These comments were shared on Facebook and are attributed to journalist, John Kavanaugh
My ten cents on the Joe Rogan controversy:
I’ve watched a few Joe Rogan episodes, on a range of subjects that are usually not overtly political–from the CIA connection to the Manson family to possible sites of Atlantis. I don”t know that I’ve watched one whole episode the whole way through. They’re usually very long! They are precisely long-form conversations in which Rogan allows guests to speak and explain themselves in a way you hardly ever see anywhere else in the media.
Rogan is intelligently inquisitive, open minded, fair, intellectually honest and consistent. I don’t know how deep is politics are, but the notion that he’s some kind of right-wing lunatic is ludicrous. I doubt most of the people railing against him now have ever seen more than 5 minutes of one of his interviews. They are exactly the kinds of conversations that everyone keeps saying we need.
I actually haven’t seen the Malone or McCullough conversations that everybody’s so worked up about, but what’s upsetting to the powers-that-be is precisely that he allowed scientists like them to explain themselves in their own terms at some length. The powers-that-be aren’t seeking to deplatform Joe Rogan in order to protect you from “misinformation”, but because they don’t want you to see and hear alternative explanations that are cogent.
Nobody’s deplatforming Rogan to protect you; they–people with a lot more power than Rogan, Young, or Mitchell–are doing it to close off scientific and political debate, and to protect themselves. What kind of fool do you have to be not to recognize this? Fools like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell are really pawns in that game, the object of which is to further tighten establishment control of discourse and to destroy the possibility of reasonable scientific and political conversation.
The call to deplatform Rogan is reactionary and ridiculous. If you join in, especially if you’ve never seen one of his conversations, you are a foolish pawn in a reactionary and ridiculous game that is helping to destroy our society.