What’s the Hold Up Joe?

“Look. I’m not a right-wing conservative. I’m a right-wing populist. You either have left-wing populism or right-wing populism. I’m an economic nationalist and a populist. And that’s because I believe we don’t need total state control. What people need is a better piece of the action. “  – Steve Bannon

First and foremost, let’s put all the cards out on the table. We love us some Joe Rogan and The Joe Rogan Experience at Advanced Citizenship. We’re longtime fans. That’s why we’re getting down to brass tacks and addressing the elephant in the room – when is Joe going to have former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon on his show? It’s essentially been six years since Bannon became a household name and so far there’s been zero movement on this front. Zilch. Fungule. Bupkus. Nada. Nothing. 

If there’s one thing we’re absolutely certain of, it’s that it is most definitely not Bannon who’s not game here. As Bannon told Bill Maher during his second appearance on the Real Time with Bill Maher in 2018 (his first appearance was actually on the panel back in 2011, alongside the late Anthony Bourdain), a spot that came on the heels of Bannon getting disinvited from that year’s New Yorker ‘Festival of Ideas’ due to gutless editor David Remnick kowtowing (you can read Remnick’s sad, pathetic statement here) to former comedians-turned-woke crybaby hacks Judd Apatow, Jimmy Fallon, Jim Carrey, and Patton Oswalt (all of whom threatened to not attend if Bannon was, you got it, simply interviewed on stage):

You know, David Remnick chased me for a year to be on his podcast and he came to me and said ‘Hey, we’d be honored if you were in this festival of ideas. I said, ‘Fine. I don’t want compensation.’ But I like going into hostile audiences with tough interviewers. I do very little conservative media now. I do CNN. BBC. The Economist. Toughest interviewers. Toughest places. And [I] say, ‘Hey, no holds barred. Hostile audiences. Let’s get it on.’ It does sharpen the blade.

It wasn’t too long ago when Rogan’s platform was itself the idea festival of all idea festivals. Back in 2015-2016, he had fascinating guests on for hours, guests that other hosts were terrified to touch with a hundred-foot pole. Since then, however, we suspect there has been some funny business going on behind-the-scenes. 

This past June, Rogan told Breaking Points hosts Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti (you can watch their conversation here) that nowhere in his exclusive $100 billion dollar podcast deal with Spotify were there any stipulations about what he was allowed to say and who he was allowed to talk to on his show. 

We’re not buying it. 

This past April, Digital Music News reported that Spotify had already deleted a whopping forty-two shows from Joe’s library, including some of Rogan’s most popular episodes with the likes of Bulletproof Coffee Founder Dave Asprey, Alex Jones (sans his most recent appearance – by the way, the AJ episodes were previously his most downloaded shows in the pre-Spotify era and the one from February 2019 has nearly 30,000,000 views on YouTube to-date), Joey Diaz, Gavin McInnes, Eddie Bravo, Milo Yiannopoulous, and more. 

Who’s Rogan having on these days? This past week he’s had Biologist Bret Weinstein (great guy, get his new book here –  but this is like his 6th appearance in the last four years) and Heather Heying, C.K. Chin (Austin, Texas-based restaurateur – Whoopity Doo!), and comedian Tom Segura all on the program. All swell folks. But are they Bannon-level interesting? We’re obviously biased (Advanced Citizenship is a populist brand, we’re 100% transparent about that), but we don’t think so.

Meanwhile, Bannon has already been on Tim Pool’s “Timcast IRL” (definitely check out Pool’s appearances on Rogan from 2019 and 2020 here and here) twice this past summer for two of the most mind-blowing conversations you’ll hear this side of the Mississippi (you can and definitely should watch those here and here). As a matter of fact, a quick glance at Pool’s guest lineup from the past several months looks a lot like what Rogan’s 2015-2016 lineup might have looked like in 2021. Besides Bannon, Pool has had Advanced Citizenship Hall-of-Famers Pedro Gonzalez. Revolver.news head honcho Darren Beattie (Pool’s most viewed episode ever), and Jack Murphy on, just to name a few. Things are really cooking at the Pool compound, that’s for sure. 

So what gives? Why hasn’t Rogan invited Bannon on his show yet? 

Despite how he is portrayed by the corporate press wing of what Curtis Yarvin calls “The Cathedral”, Bannon is hardly “far right-wing” (whatever the hell that means in 2021). In fact, Bannon is just as loathed (if not more so) by Establishment Republicans and the GOP donor class than he is by the “Left”.  In a 2018 interview with New York magazine, Bannon explained why he was a right-wing populist and not a left-wing populist:

On the left, your problem is that identity politics is stronger than your populism, and that’s why you can’t lift out of it. You can’t be a populist and buy into the globalist system — and the globalist system is open borders. It’s the Kochs. It’s Wall Street. The Kochs are the biggest open-borders guys in the world. The libertarian Cato Institute, look how radical they are. Cato hates my guts much more than the left.

This past March, Leftist Glenn Greenwald even went so far as to call Bannon (as well as Tucker Carlson and 2016-era Donald Trump) a “modern-day, right-wing socialist” in a conversation with The Daily Caller:

I think the vision is, you know, you have this kind of right wing populism, which really is socialism, that says we should close our borders, not allow unconstrained immigration, and then take better care of our own working class people, and not allow this kind of transnational, global, corporatist elite to take everything for themselves under the guise of neoliberalism.

While Bannon isn’t really a ‘socialist’ in the literal sense (he always makes it explicitly and abundantly clear that he does not believe in ‘total state control’), Greenwald’s point is nevertheless an important one. After all, Bannon’s message since day one has been the same – if American citizens don’t get a ‘bigger piece of the action’, this country will actually get “real” socialism. As history shows us, he’s not wrong. To prevent actual socialism from taking hold (it could be argued in many ways it already has), the crony capitalism that we currently have in America must be reformed. As conservative Mark Steyn recently asserted as it pertains to how our current globalist ruling class has desecrated what the founders intended, “You go around this country and look at the towns and you’ll see downward mobility. It’s a total perversion of the American dream.”

Rogan had had on plenty of guests across the political spectrum, from self-identified “socialists” to “right-wingers”. In other words, on the surface, this doesn’t seem political. However, perhaps like most of our political and cultural discourse, this is not a partisan “Left” or “Right” thing, but a “Populist” thing. 

During Bannon’s second visit to Timcast IRL on August 24th, former Bernie Sanders supporter and self-described Independent Tim Pool (he voted for Trump in the 2020 election) accurately pointed out that our ruling class is trying to destroy the American Dream and asked Bannon “Why can’t we get the Democratic voter base to understand that they’re overwhelmingly behind the machine which is stripping away their resources, their value, and their labor, for things like nation-building in Afghanistan?” 

Based Bannon laid it out in plain chapter and verse:

Listen, back in ’17 when I was in the White House, the National Security State, the apparatus … and look. I’m a veteran. My daughter is a veteran. My kid brother is a veteran. His wife is a veteran. We come from a veteran family that serves. The military and intelligence agencies lied to his face. This is not a miscalculation. They lied to his face and they’ve been lying to people for twenty years. But, the system wants to believe it. They’ve taken it all for themselves. [Meanwhile,] Populists and Economic Nationalists are sitting there and they’re saying we’re not into what these Globalists are. This Empire. The Party of Davos. The financial city of London. Wall Street. The Globalist corporations. They’ve sold these people that your sovereignty doesn’t mean anything and your citizenship doesn’t mean anything. You’re not going to own anything but you’re going to be fine. World Economic Forum. Hey, you’re not going to own anything but you’ll be happy. This is all a con. You know why? The guys pushing it on you? They own and they own a lot.

So, to that end, again – what gives? Has Rogan bought into this ‘system’? We don’t think he has, but only time will tell. Either way, it would be pretty cool if he had Bannon on to break down his extremely accessible, reasonable, and not-at-all controversial message to the masses. 

In the meantime, until that day does (or doesn’t) come, be sure to stay on top of Bannon’s War Room highlights here and sign up to be a subscribing member of the Timcast here.  

“Where you at, Joe?”