We Can Learn to Live with COVID-19, and With Joe Rogan Too
Since the threat of being “canceled,” shamed or otherwise erased from public discourse seems to be a mark of success in media work these days, congratulations, Joe Rogan! You truly have arrived.
If you haven’t heard of him, he’s big. Since he launched “The Joe Rogan Experience” in 2009, his talk show has become one of the most popular podcasts on the planet.
Size also makes him a bigger target for critics, who recently have included such boomer generation stars as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, survivors of polio who accuse Rogan of spreading dangerous misinformation about COVID-19. They asked for their songs to be removed from Spotify, the streaming service that carries his podcast under a reported four-year $100 million contract.
Health officials in President Joe Biden’s administration also urged Spotify and other internet firms to crack down on COVID-19 misinformation.
And about a week later, that controversy was upstaged by another, the online release of a startling montage of video clips of Rogan using the N-word and, in one anecdote, describing a Black movie audience as looking like the “Planet of the Apes.” Not nice.
Rogan vigorously — vigorously! — apologized for the clips from 12 years of shows, calling them “the most regretful and shameful thing that I’ve ever had to talk about publicly.”
He noted that he was “not a racist” but clearly he messed up.
As an African American who tries mightily to defend free speech, I don’t want to see Rogan, who came to fame as a “cage-fighting commentator” and host of NBC’s “Fear Factor,” chased off Spotify.
Even if he easily could find another streaming service (right-wing Rumble already has offered him a four-year $100 million contract to jump ship), his show’s removal would turn him into a martyr for those who already think their political side can’t catch a break.
Offenses when it comes to the N-word, among others, tend to be judged in the eyes and ears of the offended, and the rules, as Rogan observed, are always changing. Rogan noted how the N-word is in the title of Richard Pryor’s classic 1974 comedy album “That N-----’s Crazy.”
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