Pawn Takes Pawn: The Joe Rogan Brouhaha

I've watched a few Joe Rogan episodes, on a range of subjects that are usually not overtly political but almost always interesting—from the CIA connection to the Manson family to possible sites of Atlantis. I don't know that I've watched a single episode the whole way through. They're usually very long! They are precisely long-form conversations in which Rogan allows guests to speak and explain themselves in a way you hardly ever see anywhere else in the media.

Rogan is intellectually curious and intelligently inquisitive, open-minded, fair, and intellectually honest. I do not and would not go to him for my politics, and I don't know how deep his politics are, but the notion that he's some kind of right-wing lunatic is ludicrous. He was a Bernie supporter, ffs! The demand to cancel Rogan, coming from an aging, politically-shallow and inconsistent hippie who did not want the “faggot behind the fuckin’ cash register..handl[ing] your potatoes” in the late 80s, and did want to support the USA/Patriot Act, which meant “we’re going to have to relinquish some of our freedoms for a short period of time” in the 2000s (a “shredding of the constitution” for which, take note, he was called out in Countepunch), is particularly precious.

I doubt Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, or most of the people railing against Rogan now have ever seen more than five minutes of one of his interviews. They are exactly the kinds of conversations that everyone keeps saying we need. I struggle to think of an example of something as silly, capricious, and politically senseless and pernicious as trying to prevent everyone from seeing Joe Rogan’s interviews. Closest I can come: It’s like cancelling Larry King or Phil Donahue. What the fuck have we come to that anybody thinks this is some kind of progressive necessity?

I haven't seen the Robert Malone or Peter McCullough conversations that everybody's so worked up about, but what's upsetting to the powers-that-be is precisely that Rogan allowed scientists like them to explain themselves in their own terms at some length. They are, after all, indisputably qualified scientists who have at least as much authority to speak on Covid vaccines and treatments as the approved mainstream “experts,” who have been wrong about…well, everything. The powers-that-be aren't seeking to deplatform Joe Rogan in order to protect you from "misinformation," but because they don't want you to see and hear alternative explanations that you may find cogent, and might lead you to see how dishonest and incompetent they have been.

Nobody's deplatforming Rogan to protect you; they—people with a lot more power than Rogan, Young, or Mitchell—are doing it to close off scientific and political debate, and to protect themselves. What kind of fool do you have to be not to recognize this?

Fools like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell are really Rockin’ in  the Hedge Fund World, pawns in a game run by players like Blackrock (which actually owns Neil Young’s music), the object of which is to further tighten establishment control of discourse and to destroy the possibility of reasonable scientific and political conversation.

The call to deplatform Rogan is reactionary and ridiculous. If you join in, especially if you've never seen one of his conversations, you are a foolish pawn in a reactionary and ridiculous game that is helping to destroy our society.