Joe Rogan is very sad. The Fear Factor host-turned-wildly successful podcaster is sad because as he sees it, white straight men are in trouble.
Speaking to recent guest Joe List about the current state of comedy, Rogan lamented, “You can never be woke enough, that’s the problem. It keeps going. It keeps going further and further and further down the line and if you get to the point where you capitulate, where you agree to all these demands, it’ll eventually get to ‘straight white men are not allowed to talk.'”
But wait, it gets worse! Rogan foresees a whole range of social reparations on the horizon “because it’s your privilege to express yourself when other people of color have been silenced throughout history. It’ll be, you’re not allowed to go outside because so many people were imprisoned for so many years.”
If you think he’s joking, Rogan says no! “I’m not joking. It really will get there, it’s that crazy.”
Wow, what a terrifying and also completely nonsensical and unrealistic hypothetical scenario that must be for him! Straight white men aren’t “woke” enough, and they can never be woke enough, so the only option available to him is to stop trying to be any sort of decent person with a capacity for empathy and claim persecution.
But who exactly is it that is persecuting Rogan and other straight white men? I’m not sure exactly but I’m guessing it’s people with less power and a much smaller reach than him, the man who literally gets paid a hundred million dollars by Spotify to say whatever he wants into a microphone for hours at a time for a program that is then disseminated to millions of people.
Rogan’s podcast episodes are multiple hours long and they vary wildly in length, giving the impression that he is allowed to say quite literally anything and everything he ever wants. So yes, I guess the idea that he might, hypothetically, not be able to do that someday would be scary to him.
“Once again I am being silenced,” Joe Rogan yelled into his megaphone that was immediately uploaded online and downloaded by millions of people.
— Oliver Willis (@owillis) May 18, 2021
Can Joe Rogan point to one day in American history where straight white men shut the fuck up?
If you start the clock in 1787 they’ve had roughly 85,500 opportunities to give it a rest for A DAY, and have never ONCE let the goddamn Earth spin without offering an opinion. https://t.co/ZsIwzZnmCT
— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) May 18, 2021
“Soon straight white men won’t even be able to leave the house” is precisely the kind of overblown victimhood conservatives say is endemic on college campuses. Get a fucking grip.
— Michael Hobbes (@RottenInDenmark) May 18, 2021
What do we think prompted Rogan to fantasize about this white man’s dystopia of forced silence and imprisonment? Well, he has actually been receiving some pushback against some of his most egregious recent comments, like when he falsely and bizarrely claimed that “actual microchips” are being “injected into your arm to see if you have COVID-19,” or when he straight-up told his “young, healthy” listeners (i.e. the majority of his mostly young, mostly male audience) that they don’t need to get the vaccine.
But this conversation with List was a discussion about comedy. (You can watch here if you feel like subjecting yourself to that, with the quote above starting around the 5:00 mark.) Using Superbad as a benchmark, Rogan was bemoaning the inability to make a “good comedy” movie anymore, due to the way “they” (??) will “cancel” you (???) if you try.
We don’t know what sparked this particular lamentation, but as Fast Company notes, one of Rogan’s comedy buddies is Tony Hinchcliffe, who you might know after he recently went viral when he decided to open a set with a completely unfunny, horrifically anti-Asian racist rant.
(Warning, if you haven’t already seen this, I recommend keeping it that way. Whatever you’re imagining, it’s worse. I’m only including it here to make the full picture as clear as possible.)
Last week in Austin, I got to bring up Tony Hinchcliffe. This is what he said. Happy Asian (AAPI) Heritage Month! pic.twitter.com/9XG6upit2a
— Peng Dang (@pengdangcomedy) May 11, 2021
That rant cost Hinchcliffe both his representation at the prominent talent agency WME (why they represented him in the first place is a mystery) as well as some upcoming gigs with none other than Joe Rogan himself.
Amazing how so many people are so concerned that the backlash against Hinchcliffe is a dark reflection of our society’s moral corruption, and not that Hinchcliffe’s direct racist harassment and mockery of his fellow comedian Peng Dang is the actual problem.
Again, we don’t know if this is what sparked this particular rambling in his regular multi-hour daily ramblings, but it sure is a weird argument for Rogan to take up right now!
(image: screencap)
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