Rumble Offers Joe Rogan $100 Million Four-Year Deal with Commitment to 'No Censorship'

Video-hosting platform Rumble is offering famed podcaster Joe Rogan a $100 million deal to leave Spotify and appear exclusively on the upstart YouTube competitor. The offer arrives amid Rogan facing calls from the cancel culture mob to remove him from Spotify over alleged misinformation regarding the Chinese coronavirus, and more recently, his past usage of the N-word during podcast episodes.

“We stand with you, your guests, and your legion of fans in desire for real conversation. So we’d like to offer you 100 million reasons to make the world a better place,” Rumble said in a statement on Monday.

“How about you bring all your shows to Rumble, both old and new, with no censorship, for 100 million bucks over four years?” the video-sharing platform added in its statement. “This is our chance to save the world. And yes, this is totally legit.”

Spotify already has a $100 million exclusive deal with the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. The deal, however, includes the censorship of certain episodes of Rogan’s podcast.

Rogan has been under attack ever since hosting two guests — Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone — on his podcast, who “have an opinion that’s different from the mainstream narrative” regarding coronavirus-related issues, he said.

In reaction to Rogan hosting guests with different opinions on coronavirus topics, left-wing rocker Neil Young gave Spotify an ultimatum, demanding that the streaming giant remove his music from the platform if it refuses to blacklist Rogan’s podcast.

When Spotify reacted by announcing it would pull Young’s music from the platform, the rocker called on other musicians to join him in removing their music as well, in an apparent attempt to further pressure Spotify to cave to his demands.

From there, Young was able to get a small cohort of aging rockers to join him in his anti-Spotify crusade, with musicians David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Nils Lofgren, and Joni Mitchell making similar announcements shortly after.

But when that didn’t appear to be picking up any further steam, singer India Arie — who is perhaps best known for coming out against Rogan — shared a video compilation of Rogan using the N-word, sans context.

Now, the focus of the cancel culture mob has shifted to attacking Rogan for his previous usage of the racial slur publicly on his podcast over the years.

On Friday, Rogan responded to the controversy, explaining, “It’s a video that’s made of clips taken out of context of me of 12 years of conversations on my podcast, and it’s all smushed together, and it looks fucking horrible, even to me.”

“I know that to most people, there’s no context where a white person is ever allowed to say that word, never mind publicly, on a podcast, and I agree with that now,” he added.

Rogan went on to explain:

I haven’t said it in years, but for a long time, when I would bring that word up — like if it were to come up in a conversation — instead of saying “the N-word,” I would just say the word. I thought as long as it was in context, people would understand what I was doing.

It’s not my word to use. I’m well aware of that now, but for years I used it in that manner. I never used it to be racist, because I’m not racist — but whenever you’re in a situation where you have to say, “I’m not racist,” you fucked up. And I clearly have fucked up.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, however, said he will not remove Rogan from his platform, despite the resurfaced videos of him using the N-word.

Ek explained that while he “strongly” condemns Rogan’s “incredibly hurtful” language, he does not want to take a ride down the “slippery slope” of canceling voices.

At the time of publication, Rogan has not yet responded to Rumble’s offer of $100 million for four years of his podcast on its platform with a  commitment to zero censorship.

Rumble competitor Odysee did reply to the offer, making its own mocking offer to Rogan of “100 gazillion bucks.”

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.