Month / February 2022

by Edward Champion

Russia-Ukraine: The Eve of Destruction

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the greatest global crisis we have seen in decades and threatens to plunge many nations into a new world war.

Something like this occurred a little more than a century ago in the Balkans. And it is now happening again in Ukraine.

Explosions have rocked at least ten territories within the beleaguered nation. Missiles were fired before dawn by Russia. Russia destroyed aircraft and targeted military complexes. As of this morning, dozens of Ukrainians have been reported dead and a video circulated on social media revealed that Russian troops skirting the edge of Kharkiv, which is Ukraine’s second-largest city. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was forced to declare martial law. He begged Russia to stop. He urged his 44 million citizens to right back. Many Ukranians fled the capital in their cars. An endless stream of taillights, all caught in the maw of congestion, could be seen clogging Kyiv’s major traffic arteries. Others fled to the subway stations and hunkered down. Meanwhile, Sergiy Kyslytsya, the Ukranian UN Ambassador urged the peacekeeping international body to stop the war. While none of the UN members were sympathetic to Russia, there are two unsettling questions now lingering in the air: (1) What is Putin’s ultimate plan here? and (2) What cavalier actions from Putin will it take to drive other nations into war?

Putin’s merciless campaign to invade a nation — a 233,000 square mile region just southwest of Russia and just north of the Black Sea — has created an unprecedented geopolitical escalation that we have not seen in recent times. And because international law and the health of a shaky global economy must be upheld, there is now the very real possibility of a massive international melee that we have not seen in decades. Germany, which is heavily reliant upon natural gas from Russia, halted the certification of its Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Chancellor Olaf Scholz does not have a backup plan for how he will make up the energy shortfall. Even before the rockets rattled Ukraine in the predawn hours, crude oil prices spiked above $100 — a seven-year high. The global stock market was already operating on shaky terra firma and those once dependable lines dipped downward yesterday, with the S&P 500 — the fund for most retirement plans — plummeting nearly 2%. Russia holds nearly 5% of the global oil supply and about 24% of the global natural gas supply. By reducing the total global energy supply that is available to all, Putin’s actions have drastically shaken the delicate fissures upon which the entire global economy is built upon.

Only a few days before, Putin had declared that Donetsk and Luhansk — two separatist regions sympathetic to Moscow — as independent regions. Weeks before that, he installed 150,000 troops at strategic points along the Ukrainian border. He has proven to be immune to diplomacy. These are, in short, the actions of a dictator.

President Biden is expected to make a statement today at noon. Last night, he talked with President Zelenskyy. Republicans — led by Senator Jim Inhofe — have seized the opportunity to paint Biden as a 21st century Neville Chamberlain. Biden did issue a brief statement last night suggesting that further economic sanctions against Russia, in coordination with other nations, were forthcoming. He had previously issued a first tranche of sanctions targeting banks and Russian oligarchs. There is also the question of whether NATO forces will become involved in an armed struggle and whether America will find itself involved in a long and costly war — this after pulling out from Afghanistan. Putin knows very well that he holds all of the cards here and that getting away with a wanton invasion means that he can not only embarrass the United States, but do so with impunity. He has initiated a game of chicken and has dared the rest of the world to join in.

There will be a significant refugee crisis because of Putin’s actions. There will be a great loss of life. Putin’s actions may embolden other nations to make similar moves. The old rules of peacekeeping no longer apply.

Energy isn’t the only economic factor here. Russia is also the largest global exporter of wheat. And the missile strikes against Ukraine have already affected wheat prices. This could likely exacerbate a growing world hunger crisis.

China has refused to outright condemn Russia’s actions. In a parallel reminiscent of a sordid Facebook relationship status, spokeswoman Hua Chunying insisted that the Ukraine issue was “very complicated.” Israel has rebuked Russia after staying silent.

But it’s clear that Putin hopes to drag other nations into this conflict. It’s clear that, even with Western support, Ukraine is undermatched and outgunned in military force and that Putin is determined to annex the territory. That the fate of the world hinges upon the actions of one megalomaniacal man is a dark irony as we try to find some light that will take us out of the COVID tunnel.

Make no mistake. We are now on the brink of world war.

by Edward Champion

Brené Brown: The Susan Collins of Podcasting

Brené Brown is an opportunistic “thought leader” whose “I was against it after I was for it” stance against Joe Rogan reveals her true moral duplicity.

I’ve long suspected Brené Brown of being a disingenuous corporate sellout. Over the past twelve years, she has shrewdly branded and marketed herself as a “thought leader” (that upmarket term we now use to describe superficial thinkers serving up syncretic self-help malarkey), dispensing her platitudes to fawning and uncritical crowds while amassing vast wealth. She spoke of “shame” and “vulnerability” much in the way that sociopathic C-level executives speak of “team building” and “synergy.” In short, Brown was, and remains, a first-rate huckster. An impressive grifter preying upon the national hunger for emotional intimacy.

But now we have something of a smoking gun clearly outlining why Brown cannot be trusted.

You may recall Brown’s January 29, 2022 decision to pause her podcasts on Spotify. This was, of course, over the Joe Rogan imbroglio, a soap opera that seems peculiarly apposite for 2022’s promisingly bleak trajectory. Brown took a firm stance against Rogan’s pandemic disinformation and anti-trans rhetoric. A laudable step forward in solidarity with Neil Young and company from someone who was putatively in a position to make waves.

Except that she didn’t. And Brown’s history with Spotify further delineates that she’s not much more than a craven team-playing bobblehead.

Here we are — not more than two weeks later. Brown has now backpedaled big time with a “Podcast Update” revealing just how stupid and gullible she perceives her audience to be and how self-serving her intentions truly are.

Let’s not mince words here. In May 2020 — months into the pandemic and when it was abundantly clear that Rogan was a disinformation king who played dumb about his complicity every time he was called out — Rogan signed an exclusive $100 million deal with Spotify. In September 2020, Brown — who was surely somewhat cognizant about the Faustian bargain she was agreeing to — signed an exclusive deal with Spotify. She said nothing then about Joe Rogan, presumably because the money was too good for her to object to a know-nothing meatball poisoning the minds of 17 million listeners.

Now, a year and a half later, Brown is attempting to rewrite the narrative to serve her own ends. She claims in her blog post, “I first shared concerns with the leadership about Rogan’s content in 2020.” She now speaks out against Rogan’s anti-trans remarks and his misogynistic chortling with Joey Diaz — as if these were completely unknown factors in September 2020. Far from it. In June 2020, The Independent ran an article about the Diaz incident. As did The Sun. And it was widely criticized on social media. Earlier in the year, Bernie Sanders faced criticism for appearing on Joe Rogan’s show specifically because of Rogan’s transphobic remarks. In fact, during the month in which Brown signed the deal, Caitlyn Jenner called Joe Rogan a “transphobic ass.” Additionally that month, Spotify employees duked it out with top brass over Rogan’s transphobia.

In other words, even if you were remotely familiar with podcasting in September 2020 (when Brown signed her deal), it was fundamentally impossible to not know who Rogan was and what he represented. She claims now that she “didn’t have the option of pulling my work from the platform.” But if she truly cared about trans rights and disinformation and possessed genuine moral scruples, she would never have signed onto Spotify in the first place. Did she stand in solidarity with the brave Spotify employees who demanded editorial oversight? There is zero evidence of this. (A Twitter search turns up nothing.) Brown jumped onto a fashionable cause, received some attention for it, and is now recanting her stance — probably because she’s received a few calls from her corporate overlords.

Brown’s stance is really no different from Senator Susan Collins, a loathsome and unprincipled turncoat who has been ridiculed for years (e.g., The New Yorker‘s Andy Borowitz) for expressing similar “concerns” shortly before voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as Supreme Court Justice or to block voting rights. That Brown uses the word “concerns” shows that she is either willfully clueless or, more likely, taking a page from the Collins playbook to save her Janus face. Because in late-stage capitalism, if you can spin the story to serve your own ends and tell a lie big enough for the rubes to nod back in admiration, you’ll be a resounding success! Call it Neoliberalism, American Style! And find someone on the level of the Ron Hicklin Singers to belt out this anthem to promote shameless and solipsistic corporate fealty!

Here’s a TikTok version of this article:

@finnegansache

#greenscreen #brenebrown #joerogan #spotify #podcast #susancollins #deal #protest #money

♬ original sound – Edward Champion

by Edward Champion

A High Wind in Jamaica (Modern Library #71)

Decades before Village of the Damned or Lord of the Flies, Richard Hughes broke the 1929 literary taboo of depicting children as anything other than innocent. This impeccably written masterpiece still packs something of a jolt today.

(This is the thirtieth entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: A House for Mr. Biswas.)

Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica is the wild and bracing corrective to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (forthcoming at ML #41) that I never knew I needed. Truth be told, the two books I am least looking forward to revisiting during the course of this ridiculously ambitious and time-consuming project are J.D. Salinger’s A Catcher in the Rye (forthcoming at ML #64) and Lord. Both novels meshed with me when I was an impressionable high school kid who didn’t know any better, but I have assiduously avoided rereading both volumes as an adult — much in the way that you hang down your wiser and more mature head over some of the dodgier cartoons you advocated as a child. (For the record, in my adulthood, I still abide by The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show, the decades-long catalog of Warner Brothers cartoons, and — if you get me on the right day — Robotech and Star Blazers.)

Thankfully, I had no such qualms with High Wind; in large part because, unlike Golding, Hughes isn’t so obsessed with plugging in values — the novel as a Sudoku puzzle? — to uphold his Great AllegoryTM (and thus literary posterity). The older you get as a reader, the more you welcome the fresh shock of the visceral: those exotic and sometimes unsettling voices you may not encounter in the real world.

Hughes was twenty-five years ahead of Golding when it came to writing a novel about children losing their civilized patina as they travel deeper into the wild and aberrant vales of anarchism (in this case, by dint of a ragtag gang of pirates). But his exquisite command of atmosphere shows that he was arguably more subtler than Golding, permitting the transformation of his children to become something of a shock in part due to the great care he took with his prose. High Wind was one of only four novels that Hughes wrote. (And aside from High Wind, I especially recommend In Hazard.) He was more of a playwright, a poet, and a journalist than a fiction writer — in large part because the lapidary approach he took with his sentences significantly slowed him down. But despite his bradykinetic progress, High Wind proved to be such a literary sensation that it turned Hughes into a notable figure saddled with controversy, literary renown, and even a modestly burgeoning financial cushion.

The novel’s setup involves the Bas-Thornton children, who flirt with feral wonders in the Jamaican wild when not relishing their privileged comforts at a plantation named Ferndale. A storm devastates their idyllic paradise. And as they sail back home to England, the children are scooped up by pirates.

When the pirates do board the ill-fated Clorinda (complete with Captain Narpole sleeping through the whole imbroglio, saving face later with a devastatingly bleak letter of lies), Hughes is crisply fastidious about describing these interlopers against type:

With this second boatload came both the captain and the mate. The former was a clumsy great fellow, with a sad, silly face. He was bulky; yet so ill-proportioned one got no impression of power. He was modestly dressed in a drab shore-going suit: he was newly shaven, and his sparse was pomaded so that it lay in a few dark ribbons across his baldish head-top. But all this shore-decency of appearance only accentuated his big splodgy brown hands, stained and scarred and corned with his calling. Moreover, instead of boots he wore a pair of gigantic heel-less slippers in the Moorish manner, which he must have sliced with a knife out of some pair of dead sea-boots. Even his great spreading feet could hardly keep them on, so that he was obliged to walk at the slowest of shuffles, flop-flop along the deck. He stooped, as if always afraid of banging his head on something, and carried the backs of his hands forward, like an orangutan.

Much as Knut Hamsun seemed to anticipate the hardboiled existential feel of Jim Thompson and James M. Cain in 1890 (thank you also, late and great translator Sverre Lyngstad!), so too does Hughes depict the professional working-class criminal just before the gaudily garbed grunt became a staple of noir. These pirates do make a perfunctory effort to look presentable (the captain — later revealed to be a Danish German-speaking ruffian named Jonsen — has gone to the trouble of shaving and pomading what is left of his hair), but they are also makeshift in their sartorial choices. Hughes’s beautiful choice of “dead sea-boots” suggests something vitiated and unholy at work here. (Indeed, one of the buyers who unloads the booty is a vicar, described as “less well shaved than he would have been in England.” Later, a warped nativity play is performed to entertain the pirates. Even later, the song “Onward, Christian Soldiers” is evoked in creepy fashion.) And Jonsen’s desperate attempt to keep his fancy bespoke slippers on — coupled with the telltale pocks of his aloof hands, which resemble a spastic animal — is just one of many examples of the dry exacting comedy that Hughes doles out gently throughout this deranged adventure tale. There’s also a mysterious first-person narrator serving almost as a cosmic god offering mordant asides. Indeed, the standoff between Marpole and these thugs reminded me of the “civilized” exchange between Barry and the highwayman in Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. (In Barry Lyndon, Kubrick also had a sardonic narrator in the form of Michael Hordern’s arch commentary, which also dished up bone-dry asides on how we are all barely disguised animals beneath the human sheen. Was Kubrick familiar with Hughes? We may never know, although it is worth noting that a young Martin Amis did appear as one of the kids in the 1965 film adaptation of Hughes’s novel.)

Yet the look of these pirates is enough to ignite a modest crush within Margaret, one of the children, who marvels at their beauty. In an age in which television shows like Euphoria and high school cinematic classics like Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off are heralded for using transgressive behavior to depict teens as “adults” (one can likewise see this approach nimbly executed in Megan Abbott’s more recent novels, which have used this storytelling device by framing kids through the subcultures of ballet, cheerleading, and hockey), it’s impossible to overstate the big risk that Hughes took here in 1929. During the hurricane that plagues Jamaica, Hughes also foreshadows how living in a state of nature can inevitably subsume anyone — even a child — by having a domesticated pet named Tabby ruthlessly chased by wildcats.

You will, alas, have to contend with the novel’s appalling and off-putting racism (“there is, after all, a vast difference between a negro and a favorite cat,” writes Hughes when both die after a hurricane and there is a cruel treatment of a monkey on the high seas, which suggests an unsettling metaphor). But the sheer weirdness that forms the backbone of this sweeping story swiftly atones for these hoary and horrendous “cultural values.”

High Wind is also the first recorded instance of the Hangman’s Blood, a cocktail later favored by Anthony Burgess. Seventeen years ago, I persuaded a bartender in the Upper Haight to make me this famous libation. It was, I am sad to report, quite ghastly. I never tried it again. Hughes himself also understood what a hideous mix it was, describing it as possessing “the property of increasing rather than allaying thirst, and so, once it has made a breach, soon demolishes the whole fort.”

Subconsciously, too, every one recognizes they are animals — why else do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling the human, as they would at a praying mantis?

The children adapt to their new life much like many of today’s bored kids stare into the vacuity of their digital screens for constant stimulation. When one of their number dies, Hughes eerily notes how quickly accustomed they become to an empty bed. When Jonsen withholds the “three Sovereign Rules of Life” on the basis of their youth, Edward replies, “Why not? When shall I be old enough?” Indeed, reading High Wind in 2022 is rather eldritch, particularly in the shock of recognizing such everyday behavior among children today. Hughes does not shy away from how boredom can turn kids unruly and mischievous quite fast. Margaret speaks “with an eagerness that even exceeded the necessities of politeness in its falsity.” When the first mate attempts to inveigle the kids by mentioning a famous pirate named Rector of Roseau, the children quickly see through the superficiality of the apocryphal origin story, puncturing the first mate’s plot holes faster than the Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons. And the children strike back, with Hughes even describing a corporeal awakening among Emily.

I certainly don’t want to spoil how the kids transform. But it is subtly disconcerting, with a clever nod to the Flying Dutchman. We are left to wonder whether this particular group of kids was fated to turn out this way, even if the pirates had never kidnapped them, or if feral circumstances shaped their transmutation. Hughes, to his credit, lets the reader off the hook somewhat with this aside, pointing to how children are regularly underestimated:

Grown-ups embark on a life of deception with considerable misgiving, and generally fail. But not so children. A child can hide the most appalling secret without the least effort, and is practically secure against detection. Parents, finding that they see through their child in so many places the child does not know of, seldom realize that, if there is some point the child really gives his mind to hiding, their chances nil.

Given how problem children have been a pain in the ass for so many parents over the years, it’s rather surprising that it took so long for literature to point this out. Hughes’s immaculately written masterpiece — complete with its alligators and earthquakes as odd forms of fierce incitement and its wry asides about our assumptions about children — was one of the first major works of fiction to interrogate this discomfiting truth. And, even today, A High Wind in Jamaica is a bold and welcome reminder that kids are not to be underestimated. In an epoch in which moronic milquetoasts ban Maus from classrooms for the most arbitrarily intransigent concerns (just read the meeting minutes), High Wind — complete with its chilling final sentence — is a swift kick in the ass to the cowardly and unadventurous sensibilities that prevent us from being honest about what anyone is capable of becoming and how so many of these disturbing possibilities hide in plain sight.

Next Up: Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet!

by Edward Champion

Why Protesting Spotify and Standing Against Joe Rogan Isn’t a Free Speech Issue

Joe Rogan’s controversy with Spotify is not a free speech issue, much less a campaign to silence him. It is appropriate pushback against a man who has adamantly refused to alter his hateful and dangerous approach.

Joe Rogan has significant sway. And with great influence comes great responsibility.

A few days ago, I pulled all of my podcasts from Spotify. In terms of influence, I am about as far from Neil Young and Joni Mitchell (or, for that matter, Roxane Gay) as you can get. But I could not in good conscience allow the art that has taken up happy years of my life to be shared on the same platform as Joe Rogan, who has repeatedly demonstrated his commitment to spreading disinformation and offering a platform for anti-trans rhetoric. Rogan has stood against science (or even commonplace thinking) and, with that stance, debased the courageous front-line workers who have put in long and often traumatic hours to serve the commonweal — often with thankless and even hostile or violent reactions.

But that is my choice. It doesn’t mean I want to silence Rogan. It doesn’t even mean that I won’t listen to him — particularly if some viral clip pings on my radar. It just means that I don’t want to be associated with him. Just as I don’t want to be associated with Nazis (now making a resurgence in Florida), racists, sexists, hatemongers, people who never tip, those who exploit others for their own gain, and numerous other unpleasant individuals who stand against the human condition. This is no different from boycotting Florida orange juice in the 1970s because of Anita Bryant’s hateful homophobia.

Until Sunday, when Rogan responded to the Spotify controversy on Instagram, Rogan had outright flouted his duties as a significant influencer. It was only after Spotify lost $2 billion in market value that Rogan had deigned to say anything.

I am fully committed to free speech, perhaps far more than most people these days. My audio drama, The Gray Area, is devoted to the pursuit of humanism and empathy in narrative form. And Joe Rogan, who isn’t exactly the sharpest blade in the kitchen drawer, is fundamentally opposed to these core tenets. So I stand in solidarity with the 270 members of the medical and scientific community who signed an open letter against Rogan’s unhinged and mercenary fidelity to hate and misinformation. (And, as an aside, Media Matters‘s Alex Paterson truly deserves hazard pay for subjecting himself to 350 hideous hours of that mumbling marblemouth. I wouldn’t subject such an insalubrious assignment on my worst enemy. On the other hand, this did need to be done.)

Joe Rogan has faced controversy ever since he shifted his podcasting empire to Spotify for the kingly sum of $100 million. In September 2020, Spotify employees offered pushback against some of the more unsettling elements of the show — such as offering a platform for transphobic writer Abigail Shrier, in which she suggested that trans people suffered from autism and that social media was little more than a propaganda outlet to persuade young people to transition.

The showdown among Spotify employees and Joe Rogan was framed as a free speech issue. It was presented as wokesters trying to “silence” Rogan. But an examination of the underlying facts reveals that isn’t quite the case at all. Spotify staffers demanded editorial oversight of Rogan’s podcast. And Vice reported that there had been ten meetings between the Spotify employees and various higher-ups. Did these Spotify employees want to silence Rogan? There is no evidence. The Spotify employees simply wanted Rogan to be more mindful and sensitive to the present-day clime. They clearly understood that Rogan was a draw and they did what any loyal employee would do upon seeing a cluelessly intransigent C-level executive who is out of touch with the present clime getting hammered at the holiday party and making inappropriate remarks. They said that they felt “unwelcome and alienated.” They pointed out the dangers of hosting transphobic content. It was not unlike the brave Gimlet employees who stood against former Reply All host PJ Vogt’s toxic behavior. In the case of Gimlet, there were actual consequences. In the case of Spotify, well, as the old saying goes, money talks.

There isn’t a single artist out there who couldn’t use editorial oversight. One’s freedom to express opinions isn’t so much hindered by a careful editorial hand, as it is enhanced by someone who can help a talent find the best way to communicate that view to an audience. And that would include controversial views and opinions that often make people uncomfortable. There have been many times in my life in which I would have benefited from editorial oversight. Like anyone, I’m still learning. Rogan, however, has remained adamantly resistant to anyone helping him to become a better communicator.

Let’s examine the episode that caused a furor within Spotify. If Rogan had offered pushback against Shrier and her fringe shows on his show, then he wouldn’t have attracted concern from Spotify employees, much less trans people who have had to endure significant hate and ridicule for who they are.

But that’s not Rogan did. Here’s a transcript from his conversation with Shrier:

Shrier: A reader wrote to me — I write most often for the Wall Street Journal — and a reader wrote to me and she said, “Listen, I’ve tried to get every mainstream journalist to pick this up. No one will touch it. But my daughter got caught up in this. All of a sudden she went off to college all of a sudden with her friend. She had a lot of mental health issues, anxiety, depression. And all of a sudden, with her group of friends, they all decided they’re trans. And she went on hormones.” And this is happening to parents all across the country. Teenage girls all of a sudden deciding with their friend that they’re trans, wanting surgeries and hormones and getting them. And at first I thought, I don’t need this. And so I tried to get another journalist to take it up. A real investigative reporter. I’m not I’m an — I’m an opinion journalist usually, you know, that’s what I’ve done. And I couldn’t get someone to take it up.

Rogan: Because it’s such a minefield. Because —

Shrier: Yeah because it’s a minefield. Because for some reason, the activists who are do not [sic] representative of transgender adults that I’ve met at all. But the activists had convinced the world that because, you know, they — they, you know, object to anyone’s transition being questioned, we can’t talk about a mental health issue facing teenage girls.

Rogan: Now I’ve heard there’s an issue with some teenage girls who are on the spectrum who wind up getting sort of roped into this idea that that’s what’s wrong with them. Is that one of the things you cover in your book?

Shrier: Yeah, I actually don’t deal with that specifically very much. And the reason is that’s a whole book in of itself. Because a lot of it is true that a lot of girls who are high functioning autistic. And I did interview some experts in autism and that’s when I realized that’s a book of its own, which is that a lot of girls who are high functioning autistic, you know, they tend to fixate and they had they are particularly susceptible to fixating on the idea that they might be a boy when it’s introduced to them. So yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about in there. They are one part of this phenomenon, but they’re a big part.

This snippet is a complete failing of legitimate debate. Here’s why it’s so harmful and dangerous:

  1. Shrier uses a single anecdote to paint a broad brush about young girls who choose to transition, framing this as an epidemic. This, of course, is a logical fallacy. It is akin to saying, “Someone told me that they turned into a giant whippoorwill — the size of the Chrysler Building — after eating a chicken mole burrito for lunch. Therefore, having a chicken mole burrito for lunch will transform you into a gargantuan nightjar.” Rogan does not acknowledge this logical fallacy to his listeners..
  2. At no point does Rogan stop Shrier and say, “Wait a minute. Do you have any tangible evidence for your claim?” Instead, he agrees with Shirer’s fringe view without question, thus endorsing a transphobic view.
  3. Rogan says nothing when Shrier suggests that transgender activists are incapable of having their assertions questioned. Furthermore, Shrier here isn’t presenting any solid foundation for her claims here. By her own admission, she’s merely an “opinion journalist.” Little more than some hopped up yahoo rambling at a bar.
  4. Rogan, practicing his usual illiteracy, not only hasn’t read Shrier’s book. But he hasn’t been filled in by one of his staffers on the content that is contained within it. He’s “heard” there’s an issue with teenage girls on the spectrum, but has no actual evidence to back this up. More transphobia.
  5. Shrier suggests, quite preposterously, that a large proportion of teenage girls who are exploring their gender identity are autistic. Again, Rogan does not question this transphobic belittling of teenage girls. He does not interrogate this unfounded assertion. Thus, an impressionable Joe Rogan listener comes away from this colloquy believing that what Shrier has said is true.

Joe Rogan takes this approach because he understands on some rudimentary level that allowing pernicious views like this to be propagated without question will (a) upset and infuriate a lot of people and (b) win him attention and social media buzz.

Now I’d like to believe that Joe Rogan can change and use his platform for good. One of the baleful realities about anyone getting cancelled is that our culture is fundamentally opposed to the basic human truth that people can learn and change. Furthermore, objecting to Joe Rogan for promulgating these views doesn’t mean that he’s cancelled. It means that you insist on stronger editorial oversight. It involves acknowledging that the “views” that Rogan peddles on his podcast represent 2022’s answer to endorsing segregation without leaving any room for the audience to think for itself.

Additionally, Rogan simply cannot be cancelled. Even if Rogan were to be exiled from Spotify, it’s abundantly clear that he would still have a large platform. He has an estimated reach of 11 million listeners per episode. He has a rabid fan base that hangs on to his every word.

Thus, it is a reasonable position for any thinking person to object to the company that is enabling Rogan. It simply isn’t a free speech issue. It’s the marketplace of ideas deciding what constitutes food for thought.