Misinformed: Joe Rogan, Censorship, and Biden’s Pandemic Response

By Sean Case

If you’ve been paying attention to the news for the past couple weeks, you know that Joe Rogan is the most dangerous man in America. The host of the world’s most popular podcast — The Joe Rogan Experience — is the current focal point of the Covid-19 culture wars. From the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times to petitions launched by Democrat-aligned non-profit organizations, calls are growing for Rogan to be booted from Spotify, where his podcast streams exclusively as part of a $100 million deal signed in 2020.

First came a public letter signed by 270 doctors, physicians, and other people vaguely involved in the medical field accusing Rogan of spreading “false and societally harmful” information about Covid-19 and urging Spotify to “immediately establish a clear and public policy to moderate misinformation on its platform.” Soon after, Canadian music legends Neil Young and Joni Mitchell pulled their catalogs from Spotify in protest. On February 1, Jen Psaki — Biden’s press secretary — tacitly encouraged Spotify to remove Rogan from the platform when asked about the controversy during a press briefing; Biden’s Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, made similar comments a few days earlier. On February 3, a compilation video of Rogan uttering the N-word on several episodes of his show over the years resurfaced, adding fuel to the dumpster fire.

In response to the controversies, Rogan posted two videos to his Instagram page. In the first video, posted January 30, he apologizes for not being more diligent in his research on important topics and promises to have more diverse views on Covid featured on his show. He also pushes back against the label of misinformation. In the second video, posted February 4, Rogan apologizes for his past use of the N-word on his show, acknowledges he “fucked up,” and claims he hasn’t used the word in years.

As socialists, we should be clear that Rogan is not our ally. He’s a rich celebrity with a penchant for conspiracy theories and a history of making racist, homophobic, and sexist remarks. But we should also be critical of calls for him to be deplatformed for spreading misinformation. We stand against big tech companies’ increasing ability to censor people — famous or not — for speech deemed unacceptable by corporate executives or the capitalist state. And we should boldly call for democratic rights in and democratic control over the digital spaces that have become integral to our social and political lives.

Much of the media has made Rogan out to be a right-wing ideologue over the past weeks, but that label doesn’t quite fit. Rogan is a comedian and former reality show host. His podcast is known for his long, unplanned, meandering conversations with all sorts of guests. Politically, he’s all over the map. He’s hosted far-right people like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopolis; he’s also hosted Bernie Sanders and Cornel West, and endorsed Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary. He’s a vocal supporter of Medicare for All; he’s also made blatantly racist comments on his show and lent credence to conspiracy theories about 9/11. He’s a curious, self-described moron and a populist. His political and social views are often contradictory and sometimes offensive. In other words, they mirror the views of millions of people in the US.

What Does Censorship Solve?

The hullabaloo about Rogan is yet another instance in a series of cultural conversations about censorship and big tech over the past few years. The last one that was this all-consuming was Trump getting booted from Twitter, a move cheered on by many liberals (and some leftists). I certainly didn’t lose any sleep over Trump’s ban, but the question remains as to what it accomplished. Trump is still wildly popular among his base and still has enormous influence within the GOP. It’s doubtful Spotify will show Rogan the door, but if they do he’ll take his massive fanbase with him; that’s why Spotify offered him a contract in the first place. The video platform Rumble (popular among right-wingers) has already offered Rogan yet another $100 million contract to move over to their platform exclusively, promising no censorship. Kicking Rogan off Spotify could very well drive him into the arms of the Right.

Another question raised by this saga (and others like it) is what counts as misinformation. In his first video responding to the controversy, Rogan rather astutely points out that if you had said a year ago that vaccinated people can still spread the virus or that cloth masks aren’t much help, you might get censored by Facebook or Twitter; those statements are now widely accepted as true.

The state has outsized control over what counts as misinformation, and private tech companies have a lot of power in their ability to silence those deemed to be spreading misinformation. Tech companies also have an interest in doing the state’s bidding in this realm, in order to avoid further regulation. Twitter is happy to ban Donald Trump, and Facebook is happy to suppress reporting about Hunter Biden’s shady dealings as long as they can keep commodifying our data and literally spy on us.

While most of the discussion around Spotify has focused on pressuring the company to drop Rogan, perhaps we ought to be talking more about their patented technologies that track our location and listen to our conversations, or the fact that they (and every other major streaming platform) give musicians a raw deal.

Social media has become an arena in which private companies and the state often intertwine. Big tech companies are often threatened with investigation or regulation, but the state also relies on them for intelligence purposes and technological development. The discourse around canceling celebrities for saying stupid shit obscures the very real censorship that happens every day. Sex workers are constantly battling account cancelations for trying to earn a living. Muslims are the most censored group on social media, often auto-banned from platforms without review for something as harmless as tweeting a line from the Koran. More such measures would further erode democratic discussion in what has become our modern public square.

Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and even Spotify have become integral to our daily lives, yet we have no control over them. People have made friends and built communities in these digital spaces, but those connections can be wiped away without any say from those who made them. In order for such platforms to truly become what they disingenuously claim to be — places of public social and cultural exchange — we should build a movement to take them into public ownership and democratic control. Such a shift could end the harmful data-mining on which social media companies are built and allow ordinary working people to create vibrant and democratic online communities. If hate speech or other forms of right-wing reaction arise in those communities, the majority would speak out against the offending parties. Open discussion and debate could be the norm, rather than the monetized algorithmic fishbowls we currently inhabit.

Mass protests, civil disobedience, and labor strikes have historically been powerful ways for ordinary people to push back against oppressive ideas and practices. Grassroots demonstrations by working-class people “from below” are more democratic, legitimate, and effective responses to harmful ideas than censorship “from above.” If Rogan — or anyone else with such a platform — were to do something truly beyond the pale, we should advocate for mass action to force him to answer for his offense. The current calls to remove him from Spotify lack that mass character. Most people likely have no opinion on this controversy stoked mainly by celebrities and liberal elites.

Removing disagreeable speech from public view doesn’t drive social change, but open discussion and debate can. Rogan’s podcast isn’t an ideal platform for such discussion. Though he may occasionally share points of alignment with the Left, such as Medicare for All, on the whole he is inconsistent and sometimes reactionary. Nonetheless, it’s a mistake — and ineffective — to call for his podcast to be shut down. Instead of calling for Rogan to be deplatformed for spreading Covid misinformation, the Surgeon General could go on his show and talk to him (and his audience) for three hours. I’m sure Rogan would be happy to have him.

Rogan’s documented history of racist behavior is disgusting, and he should have to reckon with that. Scholars on race and racism could go on the show to discuss his use of the N-word and its impact on Black people, and talk about the need to build cross-racial solidarity to fight racism. It would be easier to write him and his audience off as irredeemable racists, but it wouldn’t accomplish much.

A certain amount of power does come with having a platform as big as Rogan’s, and he’s certainly spread some bad and potentially harmful ideas over the years. But the idea that he’s more influential on public consciousness around Covid than Fox News or CNN or the White House isn’t based in reality. Claiming that Rogan or others like him bear an outsized responsibility for either vaccine skepticism or racism in the US is a deflection. The question here is why so many people distrust our sources of “official” information.

Who is to Blame for Covid “Misinformation”?

Rogan’s listenership is around eleven million. Many of those listeners may be unvaccinated, and many probably are vaccinated. About 30 percent of US adults remain unvaccinated. That’s over 90 million people.

The unvaccinated are popularly portrayed as anti-science conspiracy theorists, and there exists a small minority who fit that image. But the vast majority of unvaccinated people in the US are low-income, uninsured, pregnant, incarcerated, and undocumented. Only about half of them voted for Trump in 2020. Many didn’t vote at all. The racial gap in vaccination has narrowed since a year ago, but people of color remain disproportionately represented among the unvaccinated.

Many unvaccinated people distrust the US healthcare sector. Given the nightmare that is navigating health insurance, let alone living without, it’s hard to blame them. A crucial first step in building trust between working and poor people and our healthcare system is winning Medicare for All, which would provide high quality healthcare free at the point of service and allow people to begin forming positive relationships with their doctors and other healthcare workers.

The Omicron variant surge is waning, but Covid is still killing around 2500 people a day in the US. We’re nearing one million deaths since the start of the pandemic, by far the highest total in the world. In the US 280 out of 100,000 people died from Covid, whereas in Australia only 18 out of 100,000 people died from Covid. The idea that Rogan and the cranks and quacks he sometimes hosts are primarily responsible for these deaths is absurd, and the cultural obsession with this controversy and others like it obscures who is most at fault for how poorly the US has weathered the pandemic.

Where we are today is primarily the result of a series of political and policy decisions, first by the Trump administration, then by the Biden administration. Trump did immeasurable damage by downplaying the virus and hesitating on shutting down the economy. Biden has continued in that tradition.

Biden committed to no lockdowns before even taking office and said that by his 100th day in office, we wouldn’t have to wear masks anymore. Biden’s top pandemic policy advisor is Jeffrey Zients, a wealthy campaign donor with a background in private equity and management consulting; he has no medical or scientific credentials. The administration committed to a vaccine-only plan, abandoning the idea of using non-pharmaceutical interventions like closing non-essential businesses and paying workers to stay home, policies which many other countries have enacted and have helped prevent illness and death. The administration willfully ignored the possibility of new and more infectious variants developing and spreading across the world. Vice President Kamala Harris lied publicly about the administration’s awareness that such variants were a possibility, and Biden declared victory over the virus just as the Delta variant was beginning to spread in the US.

The Biden administration’s all-eggs-in-the-vaccine-basket approach has been devastating for working and poor people in the US. Early on, the administration tossed aside a 780-page document by OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) laying out robust workplace safety measures to deal with the spread of Covid-19, including policies like paid quarantine for infected workers. The administration also refused to purchase and distribute high-quality N95 masks and rapid antigen tests even while manufacturers lobbied them to do so, saying they had the capabilities to make them on a mass scale. It was only several weeks into Omicron’s spread that the administration reluctantly committed to sending tests and masks to everyone in the country. Too little, too late.

Perhaps Biden’s gravest misstep on Covid policy is his failure to push for vaccine patent waivers at the World Trade Organization. Though after pressure he offered tepid support for the waivers, he’s since done nothing to push the issue. Failure to make vaccines widely and freely available around the world has cost millions of lives and contributed significantly to the development and spread of new variants like Omicron. The US and other wealthy capitalist countries have protected the profits of companies like Pfizer and Moderna at the expense of world health, especially the health of the Global South. Technology-sharing is crucial to put an end not just to this pandemic, but to the ones to come. A key socialist demand must be public ownership of the pharmaceutical companies.

The figures and institutions surrounding Biden and giving his administration the sheen of a science-based approach have also majorly contributed to our dire position. The CDC has misled the public over and over throughout the course of the pandemic. In June of last year, they told asymptomatic vaccinated people to not bother getting tested after an exposure. Recently, the CDC shortened its recommended isolation period after a positive Covid test from ten days to five, without any scientific basis for that recommendation. This was a blatant pro-business move, apparently pushed by the airline industry and Republican governors.

Anthony Fauci, the most visible authority on Covid and darling of liberal media, has repeatedly contradicted himself and cynically lied to the public throughout the pandemic. He flip-flopped on the necessity of wearing masks and closing non-essential businesses. He lied about Covid deaths among vaccinated people and the credibility of the theory that Covid-19 leaked from a research lab.

Pro-corporate Covid policy and advice (from the Trump and Biden administrations, from the CDC and Fauci), backed up by corporate news outlets, has eroded public trust in our governmental and health institutions. That trust had already been eroded by decades of neoliberalism, which has exacerbated the widening inequality between corporate billionaires and the working class. The betrayal and cynicism of those establishment figures and institutions is at the root of Covid misinformation.