That was my immediate response too. I mean, it’s such an obviously stupid statement, but especially in light of Rogan inviting white supremacists onto his show to spew racist propaganda. There’s no educated, good-faith argument to be made in defense of Rogan at this point.
Probably won’t change his position - Yang’s defended/shrugged his shoulders at some anti-Asian racist stuff in the past. He’s pretty committed to “not making waves.”
He supported universal basic income, and masqueraded as a tech billionaire (even though that is, as you point out, not remotely the case) and people assumed he had smart, thoughtfully developed policy based on rational arguments (which, it turns out, mostly wasn’t the case). Also he’s been pretty relaxed about racism and not making white people feel bad about their racism.
He’s not even saying that, as absurd as it already is. He’s saying Rogan can’t be racist because he interacts, in a professionally constrained context, with Black people. As if that meant anything at all.
Turns out that the ludicrous comment was inevitable. I tagged him halfway through his celebrityhood as a superficially “full-spectrum” political opportunist… one devoid of actual political chops. Hard to keep the act going. He’s like that Aesop’s fable about The Man and the Satyr.
Yang’s take is terrible, but I can see why he’d want to defend Rogan. He was one of the few that actually gave Yang time leading up to his 2020 presidential run.
The reactions to the NAACP Image Award nomination and non-pology have been interesting, to say the least. Since I’m not on Twitter, it makes me wonder if Andrew Yang had anything to say about that.
Well, at least part of the construction of his image as a “tech billionaire” wasn’t of his making - and it’s not clear to me how much of it was just him not making an effort to contradict those beliefs. I could believe he was more an unwitting beneficiary of a false narrative rather than a con artist himself. (Emphasis on “unwitting”… just in general.)
