Joe Rogan, Horse Medicine, and the Strange Logic of Cancellation
In a story that broke late Wednesday and received wall-to-wall coverage in liberal outlets, we learned that celebrity podcaster Joe Rogan tested positive for the coronavirus. But that wasn’t all. We were informed that Rogan has been “dismissive of vaccinations” and “regularly downplayed the need for vaccines.” And we learned that Rogan turned to a “litany” of unproven therapeutics to treat his COVID-19, including the infamous deworming medicine ivermectin.
The problem with all of this is not that Joe Rogan’s diagnosis, and even his treatment, aren’t newsworthy as such — both of them might be. The problem is rather that the type and amount of scrutiny directed at Rogan do not really advance the project of reporting news. Instead, they advance a type of culture war program, one I propose to call “soft cancellation.”
The media reaction to Rogan’s COVID diagnosis makes perfect sense at first glance. Liberal outlets have recently busied themselves excavating a raft of stories about certain people — conservatives with anti-mask and anti-vaccine views — who have contracted and died of COVID-19. Once-obscure figures such as Texas anti-mask organizer Caleb Wallace get fully profiled in The New York Times once they fall ill from the coronavirus; local radio host Marc Bernier also received a huge write-up in USA Today after dying of COVID.
There is clearly an agenda here, but it’s one in which the response to Rogan seems to fit. These outlets want to construct the narrative that anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers deserve whatever fallout they get from the coronavirus. The outlets deliberately create environments like that of New York Magazine, where an author can pen an article asking tepidly for less dancing on the graves of dead anti-vaxxers — and have readers comment overwhelmingly in favor of grave dancing.
“What a miracle!” wrote a reader in the top comment on the article. “How many times in your life have you seen flotsam and jetsam jump into a garbage receptacle on its own?”
We might want to assume that Joe Rogan got caught in the same process. Judging from headlines and ledes from The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post, Rogan is just another Wallace or Bernier, someone who deserves a profile (and derision) for catching COVID after espousing conservative and anti-vax views. The catch is that Rogan isn’t a Wallace or Bernier at all. He isn’t even conservative. And it’s an absolute stretch to call Rogan an anti-vax organizer or host, or even an anti-vaxxer, period.
In the podcast episode that forms the basis for media claims that Rogan has been “dismissive of vaccines” (even “regularly,” according to USA Today), Rogan said the following:
“I think you should get vaccinated if you’re vulnerable,” he said. “I think you should get vaccinated if you feel like — my parents are vaccinated. I’ve encouraged a lot of people to get — and people say, do you think it's safe to get vaccinated? I’ve said, yeah, I think for the most part it's safe to get vaccinated. I do. I do.”
“But if you’re like 21 years old, and you say to me, ‘Should I get vaccinated?’ I’ll go no,” he continued. “Are you healthy? Are you a healthy person? Like, look, don’t do anything stupid, but you should take care of yourself. You should — if you’re a healthy person, and you’re exercising all the time, and you’re young, and you’re eating well, like, I don’t think you need to worry about this.”
Clearly, Rogan tried to couch his views about young people getting vaccinated in language expressing his subjective and personal opinion. He restricted his claims to younger folks, who, on balance, do suffer less from COVID-19. And he even said he thought that it was generally safe to get vaccinated, mentioning his past endorsements of vaccines to others. Although it’s understandable to find his overall opinion irresponsible, his statements didn’t dispute specific scientific findings or contain any particular call to action.
Nonetheless, Rogan got called out across the media for his views, inciting direct responses from no less than Dr. Anthony Fauci and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex. Afterward, Rogan reaffirmed that his remarks counted as nothing more than personal opinion:
“I’m not a doctor, I’m a fucking moron,” [Rogan] said. “I’m not a respected source of information, even for me. But I at least try to be honest about what I’m saying.”
Given all of these mitigating factors, it’s misleading to imply that Rogan’s views are tantamount to anti-vax propaganda. It’s misleading, moreover, to draw a straight line between his views and his COVID diagnosis, since the views don’t even apply to people in his age group (50-plus). So why did the media go to such lengths to do these things anyway?
The goal of the recent Rogan coverage is soft cancellation. This phenomenon — wherein the media attempts to cast someone’s views as beyond the pale without a strong push from the broader public — sits at the intersection of cancel culture and elite contempt. These latter concepts have considerable overlap, but viewing them as something of a Venn diagram is necessary. Not everything that’s cancellable draws in elite censure. To see this, we can compare Rogan’s coverage to that of a very similar media figure, Charlamagne tha God.
Compared to Rogan, whom CNN’s business section dubs a “controversial podcast host,” Charlamagne gets a much more positive description from the mainstream media. Magazine publisher Variety calls him “a radio personality” who “has built an audience of more than 4.5 million listeners a week for his provocative observations on daily headlines, politics, trends and pop culture.”
The site celebrates the broad reach of Charlamagne’s views: “Now the author, podcaster and co-host of syndicated radio morning show ‘The Breakfast Club’ is stepping up to a new microphone on Comedy Central,” gushes Cynthia Littleton, Variety’s business editor. Left unmentioned, however, is Charlamagne’s open, consistent, and fully platformed belief that COVID-19 vaccines contain tracking microchips.
On an episode of The Breakfast Club, a very famous talk show/podcast on which the future President Joe Biden infamously appeared, Charlamagne voiced his opinion, heard on radio stations across the country, that then-president Donald Trump merely pretended to contract COVID-19 as a scheme to promote his own candidacy and the new coronavirus vaccines to impressionable Americans: “Millions will line up to take the vaccine, and boom, microchips for all of y’all, right in time for goddamn Thanksgiving.”
Trump could “allegedly take a coronavirus vaccine live on national TV,” Charlamagne said. “All of a sudden he’s well — give[s] the illusion to the American public that this vaccine is safe.” The idea wasn’t a joke: Charlamagne expressed this view repeatedly throughout the episode, espousing it to multiple members of the public who called into the show and concurred that Trump’s COVID case was a conspiracy. According to an article from The Verge and Reveal News, Charlamagne suggested that coronavirus vaccines contain microchips no less than four times in the same 90-minute episode. He also called the vaccines “rushed,” said that their perceived safety would be the result of a “ploy,” and referred to the vaccines as “value menu,” a reference to fast food. All of these remarks have gone unretracted.
The article from The Verge and Reveal News, along with the comments it contained, was reprinted almost nowhere. And it makes sense: liberal editors like Charlamagne’s content. In addition to a widespread perception that it is a voice of “black America,” The Breakfast Club brings an air of legitimacy to elite liberals such as Kamala Harris (who claimed to smoke weed on the show), Pete Buttigieg, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. Charlamagne gets a pass on these grounds, even though he and his guests often air views that are far more extreme than Rogan’s.
In 2017, Charlamagne brought a comedian called Lil Duval on The Breakfast Club to interview. The comedian stated that, if it happened that a transgender woman had sex with him before revealing her transgender identity, he would literally want to kill her. Charlamagne’s response revealed that while he personally thought killing seemed extreme, and would count as a “hate crime,” he also thought that such transgender individuals should probably be imprisoned for their actions. Buzzfeed transcribed the conversation:
“You manipulated me to believe in this thing,” Duval said. “I can’t live with that, bro.”
“Now, I do agree that you are taking away a person’s power of choice when you don’t tell them upfront,” Charlamagne said.
“There should be some type of repercussions for that if you do that to somebody,” Duval said.
“You should go to jail or something,” Charlamagne concluded. “Some charges should be pressed. ... But you cant go around killin’ transgenders, Duval.”
Amazingly, a widely reprinted press release concerning Charlamagne’s remarks about the episode — in which the host did not apologize for or even address his advocacy of jailing women who conceal they are trans — focused solely on his statement that he does not condone hate crimes, and used this as evidence of Charlamagne’s liberal bona fides. “Charlamagne Tha God Condemns Violence Against Trans Community . . .” proclaimed Billboard’s web site in a headline.
The Billboard article, and even an opinion piece by Janet Mock about the episode, did not mention Charlamagne’s opinion on jailing trans people (the latter only mentioned “the hosts” of The Breakfast Club laughing along with Lil Duval).
Rogan’s attitudes about trans issues and PC culture are treated very differently in the media, to say the least. The reason for this is that battle lines in the culture war depend less on politics than on the (often racialized) appearance of being on the side of the “allies,” along with one’s personal connections.
Elite contempt for Rogan and his media project, The Joe Rogan Experience, predates his brush with COVID-19. The coverage, in contrast with Charlamagne’s, reveals an ongoing and concerted effort toward Rogan’s cancellation. And it exposes soft cancellation as little more than a Machiavellian power play dressed up as cultural grievance.
In early 2019, Slate author Justin Peters wrote a withering piece, sarcastically called “Joe Rogan’s Galaxy Brain,” in which the author grew apoplectic over Rogan’s distaste for cancellation itself. Peters was incensed because, in his mind, Rogan seemed to view “the deplatforming of jerks on the internet” as an injustice: an idea apparently equivalent to thinking the “worst thing” someone can do is “not give a white guy a second chance.”
It’s manifestly clear that Peters thought Rogan himself was deserving of cancellation. Rogan had supposedly created a “safe space” for grifters comparable to “the president of the United States” (then Donald Trump), a space for people “who sneer at ‘PC culture’ and ‘identity politics’ as a means of reassuring cisgender white males that they are not and have never been the problem.”
Reaching alarming levels of condescension, Peters accused Rogan and his audience of symbolizing “the dumbest period of American history,” wherein “articulate charlatans, aggro-provocateurs, and other confident dullards . . . seek to capitalize on the end of authority by using the internet to proclaim their own truths.”
This odious group, said Peters, convinces “the world’s least-informed people that they are actually the most-informed people.”
Such a deleterious project would obviously deserve to meet a swift end: a cancellation leading to a “deplatforming” of Rogan and many of those he interviews. Like Peters, most of liberal media appears to believe this assessment deeply. But these voices have to contend with Rogan’s unquenchable support and popularity.
Thus, The New York Times felt compelled to write that Rogan is “Too Big to Cancel.” The point of this long article was to suggest that, perhaps, the world would be far safer and more responsible if Rogan could be cancelled after all. Those outside of Rogan’s fanbase — a so-called “monoculture of free-thinkers” — have reportedly grown “alarmed” at the “social capital [Rogan] managed to accumulate.” The Times article suggests repeatedly that Rogan’s show cannot be responsibly viewed as harmless and benign.
And so, what the media seeks to bring about for Rogan cannot be a cancellation, properly speaking — it’s hard to imagine a Rogan deplatforming, since Spotify just paid the podcaster about $100 million to make his show a Spotify exclusive. Instead, the mainstream media is looking for a soft cancellation, a convincing of at least its paying audience that Rogan, his views, and his show are both dangerous and unacceptable in polite discourse.
The double standards here are palpable: the mind seizes trying to imagine the mainstream press publishing anything resembling Peters’ views on Rogan about Charlamagne tha God. I think we should consider that the reasons for this are not just cultural but also covertly political.
Beyond the more obvious difference of race, there are actually notable policy differences between Rogan and Charlamagne. Rogan’s views align far more with the left flank of the Democratic party — the agendas pushed most heavily by folks such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez — than Charlamagne’s do. The latter host can be counted on reliably to police the left flank on the grounds that their politics isn’t sufficiently racialized. Vice News was able to cover Charlamagne’s interview with Bernie Sanders in a manner that heavily underscored Sanders’ lack of blackness, his lack of support for racial reparations, and his reluctance to call Donald Trump a “Nazi Cheeto.”
Yahoo! News happily reported that Charlamagne got the Sanders campaign to engage in cultural self-flagellation. “We were criticized for being too white, that was a correct criticism. We were criticized for being too male, that was a correct criticism. That’s going to change,” Sanders confessed to tha God. Charlamagne and his co-hosts offered scant praise for Sanders’ plans that would broadly expand the social state, but Charlamagne personally called on Sanders to give money to directly to “black banks” and “black entrepreneurs.”
Rogan provides precisely the opposite sort of content. He does the reverse of what a progressive host is supposed to do in the media landscape. Rather than reinforcing the association between politics and culture, Rogan upends it. Rather than trying to exclude and “white-bait” his interlocutors, Rogan looks for common ground. His show testifies to the possibility of there being a culturally diverse U.S. left, one that subordinates cultural orthodoxy to the pursuit of specific material aims. It reflects the possibility of a left that could actually reach political dominance.
This is disallowed thought. It also explains why Rogan’s use of ivermectin must be newsworthy. Rogan’s “unapproved” COVID therapies are 2021’s Bernie Bros, cultural symbols that connote danger and otherness.
The press uses these symbols in a form of reverse Southern Strategy. Instead of casting social welfare as a means to benefit undeserving minorities who imperil America itself, the liberal media casts cultural tolerance, open dialogue, and universalist politics as political cons that empower backwards cultural barbarians who imperil America itself, and especially its most deserving minorities.
Rogan used ivermectin alongside many other drugs, recovered from COVID, and shared his experience. But because ivermectin is a dangerous “horse dewormer” (also prescribed to humans), which the FDA told us not to take because none of us are a “horse” or a “cow,” Rogan must be the kind of science denier who’s responsible for COVID spread and deserves to be dumped on in New York Magazine comments sections. Above all, he must be a conservative science denier: when Dr. Fauci lied directly about science in order to save certain masks for healthcare workers, that was all well and good. Like with masks, science on ivermectin is evolving. But anyone who likes the latter thing is different from you, suggests all liberal media.
The politics of the reverse Southern Strategy are deeply effective. Reports in HuffPost from an AOC staffer suggest that the celebrity congresswoman consciously backed away from stumping for Bernie Sanders during a crucial period of the 2020 Democratic primaries, a time in which Sanders fell from his frontrunner position.
This distancing allegedly was due to two “annoyances” AOC had with Sanders. The first of these was “the [Sanders] campaign’s Jan. 23 decision to publicize the endorsement of controversial podcast host Joe Rogan.”
The media’s wager is exactly this: it bets that the left will choose cultural purity and division over relevance every time. We should remember this. And we should also remember, the next time we hear about ivermectin, vaccines, and people who should be on our own political team, that the rules of cancellation aren’t real. They themselves are a con; they are only a political game.