Spotify removes Gavin McInnes, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Alex Jones episodes from Joe Rogan podcast

[Miles Archer]

We have some extremely unfortunate news for people who like to get their profoundly misguided views directly from the sources: Spotify appears to have woken up from its bender, rubbed its bleary eyes, taken one look at the back catalogue of episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience, and said, “Wait a minute—that’s what we bought? Hoo boy, time to lay off the mezcal.”

Just a few months after the audio streaming service paid a reported $100 million for the exclusive rights to Rogan’s wildly popular podcast, the archived contents of the show have officially migrated to Spotify, and as EW reports, fans immediately noticed some glaring omissions in the historical record. Specifically, Rogan’s interviews with alt-right goons like Gavin McInnes, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Alex Jones have been scrubbed from the list of episodes available, though perhaps the last of those was simply due to Jones’ voice being indistinguishable from a bag of gravel being dragged across a copy of The Bell Curve.

The Joe Rogan Experience, for those unfamiliar, is sort of like the GOOP of podcasts, in that it has a habit of giving voice—and thereby tacitly granting the veneer of respectability—to snake-oil salesman and con men, though in this case the snake oil being sold is the sort of juvenile “how come there’s no white pride month?” intellectualism that comes from seventh graders who spent a little too much time with their racist grandparent. Rogan had previously said his entire back catalogue would remain available, though he may have simply failed to read some fine print which (we’re just speculating here) said that Spotify would ban the same personalities that have been banned from every other remotely credible social-media site for promoting racial hatred and conspiracy garbage.

To be fair, it’s possible there’s another reason for the missing episodes. After all, it seems unlikely that Rogan’s interviews with Nick Kroll and Tommy Chong—both of which have also disappeared—were pulled for promoting hatred, unless we’ve really been misreading Big Mouth and jokes about weed all this time. But those are outliers in what seems like a pretty straightforward scrubbing of racism and fraud from the archives. There’s certainly an argument to be made that by pulling these episodes, Spotify is whitewashing Rogan’s own history, a way of removing the guilt-by-association tag from the shiny new jewel in their podcasting empire; but then we remembered that McInnes mostly just promotes violence against people he doesn’t like with all the subtle wit of Jeff Dunham after being heavily sedated, and figured, hey, one less sentient confederate monument to have to pull down, right?

https://news.avclub.com/joe-rogans-podcast-migrates-to-spotify-with-episodes-fe-1844928123

[hlthe2b]

1. I know he's a "comedian," but is he a RWer/Trumpist/alt-Right type?

I see his name all the time, but I've never paid attention to him.

[Miles Archer]

2. I haven't either, but I believe your take is accurate.

...and from other bits I've read about his "humor," the AV Club assessment is accurate as well.

[dustyscamp]

3. He's a dudebro Libertarian who lets RWers walk all over him

[RockRaven]

4. He's more of a contrarian dumbass who let's shitty people on his show and Gish gallop on him

He's big into bitching and moaning about censorship and political correctness and the like, but he's seems to be less of a bigot himself as he is very tolerant of bigots spewing their crap and then playing the victim when they suffer the consequences of being a bigot in public. I think he pays major lip service to libertarian type political views. He's also big into lots of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, it seems.

But I don't listen to his show either. I've just seen a handful of more notorious clips from his show.

[winstars]

5. He's currently moving to Texas from California for "more freedom"... Nuff said!!!!

ASSHOLE!!!

[Hassin Bin Sober]

7. That's a pretty good description.

From what I can tell, he’s pretty liberal himself but he’s one of those “both sides” people.

I’ve only listened to a handful of his shows when he has people like Brian Greene and Richard Dawkins on.

He also has some goofy woo woo beliefs

But he’s been pro gay marriage long before some of our “allies”

[Oneironaut]

9. This is a perfect description of Joe Rogan's show.

His core audience is a mixture of alt-righters, extreme Libertarians, misogynist dudebros, incels, and woo-cultists. Basically, most of his audience also liked Jordan Peterson.

[Azathoth]

6. He's a respectful interviewer

He's somewhat anti-woke, but he's not right wing. His views and IQ change somewhat depending on his guest. Left to his own devices, he's happy to talk about MMA, natural supplements/drugs, and whatever weird fact/conspiracy he happened to see on Youtube the previous night.

Most of the hate for him comes from the fact that he interviews an extremely broad range of guests and doesn't deplatform or ambush people his critics don't like.

[BannonsLiver]

8. Says a lot about what a low life Rogan is.