Similarly, we should reject the suggestion corporate censorship isn’t “real” censorship because those who are censored can just find another streaming platform. We would never buy the argument that workers at Walmart who are unsatisfied with working conditions or low pay should just find another job, rather than demand union representation or an increased minimum wage. Many on the left have traditionally understood that ignoring the power wielded by private businesses, on the grounds that anything such they do is “voluntary,” is dangerously misguided. Mainstream liberals have increasingly adopted the right-wing libertarian view that “free speech” only applies to actions carried out by the state, and that private businesses are free to censor as they please.
But there’s also subjectivity at play, and to ignore how such blurred lines for acceptable discourse could be weaponized against left-wing voices is a dangerous miscalculation. Like his politics, his position on the COVID vaccine can-generously-be described as skeptical to contradictory.ĭoes the Joe Rogan Experience at times broadcast “bad” or “wrong” ideas to a massive audience? Undoubtedly it does. Rogan has been prone to conspiracy theories for so long that it seems to have been worked into the character he played on NewsRadio-a show that went off the air in 1999-so, while he isn’t exactly an outright anti-vaxxer, it’s unsurprising that he’s sympathetically interviewed an alarming number of people who spout reckless nonsense about COVID-19, and that many of his own statements about the pandemic have been somewhere on the spectrum from dubious to recklessly inaccurate. The claim made in both the MoveOn petition as well as the medical experts’ open letter that Rogan spreads falsehoods about COVID stands on much firmer ground. The truth, as my late friend Michael Brooks and I noted two years ago, is that Rogan’s political views are messy and somewhat incoherent-like the views of many millions of Americans. Dan Crenshaw for opposing Medicare for All. Those who’d pigeonhole Rogan in such a fashion would also be remiss to not watch Rogan’s classic skewering of the right-wing YouTube commentator Dave Rubin for wanting to privatize the Post Office and end the regulatory state, or Rogan’s blistering rebuke of Republican Rep. Anyone who believes MoveOn’s depiction of Rogan as nothing but a right-wing propagandist-much less a “white supremacist”-would be surprised by the content of that interview, where Rogan and West vibed on subjects ranging from socialism to Chekhov to standup comedy to the origins of white supremacy in America. Describing West as “brilliant,” Rogan tweeted that it was one of his all-time favorite episodes of the podcast. The next year, Rogan interviewed the socialist academic Cornel West.
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