A group of 270 scientists and doctors are pressuring Spotify to crack down on content from Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the U.S. One of the group’s complaints? His interview with doctor and scientist, Dr. Robert Malone.
Rogan isn’t merely the most popular podcaster in the country — he is, by some metrics, the most popular figure across the entire media.
Announcer Joe Rogan reacts during UFC 249 at VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena on May 09, 2020 in Jacksonville, Florida. (Photo by Douglas P. DeFelice/Getty Images)
It was recently reported that Rogan gets an average of 11 million views per podcast episode. The podcast’s closest competitor is Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, which gets an average of 3.21 million views.
Like Rogan, Tucker Carlson is also frequently the target of censorship efforts, but these have not dented his dominating position in cable news.
The group of experts who wrote to Spotify asking them to censor their most valuable personality objected to Rogan’s interview with Dr. Robert Malone, a doctor and scientist who conducted some of the earliest research on mRNA technology, which is used in Pfizer and Moderna’s coronavirus vaccines.
Dr. Malone, who objects to the use of mRNA in COVID-19 vaccines, was permanently blacklisted from Twitter.
Malone’s interview with Rogan, which was released just a few days after his ban from Twitter, was one of the podcaster’s more viral episodes.
The doctor’s contention that western societies are suffering from “mass formation psychosis,” a kind of collective hysteria brought about by shared feelings of fear and manipulation from outside authorities, proved particularly viral, with clips of Malone’s discussion of the concept viewed millions of times on social media.
While the specific term “mass formation psychosis” has not been widely used until now, incidents of mass hysteria, such as the “dancing plagues” of medieval Europe, have been documented in history.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.