Thread by @SethCotlar

One part of Rogan's impact on American society that I haven't seen mentioned much is the key role he played early on in helping the Proud Boys promote themselves using his platform. Spotify has removed his interviews with PB founder McInnes, like they have with the n-word.

Screen shot is from this article. rollingstone.com/culture/cultur…

Let's go to the tape.

https://twitter.com/VicBergerIV/status/1306805724975046659?s=20&t=yLilU4cS1MfHJSAv5k16WA

The Proud Boys open every meeting with a reading from Pat Buchanan's 2001 book, The Death of the West. That book is a white nationalist screed against immigrants. The PB's call themselves "western chauvinists." This is not complicated people.

So not only has Rogan contributed to the prolonging of the pandemic by using his show to amplify vaccine and public health misinformation, he arguably played a major role in promoting one of the two main groups behind the violence on Jan 6. lawfareblog.com/conspirators-p…

The Proud Boys were clearly a fascist fight club from the start. If Rogan had consulted anyone who studies this stuff for a living they could have told him that in 2017. They were a small group looking for friendly publicity. He gave it to them. No one forced him to do that.

Joe Rogan is free to platform whatever sorts of horrible, racist, homophobic, misogynist, lying humans he wants. And he's certainly done plenty of that. The question here is why Spotify decided to pay him $100 million for doing that, & what the rest of us think of their decision.

This feels relevant here, given the parade of white nationalists, alt-right trolls, far right conspiracy theorists, and a Holocaust denier that many people apparently just realized were invited on to Rogan’s show over the years.

https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1050391663552671744

In 2015 Rogan invited the same Holocaust denier on to his show who Matt Gaetz would later chose as his invited guest to the 2018 SOTU. theguardian.com/us-news/2018/f…

Letting people spew stupid racist crap like this was how Rogan built a reputation for being “open minded” and edgy. Your regular reminder that racists support the status quo and are the OPPOSITE of edgy and open minded.

https://twitter.com/Green_Footballs/status/1490140017619914756

Nothing says “edgy” like a white guy who “does his own research” spouting long debunked ideas in 2015 that were more eloquently promoted by the notoriously edgy John C Calhoun in the 1830s.

At root, Rogan is just an old school American con man. His initial business model was to promote bullshit supplements that funneled money from credulous young men into his pocket, the same men he then encouraged to be suspicious of a free, safe vaccine.
theatlantic.com/entertainment/…

Alpha brain indeed.