The Great Purge

On Joe Rogan and Major Media's Throw Down

Photo credi: Mike Roach

On my Facebook wall the other day I posted a link to Democracy Now!’s coverage of the banning of Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus. I wrote above the link: “Why is DN skipping over the left's book banning?” One of my dear friends wrote below the post that she had no idea of this to which one Facebook user wrote, “Abigail Shrier's book Irreversible Damage was banned at one point from Target, and Amazon didn't allow her publisher to advertise it on the site” and another wrote, “Where have you been? Every professor, artist, writer who's lost his/her job has lost it because of neoliberal ideology.” Then another Facebook user noted, “If you only read news sources that lean left, you wouldn’t necessarily know.”

All this is true and it presents a terrifying paradox today where one can follow a slew of centre and left-of-centre news sources while remaining totally uninformed about current political movements and censorship. Fox News, however, has been covering this subject for many years now and journalists like myself know that if you are going to write about men entering women’s and girls’ sporting competitions, book banning by the neoliberal tranche of society or the fact that health organisations and midwifery groups are ousting members who say that only women give birth, we know that we must send our pitches to more conservative publications. This is a journalistic truism at this point.

So in the goodwill of liberal readers to address the evils of Maus being banned by the ten-member school board in McMinn County, Tennessee, which voted unanimously to ban Maus, from its eighth-grade curriculum, they are only seeing one tiny part of a much larger picture. Where Rogan is now issuing apologies for using the “N-word” after the past two weeks have seen prominent musicians including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell asking Spotify to withdraw their music from the service over its decision to continue hosting Rogan’s show, we are at the crossroads of where one person’s offence meets another. 

This is both fascinating and insane-making for most of us vagina-havers and menstruators—ooops, I mean front-holers. Indeed, this is the lexicon that media, NGOs and even governmental bodies have adopted to refer to women and girls. I have whiplash from the sheer celerity at which racism is called out in a New York second while sexism throughout major media—the callouts, threats to have journalists fired, and the onslaught of harassment directed at women over the past decade—all because women say that sex in humans is immutable and that we have zero genomic links to Nemo, is deemed as bigotry.

Watching Rogan and Spotify twist under the fire of the woke mobs who are undoubtedly going back through each of his podcasts to specify in order to find another “gotcha” moment where Rogan might be found further guilty of misgendering, I am reminded of previous historical eras where mobs drove political fervour, even to the envy of those in power.

Between 1936 and 1938, there were three Moscow Trials—referred to as “show trials” and “purge trials” because the guilt was already pre-determined—where former senior Communist Party leaders were accused of conspiring with fascist and capitalist powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders in a bid to dismember the Soviet Union and restore capitalism. The Great Purge, also known as the “Great Terror,” is characterised by three widely publicised show trials and a series of closed, unpublicised trials held in the Soviet Union during the late 1930s, in which many prominent Old Bolsheviks were found guilty of treason and executed or imprisoned. The evidence presented in court was derived from preliminary examinations of the defendants and from their confessions. It has been subsequently established that the accused were innocent, that the cases were fabricated by the secret police (NKVD), and that the confessions were made under pressure of intensive torture and intimidation.

Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938), chief editor of the newspaper Pravda (1918-1929) and one of the founders of the Third International (Komintern) was subject to the third trial (March 1938) wherein he was accused of having plotted to murder Lenin in 1918. Nikolai Bukharin was accused of having collaborated with the Trotskyite-Zinovievite terrorists as well as with foreign intelligence agencies. Bukharin along with Aleksei Rykov and others were eventually tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in March 1938. Bukharin admitted his crimes calling them “monstrous” and he was executed in 1938.

While Rogan and Spotify’s CEO are not being tortured, imprisoned or executed, they most certainly are victims in our culture’s latest chapter in wokery. It will be of little note within the BCC or CNN that these purges have been happening to feminists and anyone who claims that men are not women across the English-speaking world for the past decade. Little to no left-of-centre media attention was thrown towards covering the voices of women who were forced from their jobs, who were expelled from volunteer positions, who were de-platformed from speaking engagements, and who were obliged to have bodyguards accompany them to ensure their security. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. 

Rogan’s podcast was reportedly acquired for more than $100m (£77m) in 2020 by Spotify. Where Spotify was firm on supporting free speech two years ago, one is forced to do a double-take this past week as it is now purging from its servers over 100 episodes of Rogan’s podcast. Who needs execution squads when you have mass media doing the dirty work of politicians and misrepresenting facts, playing into the silencing of rational debate in and around how this pandemic has been handled by governments and scientific bodies and demonstrating to the world that if you dare misstep, you will be sentenced to the purgatory of having your voice and history deleted. 

These are frightening times where Rogan’s use of the “N-word” and sexist comments are pulled out as if this is what is at stake. Spoiler alert: It’s not.

What is at stake here is that the pseudo-left (they’re neoliberals folks) is exploiting emotional baggage from the devastating history of the US to silence a podcaster who asks good questions, invites a variety of guests from across the political spectrum and who expresses his scepticism for how “the science” around coronavirus has been presented to us from major media, Big Tech, and our political leaders. He has tripped and slipped up as all of us do. It’s called being human. 

However, the vast body of work that Rogan has produced is more representative of what major media has failed to do during the pandemic. He has interviewed a wide range of guests, asked questions of medicine and vaccines that few media outlets have, and he has remained open to shifting his opinion, even having changed his mind on various issues.

We are being corralled into major media’s cherry-picked circus of “guilt through public scrutiny” while almost successfully tarring Rogan as a far-right ideologue. Joe Rogan is hardly conservative given his support for Bernie Sanders’ presidential candidacy, universal healthcare and free higher education. Where is MSNBC’s outrage over Neil Young’s homophobic comments during the height of the AIDS epidemic? Of course, the left-of-centre media is as silent about Young’s bigotry as it is in explaining his his choice to leave Spotify for labour-rights-infringing Amazon. Instead, The Guardian calls Young’s move “principled” while failing to address that Neil Young is now promoting Amazon Music and its four-month free subscription deal. Principled in what way exactly?

But let’s not single out the purity-posturing artists—the attacks on Rogan have been a boon for the field of marketing and its major media allies as corporate media plumps the feathers of exploitable markets. The Verge ran a transparently fake news listicle four days ago entitled, “The best alternatives to Spotify for listening to music” and yesterday Fast Company ran “Switching from (or to) Spotify is easier than you think: Want to ditch Spotify like Neil Young? This tool makes it simple.” The Seattle Times also jumped on the “how to ditch Spotify” media frenzy with its own DIY guide and Vulture’s “Seems Like a Good Time to Sign Up for a New Music Service” openly panders to market competitors of Spotify (and one must wonder if these media companies were paid for such shoddily-written marketing pieces posed as “journalism.”

Who says the news doesn’t write itself? Certainly, it cashes in on every twist and turn of this social media-informed pinball game.

Most bewildering in this scenario is that major media is gunning for Rogan as his viewer numbers dwarf theirs with 11 million viewers per episode. Fox News primetime receives an average of 2.37 million viewers per episode and CNN carries around 822,000 per episode. But this is the clown car diversion, dear reader. Rogan is a convenient cover for the bigger spectacle as the left-of-centre media comments on Rogan’s mea culpa while digging deeper to find his every misspeak and fumble.

With the other hand, however, outlets like CNN and MSNBC are ratcheting up their own brand of misinformation to the public to back a war based entirely on lies. State Department spokesman, Ned Price, made claims of Russian disinformation and a “false flag operation in eastern Ukraine” while failing to present sufficient evidence for Russia’s alleged plan to film and broadcast fake videos of Ukrainian forces attacking Russian or Russian-proxy soldiers as a pretext for an invasion. Journalist Matt Lee asked basic questions of Price accuses him of entering into “Alex Jones territory” as Price continues the lie eventually claiming that the declassified evidence of his allegations (which he fails to provide) are his very own words making the claim. In short, the evidence is the lie.

While the media is in total free-fall these months, I’ll take Rogan’s blunders, thorough and probing interviews and his ability to shift his opinion based on evidence any day over this slapstick theatre of political consciousness that major media doles out and its many followers share as if the “gospel truth.” Rogan might be on the receiving end of a postmodern Great Terror, but if history has taught us anything about these sorts of public purging—especially when the dust settles—it’s this: Purges tend to be almost entirely ideologically driven in nature and they tend to function as a warning to the millions watching on as if to say, “Don’t do this at home or you too will be cancelled.” 

We need to push back on this neoliberal machinery of religious zealotry and not repeat what the Great Terror already taught millions over 100 years ago. Or, as my friend tells me, “Say what you want about the Great Purge, at least they got healthcare.”