By Jim Geraghty
Monday, January
31, 2022
You may love Joe Rogan, you may hate him,
or you may not have strong feelings about him. I suspect that many of people
who profess to hate Joe Rogan have either never listened to him or have
listened to little more than a snippet. Zaid Jilani observed, “It’s interesting seeing so many conservatives rally around Joe Rogan
when he’s probably more liberal than 90 percent of Americans. Agnostic dude who
loves drug legalization, Bernie Sanders, thinks the CIA is awful, etc.” He later made the accurate point
that the “average episode of Rogan is about [mixed-martial arts] or drugs and
these folks think it’s like a Satanic cult ritual.”
Perhaps conservatives are rallying around
Joe Rogan because they don’t need a figure to agree with 100 percent of their
worldview in order to conclude that a figure is worth defending from an angry
mob that desires censorship of differing views.
It’s very clear that the people who are
the most determined to “deplatform” Rogan — to force Spotify to cancel his
show, and likely with that, get his videos
off of YouTube as well —
are battling a cartoon-like caricature that they’ve drawn in their heads.
If you listen
to Rogan defend his choices in a recently taped video, you’ll see that he’s not a lunkhead, and seems the opposite of a
wide-eyed extremist ideologue, hungry to hammer a twisted narrative into
brainwashed followers:
There’s a
lot of people who have a distorted perception of what I do — maybe based on
soundbites or based on headlines of articles that are disparaging. The podcast
has been accused of spreading dangerous misinformation. Specifically, about two
episodes –a little about some other ones, but specifically about two.
One
with Dr. Peter McCullough and one with Dr. Robert Malone. Dr. Peter McCullough is a cardiologist, and he is the most published
physician in his field in history. Dr. Robert Malone owns nine patents on the creation
of MRNA vaccine technology and is at least partially responsible for the
creation of the technology that led to MRNA vaccines. Both these people are
very highly credentialed, very intelligent, very accomplished people and they
have an opinion that is different from the mainstream narrative. I wanted to
hear what their opinion is. I had them on, and because of that, those episodes
in particular, were labeled as being dangerous, had dangerous misinformation in
them.
The
problem I have with the term disinformation, especially today, is that many of
the things we thought of as misinformation a short while ago are now accepted
as fact. For instance, eight months ago, if you said, ‘if you get vaccinated,
you can still catch Covid, and you can still spread Covid’ – you would be
removed from social media. They would ban you from certain platforms. Now,
that’s accepted as fact. If you said, ‘I don’t think cloth masks work,” you
would be banned from social media. Now, that’s openly and repeatedly stated on
CNN. If you said I think it’s possible that Covid-19 came from a lab, you would
be banned from many social media platforms. Now that’s on the cover of
Newsweek.* All of those theories, that at one point in time were banned, were
openly discussed by those two men that I had on my podcast, that have been
accused of ‘dangerous misinformation.’
I do not
know if they’re right. I don’t know, because I’m not a doctor, I’m not a
scientist. I’m just a person who sits down, and talks to people, and has
conversations with them.
Do I get
things wrong? Absolutely. I get things wrong. But I try to correct them.
Whenever I get things wrong, I try to correct them. Because I’m interested in
telling the truth.
For a guy who’s supposed to be a dangerous
megalomaniac who’s indoctrinating people into a hardline deceitful ideology,
Rogan seems awfully humble about what he knows and doesn’t know.
Deplatform Joe Rogan? We should give him a
medal and hold him up as a role model for conducting probing, open-minded,
respectful interviews.
Want to know something spectacularly
ironic? Drs. McCullough and Malone are opponents of the Covid-19 vaccine in
large part because of their skepticism and suspicion of the profit motive of
big pharmaceutical companies. Voices on the Left are now up in arms because
Rogan is showcasing the arguments of critics of Big Pharma.
Rogan is unvaccinated, has had Covid-19
and fully recovered, and he is no fan of the Covid-19 vaccines. But he has had
pro-vaccination doctors such as CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay
Gupta on his program. Rogan has all kinds of guests on his program and gives
them all a respectful hearing. (If you haven’t disagreed with any Rogan guest
about anything, you might have multiple personality disorder.)
There’s a giant leap from “Joe
Rogan is wrong about this, and here’s why” to “Joe Rogan must
not be allowed to have a program where he says these things.”
Rolling
Stone is
deeply concerned about misinformation, you see.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced
they “expressed
their ‘concerns’ to Spotify over Covid-19 misinformation on the platform, joining a growing group of personalities putting pressure on the
streaming service amid a dispute about Joe Rogan’s controversial podcast.”
I am only slightly tongue-in-cheek when I
declare that Prince Harry should be deported and barred from the United States,
and perhaps we should grab Sussex Royal merchandise and throw it into Boston
Harbor. This country was founded on the idea that the British royal family
doesn’t get to tell Americans what they can and can’t say.
Many voices on the Left do not believe
that good information can overcome bad information, that truth can overcome
lies, and that people need to be free to explore, discuss, and debate ideas as
they choose to find the truth. They truly believe that your naïve, credulous,
and foolish little mind must be protected from dangerous ideas and
“disinformation” and “misinformation” that will drive you to do terrible
things. This philosophy is not compatible with the First Amendment, a
constitutional Republic founded upon democratic principles, or freedom in
general. If you see the general population as children incapable of making
their own decisions, you inevitably end up with a powerful overclass making all
of the important decisions.
There are a lot of governments around the
world that wholeheartedly embrace that role as the all-knowing, always-wise,
paternalistic, controlling authority figure protecting you from dangerous ideas
and your own hopelessly bad judgment.
The Chinese government set up a massive,
all-encompassing social-credit system to “commend
sincerity and punish insincerity” — including using artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and
other technologies. The Iranian mullahs and Saudi Arabian Committee for the
Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice are protecting those devout
Muslim societies from the temptations of sin and blasphemy. The Russian
government explicitly cultivates the idea of Vladimir Putin as the national
father figure who always knows best. Sure, the American Left is nowhere near as brutal, violent, ruthless,
or authoritarian as those governments. But the operating philosophy is the
same: We know best. You cannot be allowed to make those decisions. We must find
a way to force you to make the selection that we have decided is the right one.
Either you trust your fellow citizens to
make their own decisions — and live with the consequences, even if they’re bad
consequences — or you don’t.
*I think Rogan
might have been thinking of New York magazine.
Censorship from the Right
Of course, the social-media mobs aren’t
the only censorious forces at work in American life. It is embarrassing that
the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee thought that the graphic
novel Maus “was simply too adult-oriented for use in our
schools” “because of its unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its
depiction of violence and suicide.” Previously, the graphic novel had been part
of the eighth-grade English language-arts curriculum. You can read the meeting
minutes here.
How, exactly, do you tell the story of the
Holocaust without any depiction of violence? (Is that why The Diary of
Anne Frank is part of so many curriculums? Because in addition to
having an author and narrator that kids are more likely to relate to, so much
of the violence and brutality of the Holocaust is metaphorically “offscreen,”
with Frank’s horrific fate addressed only in a brief section after the diary
ends?)
Yes, removing a book from a curriculum is
not the same as “banning” it, and educators have a responsibility to determine
what materials are age appropriate. I suspect the people defending Maus right
now would concede it probably wouldn’t be a good choice for kindergarteners.
But getting up in arms about the depiction
of nudity of an anthropomorphic mouse in a concentration camp is an epic case of missing the forest for the trees. Of
course Maus is deeply upsetting. The Holocaust is deeply
upsetting! There’s no way to teach about the greatest horror in modern history
and to make it emotionally “safe.”
This is one of the many advantages of
local control of schools. A dumb decision by a local school board gets
contained in that community, not statewide or nationwide.
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