Tastes like horse paste. Joe Rogan has been a favorite target of media scorn for years, and for a simple reason: if he had to, he could produce his show in a garage with an 80-dollar mic and still have an audience of millions, which is honestly just annoying. He doesn’t need the resources of a multi-billion dollar media company. He doesn’t need the support of Brooklyn-based taste-making gatekeepers. He doesn’t even really need a studio. He’s just some guy, who sounds like ‘just some guy,’ with a beautiful family, more money than he could ever hope to spend, and the most popular podcast in history. The natural question is how do we destroy him? Fortunately, there’s a pandemic to exploit, half the country has discarded all notions of open discourse as a value, and Rogan made the mistake of noticing how wrong our public health “experts” have been about pretty much everything. He shared his perspective. He invited guests on his show to share their perspective. He neglected to kiss Fauci’s ring.

Not today, Satan.

The Rogan discourse has been heating up since this past summer’s drama over Ivermectin, a Nobel-prize winning antiparasitic in human use around the world with an unapproved and controversial use in Covid treatment, cynically reduced by propagandists in the press to “horse dewormer.” Rogan not only took the drug but publicly discussed it, and has been considered a danger to the nation since. Earlier this month, a few hundred random doctors, the majority of whom do not actually appear to be practicing, signed a letter demanding Rogan be deplatformed for his crimes against “the science,” as defined by opinions with which this select group of people agree. The letter made headline news around the world, and provoked 76-year-old ex-relevant musician Neil Young to issue Spotify an ultimatum. If the company refused to cancel the most popular podcast on the planet, Young would pull his music from the platform. Spotify declined to comply with Young’s demands, and the artist pulled the trigger. 78-year-old ex-relevant musician Joni Mitchell followed Young. 70-year-old ex-relevant musician Nils Hilmer Lofgren (I literally had to google this person) followed Mitchell. Hunter Walk, a tech person with a moderately popular Twitter presence, wrote a “yay censorship” blog post.