The Rogan Experience: A Lesson for Dissidents

Just as the anti-vaccine-mandate protesters in Canada were branded as far-right, white supremacist, antisemitic, anti-black, transphobic, homophobic, racist insurgents; just as their funding was confiscated by a payment processing system and the Ottawa chief of police announced that the truckers’ convoy would be encircled by his officers and infiltrated by intelligence agents, a singular hero seemed to have emerged. His apparent free expression and material success appeared to serve as a beacon of hope for the censored, cancelled, disappeared, and soon-to-be disappointed. The convoy represented a middle class surrounded and besieged by the woke-covid regime, and this lone ranger represented their voice in a media sphere otherwise aligned utterly against them.

Joe Rogan had apparently beaten the elite and their leftist foot soldiers; Neil Young’s ultimatum on January 25th that Spotify either de-platform Rogan for channelling “fake information about vaccines” or face the removal of his music from the platform seemed to have backfired. Instead of deleting The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE), Spotify removed the music of the iconic radical turned establishment shill. But this would turn out to be a pyrrhic victory after all. 

While Young’s gambit seemingly flopped, other artists, including Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Graham Nash, and Stephen Stills soon followed suit. Rogan apologised for any offences, promising to do better and to add “balance” to his palette of podcasts. On Sunday, January 30th, Spotify would then issue new policies about hate speech and medical “misinformation,” its CEO Daniel Elk stating that he felt “confident” about the streaming company’s new efforts, including adding content warnings on episodes about COVID-19 and a database of trusted medical resources. 

Then, two days later, musical artist India Arie announced on Instagram her decision to “boycott Spotify” and to pull her music from the platform. In her case, however, the episodes on Covid were not the primary concern: “I find Joe Rogan problematic for reasons other than COVID interviews … For me, it’s also his language around race.” Predictably, the issue of race had entered the ring.

On Friday, February 5th, Spotify removed 71 JRE episodes, bringing the total of expunged podcasts to 113, all but one of which was an episode recorded pre-covid. The rationale for these excisions had remained unclear — that is until India Arie’s Instagram post featuring a montage of Rogan using the n-word some 24 times and comparing a black neighbourhood to Planet of the Apes became news. Rogan again apologised profusely. But as might be expected, the apologies failed to quell the leftist outrage. Rogan was not only a promoter of pseudoscience; he was a “racist” to boot.

Rogan ended his confessional statement by suggesting “that this can be a teachable moment” for others who might learn from his mistakes. But the mistake is not only his, and the lesson to be drawn from the Rogan imbroglio is not the one he had in mind. No, I won’t repeat the now common adage that commands one ‘never apologise’ to the mob, although Rogan surely erred by grovelling for forgiveness. The lesson is that dissidents should not have hitched their boxcar to the Rogan train in the first place. The right to free speech, self-determination, mobility, and property are not trivial matters to be adjudicated in terms of celebrity proxies like Rogan and Arie. 

Now the battle over censorship and cancel culture has been turned into a cartoon, with Twitter opponents jousting over whether Rogan is a hero or a villain and the rights of citizens hanging in the balance. This is not the way to advance the cause of liberty for subjects of the Covid-woke regime, which memory-holes deviationists based on identity, vaccination status, and political fealty. 

Regardless of the fate of the Rogan podcast and the podcaster’s career, the censorship will be amped up amid the U.S. Justice Department’s targeting of white supremacist “domestic terrorism,” which supposedly plagues the nation and is its number one threat. In the war on white and the “white identifying” middle class, dissidents have unnecessarily and unwittingly ceded even more ground to a ruling elite that wants nothing but absolute obedience and submission, if not their eradication.