Joe Rogan has been doing a podcast for 12 years. At the time of writing, he has made a total of 1776 episodes of his flagship Joe Rogan Experience, averaging two and a half hours each with the longest episode running for over five hours. He has had 928 guests, most of whom you have never heard of, for a total of more than 5,000 hours listening and an average audience of 10 million. To take all this in, you would have to devote two and a half full-time work-years to listen to all of Rogan’s shows. I doubt anyone has, apart from maybe some long-haul truckers and retirees. In 2020, Rogan signed an exclusive deal with Spotify to carry his podcasts for a reported $100 million.
Yet a few weeks ago, musical icon Neil Young asked his label to remove his content from Spotify. His complaint was that Rogan’s show was spreading Covid misinformation, chiefly through two episodes last December, one with virologist and vaccine pioneer Dr. Robert Malone, and another with cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough. Neither episode was anywhere near Rogan’s most popular– the top was Elon Musk at 50 million, and second was Alex Jones with 30 million listens.
I listened to the Musk episode, which was a fascinating look at one of America’s most original entrepreneurs, the Thomas Edison of our time. I had no interest in hearing anything from Alex Jones, who is most famous for his despicable claim that the Sandy Hook massacre—where in 2012 a 20-year-old man shot and killed 20 young children and 6 adults protecting them—was a hoax. It was not. As a discerning listener, I thus exercised my power of selection, in choosing a show I wanted to listen to, or not, and the episodes I wanted to listen to, or not.
Adding fuel to the Covid-controversy fire, a political media outfit released a clip harvested from 12 years of shows in which Rogan said the ineffable ‘N-word’ roughly once a year (for the most part in discussing rap lyrics or someone else’s use of the word). They also found a tasteless joke which Rogan quickly regretted on air and apologised for. A few years ago, notably, Rogan accepted the consensus view that even repeating someone else’s use of the ineffable word is off-limits and unacceptable for anyone not black, and he stopped doing so.
Still, CNN’s John Blake hysterically compared Rogan’s rare utterances to “the mainstreaming of a form of political violence that's as dangerous as the January 6 attack,” going on to imagine how it could end in a Rwanda-style mass murder in America. Another CNN pundit said that Rogan’s “brand of conversation … at times traffics in conspiracy theories, cultural intolerance and blatant racism,” calling the show a “haven for racial intolerance, sexist insults and … so-called "locker room talk."
Following Neil Young, the rest of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, then Joni Mitchell, then India Arie also wanted their music off Spotify to coerce them to stop hosting Rogan. I don’t know Arie’s music, but about the first album I ever bought was Déjà Vu. That these legends of the 60s have piled on the cancellation bandwagon is drearily disappointing. Crosby’s anthem Almost Cut my Hair speaks of letting his freak flag fly, but he seems to have lost that spirit (along with his hair) since 1973. The best of the Boomers were about their love of freedom and liberty (sex, drugs, rock and roll), protesting the Vietnam War, and the U.C. Berkeley Free Speech Movement; but lest we forget, the 60s were not all about flower children, hippies, dope, and free love.
They also gave us Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the anarcho-racist conspiracy of the Manson Gang, and the Weather Underground, a highly destructive domestic terrorist group, most of whose members nonetheless went on to freedom and even cushy academic jobs. (Among them were the biological and adoptive parents of Chesa Boudin, the San Francisco D.A. whose leftist attitude towards crime and incarceration has turned that city into a social experiment predictably leading to a rampant crime spree). There is a hard-Left authoritarian vein running through the 60s and the Boomers which may have gone to ground for a few decades but never entirely went away. Millennials seem to agree with that militant Leftism but abjure any of the vital parts, like freedom.
Now, illiberal Boomers have joined hands with the Millennial/Gen Z scolds, their grandchildren, in a censorious partnership against Generation X, so labelled by Douglas Coupland’s quirky little book from 1991. Take a look at cancel culture’s latest victims, all Generation X: J.K. Rowling is still in the dog-house for ideas she has eloquently expressed on women’s rights, views which a decade ago were almost universal but are now toxic. Katherine Stock, a professor at Sussex University in England, was forced out of her job by a militant student body for her measured but non-conformist opposition to the ideology that men self-identifying as women should have full access to all women’s spaces including rape shelters and prisons. Dave Chappelle, America’s top comedian, is also on the outs with the wokesters due to his support of Rowling and refusal to align his views with the Gender Borg.
Last year, law professor Jason Kilborn from the University of Illinois-Chicago had a question in his Civil Procedure exam about a discrimination case which, to illustrate the injury to the plaintiff, posited that other employees had called her “a ‘n___’ and ‘b___’ [sic].” For this, Kilborn was suspended from his job, left to twist in the wind by his university administration, and later put through a re-education program reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. A simpler solution, such as asking him to change an exam question he had used for years to accommodate evolving student sensitivities, doesn’t seem to have been tried. Antonio García Martínez, a tech entrepreneur, wrote a book called Chaos Monkeys about his experiences in Silicon Valley. The book, in the spirit of Hunter Thomson or Tom Wolfe but published in a less freewheeling age than theirs, upset employees at Apple because of instances of perceived misogyny and ended up costing him his new job there last year. In this mixed group of cancel targets you have a white man, two women (one a lesbian), a black man, and a Hispanic, none of which intersectional identities were any armor against the newly-hatched orc armies of Saruman the Woke.
Generation X seems to be unsuccessfully holding the embattled libertarian middle ground between the neo-intolerant Boomers and the Millennials/Gen Z, whose inability to accept a diversity of viewpoints is second only to their obsession with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in every other aspect of life. Nobody may have expected the Spanish Inquisition in the Monty Python catch-phrase, but now everyone should expect the woke inquisition, which will peel apart your thoughts and writings like an onion, with painstaking care, until it finds a grain of dirt from which to make a pearl of toxicity, leading to your cancellation. Luckily, Generation X has the best independent journalists; not just the fearless Abigail Shrier and Megyn Kelly on the center-right, but others like Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi, and Glenn Greenwald who are essentially progressives, driven out of the mainstream media tent when it became small and sanctimonious and hostile to free thought.
For Gen Z and the Millennials, we can only hope age brings wisdom and tolerance. It’s too late for Neil, Joni, David, and those Boomers who in their sunset years have forgotten the 60s spirit they sang about. Crosby had better fold that libertarian Freak Flag up and put it in the closet – maybe his great-grandchildren will one day find it, along with some dusty N95s, and wave it again. Meanwhile, Generation X must hold the fort against the twin armies of Boomer Mordor and Millennial Isengard, waiting for rescue from whatever Rohan turns out to be. Judging from the Joe Rogan experience, it will be a long time before that cavalry arrives.
—J. L. Reiter has East Coast origins but has lived and worked abroad for 25 years. He writes a regular column here, ‘The Society,’ on US domestic culture, society, and politics.
Yes Simon, I really loved this one, too; we have to hope (above all, because the boomers are useless) that the younger generation discovers the joys of liberty and personal agency and soon, or we are in for a very hard time. On the other hand, I'm thrilled to be an x'er at the gates, defending just those qualities. Thanks ever so much for your steadfast support and fondly, John
I love the reference to re-education along the lines of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
No doubt it will also be Gen X's fault that house prices are so high and unattainable for Gen Zs/ Millennials and that climate change has not been solved.