The enforcers of ideological conformity must be confronted, without mercy.
Joe Rogan might be too big to cancel, but just barely.
The podcaster is on his second round of apologies, more than 100 of his episodes have been removed, and the CEO of Spotify sent a missive to employees on how he sympathizes with their dire emotional plight having to live through such a traumatizing episode.
If Spotify hadn’t invested $100 million in Joe Rogan, it would have dumped him by now.
The episode is, of course, another sign of the growing threat to free and open speech in this country, and why it needs stalwart, principled, untiring friends, which National Review, with your help, has been and will continue to be.
We haven’t defended Joe Rogan because he’s a conservative (he’s not) or because we are in the practice of defending Bernie Sanders supporters (we’re not). We have stuck up for him in numerous pieces and a blistering editorial
— because open debate is a pillar of a free society,
— because the appetite of the mob grows with the eating,
— because in an age of enforced conformity, interesting and dissenting voices are more valuable than ever,
— and because we are deeply devoted to the freedoms at the root of our constitutional order,
we believe that these freedoms are never out of style and have spent nearly seven decades defending them, and we’ll keep doing it until we can no longer put print to paper or pixels to screen.
If you think it’s valuable to have a committed, consistent, and credible voice pushing back against the mob, please help support NR with whatever donation you deem appropriate, from $5 to $500. Every penny makes a difference and is appreciated.
A controversy that has gotten less national attention, but is as egregious, is the campaign against Ilya Shapiro, the libertarian constitutional scholar whom the cancelers wanted preemptively fired from a job at Georgetown Law over a poorly worded tweet.
We immediately rebutted the case against Shapiro in detail.
We defended Shapiro in an editorial and excoriated a Georgetown dean who had denounced him.
We mercilessly mocked the disingenuous Slate journalist who got the cancel mob going, such that he took to Twitter to absurdly accuse us of libel.
We sent a reporter to cover the controversy on the ground at Georgetown Law, and he owned the story, exposing how preposterous the student reaction was, including a demand for a cry room.
Whenever someone thanks me for coverage like this, I say — quite sincerely — that he or she shouldn’t mention it, because this is what we’re here to do.
And it is. But we need your help to keep doing it.
NR is a serious journal of opinion at a time when there aren’t many left. We don’t compromise the quality of our journalism or bend on what we consider timeless values, with free and open debate being high among them.
I hope at this point Joe Rogan survives. But someone else, predictably, will be targeted soon enough, and we will stand by him or her, too.
Free speech needs stalwart friends, and so do we.
Thanks for reading, and God bless.
P.S. We’ve also been hitting China in this web drive. Amazingly enough, the CCP has also been able to crimp speech in this country via its market power and the cravenness of business leaders, Hollywood, and sports leagues. They, too, need calling out, and we gladly do it all the time.
