I am saying that when grown adults say they have no responsibility whatsoever to learn or understand or contextualize fringe ideas, they are doing the work of authoritarians, and at minimum, they are absolving themselves of any responsibility to check the tide of it. Think You’re Pretty Smart? Prove It With This Week’s Quiz. The Unavoidable Factor That Could Determine the War in Ukraine The Police Are Now Telling a Very Different Story About What Happened in Uvalde That which is neutral has been politicized, and that which is abhorrent has been normalized, all in the name of just asking tough questions. Under cover of having all sorts of interesting and entertaining questions, actual fact has been subordinated. The current democracy-on-the-cusp scenario we all live in now is the result of this tendency: People are running for secretary of state positions across the country because they rose to prominence after “just asking questions” about the 2020 election Donald Trump pushed real plans to seize election machines because he was just probing “both sides” of the Big Lie. The beauty of “just asking questions” as a rhetorical frame is that it provides cover for some of the foundational work of authoritarianism-it casts broad and enduring doubt on government, on science, on fact, on vote tallies, and on science.
That is also what Carlson is selling and what the GOP is selling, and that is what Donald Trump has been selling for six years. Truth won’t out because the market wants what Rogan is selling, and what Rogan is selling is doubt. Who is he to judge? And who are we to judge him? And who is Spotify to judge us judging him? His is the enormous privilege of the perpetual tabula rasa machine: His gift is that he can be an empty vessel who merely lucked into a huge audience and millions of dollars. Rogan now says he will do a better job attempting to learn the issues he doesn’t understand, but his whole raison d’être is that he doesn’t learn. If he invites someone who’s demonstrably wrong to come back, it’s also because he doesn’t know better. I’m just saying it.” If Rogan hosts someone controversial and agrees with them, he says it’s because he doesn’t know better. His vaccine comment defense was the essentially the same: “When I say something stupid, I’m not thinking about what I’m going to say before I say it. I think I’m talking to people, and you can listen. I didn’t think about it that way, and I don’t think that’s what I’m doing.
“Why are you giving this person a platform?” OK. There’s certain people that I’ll have on, whether it’s Alex Jones or anyone that’s controversial, where people who get fucking mad. If folks perceive that, as they perceive Carlson, as factual, that’s someone else’s fault. Rogan then praised Young, misidentified a song by Mitchell, and said he’d try to prepare more, but maintained that the real object is and always was “to create interesting conversations, and ones that I hope people enjoy.” Much like Tucker Carlson, whose lawyers quite literally defended his news show as-according to a judge who agreed with them-“ ‘exaggeration,’ ‘non-literal commentary,’ or simply bloviating for his audience,” the reason Rogan explained that he should essentially keep on doing what he’s been doing is because this is all just entertainment, asking hard questions, and airing all sides of controversial and unsettled questions.
And oftentimes I have no idea what I’m going to talk about until I sit down and talk to people and that’s why some of my ideas are not that prepared or fleshed out because I’m literally having them in real time.” This was all not so much his fault but a result of the fact that his podcast exploded years ago and then “boom, it’s become what it is today, which is like some out-of-control juggernaut that I barely have control of.” The out-of-control-ness is thus the justification, not the problem. Sighing that “you know, I do all the scheduling myself, and I don’t always get it right,” he explained that “these podcasts are very strange because they’re just conversations. He first sacrificed a goat at the altar of bothsidesism by promising that from now on, whenever he amplifies the views of science deniers, he will attempt to follow up with mainstream experts who can also give their viewpoints. The alleged perils of cancel culture notwithstanding, Rogan’s non-apology apology was a tour de force in both accepting and declining responsibility.