Joe Rogan will be the first to tell you he’s a “fucking moron.” He actually said this following backlash to comments he made on his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, in April 2021—right around the time COVID vaccines became widely available to all U.S. adults—when he advised young, healthy people not to bother getting vaccinated.
Rogan, ever self-aware, told his audience of millions: “I’m not a doctor, I’m a fucking moron, and I’m a cage fighting commentator who’s a dirty stand-up comedian,” adding, “I’m drunk most of the time.” (He also noted he’s high on marijuana and psychedelics a whole lot, too.)
And you know what? He’s right. He is just a lowbrow entertainer. He shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
ADVERTISEMENT
The problem is, for all his self-mockery, Rogan does, in fact, take himself very seriously. How could he not?
He’s built a vast and lucrative empire out of a podcast where he and his guests pontificate on any number of subjects. Sometimes, it’s clear Rogan’s done some homework and his guest is a good faith actor, with interesting fact-based things to say. Many other times, Rogan shoots from the hip, and/or his guest is a charlatan grifter, a partisan hack, or a questionably-credentialed quack.
Rogan’s prominent superfans—mainly right-wing media figures and “heterodox” social media personalities—have called him the “Walter Cronkite of our era” and “the new mainstream media.” His show has been heralded as the biggest platform for the “Intellectual Dark Web,” and the calls to remove him from Spotify have been likened to “the front line of the battle over free speech, which is the keystone of the democratic west.”
Sure seems like a lot of people take him and his show very seriously.
That’s why it’s the height of chickenshit deflection for Rogan and his superfans to pivot to the argument that his detractors are merely humorless scolds or bots in thrall of the “corporate media,” who are simply too brainwashed to understand that his “everyman” idiocy is his true genius.
Rogan, quite obviously, has no intellectual consistency or coherent political principles. He’s a Bernie Sanders supporter who also pals around with the sadistic, professional right-wing liar Alex Jones. He’s done popular interviews with esteemed medical experts and anti-vaxx conspiracy theorists.
He’s told people to be suspicious of the COVID vaccine, and also told them to get the vaccine. And just two years ago he passionately defended vaccines as a miracle, and openly mocked vaxx-skeptics.
If Rogan were touted as just a “fucking moron” with an entertaining interview style, that would at least be honest. But when the same people who declare that the Joe Rogan Experience is crucial to the continued existence of Western civilization also say that “he’s just an MMA comedian bro,” that’s simply a copout.
Jon Stewart was once derided (mostly) by conservatives annoyed by his “clown nose on/clown nose off” style of slithering out of accountability.
So long as Stewart was eviscerating worthy targets like Tucker Carlson, he was praised as arguably “The Most Trusted Man in Media.” But when he was called out for deceptively editing interviews with conservatives, giving pattycake interviews to liberals, and credulously platforming anti-vaxxers like RFK Jr., Stewart and his defenders would retreat to “clown nose on”—arguing that you were the silly one for taking a Comedy Central show hosted by a standup comic so seriously.
Stewart recently came to Rogan’s defense over the latter’s platforming of “misinformation.” During the run-up to the Iraq War, when popular sentiment was overwhelmingly pro-invasion, Stewart stood in opposition. Meanwhile, outlets like The New York Times printed articles based on bad intelligence (a.k.a. misinformation) that helped sell the war to the public.
If the “censor misinformation” movement of 2022 were around in 2002, would Stewart have been censored for his skepticism of the mainstream narrative? “Who gets to decide” what is misinformation, Stewart asked.
This is an important point that can’t be understated. Particularly during politically fraught times, the maintaining of a culture of free speech is crucial. What is considered unpopular speech today could be the birth of a new civil rights movement in a few years.
But even if it would be counterproductive and a bad precedent to deplatform an entertainer like Rogan, he and his boosters need to make up their minds.
Is he just a shock-jock comic, a la 1990s-era Howard Stern? Is he the truth-to-power sage of popular culture, like 2000s-era Jon Stewart? Or is he the new “mainstream media,” a beacon of bravery in a morass of corporate media groupthink?
It is possible to be different things to different people, especially when you churn out tens of thousands of hours of content like Rogan. But it isn’t too much to ask whether he should be held to the same standard as any socio-political commentator (clown nose off), or not (clown nose on).
