For over ten years, Joe Rogan Experience podcast has built a diverse audience. Its long-form interviews across a unique spectrum of politics and professional expertise have no other mainstream analogue. It has become the biggest podcast and most influential show on the planet.
Central to its growth has been Rogan himself and his commitment to let his guests speak, to let their own words define them without censorship from above. JRE was rewarded this year with a $100 million deal to bring the content to Spotify, citing growing censorship on YouTube as a major factor in choosing the Swedish company.
The move to Spotify took place on 1st September 2020. It has become clear the promise of migrating the entire back catalog is not being kept. Someone has purged dozens of key episodes, including two from the 20 most popular ever. What’s more, it’s clear there’s to be a sly opacity about the censorship – a familiar authoritarian strategy – despite an obvious theme to the poor bogeymen and language thought-policing Spotify (or JRE) chose to exclude.
Is it Spotify abusing corporate privilege, exploiting a loophole in Rogan’s contract? Or is Joe bending the knee and sacrificing his reputation for the big money payoff?
Corporate-backed authoritarian ideology always seeks to cancel content that humanize an individual the media is conspiring to paint as a bogeyman. It’s a lesson from the Josef Goebbels playbook: society can get away with crimes against people if those people are untermensch, and untermensch is best achieved by making the targets into cold symbols of enemy/evil, not living breathing hopes-and-dreams humans.
Alex Jones, Chris d’Elia, Gavin McInnes, Owen Benjamin, Eddie Bravo, David Seaman, Milo Yiannopoulos, Stefan Molyneux and various less known contrarians have been purged from the Joe Rogan Experience on Spotify. Some episodes remain on YouTube until the end of the year.
Spotify geolocation is already excluding populations of certain countries, so every JRE episode is no longer available to the entire world. Presumably if a particular episode offends the King of X, he can nudge Spotify and they’ll block that episode so nobody in X can access it. This is a slippery slope. It is an evil descent towards totalitarianism. Who knows which country’s citizens get shut out next? Who knows the next Emmanuel Goldstein to be targeted by media at the behest of the powers-that-be?
Reasons enough to resist.
Here’s the full list of Spotify censored, purged, and lost episodes. Some were lost (or removed) before the Spotify deal. Many great episodes risk being lost forever. They have restored half a dozen episodes since the start of September 2020. We mark these with a strike-through. The litmus episodes are those with Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos and Owen Benjamin. These flawed individuals are subject to corporate-ideological silencing not because they preach an evil doctrine but because letting the public see the Rogan episodes, there’s a risk of humanizing them.
SEPT 1st 2020 CENSORED OR PURGED EPISODES:
#1461 – Owen Smith- #1458 – Chris D’Elia
#1456 – Michael Shermer#1303 – Tommy Chong#1296 – Joe List- #1255 – Alex Jones Returns
#1182 – Nick Kroll#1164 – Mikhaila Peterson- #1093 – Owen Benjamin & Kurt Metzger
- #1033 – Owen Benjamin
- #998 – Owen Benjamin
- #980 – Chris D’Elia
- #979 – Sargon of Akkad
- #920 – Gavin McInnes
- #911 – Alex Jones & Eddie Bravo
- #820 – Milo Yiannopoulos
- #750 – Kip Andersen & Keegan Kuhn, producers of Conspiracy
- #710 – Gavin McInnes
- #702 – Milo Yiannopoulos
- #640 – Charles C. Johnson
- #582 – David Seaman
- #538 – Stefan Molyneux
#524 – Rickson Gracie, Eddie Bravo- #520 – David Seaman
- #487 – David Seaman
- #463 – Louis Theroux [blocked on youtube by A+E Networks]
- #461 – David Seaman
- #441 – Brian Dunning
- #368 – David Seaman
- #361 – Dave Asprey, Tait Fletcher
- #331 – Dr. Steven Greer
- #303 – Matt Vengrin, Brian Redban
- #276 – David Seaman, Abby Martin, Dell Cameron
- #275 – Dave Asprey
- #256 – David Seaman
- #239 – Adam Kokesh
- #213 – Eddie Bravo
#199 – Joey Diaz- #128 – Joey Diaz, Brian Redban (audio only) [not on joerogan.com or youtube]
- #119 – Jan Irvin
- #98 – Daryl Wright & Brian Whitaker
- #81 – Pete Johansson (audio only) [on joerogan.com / error in playback on youtube]
PREVIOUSLY LOST OR PURGED EPISODES:
- #454 – War Machine [on joerogan.com / video unavailable on youtube / on vimeo]
- #182 – Bryan Callen, Jimmy Burke, Brian Redban [error in playback on youtube / not on vimeo]
- #108 – Joey Diaz, Brian Redban [NOT on joerogan.com / not on youtube]
- #97 – Freddy Lockhart, Brian Redban [NOT on joerogan.com / not on youtube]
- #57 – Jayson Thibault, Brian Redban [on joerogan.com / video unavailable on youtube]
FEEL FREE TO CUT-AND-PASTE THIS LIST OR QUOTE OR REPEAT THE ABOVE LIST INFORMATION ANYWHERE AND EVERYWHERE.
SPOTIFY/JRE and youtube WILL TRY TO SHADOW-BAN ATTENTION BEING DRAWN TO THIS CENSORSHIP, e.g. comments about the missing episodes won’t be shown to anyone but the person making them.
as a rule, SHEER WEIGHT OF NUMBERS is the only way to overmatch shadowbanning i.e. REPEAT, RETWEET, REPLY, RELAY WHAT’S GOING ON. Applies to anything contentious. we should all make a point of pushing back against suppression from above, of individual voices IN CASE NEXT TIME IT’S OUR OWN VOICE BEING SILENCED.
ubercynic 