’s up, she wants to, you know, drink a Red Bull and fuckin’ party on.’”

President-elect Donald Trump appeared on Rogan’s podcast on Oct. 25, recording a three-hour episode that has amassed over 47 million views on YouTube as of Friday.

“I just wanted to talk … I feel like you give someone a couple of hours and you start talking about anything, I’m [going to] see the pattern of the way you think,” Rogan said Friday. “I’m gonna see the way you process ideas. I’m gonna see whether or not you’re calculated or whether you’re just free. Or are you comfortable with you or are you projecting things?”

The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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In the last few months of the election cycle, corporate media and Vice President Harris’ campaign upped their rhetoric against Trump, with President Joe Biden calling him to be “locked up” and Vice President Kamala Harris calling him a fascist. On “The Joe Rogan Experience,” the podcast host began by calling out how Republican turnout for the former president was “too big to rig,” before Smith jumped in to compare the race to former President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.

“So, turns out, voting works. It’s real. As much as we fucking thought they had it rigged, as much as we thought there was shenanigans and bullshit and it’s just a puppet show and there’s no way anybody could buck this system, turns out, voting is still real,” Rogan said. “And clearly he was too big to rig.”

Polls in October between Trump and Harris continued to show a dead heat between the two candidates, with The New York Times/Siena College final poll showing there was just one-point separating the two. Smith went on to note that despite polls and political pundits claiming it was a tight race, Trump won both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

“And it was like that with Trump where it’s like, all the signs are that he’s clearly running away with this. But then every single poll told you, ‘No, this is the closest election of your lifetime,’” Smith continued. “And then it was just, there was a very interesting feeling to see it and be like, ‘Oh, okay, I’m not crazy. I was observing all the things I was observing.’”

Rogan also added how the media gaslit voters, comparing Trump to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and other authoritarian regimes. In late October, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, John Kelly, told The New York Times and The Atlantic that Trump “met the definition of a fascist” and reportedly admired figures like Hitler, leading the way for corporate media to continue their rhetoric and pushing Harris to echo the sentiments at her town hall event with CNN.

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“The media gaslit us to the absolute limits of their ability. The absolute limits. Joy Reid spent the entire time she was discussing Trump the other day, comparing him to Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, talking about a right-wing authoritarian regime, as if he had never been president for four years and didn’t behave like any of those things,” Rogan responded.

“As if the economy wasn’t booming, as if people weren’t making more money, as if we weren’t involved in any new conflicts overseas, no new wars. I could point to a lot of things Trump did in his four years that I think were bad, but they were things that were similar to Obama and Bush. I bet he could point to them too,” Rogan said.

Smith responded by stating that the corporate media and Democratic Party was only hurting themselves by relying on “lies,” calling out how they attempted to keep their control of the White House throughout the campaign cycle.

“Look, there’s obviously a huge series of these things where the Democrat establishment and the corporate media, but I repeat myself, it’s death by a thousand self-inflicted wounds. But it is almost as if— It’s like their whole thing relies on lies. It’s just all lies,” Smith said. “They have their eyes shut and their fingers in their ears, and they’re going, no, no, no, no, no, no. Nope. We’re just pretending reality is the thing we want it to be.”

“They don’t want to get slowed down by this force that is objective reality,” Smith added. “And so all of it, whether it’s Joe Biden’s sharpest attack, Kamala Harris’s joy, Donald Trump is Hitler, Tony Hinchcliffe was a man at an event who made some comments.”

Prior to Biden dropping out of the race, Republicans had highlighted to Democrats and corporate media how Biden’s mental fitness appeared to be deteriorating. However, Democrat lawmakers pushed back against the callouts until his debate against the former president in June when many began to question if Biden could handle another four years in office.

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Rogan’s plans to conduct a one-on-one interview with Harris on his popular podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” fell apart after Rogan denied the Harris campaign’s request for him to travel out to the vice president and only interview her for the duration of one hour, the podcaster said on X. Khanna said Harris made a campaign mistake by not appearing on the podcast to make her platform known to Rogan’s millions of listeners.

“I’m confident we’re gonna rebuild in 2026 and we’ll win back the White House in 2028 and we gotta listen, we gotta go on some of these podcasts, I was just on “All In [with Chris Hayes] saying we should’ve done, in my view, Joe Rogan, go on all the podcasts and listen to what we need to know and and have a compelling economic message,” Khanna told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki. “But I’m still very hopeful about the party and our future.”

An undecided voter ultimately chose to support Trump over Harris because she did not appear on Rogan’s podcast, MSNBC correspondent Gadi Schwartz said Tuesday. Rogan’s show has over 14 million Spotify followers and 18.3 million YouTube subscribers, and has an audience of 80% male viewers, with 51% falling between the ages of 18-34, according to Edison Research.

President-elect Donald Trump appeared on the podcast for an Oct. 26 interview spanning nearly 3 hours, which garnered over 46.7 million views as of Thursday. Rogan endorsed Trump on Monday, just one day before the election.

The president-elect defeated Harris early Wednesday and currently holds 295 electoral votes, with Arizona and Nevada yet to be called.

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In recent weeks, the popular podcast host has separately interviewed Trump and his running mate, Republican Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, to discuss their policy platform and thoughts on the campaign. Rogan endorsed Trump to X (formerly known as Twitter) after his interview with billionaire Elon Musk was released, applauding the SpaceX and Tesla founder for his case supporting Trump before.

“If it wasn’t for him we’d be fucked,” Rogan wrote of Musk. “He makes what I think is the most compelling case for Trump you’ll hear, and I agree with him every step of the way. For the record, yes, that’s an endorsement of Trump. Enjoy the podcast,” Rogan wrote.

The great and powerful @elonmusk.
If it wasn't for him we'd be fucked. He makes what I think is the most compelling case for Trump you'll hear, and I agree with him every step of the way.
For the record, yes, that's an endorsement of Trump.
Enjoy the podcast pic.twitter.com/LdBxZFVsLN

— Joe Rogan (@joerogan) November 5, 2024

In August, reports claimed Rogan had endorsed former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during an episode on his podcast, after praising the then-candidate, according to Deadline. However, the podcast host later took to X to state that his comments were not an endorsement, but just expressing his appreciation for Kennedy’s civility in politics.

“For the record, this isn’t an endorsement. This is me saying that I like RFKjr as a person, and I really appreciate the way he discusses things with civility and intelligence. I think we could use more of that in this world,” Rogan wrote at the time.

Rogan’s interview with Trump on Oct. 25 has garnered over 45 million views on YouTube, while J.D. Vance’s episode has reached 14 million views. In addition to hosting Republican candidates, Rogan offered to have Vice President Kamala Harris on his show, telling Trump during their episode that he wanted to discuss her policies with her.

Despite the offer, Rogan later revealed that Harris’ campaign missed their “opportunity” to sit down with him while she was in Texas. The podcast host wrote on X that her team had wanted him to travel to her, even though he had offered to host her at his Austin studio while she was attending a rally in Texas.

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Americans are tired of talking heads and the opinions of editorialists masquerading as journalists. But this should not be confused with declining interest in news or politics; viewers are simply moving to channels where they can get an unfiltered view of the candidates from personalities they trust.

If there is one clear lesson from the 2024 election cycle, it’s that candidates for public office must be prepared to engage in this new media landscape to stay competitive, especially on long-form podcasts.

The last time we had a shift this significant was 1960, when America saw the first televised presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. The Kennedy-Nixon debate underscored the power of television to shape public perception.

Remember, past is prologue. Take, for example, Donald Trump’s appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Already, it’s racked up about 45 million views—just on YouTube alone. Trump’s interview with Theo Von received 14 million views. For her part, Kamala Harris’ appearance on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast received 733,000 views and she received 665,000 views on the “All the Smoke” podcast.

While traditional media audiences are shrinking, these appearances have outperformed the average audiences of these podcasts oftentimes 10 to 1. Remarkably, the candidates’ episodes are even outpacing episodes featuring internationally known Hollywood celebrities.

Voters are hungry to hear from the candidates on an unfiltered, authentic platform, and podcasts are filling that need.

This shift is redefining how viable candidates will approach media going forward. Those who want to succeed in politics but are afraid, or unable, to allow the public a view into who they really are going to have a ceiling on their career if they don’t do long-form interviews.

Political campaigns are going to change in two ways due to this dynamic.

1. Candidates need to get comfortable in their own skin, open up and answer personal questions about heartache, addiction, and what makes their spouse smile. This open, honest, and unvarnished content mirrors what the public is receiving in their social media feeds already, so it makes sense that they are demanding the same transparency from their political leaders.
2. It’s going to transform the way political professionals engage with the electorate. According to GWI, a consumer research company, the “typical” internet user spends almost 2.5 hours each day using social media platforms, equating to more than one-third of their total time online. As a result, campaign resources should shift to talking to the electorate where they are spending their time, which is on their phone. That is where people are getting their news, listening to podcasts, vegging out, and forming opinions about who they will vote for.

The reason these podcasters and creators carry so much influence is because of the community and trust they build with their audience. As James Clear, author of The New York Times bestseller of “Atomic Habits,” says about changing opinions, “Facts don’t change our minds. Friendship does.”

This election year, I was part of an effort that enlisted thousands of podcasters and social media personalities to encourage unregistered and low propensity voters to engage in the political process. Content creators in coordination with Vote4America delivered billions of impressions to tens of millions of voters. The posts calling on people to engage in the election significantly overperformed the average post of the creator, much like the success of the Trump and Harris podcast appearances.

We won’t know the full effect of all this content until all the votes are counted, but we can already see that 8.5% of all early votes are being cast by previously eligible first-time voters, meaning they are of age to have voted in past elections but decided not to.

The authenticity and trust of these podcasters and content creators is clearly having an effect on voter behavior.

What Jeff Bezos got wrong was his slight at podcasts as “unresearched.” The public clearly disagrees.

Americans are choosing podcasts over Bezos’ newspaper as their trusted source of news and information. Traditional media and candidates for office now must grapple with the new expectations of the electorate: unfiltered, unedited, authentic content.

Trump, who enacted tariffs on steel and aluminum in 2018 during his presidency, sat with the podcaster in a nearly three-hour long episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan asked Trump if he was “serious” about using tariffs to offset the elimination of income taxes.

“To me, the most beautiful word — and I’ve said this the past couple of weeks, in the dictionary today — is the word tariff,” Trump told Rogan. “It’s more beautiful than love, it’s more beautiful than any — it’s the most beautiful word. This country can become rich with the use, the proper use, of tariffs.”

Trump said he would impose a 200% tariff on John Deere’s tractors if it closed an American factory and moved production to Mexico in September.

“Did you just float out the idea of getting rid of income taxes and replacing it with tariffs?” Rogan asked. “Were you serious about that?”

“Why not?” Trump responded. “Our country was the richest, relatively, in the 1880s and 1890s, a president who was assassinated named McKinley, he was the tariff king. He spoke beautifully of tariffs. His language was really beautiful: We will not allow the enemy to come in and take our jobs and take our factories and take our workers and take our families unless they pay a big price and the big price is tariffs.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has claimed in ads and in speeches that Trump’s plan to impose tariffs would act as a “national sales tax” and insisted that it would cost American families $4,000 a year in higher prices, the Wall Street Journal reported.

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She has six employees. When she was fired by NBC in 2018, she believed that it was the end of her career. She went to dark places in her mind.

But she bounced back with her own broadcasting company and has never been happier or more influential.

The same story has been told by Tucker Carlson, whose network is gigantic and whose influence is far beyond even the heights that he obtained at Fox in the old days. I have no direct knowledge of how many people work for his personal channel, but it is a reasonable guess that it is no more than a dozen.

Everyone knows about the success and reach of Joe Rogan’s show. Apart from that, there are many thousands more with influence in their own sectors of reach. The share of influence dominated by legacy seems to be falling dramatically. You can detect their influence in this election season in which candidates are working the podcast circuit.

You might chalk this up to technology: Everyone has the capacity now to make content and distribute it. Therefore, of course, people do it.

The real story, however, is more complicated.

A new poll from Gallup offers an intriguing look. The latest polls show trust in major media is at an all-time low. It’s fallen from a post-Watergate high in 1976 of 72 percent to 31 percent today. That is an enormous slide, impossible to dismiss as mere technological change. Along with that, the poll documents dramatic losses of trust in government and essentially all official institutions.

The loss of trust has hit all age groups but more profoundly affects people younger than 40 years old. These are folks who have grown up with alternatives and developed a sophisticated understanding of information flows, and are deeply suspicious of any institution that seeks control over public culture.

Gallup stated: “The news media is the least trusted group among 10 U.S. civic and political institutions involved in the democratic process. The legislative branch of the federal government, consisting of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, is rated about as poorly as the media, with 34 percent trusting it.”

In contrast, “majorities of U.S. adults express at least a fair amount of trust in their local government to handle local problems (67 percent), their state government to address state problems (55 percent), and the American people as a whole when it comes to making judgments under our democratic system about the issues facing the country (54 percent).”

It seems based on this poll that, in people’s hearts and minds, we are defaulting back to the America of Alexis de Tocqueville, a network of self-governing communities of friends and neighbors rather than a centrally managed and controlled monolith. The farther the institutions get from people’s direct experiences, the less they are trusted. That is how it should be, even aside from other considerations.

In this case, the causal factors are not only the distance and not only the technology that allows for alternatives. Legacy media has been so aggressively partisan for at least nine years that it has alienated vast swaths of the viewing audience. Top executives have known about this problem for a very long time and worked to fix it, but they face tremendous pressure from within, from reporters and technicians with Ivy educations and a dedication to woke ideology.

The New York Times after 2016 attempted to repair the damage from having so completely mishandled and miscalled the election. It hired new editors and writers, but it was only a matter of time before they were driven out in a reminder to the top brass that there was a cultural revolution afoot, and that the personal is the political and visa-versa.

The newspaper defaulted back to extreme partisanship, leaving owners and managers to figure out other paths to sustaining profitability.

As a result, it appears that an entire industry is in the process of a long meltdown with no available fixes. Huge audiences have turned away from it toward alternatives that are not necessarily partisan on the other side but simply display a dedication to telling facts and truths about which actual readers care.

A question has long mystified me: Is this loss of trust entirely because of a change in media bias, or is it that new technological options have fully revealed what might always have been there but was not widely known? I don’t have the answer to that but it is worth some reflection.

When I was a kid, there were exactly three channels on television and one local newspaper. There was never a chance to see The New York Times except perhaps at the public library. The nightly news came on at 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. It lasted for 30 minutes. It opened with international news, moved to national news, turned to sports, and then the local affiliate took over with local news and weather.

There was perhaps 10 minutes per day of national news on three separate channels, each reporting more or less the same thing. That was it. People in those days chose their station based on whether they liked the voice and personality of the broadcaster. News media was highly trusted. But was that trust based on reliable and excellent reporting, or simply a reflection of all that people did not know?

In those days, my own father was deeply distrustful of what he saw on television. Somehow, he intuited that Richard Nixon was being railroaded by the Watergate scandal. He theorized that someone was out to get him, not for bad things he had done, but for the good he had done and had planned to do. He preached this opinion constantly and it set him apart from all conventional wisdom. Indeed, as a young man I knew for sure that my father was the outlier: None of my friend’s parents agreed and none of my teachers did, either.

Since then, much has come out that seems to reinforce my father’s views.

If Watergate happened in today’s world, there would be a huge explosion of opinions in all directions, with motives of all actors pushed out on every channel, and there would be widespread competition to find the real story. We certainly would not be relying on two relatively inexperienced reporters at The Washington Post.

I happen to believe that this is a good thing, even though it has come with a loss of trust. Maybe the old trust was not nearly as merited as people thought, simply because there were so few options. As the years went on, there were even more sources, starting with PBS but moving to CNN and C-SPAN. After the web came online and social media took off, that’s when the veil was really pulled back and media wholly transformed.

People on all sides of the political spectrum today express profound regret for this change. Former presidential candidate John Kerry has said that today’s media environment makes governing impossible, and Hillary Clinton has floated the idea of criminal penalties for misinformation, a word tossed around so frequently these days but rarely defined as anything other than speech that some people do not like.

All told, the rise of alternative media has surely contributed to the decline in public trust in the mainstream media. This might not reflect a fundamental change in the bias of media sources but simply the reality that we are only now fully aware of what has always been true. In that case, we are better off seeing these trends as good news all around, provided that we have an attachment to seeing reality as it is. In any case, we all should.

Returning to the Kelly/Carlson business model: They are doing far more with fewer staff members than was ever thought possible. It’s a solid prediction that many legacy media companies will be downsizing in terms of personnel in the future. They can do more with less. And they can do it with more fairness and less bias. Economic realities will likely make it so.

The entire landscape of information and media economies is dramatically shifting. That is precisely why we are hearing ever more calls for censorship. Many elites long for the old days of canned and constructed narratives with no other options. But the well-documented loss of trust makes that little more than a pipe dream. It cannot and will not happen.

The only viable path to earning audience loyalty in our times is to write and speak with fact-based integrity. Trust has to be earned.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.