Tucker Carlson: You’re not allowed to use government power to shut down people who criticize you

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Tucker: Weak people call for censorship

‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ host discusses the ‘political pressure’ surrounding Joe Rogan, Spotify controversy.

Joe Rogan may be the most popular broadcaster in the English-speaking world right now. Every episode of his podcast "The Joe Rogan Experience" reaches about 11 million people, and some of the episodes get an audience many times that. How many people is that? It's a lot. 

For perspective, last night, CNN's highest-rated show had a little over 700,000 viewers total. So Joe Rogan is big, and unlike CNN, he's not especially political. His show covers pretty much everything: comedy, science, nutrition, the paranormal, recreational drug use, exercise, mixed martial arts, music, Hollywood and a huge range of other topics, often with guests you've never heard of. 

Rogan is not a reactionary, unlike most people in the media, he doesn't think he already knows everything. He's genuinely curious, and so he lets his guests speak. His longest interview lasted for more than five hours with a standup comedian. When Rogan does talk about politics, it's pretty clear he's not an ideologue. He interviews everybody. Liberals and conservatives, as well as a lot of people like Mike Tyson, who could be either one. And he does it most of the time with respect and self-deprecation. 

He's not an expert on politics. He's not pretending to be one. Rogan just asks questions, and he notes the obvious. It's this last quality that makes the people in charge hate and fear Joe Rogan. If you're trying to sell an absurd, obviously untrue idea, it is possible that Joe Rogan is going to call you on it. Not because he's a partisan, he's not. But because he just can't help but notice. That's his secret. A few months ago, Rogan watched the White House press secretary lie about the FDA's approval process for Pfizer's COVID vaccine. So he said something about it. Watch.  

ROGAN: Jen Psaki's talking about misinformation online and combating misinformation. She distributed misinformation, because she said that it's approved by the FDA and their gold standard. 

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Yeah. What he said was true. Rogan's pretty literal, actually. It's one of the reasons people trust him. And he was right in this case. Jen Psaki was lying to the country, and it wasn't even an especially clever lie. Anyone with internet access could have verified that what Jen Psaki said was a total crock, from the podium, too. But when Joe Rogan points this out, it really stings. A lot of the people listening to him believe him. And the White House took notice. So what happened next? Well, here's Jen Psaki from yesterday calling on Joe Rogan's employer to censor him. Watch. 

PSAKI: This disclaimer, it's a positive step, but we want every platform to continue doing more to call out misinformation and disinformation, while also uplifting accurate information. But ultimately, you know, our view is, it's a good step, it's a positive step, but there's more that can be done.  

White House press secretary Jen Psaki. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

There's more that can be done? Hey, you little fascist, that's a threat. That's exactly what it is. Politicians and their spokes chicks didn't use to talk this way. They were not allowed to talk this way because the First Amendment explicitly prohibits it. You're not allowed to use government power to shut down broadcasters who criticize you. Period. And now that's exactly what they're trying to do. 

So far, Joe Rogan's employer, Spotify, hasn't caved to the pressure. Rogan still has a job, but the company is bending. It's deleted more than 20,000 COVID-related podcast episodes made by other Spotify hosts. Spotify claims they "cause harm." How exactly can a podcast cause harm? Spotify didn't explain, because, of course, they couldn't explain. 

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Podcasts don't cause harm, weapons cause harm. Anyone who knows anything about American business right now understood what's actually going on. In a moment like this, it is virtually impossible to run a public company, no matter how hard you try. It's not just in podcasting, it's not just Spotify. It's any company with shareholders; from breakfast cereal manufacturers to tennis shoe retailers. The political pressure is coming at these companies from all sides; from activist investors, from the media, from their own employees. Every day is a brand-new crisis. Imagine the emails between the CEO and the PR department. They never stop. And under those circumstances, it's impossible to think clearly, to stand on principle, or even to consider your own best interests long-term. That's what's going on with Spotify. They probably don't want to censor anybody. They're being pushed to. In their case, pressure to censor Joe Rogan over his views is coming from other content providers on the site, and most of them are D-listers, you should know. 

The other day, that annoying fake duchess from L.A. and her brain-dead husband threatened to walk if Spotify refused to muzzle Joe Rogan. "Hundreds of millions of people are affected by the serious harms of rampant mis- and disinformation every day," they yelped through a publicist. But of course, they don't mean that, they're not going anywhere. These two grifters have a $25 million podcast deal with Spotify for essentially no work. So far, we believe they produced just over 30 minutes of content. That means these two have been paid about a million dollars for each minute of talking they've done. That's a good gig. It's too good to leave. But their performance does raise the question, what exactly about Joe Rogan's podcast has caused "serious harm?" We're literal, too. So we scoured his archives to find out. And it turns out, as usual, the opposite is true. Joe Rogan is actually a force for safety in this world. Watch this clip in which he warns the public about the dangers of approaching gorillas in the wild. It turns out, sneaking up on a gorilla, as Joe Rogan pointed out, could lead to actual serious harm.  

Spotify announced that it will begin to put a disclaimer at the beginning of Joe Rogan’s show when he discusses COVID. (Photo by: Vivian Zink/Syfy/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)

ROGAN: We're so soft, we think it's okay to look at a wild animal in its eyes, that's how stupid we are. "Hi, hey, we're cool, man, we're from National Geographic Society, we're just going to make sure your baby's okay." Crazy, 800-pound silverback is bursting through the trees. It's right in your face. He's got fangs and only eats vegetables. The fangs are only designed to f--- you up. And you couldn't even imagine what an 800-pound gorilla strength is like because you would think of it as like an 800-pound man, but it would really be more like a 3,000 pound man.  

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He's interested in animals, by the way, and he's curious, that's part of the allure. People in the media are paid to be curious, to ask questions, to wonder about other people. None of them do. They just want to lecture you. This guy actually is interested. But no one who is criticizing him seems to know that, doesn't seem like they have actually listened to his show. Neil Young probably never has. Neil Young is an elderly folk singer from the nation of Canada. Young is already pulled his music from Spotify in protest of Rogan's open-mindedness. Does Neil Young actually own his own music? We don't know. But we know that the gesture received widespread applause from the usual morons who then revealed themselves to be even dumber than you thought they were. Variety Magazine, for example, which still exists, informed us that Neil Young stands against Joe Rogan, makes him "a hero" to the younger generations. Right. Because if there's one person kids of today revere, worship like a god, it's 76-year-old Neil Young. They take Neil Young over Joe Rogan any day because young people everywhere are anxious to side with the Biden administration and demand the firing of any podcast or interviews Kamala Harris disagrees with. It's hilarious. They're more out-of-touch than Neil Young is. But at CNN, they've convinced themselves it's all totally true because Joe Rogan is peddling misinformation. Therefore, he must be stopped. 

BRIAN STELTER: You think about major newsrooms like CNN that have health departments and deaths and operations that work hard on verified information on COVID-19. And then you have talk show stars like Joe Rogan who just wing it, who make it up as they go along, and because figures like Rogan are trusted by people that don't trust real newsrooms, we have a tension, a problem that's much bigger than Spotify, much bigger than any single platform.  

People are trusting Joe Rogan over eunuchs — can you imagine? Damn the people. They should be watching CNN. CNN has departments and desks and entire operations designed to verify information and filter out misinformation. And that's why they described Ivermectin, which in Joe Rogan's case was prescribed by a human doctor as "horse de-wormer" and did on like nine different shows. And those same standards led them to suggest, famously, that a passenger jet must have been sucked into a black hole. 

Spotify faces recent backlash over Joe Rogan podcast. REUTERS

DON LEMON: What if it was hijacking or terrorism or mechanical failure or pilot error, but what if them was something fully that we don't really understand? A lot of people have been asking about that, about black holes and on and on and on. Also referencing "The Twilight Zone," which is a very similar plot. That's what people are saying. I know it's preposterous, but is it preposterous you think? 

We can't get enough. Yes, that clip was from eight years ago, but we watch it every single morning, along with our pilates and sauna just to get ready for the day. And if you want to watch a lot more like that, CNN has just announced you can subscribe to CNN+, and Don Lemon will be on there constantly, for a small extra fee. So that's their answer to Joe Rogan: more nonsense but the lowest-rated dummies in the entire TV business. Joe Rogan, meanwhile, consistently turns out interesting, informative programing just by being curious, just by asking obvious questions. That's all it takes. Care about what other people are saying. Watch the world around you. Take an interest in something beyond yourself. And when he does that, they don't like it. Watch this exchange with Dr. Robert Malone, who is one of the inventors of mRNA technology.

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DR. MALONE: The how question of a third of the population basically being hypnotized, and totally wrapped up in whatever Tony Fauci and the mainstream media feeds them, whatever CNN tells them is true. The answer is mass formation psychosis. When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don't make sense. We can't understand it. And then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis. They literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere. 

That was the interview that pushed CNN completely over the edge, not because it was false, but because it was entirely credible. "Hypnotizing the public?" "That's our job", they said. "Mass formation psychosis?" "Yeah, that's us." So of course, they immediately set about encouraging the tech platforms to ban that interview. Dr. Malone, again, one of the inventors of mRNA technology, being used in over a billion doses of vaccine, currently in people's bodies, that's the man who was talking. Credible? Yeah, no one more credible than that. And that's exactly why they hated it. That's exactly what they said you couldn't hear it. Now that same month, it was justthis  past December, Rogan spoke to a doctor called Peter McCullough about Ivermectin. Watch 

MCCULLOUGH: Sanjay Gupta and the CNN correspondent, there was no fair balance there. He parodied a talking point that our head of the National Allergy and Immunology branch parodied. They said that there was no data for Ivermectin. They said it was a horse de-wormer. Now, either they knew or they should have known the 63 supportive studies and the over 30 randomized trials. 

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So those are facts. And if you think they're wrong, tell us how they're wrong. But why shouldn't people hear that? Why shouldn't they be allowed to? Well, because Dr. Peter McCullough, who certainly has the credentials to do it, criticize the people in charge. He mocks CNN for ignoring dozens of clinical trials, making fun of a drug that could have helped a lot of people, possibly saved lives. What do you think of that? Well, that's immoral, of course. 

But notice what Joe Rogan didn't do in the face of that information. He didn't call for CNN to be censored because they spread disinformation. He didn't say we have to pull CNN off the air, they're killing people. Because he's not for censorship. You know who is for censorship? Weak people are for censorship. I can't handle what you're throwing at me — shut up or else. That's exactly what they're saying. Strong people don't behave that way. Only the weak. Everybody knows that. They can smell it. And the reason Joe Rogan is successful? Because he's not weak. That's the truth.  

This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the February 2, 2022, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."