We Must Cancel Joe Rogan for Telling a Zach Galifianakis Joke

This is unacceptable

Whoever coined the term “the arc of history” was a dolt, because history doesn’t arc. People don’t learn from the past. History lurches and stalls and twists and turns and loops back on itself so the same stupid behavior happens again and again and again. Like we’re seeing right now.

The first time I saw a moral panic grip the media was in the ‘80s, when the PMRC went after musical artists who talked about the birds and the bees.¹ That effort was led by Al & Tipper Gore and other prominent Democrats, and now we’re watching today’s generation of Dems trying the same thing with Joe Rogan.

The ostensible reason for kicking Rogan off Spotify is that he’s supposedly spreading COVID misinformation. Maybe he is, I don’t know. Each episode is three hours long and he’s done almost 1,800 of them. In all those thousands of hours, it seems unlikely that every single utterance would pass a fact-check. But if that’s the standard, CNN would be off the air already, because those buttholes have been lying to us about COVID 24/7 for almost two years.

Now the focus has shifted from COVID to all the other stuff Rogan has said that hurts people’s feelings. Did you know he said a bad word for a certain race of people? Gasp! Were you aware he made jokes about the transgender community? Shock horror!

Here’s an example of how stupid this whole thing has become. An intern for Media Matters for America — the organization that lied about me when I got hit by a car — has been assigned to listen to all of Rogan’s shows and find stuff that will make people angry. It doesn’t even need to be about the pandemic, because Rogan is now one of MMfA’s targets no matter what he says:

Alex Paterson @AlexPattyy

Spotify's Joe Rogan and comedian Akaash Singh mock child sex abuse and claim it's “fine” for boys to have sex with adult women Rogan: "You don’t feel bad at all. ... Even 13, he's going to be fine if he’s got a good dad. You're going to be fine, kid, keep moving. Walk it off.”

Now, Joe Rogan isn’t exactly breaking new ground here. Every time there’s a news story about an attractive female teacher having sex with her male students, we get the same jokes about how awesome it must be for the kid. Rogan even ineptly quotes a Zach Galifianakis joke about it in that clip. That’s today’s reason for getting Rogan fired.

But nobody seemed to have any problem with that joke when Galifianakis told it on Saturday Night Live in March 2010:

“I was reading on CNN.com today before the show. You know that kid that had sex with his high-school teacher about a year ago? I read online today that that kid died. Today. He died of high-fiving. He was in a high-fiving accident.”

That joke was told on live network TV, not quite 12 years ago. And it wasn’t a big deal, because nobody was getting paid to destroy Zach Galifianakis’ career. Hell, SNL even invited Galifianakis back to host twice after that, and he’s still working today. Yet now that same joke is presented as evidence that Joe Rogan is too dangerous to have a career saying words into a microphone.

None of this is about the coronavirus. It’s not about protecting people. It’s about an entire ecosystem that has developed in our society, devoted to bringing down people who step out of line. You don’t even need government censorship anymore, because Democrat super PACs and social media and the 24/7 news cycle are so much more efficient. Today’s smear merchants work a lot faster than ol’ Joey McCarthy ever did.

Rogan will withstand it regardless. He’s got more money than he could spend in 10 lifetimes, and millions of fans who will follow him anywhere. He’ll be fine. No, this message is for the rest of us:

You see what we’re doing to this guy? You want it to happen to you next? No? Then shut your mouth.