December 24, 2009: The Joe Rogan Experience premieres. It becomes the most-listened-to "podcast" in America.
This was not a good thing.
Joe Rogan was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1967, about a month after the race riot there, but grew up in Boston. After a few years of standup comedy, he was part of the cast of the NBC sitcom NewsRadio. Then, he was exposed as a despicable person by his hosting of the NBC "reality series" Fear Factor from 2001 to 2006. He gained even more fans as a commentator for UFC, "Ultimate Fighting Championship," basically "boxing for white men."
He started his podcast to cater to white men looking to reclaim what they thought of as their lost privilege, in the wake of the election of a black man, Barack Obama, as President of the United States.
He claims that his podcast features "interesting conversations with people that have differing opinions." It does not. It features dangerous conversations with people that tell already-proven lies.
It also helped to make millions of Americans believe that both sides of any argument had a point, and that both sides were equally valid. This is wrong. In almost any argument, there is a right side and a wrong side. A moral side and an immoral side. A good side and an evil side.
And Rogan, all too often, has been on the wrong, the immoral, the evil side. Never more so than when he advocated for the election of Donald Trump as President.
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December 24, 2009 was a Thursday. Baseball was out of season. The NFL was in midweek. Being Christmas Eve, there were no games in the NBA or the NHL. There was 1 college football game played that day: Southern Methodist University (SMU) beat the University of Nevada, 45-10, at the Hawaii Bowl, at Aloha Stadium in Honolulu.

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