Former Chief White House Censor Rob Flaherty Behind Attack On Joe Rogan Over Kamala Harris Podcast Fiasco
You will never guess who's behind the misinformation campaign against Rogan on Kamala Harris' team.
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Remember the whole Kamala Harris x Joe Rogan debacle?
An unreleased new book by Jonathan Allen and Ami Parnes entitled Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House attempts to detail the massive opportunity failure in one of its chapters.
The relevant excerpt was published on NBC News last week wherein the authors speak to multiple Harris campaign staffers to get to the bottom of why the podcast didn’t pan out.
The excerpt featured a number of highly suspect claims which directly collided with Rogan’s previous statements on the matter. Now, Rogan has responded to the claims in a segment of his podcast this week. I was following this story from the start because it’s such a fascinating trend in modern media that the most sought-after platform for presidential frontrunners is a podcast hosted by a hilarious pot-smoking psychedelic hippie. I’m going to refute a few striking passages from the book before deep-diving into the key orchestrator of this misinformation campaign who most of you will have heard of in a different — but similarly propagandistic — context.
First, this is just comical:
On October 11, Harris deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty, the aide in charge of digital strategy, made the first Zoom call to start negotiating with Rogan’s reps. He did not know what to expect. These might be juiced-up, UFC-looking supplement people, he thought. He was surprised—perhaps a tad disappointed—to find out that Rogan’s associates were more like Hollywood agents. In that vein, they outlined the podcaster’s conditions for an interview: no staff in the studio, no topic restrictions, and Harris would have to sign a waiver.
Really?
Rogan’s associates are apparently Hollywood agents like Ari Gold or something (watch Entourage - a riveting dramedy series on the machinery of Hollywood). What’s the evidence for that? They don’t have staff in the studio and called for free-flowing conversation with no topic restrictions!
If that’s “Hollywood,” I don’t think Rob knows what Hollywood really is. Sanitized Hollywood environments (where creativity dies) are filled with endless clipboard-carrying staff members and known to be heavily speech-restricted political echo-chambers.
Secondly, this is just a blatant lie:
Along with fellow Harris campaign advisers Stephanie Cutter and Brian Fallon, Flaherty offered up that Harris would be happy to talk about social media censorship, weed, and other issues they thought would be of most interest to his listeners. From their perspective, it was a suggestion of possible topics, not an exhaustive or exclusive list. That’s not what Rogan wanted to talk about. “Joe just wants to talk about the economy, the border, and abortion,” one of his reps said, according to a person familiar with the negotiations.
Kamala’s team never offered to talk about pot. It’s the exact opposite. Kamala’s team actually tried imposing restrictions on the conversation on topics like marijuana legalization (presumably because of Kamala’s aggressive prosecutorial past):
“They had requirements on things she didn’t want to talk about,” he said. “She didn’t want to talk about marijuana legalization — which I thought was hilarious.”
For reasons I cannot fully explain, I am entirely convinced this version of events is accurate and the former is a boatload of lies. Here’s one reason why you should believe in Rogan’s version: they did the same thing with Kareem Rahma, a Tik-Tok-viral Muslim comedian. From The New York Times:
Rahma also had policy concerns. As a Muslim and an Arab, he objected to the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza, which has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians — including many women and children — since Hamas’s attack on Israel last October, in which 1,200 people were killed and over 200 were kidnapped. In three phone calls with Harris’s staff and the Democratic National Committee, he said, he had proposed raising the conflict with the vice president — perhaps at the end of the episode — but was rejected.
Just like Rogan said about the topic of marijuana legalization being off-limits on his show, the Harris team also told Rahma to steer clear of the Israel-Gaza conflict. This lead to comical headlines like “Harris campaign tells Muslim interviewer he can't ask about Gaza, she talks up bacon instead: 'Taken aback’” (Fox News). This is not some wild right-wing news-spin. Harris — like your favourite drunk aunt who you don’t want to see more than once-a-year — actually brought up bacon in the interview while dodging mass bloodshed in Gaza:
…When they sat down, however, Harris had surprised him with a different take: “Bacon is a spice.” (Two senior campaign officials said this topic had been raised in advance. Rahma and his manager dispute this.)
Rahma, who doesn’t eat pork for religious reasons, was taken aback. “I don’t know,” he says, in an unpublished video recording of the interview, his voice rising to an unusually high pitch. Harris elaborates that bits of cooked bacon can be used to enhance a meal like any other seasoning. “Think about it, it’s pure flavor,” she says.
The interview never saw the light of day.
Here’s the most pernicious lie in the book excerpt:
Harris campaign chief Jennifer O’Malley Dillon broke the impasse. Harris would be in Atlanta on October 24 with Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen. O’Malley Dillon said the campaign could fly her to Houston for a rally—under the cover of visiting a state with one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion laws—to put her in proximity to Austin. She dispatched an advance team to the Texas state capital to do a walk-through of Rogan’s studio and get ready for a Harris arrival. She authorized her negotiating team to give Rogan what he demanded—an in-studio interview in Austin—on October 25.
As Rogan clarifies in his new video, this never happened. Her crew never entered his premises to do a “walk-through” of his studio space. They never agreed to do the podcast. Kamala’s Deputy Campaign Manager continues to distort and manipulate the facts of the situation:
Only a few people knew the real reason: the whole Houston rally was built to put her in proximity to Rogan. The ongoing negotiations on that were touch-and-go.
Flaherty had called his Rogan contacts on October 18, before the rally was set.
“We could do Friday, the 25th,” Flaherty said.
“Wish we had known about this sooner, because he has the 25th blocked out as a personal day,” one of Rogan’s reps said.
“What about Saturday morning?” Flaherty countered.
“Only if it’s before 8:30 a.m.,” came the tough reply.
The tone is different, Flaherty thought. The vice president of the United States is offering to come to your f—ing show, and you keep putting up more hoops. Harris’s team still wanted to make it work, but a new wariness set in.
This makes it sound like Rogan and his team are a bunch of difficult, uncooperative douchebags trying to make schedule coordination nearly impossible. What he’s omitting is Rogan actually wanted to do the 25th because of his goal to release both interviews (Trump and Harris) at the the same time and let the American public watch and judge for themselves. Here’s what Rogan says about bending over backwards to try and interview Harris on the 25th - the same day Trump came into his studio:
I said I would do it at night I'll come back I'll do it at midnight I don't give a fuck. I'll do it. so it wasn't me fucking someone over and so just whoever's in charge of spreading that narrative that's deceptive.
On the 8:30 AM time restriction the next day, he elaborates that was the only time he could do it before his pre-scheduled 4.5 hour fight companion podcast with Bryan Callen, Brendan Schaub, and Eddie Bravo:
I said I'll do it but it has to be like 8:30 in the morning because I have to be done by the time the fight start, that's reasonable; they didn't do that either so this idea that I sabotaged her there's a bunch of people that say I fucked her over or whatever like that's not true so you can think whatever you want.
This fiasco was seen as a “traumatic event,” according to one Harris aide who was quoted in the excerpt. This doesn’t quite make sense — or perhaps different aides had wildly different perceptions of this issue, since it was also leaked from multiple sources that several of Harris’ aides strongly opposed the prospects of her going on the show (“Would you really go on Hitler’s podcast?”):
Sources:
1) https://x.com/SantsPliego/status/1886964160636059818
2) https://www.yahoo.com/news/harris-aide-reveals-real-reason-123515635.html
The most noteworthy part of this whole story being reported on across mainstream media is the seeming orchestrator of this whole misinformation circus: Rob Flaherty. Anyone recognize that name?
(X page: https://x.com/Rob_Flaherty)
Yes, he was the Director of Digital Strategy under Biden before becoming Kamala's Deputy Campaign Manager. Here he is doing his best work during the pandemic: complaining about Tucker Carlson saying the vaccines don’t work as promised by Pfizer and the CDC (true) and Tomi Lahren’s personal choice not to get the shots (why would she as a seemingly healthy, young woman in her 30s?).
He went directly to Facebook as a White House official to call for “reduction” of apparent misinformation.
Source: https://x.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1611822612728156161
In Rogan’s recent major interview with Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO stated White House officials would call his employees and “scream” at them with censorship demands. Here’s Mr. Flaherty in that vain angrily responding to a Facebook employee in an email chain about the spread of seemingly outrageous Covid misinformation:
Here’s one more screenshot of his free-speech-limiting vaccine advocacy as a senior White House official:
Link: https://x.com/JeninYounesEsq/status/1613655305228881920
He expresses interest in virtual interventions to boost “vaccine interest within hesitant communities” and lower the spread of “vaccine-skeptical content and misinformation to vaccine fence sitters.”
Is this Democratic party operative really someone we can trust?
Here’s Illusion of Consensus co-founder Jay Bhattacharya in 2023 with me in a podcast paraphrasing what Rob Flaherty was doing during Covid:
So what we found, for instance, was that these government officials were directly threatening these social media companies if they didn't comply. So what would happen is the government would say they had direct line into the databases of these companies and communication with the trust and safety people within these social media companies. And so you see emails from Rob Flaherty, who's the ex-deputy assistant of the president.
He'd send an email to Facebook and he'd say (Jay’s interpretation),
“Look, Here are people that need to be censored. Here are accounts that need to be censored. Here are ideas that need to be censored. And if you don't listen to us, if you don't censor these people, take, deplatform these people, put misinformation labels on these people, then, you know, you should remember that the federal government has broad regulatory authority over your companies. Section 230 protections are regulated by the federal government.”
The implicit message was really clear.
If you don't listen to us, if you don't censor the way we're telling you to censor, I mean, that's a nice company you have there. Wouldn't it be terrible if something were to happen to it? The threat was, I mean, it was just clear from every single one of those those emails that these companies, even though they were they sometimes look like they're cooperating, they were operating under a threat, a threat by the federal government that if they didn't comply, that they would be regulated out of existence. And around the same time, you had President Biden going around saying things like, “Facebook is killing people by permitting misinformation.”
The same person who aggressively pushed for censorship in the Biden administration is now spreading heavily distorted narratives on the Harris-Rogan podcast fiasco.
The collision between Rogan’s straightforward explanations and the Harris campaign’s contradictory narrative exposes the inner workings of modern political media manipulation. The situation is bigger than a simple podcast scheduling conflict and has evolved into a broader lesson on how narratives are constructed and propagated within political campaigns to save face, even when they contradict the facts.
Rob Flaherty’s role as a key player in this debacle is emblematic of the deeper issues surrounding trust and transparency in politics. His history of orchestrating narratives, whether on pandemic-related censorship or the Harris campaign’s public relations efforts, reveals a pattern of control that prioritizes perception over substance. Ultimately, this episode serves as a reminder of the growing power imbalance between the political class and independent platforms like Rogan’s—platforms that challenge the conventional gatekeepers and force politicians to face unscripted, unfiltered conversations.
Rav Arora is an independent journalist known for his coverage of Big Pharma, political trends, and psychedelic therapy. He has appeared in podcasts with Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, Bret Weinstein, and Tim Pool, and Dave Rubin while his work has been highlighted by the likes of Megyn Kelly and Joe Rogan.
If you support the fearless science and Big Pharma journalism on this site, consider supporting The Illusion of Consensus with a one-time donation.
I would guess that Flaherty blames everyone but himself for why Harris lost. will be interesting to see if he an get hired by any of the Dem candidates or if they see through his BS.
Oh the bullet we dodged. To think what life would be like with puppet Harris as “president” and these awful Democrat operatives pulling her strings as you’ve outlined here. Shades of her CBS “interview”.