The Great COVID-19 Red-pilling

A Bad Joe Rogan 'Joke' Highlighted A Predictable Post-Pandemic Political Dynamic

Joe Rogan, giving “discarded Gulden’s mustard from last Labor Day’s barbecue at the bottom of the garbage pail” vibes in his new special Burn The Boats

Joe Rogan, the influential podcaster, UFC host, and sometimes comedian, debuted his latest comedy special this weekend, Burn The Boats. I am not a Rogan fan, so I won’t watch it. I will never fully understand his popularity. However, friends who liked or were indifferent to him watched the special and found it lacking. The jokes, they tell me, are stale, focusing on the same “anti-woke” and “anti-trans” stuff performers like he and Dave Chappelle have been relying on for laughs for half a decade or more now.

One segment that stood out to my friends was about COVID-19. It echoed something I’ve been saying since the pandemic. Rogan makes fun of people who were supportive of COVID-19 mitigation efforts like vaccines and social distancing, describing them as the real people “lost” to COVID, as opposed to, I guess, the people who died of the disease. Here’s how it went:

"COVID was just so strange. We lost a lot of people during COVID, and most of them are still alive. There are a lot of people that I don’t fuck with anymore. Before COVID, I would have told you that vaccines are the most important invention in human history. After COVID, I’m like, 'I don’t think we went to the moon. I think Michelle Obama's got a dick. I think Pizzagate is real. I think there's direct energy weapons in Antarctica.' I'm just kidding — I don't think Michelle Obama’s got a dick, but I believe all of that other shit."

The joke, if you can call it that, triggered a discourse among progressives who have finally come around to accepting that many previously liberal-leaning people have shifted to the Right in the wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic and adopted a lot of QAnon-aligned insane ideas and conservative beliefs, even going so far as to back Donald Trump this year after not voting for him in either 2016 or 2020.

This was largely due to their opposition to COVID mitigation policies like masks, vaccine mandates, and school closures, especially into 2021, once vaccines were widely available, and the smug, self-righteous lecturing they got from progressives when they questioned the need for or effectiveness of them beyond the first wave. As a result, these people became negatively polarized against other liberal-leaning issues on race and identity, triggering panic over Critical Race Theory and transgender rights.

This isn’t the first time I warned about this dynamic. I almost got sucked into it myself and recognized about the problem as early as Jan. 6, 2021. For a year, people trusted Public Health, a liberal-coded authority, that what they were advising or encouraging our government to do was in their best interest and the best interest of their children and loved ones. As time passed, and parents began to see the damage done to their children’s educational and social development - combined with public health admitting they were winging it the entire time - these people became angry and vengeful. They increasingly felt that the regulations and mandates placed on them and their children made them pawns in a failed experiment. COVID-19 did not go away; it became more entrenched. A million Americans died anyway, very few of them children. It made people open to the theories that they and their children are also being used as guinea pigs in other social experiments thought up by liberal-leaning academics, which made panics like Critical Race Theory and alleged “grooming” by LGBTQ activists more believable. This is the cusp of Rogan’s “joke.”

Some of these people even supported COVID-19 mitigation early on. As late as February 2021, I was lectured about how "We have to do all this to save lives for as long as it takes." By the end of 2022, some of the same people wanted to send Dr. Anthony Fauci to The Hague.

These parents were taking advice from public health because they were scared and confused and didn't know the correct answers. They placed their faith in them. After seeing what happened to their kids and their schools, parents felt like they were misinformed and used to push an agenda. Now, they don't trust anyone with authority who is liberal-coded, only conspiracy theorists and grifters like Rogan, who told them from the start that all of it was BS.

Progressives counter this dynamic by saying we had to do these mitigations well into 2021. Anyone still angry about them is selfish, focusing on their personal needs and comfort rather than the larger community's and humanity’s needs.

Obviously.

How often does it need to be explained to progressives that most people always prioritize their needs over "the community?" No one will listen if you do not speak to their personal needs. We are not, nor have we ever been, a “community-focused” society. Our communities are not very cohesive, and the ones that appear to be are conservative-leaning: Think churches and social clubs like Kiwanis. If people do things that benefit the “community,” they will do so when it also benefits them and frame it as a “community issue,” as progressives often do with their own pet issues, like student loan forgiveness.

"Community health" is a dead-end street in a free society. Nearly every public health rule, outside of targeted food and medicine safety regulations, is merely a suggestion that most people do not follow. Very few mandates are placed on the general population, and the few that exist, like vaccine mandates, are controversial and have many caveats to allow people to opt-out. People aren’t forced to eat their hamburgers well done, nor do they limit themselves to one drink at the bar. We don’t apply SPF 30 sunblock every time we go out in the sun and reapply every two hours, and we don’t fine or arrest people for not doing it.

Other countries have some mandates on their population. Canada mandates that all hamburgers be made well done. When I was in Ontario in 2014, a waitress told me she knew when her customers were American because they picked fights over that. Even then, the chef broke the law and made it medium well, not because I demanded it, but because he thought the mandate was stupid and knew I wouldn’t report him. People generally don’t like being told what to do and what to think, even if it’s something they would do or believe in their own free will. They’d rather be given the options and decide for themselves. Progressives not only abandoned that concept during and after the pandemic, they became openly hostile to it. As a result, Americans became openly hostile to them and everything they believed in.

Right-wing grifters and conspiracy theorists reaped the benefits.