The Joe Rogan Right is winning because the Left has become boring

Telegraph

04-04-2025

The Right increasingly dominates the online media landscape. An analysis of the top 320 online shows by Media Matters reveals a striking disparity: Right-leaning commentators command a vastly larger audience compared to their Left-leaning counterparts.
According to the study, What Now? with Trevor Noah, the most popular Left-leaning show, has 21 million followers and subscribers across platforms. Yet even that show is performing less well than heavyweights like Joe Rogan (40 million), Jordan Peterson (23 million), and Ben Shapiro (25 million).
Not only do Right-leaning shows attract bigger audiences, but there are way more of them.
To understand why the Right is winning, ask yourself the following question: when was the last time you heard a Left-leaning commentator ask anything interesting?
The Left is floundering because they lack curiosity. So certain has the contemporary Left become, on everything from climate change and crime to the virtue of their own position, they use questions not to examine ideas, but to hector those who hold the 'wrong' ones instead.
Back in 2018 in the UK, Channel 4's Cathy Newman interviewed the then somewhat obscure Canadian psychologist, Jordan Peterson, about his new book. Instead of engaging with what he had written, she opted for a lazy attempt to browbeat him.
That interview, now viewed over 50 million times on YouTube alone, became infamous not just for how Peterson turned the tables — leaving Newman looking foolish — but for her seeming lack of interest in what Peterson's book had to say.
The problem for the Left is that they have carried on much the same ever since, both online and off.
As a consequence, Jordan Peterson's online show now commands an audience many times larger than anything Cathy Newman is ever likely to appear on.
Sure, there's a largish niche for Britain's Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell's The Rest Is Politics, where they give their 'hot takes' on Donald Trump (they are against) or action on climate change (they are in favour). But compared to the new Right media titans, they're a blip, despite their attempts to break into the US market. Without curiosity, they will remain a blip.
Contrast how the BBC's hapless James Clayton interviewed Elon Musk about X (questions seemingly designed to reproach not inquire) with the way Joe Rogan handled Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg (allowing him to elaborate at length on what he actually thought).
I came across the Left's lack of curiosity on a much smaller scale the other week. I asked online why it was that Western societies are more technologically successful than non-Western ones, and – judging by the number of non-Westerners wanting to live here – offer a better way of life.
Within a few minutes, a leading Leftist intellectual was suggesting I must be on the same side as the Nazis. End of discussion.
The Left's unwillingness to grapple with questions that challenge their world view leaves them blinkered. It will also leave them with little to say on some of the great topics of our time.
This is going to become increasingly important as new research and the democratisation of opinion-forming start to shift the intellectual tectonic plates on which many of our policy assumptions have been built.
Thanks to conversations on Substack, X and YouTube, the Left aren't going to be able to stop these new debates from taking place. 'No platforming' might once have worked on university campuses. Today, the Left's refusal to engage in new ideas online merely means that they are the ones without a platform.
We've long been told that mass immigration boosts our economy, for example. But evidence from Europe increasingly suggests that immigration from some societies can be a social and cultural disaster. Once again, the Left sidesteps the debate, ignoring what anyone online can see are among the most pressing questions of our time.
What is so striking about Media Matters' list of so-called Right-wing shows is how many of them were not until recently regarded as Right wing at all. Rogan used to align with various progressive positions a decade or so ago. Jordan Peterson started out on the Left.
What has moved them to the Right is a willingness to ask questions, or rather the Left's censorious refusal to even consider alternative points of view. Perhaps a willingness to engage with the world doesn't so much make you Right politically. It also makes you more likely to be right, as in correct.