Joe Rogan rose to the top of the podcaster world, literally putting the medium on the map, by being himself: Saying what he wanted to say and not caring a whit what others thought.
His insights were nothing exceptional, mind you, but what made "The Joe Rogan Experience" appealing was the fact that it was pure First Amendment. He and his guests had conversations about a myriad of topics and they were unfiltered, uncensored and frank, just like real conversations actually are.
Then, he dared to invite medical experts on his program that are not toeing the deep state, woke mob lines about the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines, potential treatments and other 'outside the box' topics and suddenly, The Joe Rogan Experience was no longer 'allowed' to be a truly unique experience.
Joe broke the rules: He and his guests said things about vaccines and the pandemic that are not preapproved and thus are not permissible, leading to cries of cancellation from the cancel culture woke mobs on social media, most of whom probably aren't even real people.
But instead of standing up for himself, Rogan decided to bend the knee instead, something we never thought we'd see this podcast pioneer do.
In a video Rogan posted to his Instagram account this week, he, at first, appeared to be waiving the mob off after Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced the company would add an information hub for coronavirus in response to 60s musicians Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and a few others removing their songs from the platform. The singers were angry that Rogan had on guests, both of whom are serious scientists and physicians who offered a different view of treatment options other than the vaccine (and one of them, Dr. Robert Malone, actually led mRNA vaccine research).
But then later on his show, he went all-in with an apology and 'pledged to do better.'
“The podcast has been accused of spreading dangerous misinformation, specifically about two episodes, a little bit about some other ones, but specifically about two,” Rogan said in his video. “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’s different from the mainstream narrative. I wanted to hear what their opinion is," he continued.
“I had them on and because of that, those episodes in particular, those episodes were labeled as being dangerous, they had dangerous misinformation in them,” Rogan added. “The problem I have with the term misinformation, especially today is that many of the things that we thought of as misinformation just a short while ago are now accepted as fact, like, for instance, eight months ago, if you said, ‘if you get vaccinated, you can still catch COVID and you can still spread COVID,’ you’d 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’d 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 had been accused of dangerous misinformation," he said.
But then on Sunday during a podcast, Rogan definitely backpedaled and genuflected to his $100 million Spotify paymasters.
“If there’s anything that I’ve done that I could do better, it’s having more experts with differing opinions right after I have the controversial ones,” the host said, noting he agreed with Ek’s disclaimer and content warning announcement.
“I would most certainly be open to doing that. And I would like to talk to some people who have differing opinions on the podcasts in the future. I do all the scheduling myself and I don’t always get it right," he said.
What's to 'always get right?' It's a conversation show. It's open-ended. It used to be open-minded, too, until someone started threatening the money flow.
Our culture has already been destroyed if the most influential among us aren't willing to stand up and defend our founding principles.
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