Jon Stewart is Mostly Wrong About the Joe Rogan Controversy
The anger at Joe Rogan has always been somewhat enigmatic to me. We ought to care about the proportionality of people’s influence and rhetoric. There are certainly performers who do much more damage than Rogan. Actual “bad actors” as Jon Stewart called them today, like Tucker Carlson, are worth going after. Stewart also said that engagement is more effective than “cancelling.” But, really, who has the ability to engage Joe Rogan? I don’t play steroid-basketball with the guy. Is it not the case that we, the undiscerning viewers, are only able to engage through what is laughably called cancellation? By listening to Pandora or tweeting that we agree with Neil Young (who has consistently been on the right side of history) or lazily engaging in some other form of activism.
But this undergirds a different problem — we (and by we I mean sane people who care about climate change and vaccines) are not really able to deal with those that are bad actors. Why? Because we simply don’t have financial or intellectual influence over them. Am I going to boycott Fox News which I already don’t pay to see? Well, except to see what color of Klan hood is in season this winter, of course. We only have influence over people who we have some financial or social or other form of control over. That doesn’t include the extruded Frankenstein’s monsters populating right-wing media. And, it actually seems somewhat to Rogan’s credit that he at least gives a shit about the potential cancellation.
I’m not comfortable giving him all that much credit though. He acknowledges that he’s quote “a moron.” Ironically, if you are going to use the excuse that you know you’re dumb then you are actually just choosing not to act on the fact that you’re an idiot by, say, asking for advice. It’s like saying “sorry officer! You can’t hold me accountable. I’m just a bad driver!”
And it’s also holding ourselves to an unfair standard to which society doesn’t hold the right-wing in general. The “left” didn’t invent cancel culture. It was the religious conservatives who didn’t allow gay people to get married. And why we can’t curse on TV today. And why we have an issue teaching evolution and racism in classrooms. Why is it so taboo then for us on the left to (lazily I will add again) criticize someone like Joe Rogan for having the fascist who said the Sandy Hook family members were actors on his podcast, or “just asking questions” about vaccines, or having female guests on his show almost only to talk about the problems with trans athletes.
Joe Rogan is a moron, he knows it, he can do better. Give Neil deGrasse Tyson a call before the next time you have a doctor on the show.
