With all the dumb sh*t Joe Rogan has said over the decade-plus he’s been hosting The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, it would be easy to think that there is no line for him to cross that would bear any real consequences. But it turns out that there is a line, at least as far as YouTube is concerned, and that is comparing COVID vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany.
As New York Daily News reports, YouTube removed a clip from the New Year’s Eve episode of Rogan’s bafflingly popular podcast, which included an interview with Dr. Robert Malone, a controversial virologist who The Atlantic dubbed “The Vaccine Scientist Spreading Vaccine Misinformation” back in August. In the clip, Malone compared today’s America to Germany in the 1920s and ‘30s, declaring vaccine mandates a form of “mass formation psychosis.” According to Malone:
“It was from, basically, European intellectual inquiry into what the heck happened in Germany in the 20s and 30s. Very intelligent, highly educated population, and they went barking mad. And how did that happen? The answer is mass formation psychosis. When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other, and has free floating anxiety, in a sense that things don’t make sense. We can’t understand it. And then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis. They literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere.”
Malone, who had his Twitter account suspended last week for sharing this same Nazi-comparison rhetoric, is hailed as a hero by many conservatives. As the Daily News writes:
They point to the fact that Malone—whose skepticism of COVID vaccines is at odds with the mainstream medical community—was among the earliest researchers in mRNA technology that eventually led to the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines. Malone has also shared his thoughts during conversations with fringe cable TV hosts including Tucker Carlson and Glenn Beck.
Critics, meanwhile, believe that many of the headline-grabbing opinions of both Malone and self-described “f***ing moron” Rogan are meant purely to drum up publicity, negative or otherwise. Given that Rogan hosts the most popular podcast in the world, it’s a tactic that sadly still seems to work.
(Via New York Daily News)