Joe Rogan and Tim Dillon Are Too Dumb to Fact Check
When anti-trans propaganda is entertainment the facts don’t matter.
by Evan Urquhart
Joe Rogan talks about trans people, and trans kids, a lot. Once, the podcaster agreed with Matt Walsh that being transgender is a mental illness. Another time he and Jordan Peterson reportedly agreed that the acceptance of transgender people is a sign of societal collapse, according to the LGBTQ+ news site Them. Rogan most recently discussed trans people with conservative-leaning gay comedian Tim Dillon last Friday, expressing concern that children might be exposed to the concept of trans people existing in school, according to an article regurgitating things a podcaster said last week on Fox News. This news story relaying what was said on a podcast was then republished by the New York Post.
screenshot from Fox News
Joe Rogan says a lot of things. He’s falsely claimed that “left-wing people” started forest fires in Oregon. He’s said the COVID vaccines are really gene therapy, which is nonsense talk. He has made antisemitic remarks. The guy has no commitment to saying things that are true, perhaps no awareness of truth as something different from the things randomly popping into his head, and a podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience, that releases multiple episodes a week, often coming in at over 3 or 4 hours long. In fact, while we wrote above that he “most recently” discussed trans people on his podcast last Thursday, August 10, the next day he put out a nearly two-hour episode with a guy called Mike “Python Cowboy” Kimmel, and it’s entirely possible he and Python Cowboy talked about trans people too.
We are definitely, definitely not going to listen to two hours of Joe Rogan to check.
Joe Rogan has been fact checked repeatedly and found to have spread false or misleading claims. And, we believe in fact checks here, we really do. Rogan complained that not enough cultural attention is being paid to detransitioners. The New York Times found that fewer than 10 detransition activists have traveled from state to state as part of a successful effort to ban gender-affirming care for youth, resulting in successful bans in 19 states that go against the recommendations of every mainstream medical organization in the country.
He agreed with Dillon that it’s not right to introduce “the concept of gender theory to children.” Gender theory is a fuzzy concept with no fixed meaning, but bans on discussions of gender and sexuality in Florida schools have resulted in a mandate to misgender transgender teachers and force them to use restrooms according to their birth sex. Because “gender theory” and “gender ideology” have no real meaning in practice it’s the existence and acknowledgement of trans people that is being forced out of public schools.
Joe Rogan also referenced books with “illustrations of oral sex” and books written about “lust and wanting someone” as being inappropriate, and pornographic, for students. This seems to be a reference to Gender Queer, a memoir written in a graphic novel format which includes a cartoon depiction of oral sex and has been banned from many high school libraries. It is not pornography in any commonly understood sense.
Facts are good, we all like facts, but fact-checking the comments Joe Rogan pulls out of his ass feels like a fools’ errand. He is not discussing the issue of what sort of sex education and identity exploration is appropriate for school children at which ages, he’s not sharing his opinions or educating his listeners on the facts, he’s using transphobia to entertain. The comedian he discussed this with is doing the same. Tim Dillon once tweeted, in response to the controversy over Dylan Mulvaney’s partnership with Bud Light, that trans women dominate every sport. This is so obviously, transparently untrue that it strains credulity to pretend it was ever trying to be true.
screenshot from Twitter.com
Facts alone can’t combat misinformation, because outrageous lies often spread further than their fact checks, because partisans are skeptical of fact checks that don’t validate their biases, and because some research has shown fact checks can do more harm than good for people in the grips of conspiratorial thinking. Still, in a news context, it’s simply the case that having well-sourced information available is important for, like, basic reality testing and understanding the world in which you live.
Misinfotainment, which is what Rogan peddles, is different. He isn’t skewing the facts to influence people’s opinions, like Fox News, he’s skewing his opinions to cater to tickle the fancies of his fans. His fans find dumb-guy-transphobia entertaining, so he performs it. If he decided he wasn’t going to perform it for them, they’d go find someone who did. How else do you think a self-proclaimed libertarian become the voice of screeching moral panic over pornography in public schools?
Rogan has been a force for radicalization, the first step for many a dunderheaded dude to become a radicalized, dangerous dunderheaded dude. He’s dangerous, no doubt. But the point of intervention can’t be a fact check of some stupid shit on the Joe Rogan Experience that he or one of his guests pulled out of their ass. The point of intervention has to be somewhere earlier, or something deeper. Instead of persuading people that Gender Queer is a memoir, we need to persuade them not treat taking other people’s rights as a goofy macho game. Instead of fact-checking Rogan we have to start persuading people that knowledge is useful, facts have value, and truth is a noble thing to pursue. Until we can manage to do that, the fact checks themselves will be as fluffy as the content they’ve checked.