Musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, among others, have pulled their music from Spotify, claiming that podcaster Joe Rogan is promoting misinformation. Spotify has not removed Rogan’s podcast, but they have quietly started culling his catalog. Although, not the episodes that led to the rhubarb.
Specifically, there are two podcasts that have caused the controversy. An interview with Dr. Peter McCullough, MD and another with Dr. Robert Malone, MD. Dr. McCullough is a board certified cardiologist with over 1000 publications and 600 citations in the National Library of Medicine. Dr. Malone holds nine patents on mRNA technology, and is responsible in part, for helping to create it. Both Dr. McCullough and Dr. Malone have offered opinions on the coronavirus that differ from opinions offered by the establishment media.
There are two issues with this. First, social and global media that are a part of the Trusted News Initiative have not gotten everything right about the coronavirus in the past two years.
Here is a short list of views that were previously censored by members of the Trusted News Initiative that have since been proven to be true:
CDC concedes cloth masks are ineffective
CDC admits coronavirus shots do not stop transmission
CDC publishes paper showing that vaccinated individuals are up to four times as likely to be infected as those with natural immunity
Journal of the American Medical Association finds natural immunity to be durable for at least 20 months
John Hopkins meta-analysis shows lockdowns were ineffective and only lowered coronavirus mortality by 0.2 percent
Media mentions mounting evidence that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology
CNN has promoted shunning people with different views and used the term super-spreader, not only as a descriptor for transmission of the virus, but as a label for individuals who spread “misinformation.”
Last month, President Joseph Biden made a special appeal to social media companies to, “deal with the misinformation,” saying, “It has to stop.” Last week, the U.S. Surgeon General said that Big Tech has an, “important role to play,” in helping, “to limit the spread of misinformation.” This week, in response to Spotify putting a content advisory on podcasts, the White House Press Secretary said, “we want every platform to continue doing more to call out misinformation.” Shutting down the virus has turned into shutting down dissent.
Last year in Merseyside, England masked police officers used a truck with an electronic billboard to share the following message:
Courtesy Merseyside police.
When it was pointed out that being offensive is not against the law, yet, the police pivoted to say, that they were raising awareness about hate-speech, which is illegal in the UK. The terms hate-speech, misinformation, and fact checking are being used by countries and companies to curtail freedom of speech.
Fact checking is censorship. It is simply a euphemism that is now used to ban speech. Facebook admitted in a court filing last fall that its fact checking is nothing more than “opinion.”
Questioning cloth masks, lockdowns, and transmissibility post jab, is now acceptable but was once labeled as misinformation. The last two years have proven that free and open debate do not obscure truth, but censorship does.
The second issue with censoring Joe Rogan is the First Amendment. The United States of America is unique among all the nations of the earth. Our founding documents state that our rights are given by God not government. Governments are instituted not for the production but for the protection of rights.
Many of Rogan’s podcasts average three hours. Each one is an unscripted conversation. In his book, 12 Rules for Life, Dr. Jordan Peterson states that, “people organize their brains with conversation.” He goes on to say, “Much of what we consider healthy mental function is the result of our ability to use the reactions of others to keep our complex selves functional. We outsource the problem of our sanity.” The Joe Rogan podcast is a documented attempt to think out loud. It has made the world a saner place.
Spotify currently lists one thousand one hundred and seventy one episodes of Rogan’s podcast, with the first one dating back to 2009. This attempt to ban thousands of hours of long form conversation, much of which took place years before any mention of the coronavirus, is misguided at best.
Spotify’s first response to calls to censor coronavirus information was, we have been. They claim to have removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to the coronavirus. Rogan averages 11 million listeners per episode and is likely too big to be cancelled outright. But some episodes did not migrate to Spotify when Rogan made the move. Recently, the platform has been quietly removing episodes. The coronavirus misinformation label did not stick, so now Rogan is being called racist. As of today, there are 113 episodes missing. All of these interviews occurred pre-response to coronavirus, except for one with actor, comedian Chris D’Elia that occurred in April 2020.
Also, anyone with a smaller audience, which is everyone, is subject to being censored. Platforms will continue to censor content based on what the experts label as misinformation, even though they have made glaring mistakes in the past two years. How fragile is the expert narrative that it cannot withstand robust, open debate?
Besides silencing smaller voices, these calls to censor Rogan will lead to more self-censorship.
One person on the Zoom meeting who thinks Joe Rogan is spreading dangerous misinformation will be able to keep everyone else from talking about the podcast. People won’t stop listening to Rogan, but they may stop doing it openly and they will be less likely to share his content. It is an intentional poisoning of the well of discourse.
I like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell’s music. I think it’ sad that musicians want to become the arbiters of free speech. It feels like yesterday telling today that it is more important than tomorrow.
Protesters arrive at Parliament Hill. (Lars Hagberg/AFP via Getty Images)
Also this week, the establishment media has mostly chosen to ignore or disparage the thousands of Canadian truckers who are peacefully protesting mandates in Ottawa, and raised $10 million, which GoFundMe has frozen. Facebook deleted a group called “Convoy to DC 2022” that had over 130,000 members, that was trying to plan a similar protest in the US. And high school students on the west coast protested mask mandates, which literally de-face us.
Two years ago I went to an optometrist. As a child I had been diagnosed with astigmatism and given corrective lenses, but the problem had gotten worse. My left eye ached and was blurry. The bridge of my nose kept showing up in my field of vision. After the exam, I told the doctor I knew the problem was my left eye.
“No,” he responded. “You were misdiagnosed. You have esotropia. Your right eye is not being activated. Your left eye is aching and getting blurry from overuse; it is doing all the work.”
Daily exercises since then have helped to correct this.
A similar well intentioned misdiagnosis is occurring culturally. There is a rush to blame the ones who are making us ache, who are making us uncomfortable, as being the problem, when really, they are the ones doing the hard work of paying attention. Instead of blaming them for offering a blurry picture, perhaps it is time to lend our insights to theirs.
If we can acknowledge that even something as simple as looking out of both eyes takes practice, maybe we can begin to see the whole picture.
My eye.
*This episode was updated to reflect the number of episodes being deleted from Joe Rogan’s catalog as of 2/4/2022.
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