Post by LFC on Feb 8, 2022 20:04:25 GMT
With all the kerfuffle about Joe Rogan platforming an endless stream of cranks we now have people digging into his old shows where he seems to be inordinately fond of the n-word. Also bashing "feminists."
ensuring The Joe Rogan Experience—a podcast whose eponymous host, a muscle-bound man most famous for providing MMA color commentary and pressuring people into eating bull testicles for money—has become an online cause célèbre in recent months after a group of 270 doctors penned an open letter to its distributor, Spotify, accusing the show of having “a concerning history of broadcasting misinformation, particularly regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The letter took particular issue with a recent episode featuring guest Robert Malone, a biochemist who conducted a series of groundbreaking laboratory studies on cells using mRNA technology in the late-1980s and early-1990s. Malone is a pharmaceutical executive and lab researcher with no history of treating patients—he did not even complete his medical residency, according to his own CV. This did not stop him from floating wild, baseless claims about the COVID-19 pandemic, including that vaccine efficacy is a mirage attributed to “mass-formation psychosis” (despite Malone himself being vaccinated), and that hospitals are engaged in a grand conspiracy of misdiagnosing COVID-19 deaths in order to up their profits. He further compared the current public health climate to the rise of Nazism. Rogan not only provided Malone with a large platform and failed to push back on any of his pandemic conspiracies—which he has been banned from Twitter for constantly spreading—but appeared to agree with them. The episode was immediately removed from YouTube for violating its COVID-19 disinformation policy.
“As scientists, we face backlash and resistance as the public grows to distrust our research and expertise,” the doctors’ letter concluded. “As educators and science communicators, we are tasked with repairing the public’s damaged understanding of science and medicine. As physicians, we bear the arduous weight of a pandemic that has stretched our medical systems to their limits and only stands to be exacerbated by the anti-vaccination sentiment woven into this and other episodes of Rogan’s podcast.”
This is, of course, not the first time Rogan’s wildly popular podcast, which attracts up to 190 million downloads per month on Spotify, has signal-boosted potentially dangerous pandemic fictions. In late December, he welcomed Peter McCullough, a former cardiologist who’d been fired from the Baylor University Medical Center for spreading numerous COVID conspiracies—including his repeated endorsement of hydroxychloroquine as a viable treatment—on his podcast. There, McCullough argued, against all reason, that the pandemic was a “planned event”; that masks do not offer any protection against COVID; that the virus cannot be spread by asymptomatic persons; that being infected with COVID offers you permanent immunity from the virus; and that vaccines are causing mass deaths that are being unreported. Again, Rogan, himself a vaccine skeptic who’s publicly endorsed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as alternative treatments for COVID, failed to counter these falsehoods.
In the wake of the doctors’ letter, a number of music artists, from Neil Young and Joni Mitchell to India.Arie, removed their catalogs from Spotify in protest at Rogan’s reckless platforming of COVID lies.
Over the past week, however, criticism of Rogan and his podcast has reached a fever pitch, as a number of other videos re-emerged of the host engaged in a wide variety of offenses, from repeatedly saying the N-word to laughing hysterically as his pal Joey Diaz described coercing women into giving him blowjobs for stage time at The Comedy Store. (Rogan, who once bragged that he could perform oral sex on himself, retweeted Diaz’s defense of the clip when it first gained traction in 2020, calling his critics “cocksniffers.”).
That’s not all, of course. A clip went viral of Rogan on his podcast calling a movie theater filled with Black people “Planet of the Apes”:
The letter took particular issue with a recent episode featuring guest Robert Malone, a biochemist who conducted a series of groundbreaking laboratory studies on cells using mRNA technology in the late-1980s and early-1990s. Malone is a pharmaceutical executive and lab researcher with no history of treating patients—he did not even complete his medical residency, according to his own CV. This did not stop him from floating wild, baseless claims about the COVID-19 pandemic, including that vaccine efficacy is a mirage attributed to “mass-formation psychosis” (despite Malone himself being vaccinated), and that hospitals are engaged in a grand conspiracy of misdiagnosing COVID-19 deaths in order to up their profits. He further compared the current public health climate to the rise of Nazism. Rogan not only provided Malone with a large platform and failed to push back on any of his pandemic conspiracies—which he has been banned from Twitter for constantly spreading—but appeared to agree with them. The episode was immediately removed from YouTube for violating its COVID-19 disinformation policy.
“As scientists, we face backlash and resistance as the public grows to distrust our research and expertise,” the doctors’ letter concluded. “As educators and science communicators, we are tasked with repairing the public’s damaged understanding of science and medicine. As physicians, we bear the arduous weight of a pandemic that has stretched our medical systems to their limits and only stands to be exacerbated by the anti-vaccination sentiment woven into this and other episodes of Rogan’s podcast.”
This is, of course, not the first time Rogan’s wildly popular podcast, which attracts up to 190 million downloads per month on Spotify, has signal-boosted potentially dangerous pandemic fictions. In late December, he welcomed Peter McCullough, a former cardiologist who’d been fired from the Baylor University Medical Center for spreading numerous COVID conspiracies—including his repeated endorsement of hydroxychloroquine as a viable treatment—on his podcast. There, McCullough argued, against all reason, that the pandemic was a “planned event”; that masks do not offer any protection against COVID; that the virus cannot be spread by asymptomatic persons; that being infected with COVID offers you permanent immunity from the virus; and that vaccines are causing mass deaths that are being unreported. Again, Rogan, himself a vaccine skeptic who’s publicly endorsed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as alternative treatments for COVID, failed to counter these falsehoods.
In the wake of the doctors’ letter, a number of music artists, from Neil Young and Joni Mitchell to India.Arie, removed their catalogs from Spotify in protest at Rogan’s reckless platforming of COVID lies.
Over the past week, however, criticism of Rogan and his podcast has reached a fever pitch, as a number of other videos re-emerged of the host engaged in a wide variety of offenses, from repeatedly saying the N-word to laughing hysterically as his pal Joey Diaz described coercing women into giving him blowjobs for stage time at The Comedy Store. (Rogan, who once bragged that he could perform oral sex on himself, retweeted Diaz’s defense of the clip when it first gained traction in 2020, calling his critics “cocksniffers.”).
That’s not all, of course. A clip went viral of Rogan on his podcast calling a movie theater filled with Black people “Planet of the Apes”:
It just gets worse from there.
