nah his MOST ideologically aligned audience is made up of actual zealots. my dad was literally screaming at me, “he’s got the most popular show in the world! he’s a big deal!” because i said i didn’t think joe was a smart guy the other night.

the context was, of course, vaccine skepticism. he’s really just diet alex jones, but since he’s popular i guess there’s no issue there?

i’m so tired y’all.

I think one thing to understand is that most of his casual audience very likely engages through watching clips, not sitting through whole interviews. The reasonable, mainstreamable stuff gets clipped out and perhaps you run across it sarching for something else, or it's algorithmically fed to you because of your interest in an adjacent topic. Clips of the weirder, creepier manosphere/Alex Jones/Art Bell guests don't get surfaced as readily, at least until you're down the rabbit hole, so Rogan himself ends up having a veneer of reasonability and respectability that he doesn't really deserve.

Same goes for Trump rallies, or probably almost any major political speech now. There's a front line of people who will watch the whole thing, but then they recirculate specific clips based on how they want to portray the subject.