Joe Rogan recently said on his podcast that if you’re 21 years old and healthy, there might not be a reason to get the c*vid v*ccine. This caused a minor social media freakout, which means that it was covered in the clickbait fake news, which means that all the same people got to trot out their dumb opinions about him and his show. Again.
The Joe Rogan Experience is a podcast released daily (sometimes twice daily) where the host speaks to a wide variety of thinkers, athletes, and comedians, usually for two to three hours at a time. Occasionally, there can be up to six hours of conversation a day, if you’re so inclined to listen to it. Many people are. Couldn’t be me.
So of course, being that he’s on the air for so long, eventually he’s going to say something that incenses the general population. In this case, it was extremely mild. There’s nothing at all wrong with what he said, but we’ll get to that here in just a bit.
There’s an unfortunate tendency in people to boil entire human beings down to bite-sized talking points. You don’t like Joe Rogan because he’s an alt-right whatever. You don’t like Tucker Carlson because he’s a fascist whatever. You don’t like Rachel Maddow because she’s a conspiracy theorist. On and on and on.
I presented those in descending order from how much time I have for a particular broadcaster, down to how little. Between Tucker and Rachel, it’s a dead heat, really, but Maddow wins out by a hair.
Anyway, the point I’m making here is that these are long, dense programs that (in the case of those last two) are trying to push an agenda, and in the case of JR, is genuinely trying to figure shit out. I’ve listened to the show on and off for the past four or five years, and Rogan, to me, seems like a genuine person. Does he always say the smartest, most correct things? Who does? He’d be the first one to admit that he’s often wrong. That’s why people listen to him. It’s refreshing in its own way to listen to someone think in real time, to question things, to stumble around for some kind of answer, often never finding it.
It’s this searching, I think, that pisses people off. There’s a contingent of leftist know-it-alls who can’t stand listening to someone look for answers. They don’t want a search. They want authority. They want something like Chapo Trap House to tell them, in the most definitive and smarmy way possible, how things are and how things are going to be. Never mind those dudes are always wrong about everything.
Then you have someone like Alex Jones, for example. Again, this is a guy who is on the air for hours a day. He’s an entertainer, and he knows his audience, and he has a shtick. BUT, he’s also pretty consistently correct about things. He knew about Epstein years before we all did, he was right about the rich using the blood of the young to stay young…he was even (kind of) right about “them turning the frogs gay.” There’s a whole Twitter account devoted to the times Alex Jones was right that I encourage you to check out.
He got Sandy Hook very, very wrong. It’s a somewhat complex issue that I guarantee you don’t remember correctly, but he essentially enabled his staff and his listeners to guide a line of questioning that directly led to the parents of murdered children being harassed. That’s unforgivable to some people, understandably so, although I do find it interesting that those same people will overlook the other dead children that their pet political candidate is actually directly responsible for. But I digress.
My point about Alex Jones (which leads into my point about Joe Rogan) is that the laser-focus on their gaffes is not organic. If you have someone like Jones, who has snuck into Bohemian Grove, who has direct lines of communication open on some highly shady (and let’s be honest, probably true) dirt on our deepest levels of government, you have to make him illegitimate in some way. It’s the same tactic used in politics to smear one candidate to make the other look better. I still don’t know what Benghazi is, or what was in Hillary’s e-mails, but I’ll tell you what: Trump supporters definitely know that shit. I don’t understand how Trump was dog whistling racists every time he opened his mouth, but I’ll tell you what: Biden supporters definitely know that shit.
And they don’t know that shit by accident.
If you think for a second that the outrage over what Joe Rogan said was organic, then I’ve got bad news for you. The narrative makers need an easy target for v*ccine deniers, and they already have a coded language around Rogan and what he represents. So that’s the story that gets amplified. It wouldn’t work if someone with a more scientific clout said the things Rogan said. It has to be him, because “we already know” he’s a water-carrier for the evilest Nazis in society. It’s a slam dunk.
The media is controlled by pharmaceutical companies, full stop. This is not controversial. Turn on any major news network of any political stripe, and the commercial breaks are packed to the gills with ads for pills. That is money that goes into the pocket of the news organizations, which is how they stay afloat. This necessarily means that they are not going to openly go against a company like Pfizer or Moderna. It just won’t happen.
Rogan, on the other hand, is sponsored by Spotify, which is sponsored by VPN services, downmarket dick pills, and Squarespace, among others. There isn’t the same restriction placed on what he can and can’t say. That leads to conversations that are a bit more unfiltered, leading to moments of brilliance (yes, you heard correctly) and also, sure, complete dumbassery.
Which, finally, leads us to his actual point. He’s correct. If you’re young and healthy, taking the v*ccine is redundant. It’s now available to whoever in America wants to take it, and if you’ve taken it, that should mean (hypothetically) that you are shielded from the worst symptoms of the v*rus. If not, then the v*ccine doesn’t work. If the goal is to stamp the v*rus out completely, well, sorry about that. It’s endemic, now. You’re going to get it one day. But! Now you won’t die. That’s a win, at least. In the meantime, you can stomp your feet and cry all you want. Adults don’t have to put something in their bodies if they don’t want to. Especially adults who take care of themselves. The world doesn’t bend just for you. People have lost their jobs, their sanity, their health, global supply chains have fallen into shit, real people in real poverty have starved, suicides are at an all time high, a collective year and change is now gone, all to keep the most frightened subset of the population “safe” from a v*rus. That’s it. It’s enough. You’ve got a v*ccine. Now leave people alone.
Kid is squirming, gotta go. More tomorrow.
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