![]() ![]() ![]() He helped spread the false gospel of ivermectin by hosting Dr. During the pandemic, Rogan has played a major role in spreading COVID misinformation of all kinds to his enormous audience, including telling young viewers they didn’t need to get vaccinated before backpedaling in the face of enormous criticism. The answer appears to be quite far indeed. In hindsight, this was a bellwether moment, with Rogan testing just how far Spotify was willing to let him go. Rogan confirmed on his show that he’d agreed to let Spotify remove some episodes, telling a guest, “There were a few episodes they didn’t want on their platform, and I was like ‘Okay, I don’t care’.” But, he added, “Other than that, in terms of what I do in the future, the big test was having Alex Jones on.” (Spotify kept several very transphobic episodes of the show, however, and CEO Daniel Ek defended the move in an all-hands town hall meeting with the company’s infuriated employees.)Īnd appear Jones did, almost immediately Rogan’s podcast became available on Spotify in September 2020, and by October, Rogan was hosting Jones and comedian Tim Dillon in an episode where Jones claimed that wearing a mask to protect against COVID is ineffective and got an anecdote about polio vaccines fairly wrong in an apparent attempt to falsely suggest all vaccines are dangerous. He later founded the Proud Boys in 2016.) He left the company in 2008 and has had no involvement since then. (Disclosure: Gavin McInnes was a co-founder of VICE. Those shows included episodes featuring Alex Jones, general shitlord Milo Yiannopoulos, Pizzagate promoter David Seaman, and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. ![]() When Spotify made a nine-figure deal to become the exclusive home of The Joe Rogan Experience in May 2020, the company quietly removed about 42 shows from his back catalog, as Digital Music News reported at the time. And no one making money from the latter half of the equation seems to mind a bit. (“This is something governments have done forever,” he breezily told technology ethicist Tristan Harris, suggesting that “one particular individual” encouraged thousands of people to storm the Capitol.) Rogan’s increasingly prominent role in extremist spaces-and as a major promoter of ivermectin, an unproven treatment for COVID-19-is coming into direct confrontation with his role as a mainstream sports commentator and linchpin of Spotify’s podcast empire. Earlier this month, Rogan also returned from a four-month hiatus to begin working as on-air talent at UFC events again, when he wasn’t busy giving Aaron Rodgers terrible pseudo-medical advice while the quarterback dealt with COVID-19, or suggesting, on his own program, that the January 6 rioters were led by a government-backed agent provocateur. On November 16, he appeared on far-right YouTuber Tim Pool’s show, sitting alongside conspiracy king Alex Jones extremely red-pilled self proclaimed “anarchist” author and podcaster Michael Malice Drew Hernandez, a right-wing commentator most recently seen testifying at Kyle Rittenhouse’s trial and Blaire White, another far-right YouTuber. As November wears on, Joe Rogan has begun to inhabit, more fully than ever, what can best be described as a double life.
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