I wrote yesterday about the Joe Rogan problem our elite faces today, where even such leading intellectual lights as Prince Harry and Meghan Markle must take up the solemn duty of condemning their Spotify colleague who actually does the work his contract demands. Of course, the company’s decision to essentially add a “dangerous, do not ingest” warning to Rogan’s interviews is just a prelude to more crackdowns, as Zaid Jilani recognizes:
As Jilani notes, there has been a demonstrable increase in the number of leftists who favor censorship by any entity necessary — including private corporations — all in the cause of shutting down speech that they find irritating or inconvenient to the narrative they favor:
Young’s transformation from countercultural champion of freedom of speech to corporate censorship advocate and defender of the public-health bureaucracy didn’t occur in a vacuum. Progressives have become increasingly censorious over the past few years. A majority of Democrats now believe that both private tech companies and the U.S. government should “take steps to restrict false info online.”
This is the “reality based community” coming home to roost: where once the counterculture spoke of dying to defend the right to disagree, now they will bring down the entire house of individual liberty to shut you up. But what is a leftist to do when someone like Rogan can’t be shut up? When his work — bizarrely coming in the form of interviews so long they outpace Doctor Zhivago — is so defiantly popular that it attracts the eyes and ears of a nation hungry for more information?
Continue reading at The Federalist