American podcaster and Trump ally Joe Rogan has revealed that Vice-President Kamala Harris and her allies drew a red line on one particular topic when she planned an interview with him. It was "marijuana legalisation."
The famous podcaster, who has 18.1 million subscribers, revealed on Wednesday that Harris's campaign had discussed an interview for his podcast as they believed it would help her reach out to young men who were leaning towards Donald Trump. The interview did not happen though. Though Rogan did not mention the reason for calling off the plan, Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson Ian Sams told the New York Post that the scheduling never worked out.
However, unnamed aides claim Harris feared the interview would generate 'progressive backlash'.
According to Rogan, the Harris-Walz campaign had requirements on things that she didn't want to talk about. "She didn’t want to talk about marijuana legalisation, which I thought was hilarious," the popular podcaster revealed on his Tuesday episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience."
Rogan also has a perspective on what that could be. "Because of her prosecuting record," he said, adding how Harris, who formerly served as California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney, "put a lot of people in jail for weed."
In a bid to court Black male voters, Harris had introduced a suite of policies before the elections, significant of which was the legalisation of marijuana. During her campaign, she defended her track record, stating that the allegations that she locked up a lot of Black men during her stint as a prosecutor for more than a decade were "not true." She also called herself "one of the most progressive prosecutors" on marijuana cases. She promised she would decriminalise marijuana if elected President because "she knew how the laws have hurt certain populations, especially Black men."
Rogan also added that Harris-Walz's campaign had other demands, which included limiting the discussion to about an hour and the inability to travel to his studio in Austin, Texas. Rogan said the last one was a deal-breaker.
"They had, I don’t know how many conversations with my folks, but multiple conversations giving different dates, different times, different this, different that, and we knew that she was going to be in Texas, so I said, ‘open invitation,'" Rogan said.
