Political commentator Anand Giridharadas said Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that Democrats needed a “feminist” version of Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Giridharadas said, “You know when one person has a traumatic experience, we know what to do. we go to a counselor, a therapist, maybe they take some medication. When an entire country has a traumatic experience, it’s just called life. It’s just called history. We have an entire country and world that had a traumatic experience, whether it was my kindergartner wearing a mask to school, which I’m very glad we had masks, but also watching my kindergartner not being able to recognize the faces of their best friend because eyes are not enough at age 6 to recognize a face. And the enormous amount of mental health challenges that I don’t think we even fully realized were unleashed. The sense of defenselessness people felt economically. And you’re right that when you have that kind of traumatic event, it’s just in the blood in ways that historians may make sense of, sociologists may make sense of. I don’t think we right now are in a position to make sense of it.”
He added, “Particularly the media ecosystem, it is not it’s not a good one. It’s a negative one, it is a radicalization funnel. What they have done in the online media ecosystem is build a radicalization engine, the way militant groups do around the world. It takes people from low level annoyances with the world, ‘Why are eggs so expensive? Why are my kids learning things in school I didn’t learn? And then moves through You Tube videos, podcasts, moves them from the annoyance, to a full blown fascist politics. It’s an elaborate multibillion dollar infrastructure, and there is nothing like it on the pro-democracy side. We don’t have, when a man is lost and lonely and not yet radicalized, we don’t have the equivalent of Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson to move that man in a feminist direction.”
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