George Orwell Would Support Joe Rogan
As the ruling elites attempt to silence Joe Rogan, those who believe in freedom of the press should defend him.
I don’t normally listen to Joe Rogan’s podcasts, and until two months ago I had never listened to even one of his widely popular shows. But my twenty-something boys listen to him, and so do most of their friends, regardless of their political affiliation. Rogan is the most popular podcaster in the country, by far, and adored by people under 30. They love his interview style and the variety of interesting guests he has on his show. He is so famous that the cultural establishment rewarded him with a $100 million contract, and until recently, no one seemed to dislike him. That is until he started questioning the ruling elite’s (comprised of both Democrats and Republicans) official Covid narrative.
Last September Rogan contracted Covid. He “immediately threw the kitchen sink at it,” including taking Ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug that was being repurposed for treating the Covid virus. Rogan got well in days, crediting all the medicines and vitamins he took, giving a strong impression that these controversial treatments work well when taken early, contradicting the official narrative that there is no known treatment. Whether he intended it or not, he seemed to be telling the world that Big Pharma had been lying about the absence of known treatments. And Big Pharma couldn’t have been happy.
So Big Pharma called on their comrades in Big Media and Big Tech to put down this “disinformation” before it could spread to all Rogan’s listeners. MSNBC and CNN, like most of the mainstream media, flat out lied about Rogan, claiming he was taking a horse de-wormer, knowing full well this wasn’t true. Even when Rogan made it clear that he got the Ivermectin prescription for humans (not horses) from his doctor, they continued to lie. When Rogan interviewed Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical expert, and confronted him about his network’s continual prevarications, Gupta sheepishly admitted that CNN lied and couldn’t provide a reason why they did so. It wasn’t a good look for him or CNN. I knew right then that the ruling elites wouldn’t let this go. They don’t like being shown up and certainly not by someone with a platform as big as Joe Rogan’s podcast.
In mid-December, my boys sent me Rogan’s interview with Dr. Peter McCullough, a highly credentialed and decorated doctor, who has been treating Covid patients since the start of the pandemic. I had never heard of Dr. McCullough, but my boys assured me I needed to listen to the interview. So I decided to listen to my very first Joe Rogan podcast. I knew this interview would cause Rogan more trouble. When the McCullough interview (and soon after that the Dr. Robert Malone interview) went viral, it wasn’t hard to see what he had coming his way—a storm of unimaginable proportion.
And that is what we have seen in the weeks since--an organized, systematic takedown of Joe Rogan. First, with an aging rocker and then with videos, most cut out of context, and most hanging around in the public domain for years, attempting to paint Rogan as a racist. So why are these doctored videos coming out now? Because this isn’t about race; race is only a ruse; race is only being used for something much bigger--protecting the Covid lockdown narrative at all costs. This is why Whoopie Goldberg, after making racially insensitive comments, only got a slap on the wrist. She supports the official narrative. Rogan, on the other hand, questions it.
Trying to calm the media storm, Rogan has apologized not for using a racial slur, because it doesn’t appear he did, but for quoting others who used the word. Yet, if he continues to challenge the larger narrative it just won’t matter; he can apologize till the cows come home and it won’t help him, which is why so many told him he shouldn’t have done it. Others like Sam Harris, a good friend of Rogan, have come to Rogan's defense, making it clear that Rogan is not a racist and that these clips were taken out of context to damage him.
Let’s be clear. Racism is wrong and should always be condemned. Yet, everyone knows this isn’t really about his views on race. The attempt to cancel him is because Rogan dared to challenge the official Covid narrative that vaccine mandates (Rogan wants people to have the freedom to choose) are vital, that early treatments don’t exist (plenty of scientific studies prove they do exist), and that the lockdowns are needed to stop the spread (nothing can stop the spread, as Omicron has proven). In challenging the official narrative, he poses a threat to their grip on power.
In the minds of the ruling elites, any threat to their power is a threat to “Our Democracy.” And democracy must be protected at any cost. “The ends justify the means,” they say. This unethical moral position would have infuriated George Orwell, a champion of the working class, an enemy of the ruling elites, and a defender of free speech.
Over the past few weeks, I have been reading George Orwell’s essay “The Freedom of the Press” and thinking about it in light of Joe Rogan. I am convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt Orwell would stand with Joe Rogan, even if he didn't believe everything Rogan believed or said. Why? Because Orwell believed in the freedom of the press and the role it played in protecting liberty. Orwell held that people like Rogan, insiders who are critical of the ruling narrative, are important for holding the reigning orthodoxies accountable so that they don’t devolve into totalitarian narratives. As a man of the left himself, Orwell made a career out of criticizing his side, calling them out when they defended totalitarian views and practices. How is Joe Rogan, who claims to be “socially liberal,” doing anything differently than Orwell? He isn’t. And Orwell, himself the target of censorship, would not be surprised at the ordeal Joe Rogan is now going through.
“Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy,” Orwell writes in The Freedom of the Press, “finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.”
I mentioned that Orwell was censured. His best-selling Animal Farm was turned down by multiple publishers, delaying its publication by years; not because they didn’t think it would sell, but because it challenged the reigning orthodoxy, a narrative that at the time saw Russia as an ally against Germany and the best example of a worker’s paradise on the planet, even though by 1946 Stalin had already murdered millions of his people, and everyone knew it. But to criticize Russia was off-limits, and thus Orwell’s anti-Russia satire was rejected multiple times. Finally, after several years of trying, Orwell found a publisher for Animal Farm.
But to let the world know what happened, he had proposed adding an introduction to the book, which never got used. The introduction was discovered in 1972 and later published under the title, “The Freedom of the Press.” In this essay, he wants to warn democracies that when a reigning orthodoxy resorts to censorship to stay in power, it has become totalitarian, despite any claims that it is only protecting democracy. Orwell writes:
“There is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken [i.e. misinformation, disinformation] doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought.”
And that is really what is going on with Joe Rogan. Once a celebrated member of the left, he dared to think independently of the ruling elite’s narrative. This can’t be allowed. He is a threat to “our democracy,” a phrase they love to repeat. But what he really represents is a danger to their ruling narrative, their grip on power, and their money train, which has made Big Pharma and Big Business billions of dollars over the past two years, while the middle and working classes have become more impoverished.
If Orwell were alive, he would undoubtedly challenge Rogan’s views on any number of topics, (because that is what Orwell did) but he would defend his right to speak, to continue as a journalist. He would defend Rogan as someone that our democracy needs, because Rogan isn’t afraid to tackle difficult subjects, to look at things from both sides, to tell people what they don’t want to hear. And Orwell would take on the ruling elites for their immoral policy of “the ends justify the means,” proving definitively that they have become the totalitarians. As a litmus test, he would point to the way they treat journalists like Joe Rogan, pointing out in no uncertain terms that they are failing the test of liberty.
In the words of Orwell, “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.” And that is what Joe Rogan does and the ruling elites don’t like it. Orwell would have pushed back. He would stand with Joe Rogan. Will you?