Do not hide behind “freedom of speech” - you are completely misinterpreting why people don’t like Joe Rogan.
The #1 criticism of Joe Rogan is that he gives an equal platform to real science and pseudoscience on the biggest podcast in the world. He’s turned plenty of nutjobs with absolutely terrible theories into household names.
Fair enough. I don’t feel like I’m hiding behind freedom of speech as much as I’m saying that it’s fundamentally important to the functioning of a healthy society. With that comes knowledge that some people out there are going to be dishonest shits. If what I’m saying about it’s importance is true, then that should be the starting point for any discussion like this.
The question is then, who get to decide what is appropriate to talk about? What percentage of the people he talks to have to be agreeable before he comes off as a good actor? I would never have become a leftist if it weren’t for information out there that didn’t fit the national narratives that we get from existing im the US.
This whole covid fiasco has been an excellent example of people who were off narrative (lab leak, anti shutdowns etc) being at least partially vindicated by the actual outcomes later in the game. It’s not always the case, but it happens and we should be aware of that.
The problem with freedom of speech is that not everybody has an equally sized platform to be heard from.
Who gets to be heard isn’t based off of who has the best ideas or has everybody’s interests at heart, it’s based off of who is willing to say the most outlandish things, or is willing to tell people what they want to hear, or sometimes simply because they have alot of money/power.
I used to listen to Rogan a lot, but I remember a few instances adding up over the years and I distinctly remember the instances that made me eventually say “this guy is not a good person.”
When he interviewed Milo Yiannapolis, I was genuinely upset Joe gave him a platform to spew his hateful rhetoric. Milo is a toxic person whose xenophobic, misogynist, and transphobic rhetoric directly hurt a lot of people and Joe simply gave him more ammo.
When his old friend Duncan Trussell visited the podcast for one of the last times, Trussell and Joe were celebrating his move to Spotify deal, and in the middle of a drunken ramble, Trussell warned Joe not to field Ben Shapiro, that Shapiro was not a good person, to which Joe simply shrugged it off.
While I’m unsure if the two are on good terms today as I no longer listen to either podcasts, Trussell is one of Joe’s long term friends and it made me respect Joe a lot less that he wouldn’t engage with his friend on this topic with a genuine discussion/debate. This struck me as one of the first instances where Joe drew a line in the sand, displaying that criticism of Shapiro was somehow off limits.
His indulgence of Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris has not aged well as both have been revealed through the careful scrutiny of time to have been vectors that infiltrate, manipulate, and inject grade school level philsophical viewpoints into the mainstream public discourse as if these belabored arguments haven’t already been repeatedly disproven in academic circles. This is made very apparent when they encounter actual intellectual debates like the Peterson/Zizek debate which demonstrated Peterson didn’t understand even the most elementary aspects of Marxism.
The harm of Joe’s platform can be exemplified by the fact that Peterson is still more culturally relevant. This is due in part to the fact that Zizek could never be on the Rogan podcast because his ideas are honestly too intellectually robust to be of interest to the majority of Joe’s audience, and pose a strong existential antithesis to capitalism, much stronger than Bernie Sanders, I might add. But a philosophical mind like Zizek’s is exactly who anyone respectable on the right would need to contend with in order to pose a legitimate argument for capitalism. The fact that Peterson was posed as some sort of equal to Zizek, and that their debate was one of the most watched in recent history, points to the power of Joe’s influence in adding legitimacy to Peterson’s platform when honestly Peterson shouldn’t have any. Instead he was, and, to a lesser extent, still is, considered to be the greatest proponent for capitalist and traditionalist thought.
Lastly, Joe stood up for his long time friend Alex Jones multiple times, making excuses for him when things looked bad, and failed repeatedly to call him out on his bad faith conspiracy lunacy. The last time Alex Jones was on Joe’s show, which I believe was one of his last Youtube shows, I stopped watching. I disavowed Joe as a shill for the right wing, and I’m honestly ashamed I gave him so much of my time and attention.