Joe Rogan took President-elect Donald Trump’s suggestion that the United States should take over Canada a step further by saying the country should also absorb Mexico.
On Wednesday’s The Joe Rogan Experience
, Rogan and fellow comedian Theo Von discussed Trump’s recent talk
about Canada
and Rogan addressed a social media post where he first suggested taking over Mexico.
“I say we let Mexico in too,” Rogan wrote on Instagram. He included a screenshot of a Truth Social post from Trump in which the president-elect claimed “many people in Canada LOVE being the 51st state.” Trump promised that “merging” the countries would lower taxes and more.
On his podcast, Rogan suggested letting people “sneaking” in from Mexico “stay here,” which would likely go against Trump’s mass deportation
promises.
Check out the exchange between Rogan and Von below:
THEO VON: “Do you think that they’ll take Canada in to be the 51st or 52nd state, whichever one it is?”
JOE ROGAN: “Here’s what I think, I think we take Canada and then we go right into Mexico.”
VON: “Let’s fucking go.”
ROGAN: “I tweeted that today?”
VON: “You did? I didn’t see that.”
ROGAN: “I tweeted we should let Mexico in too.”
VON: “I want to be fucking Mexican.”
ROGAN: “Everybody keeps sneaking over, how about we just let them stay here. Just like, how about we go into that? How about what I said? How about instead of trying to, like, let all the bad stuff in, how about we make this like totally lockdown safe and then expand safety? Expand it, but you got to do it without stripping people of their rights.”
The U.S. will honor President Jimmy Carter, the nation’s 39th commander-in-chief, with a state funeral beginning Thursday at 10am at the National Cathedral in Washington,
Loosening the grip of a conspiracy theory is a complex task, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. Aim at changing the relationship with your friend, not
Yesterday morning, donning his new signature fit—gold chain, oversize T-shirt, surfer hair—Mark Zuckerberg announced that his social-media platforms are getting a makeover. His aggrievement was palpable: For years, Zuckerberg said
, “governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.” No longer. Meta is abolishing its third-party fact-checking program, starting in the U.S.; loosening its content filters; and bringing political content back to Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Meta’s chief executive declared.
In the announcement, Zuckerberg identified “the recent elections,” in which Donald Trump won the presidency and Republicans claimed both houses of Congress, as a “cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” He said Meta will take direct inspiration from X’s “Community Notes” feature, which allows users to annotate posts—and surfaces the annotations based on how other users rate them—rather than granting professional fact-checkers authority to remove or label posts. Among the notable changes is permitting
users to describe gay and transgender people as having “mental illness.”
The dog-whistling around legacy media, censorship, and free-speech sounded uncannily like one of Zuckerberg’s greatest rivals: Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and a defender of the most noxious
speech—at least when he agrees with it. Over the past several years, Musk has become a far-right
icon, railing against major publications and liberal politicians for what he deems
a “censorship government-industrial complex.” After buying Twitter, he renamed it X and has turned the platform into a bastion for hate speech, personally spread misinformation, and become a Trump confidant and trusted adviser. Zuckerberg has been feuding with Musk for years over their respective social-media dominance and masculinity—the pair even publicly challenged each other to a cage match
in 2023.
This week’s policy changes might be understood as another throwdown between the two men. Although Facebook and Instagram are both considerably more popular than X—not to mention extremely profitable—they lack the political relevance that Musk has cultivated on his platform. That asset has helped bring Trump back for occasional posting there (he is still much more active on his own platform, Truth Social) and, more important, has put X and its owner in favorable positions ahead of Trump’s ascension to the presidency. Musk will even co-lead a new federal commission
advising his administration. Their close relationship will likely benefit Musk’s AI, space, and satellite companies, too. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has not been viewed favorably by Trump or his allies: The president-elect has stated that Zuckerberg steered Facebook against him during the 2020 election, and threatened
to put the Meta CEO in jail for “the rest of his life,” while Republicans such as Ohio Representative Jim Jordan have complained about alleged censorship
on the platform. Currying favor with the right wing, as Musk has done so successfully, may well be mission critical for Meta, which is currently facing an antitrust suit from the Federal Trade Commission that it would surely rather settle
.
These shifts are occurring against a longer transformation
for the company and its chief executive. Zuckerberg has gone from a deferential, awkward, almost robotic nerd to a flashy mixed-martial-arts enthusiast who posts photos of his fights and has public beef with other tech executives. Meta, after years of waning influence, has been attempting a cultural and technological revival as well—pivoting hard toward generative AI by widely promoting its flagship Llama models and launching its own X competitor, Threads. These personal and corporate changes are one and the same: Zuckerberg has recently shared a photo of himself reading his infant a picture book titled Llama; posted AI-enhanced videos of himself sporting his new martial-arts physique, leg-pressing gold chains, or dressed as a Roman centurion; and showcased an AI-generated illustration of himself in a boy band. Also this week, the company announced that Dana White, the CEO and president of UFC (and a notable Trump backer), joined Meta’s board of directors. The blog post outlining Meta’s new “more speech” policies was written by Joel Kaplan, a Republican lobbyist at Meta who just replaced the company’s long-standing head of global policy, who was considered center-left. Jordan, the once adversarial congressperson, said
he is pleased with Meta’s new approach to content moderation and will meet
with Zuckerberg in the coming weeks.
But for all the effort and bravado, Zuckerberg and Meta have been consistently outdone by Musk. The latter has already overhauled X into a “free speech” haven for the right. If Meta is responding to the recent election by seeking favor with the incoming Trump administration, Musk helped bring Republicans victory and will advise that administration. Musk helped get OpenAI off the ground, and his newer and smaller AI company, xAI, rapidly developed a model, Grok, that has matched and by some metrics surpassed Meta’s own. Zuckerberg might boast
about Meta’s AI infrastructure, but xAI partnered with Nvidia to build the world’s largest AI supercomputer in a shockingly fast
122 days. Musk has touted Grok as fulfilling the need for an anti-“woke” AI—the software has been shown
to readily sexualize female celebrities and illustrate
racist caricatures. It’s easy to imagine Meta lowering its AI guardrails next in a bid to better emulate Musk’s own offensive showboating.
Even if he catches up, Zuckerberg still lacks the confidence of his rival. He presents as both rehearsed and ostentatious; he announced the end of independent fact-checking while wearing a $900,000 watch
. Musk is many things, but he is not a poser: His speech is rambling, off-the-cuff, and perceived as visionary by his followers and much of Silicon Valley. He shows up to Trump rallies wearing T-shirts and talks business
while streaming video games. “This is cool,” Musk wrote
of Meta’s “free speech” pivot, on X, as if commending a younger sibling.
Becoming a martial-arts enthusiast, pivoting to AI, bringing Republicans into Meta’s leadership, decrying “legacy media” and “censorship,” and permitting homophobia are Zuckerberg’s attempts at defiance and renewal. But in no respect is he leading the conversation—rather than upending the technological landscape with the “metaverse
,” he is following his competitors in both AI and social media. He may not be capitulating to the Democratic establishment, as he believes
his company did in the past, but he is still capitulating to the establishment. It’s just that this time, he is apologizing
to the ascendant far-right. “They’ve come a long way,” the president-elect said of Meta’s changes at a press conference
yesterday. (Did he think the changes were in response to threats he had made toward Zuckerberg in the past? “Probably,” Trump responded.)
It is worth recalling that Facebook did not strengthen its approach to content moderation and limit political content, changes that Zuckerberg now says amount to “censorship,” just because a few Democratic senators asked. Russian-interference campaigns, various domestic far-right militias, and all manner of misinformation were rampant on the platform for years, wreaking havoc on multiple presidential-election cycles. Facebook exposed users’ private data, was used to plan
the Capitol insurrection in the U.S., and fueled ethnic genocide abroad
. The platform, prior to those policy changes, was viewed by some as a legitimate threat to democracy
; “we have made a lot of mistakes,” Zuckerberg told
Congress in 2018. He has had a change of heart—yesterday, Zuckerberg again promised to make “fewer mistakes,” this time referencing the supposed policing of conservative speech. For one of Silicon Valley’s self-appointed kings, perhaps abetting the unraveling of democracy and civil society is, in the end, nothing to apologize for.
Presidents whom most voters view as failures, justifiably or not, have frequently shaped American politics long after they leave office—notably, by paving the way for presidencies considered much more successful and consequential. As President Joe Biden nears his final days in office, his uneasy term presents Democrats with some uncomfortable parallels to their experience with Jimmy Carter, whose state funeral takes place this week in Washington, D.C.
The former Georgia governor’s victory in 1976 initially offered the promise of revitalizing the formidable electoral coalition that had delivered the White House to Democrats in seven of the nine presidential elections from 1932 (won by Franklin D. Roosevelt) to 1964 (won by Lyndon B. Johnson), and had enabled the party to enact progressive social policies for two generations. But the collapse of his support over his four years in office, culminating in his landslide defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980, showed that Carter’s electoral victory was instead that coalition’s dying breath. Carter’s troubled term in the White House proved the indispensable precondition to Reagan’s landmark presidency, which reshaped the competition between the two major parties and enabled the epoch-defining ascendancy of the new right.
The specter of such a turnabout now haunts Biden and his legacy. Despite his many accomplishments in the White House, the November election’s outcome demonstrated that his failures
—particularly on the public priorities of inflation and the border—eclipsed his successes for most voters. As post-election surveys
made clear, disapproval of the Biden administration’s record was a liability that Vice President Kamala Harris could not escape.
Biden’s unpopularity helped Donald Trump make major inroads among traditionally Democratic voting blocs, just as the widespread discontent over Carter’s performance helped Reagan peel away millions of formerly Democratic voters in 1980. If Trump can cement in office the gains he made on Election Day—particularly among Latino, Asian American, and Black voters—historians may come to view Biden as the Carter to Trump’s Reagan.
In his landmark 1993 book, The Politics Presidents Make, the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek persuasively argued that presidents succeed or fail according to not only their innate talents but also the timing of their election in the long-term cycle of political competition and electoral realignment between the major parties.
Most of the presidents who are remembered as the most successful and influential, Skowronek showed, came into office after decisive elections in which voters sweepingly rejected the party that had governed the country for years. The leaders Skowronek places in this category include Thomas Jefferson after his election in 1800, Andrew Jackson in 1828, Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Roosevelt in 1932, and Reagan in 1980.
These dominating figures, whom Skowronek identifies as men who “stood apart from the previously established parties,” typically rose to prominence with a promise “to retrieve from a far distant, even mythic, past fundamental values that they claimed had been lost.” Trump fits this template with his promises to “make America great again,” and he also displays the twin traits that Skowronek describes as characteristic of these predecessors that Trump hopes to emulate: repudiating the existing terms of political competition and becoming a reconstructive leader of a new coalition.
The great repudiators, in Skowronek’s telling, were all preceded by ill-fated leaders who’d gained the presidency representing a once-dominant coalition that was palpably diminished by the time of their election. Skowronek placed in this club John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, and Carter. Each of their presidencies represented a last gasp for the party that had won most of the general elections in the years prior. None of these “late regime” presidents, as Skowronek called them, could generate enough success in office to reverse their party’s declining support; instead, they accelerated it.
The most recent such late-regime president, Carter, was elected in 1976 after Richard Nixon’s victories in 1968 and 1972 had already exposed cracks in the Democrats’ New Deal coalition of southerners, Black voters, and the white working class. Like many of his predecessors in the dubious fraternity of late-regime presidents, Carter recognized that his party needed to recalibrate its message and agenda to repair its eroding support. But the attempt to set a new, generally more centrist direction for the party foundered.
Thanks to rampant inflation, energy shortages, and the Iranian hostage crisis, Carter was whipsawed between a rebellion from the left (culminating in Senator Edward Kennedy’s primary challenge) and an uprising on the right led by Reagan. As Carter limped through his 1980 reelection campaign, Skowronek wrote, he had become “a caricature of the old regime’s political bankruptcy, the perfect foil for a repudiation of liberalism itself as the true source of all the nation’s problems.”
Carter’s failures enabled Reagan to entrench the electoral realignment that Nixon had started. In Reagan’s emphatic 1980 win, millions of southern white conservatives, including many evangelical Christians, as well as northern working-class white voters renounced the Democratic affiliation of their parents and flocked to Reagan’s Republican Party. Most of those voters never looked back.
The issue now is whether Biden will one day be seen as another late-regime president whose perceived failures hastened his party’s eclipse among key voting blocs. Pointing to his record of accomplishments, Biden advocates would consider the question absurd: Look, they say, at the big legislative wins, enormous job growth, soaring stock market, historic steps to combat climate change, skilled diplomacy that united allies against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and boom in manufacturing investment
, particularly in clean-energy technologies.
In electoral terms, however, Biden’s legacy is more clouded. His 2020 victory appeared to revive the coalition of college-educated whites, growing minority populations, young people, and just enough working-class white voters that had allowed Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to win the White House in four of the six elections from 1992 through 2012. (In a fifth race over that span, Al Gore won the popular vote even though he lost the Electoral College.) But the public discontent with Biden frayed almost every strand of that coalition.
Biden made rebuilding his party’s support among working-class voters a priority and, in fact, delivered huge gains
in manufacturing and construction jobs that were tied to the big three bills he passed (on clean energy, infrastructure, and semiconductors). But public anger at the rising cost of living contributed to Biden’s job-approval rating falling below 50 percent in the late summer of 2021 (around the time of the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal), and it never climbed back to that crucial threshold. On Election Day, public disappointment with Biden’s overall record helped Trump maintain a crushing lead over Harris among white voters without a college degree, as well as make unprecedented inroads among nonwhite voters without a college degree, especially Latinos.
