Did Douglas Murray’s arrow hit the bull’s-eye?
And more importantly, does it matter?
To anyone watching with growing alarm as Joe Rogan in recent weeks has platformed Darryl Cooper and Ian Carroll — both Carroll and Cooper have been accused of disseminating antisemitic ideas — as well as anti-vax flamethrowers like Suzanne Humphries, a sit-down with the British neoconservative thinker Murray last week was just the Robin Hood moment we needed.
After all, with his hosting of the unholy trio, the most popular podcaster in the world — some 15 million accounts follow The Joe Rogan Experience on Spotify while millions more consume its content elsewhere at least four times a week — has been on a tear of the kind never seen by an information megaplatform.
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Murray got in the chair and had none of it.
“I feel you’ve opened the door to quite a lot of people who now got a big platform, who have been throwing out counter-historical stuff of a very dangerous kind,” Murray said to Rogan and Dave Smith, the comedian-commentator who had been invited to the party too.
“These guys are not historians; they’re not knowledgeable about anything,” Murray said, alluding to Cooper and Carroll.
Rogan got mealymouthed. Hesaid he didn’t believe he was platforming dangerous figures. “I don’t think about it that way,” he told Murray. “I just think, ‘I’d like to talk to that person.'”Welcome to the new “just asking questions.” “Just talking to people.”
Ah, but what are those people saying?
Carroll spent stretches of his nearly three hours insinuating (and sometimes doing more than insinuating) ominous-sounding connections between Jeffrey Epstein, Israel, organizedcrime and “global Jewish billionaires,”egged on by a credulous and enthusiastic Rogan. Carroll straight-facedly dropped allegations that Epstein was sex-trafficking on behalf of the Israeli government while Rogan nodded thoughtfully, agreeing that it’s “the deep state of the intelligence agencies in Israel.”
“Jews are regular people just like everyone else,” is the kind of thing Carroll says, softening the audience so they barely clock what comes next, about the plans the “powerfulJewish people” are making.
A week later Darryl Cooper arrived to perform his act, which can be described as offering outrageous provocations he then half walks back so he can repeat them all again tomorrow.In September, Cooper had appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast to say that Churchill was the real villain in World War II and that Nazis didn’t want to kill Jews in concentration camps; Jews only “ended up dead” because Germany didn’t have the resources to take care of them. Two dozen Jewish congresspeoplecalled outCooper’s appearance and Carlson’s implicit endorsement. Cooper later said he was being “hyperbolic” about Churchill. Of course, by that point it didn’t matter.
On Rogan, Cooper went on a jag essentially about how he was not given free rein to empathize with Nazis and how antisemites were being unfairly banished from the public square.
“Antisemitism is a weird thing,” he said. “I think a lot of it also has to do with the fact that so many of these questions have really been made, you know, it’s not like they’re off limits like they’re illegal and you’re gonna go to jail if you talk about them;I’m still sitting here. I mean, I’m on your podcast and so that’s a big platform to talk about these things. It’s not like that. But the attempt is to makeit so that you can’t be in any kind of respectable society.Yeah, the attempt is to make you radioactive.”
Cooper went on to allude to “your paranoid Jewish friends who think that everybody’s antisemitic,”with a bizarre lack of self-awareness at how his own remarks might have just disproved the adjective. One hardly needs to have studied the lessons of World War II — and a good thing, as Cooper does not seem to have — to understand where both men’s demonization of Jews can lead.
If you thought Humphries came off any sounder, think again; her folksy country-doctor turn on Rogan did not make her scientifically disproven howlers any less howl-y. Among the claims the scientifically discredited Humphries made was that TB wasa “side effect of the smallpox vaccine,” the evidence-free assertion that the COVID vaccine contained snake poison and that polio was caused by DDT (she’s suggested that sanitation and not vaccination primarily stopped its spread).
Rogan was as welcomingly agreeable to her as he was to Cooper and Carroll, saying he now saw the truth about vaccines and cringed at his previous assumptions that vaccines “saved us from polio, it saved us from smallpox.”He called Humphries “a very brave and brilliant woman” and called COVID “this enormous gaslighting experience that we all just went through.”
As the BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh noted, Humphries “rolls out a series of false, repeatedly debunked claims about vaccines for polio, tetanus and other diseases being unsafe and harmful.”
The episodewas so filled with apparent falsehoods it even gota slapdown from Elon Musk, who posted in response that“vaccines, essentially training your immune system for battle, do work well for addressing many diseases.”
It was into this chasm that Murray tossed his grenade — this was all dangerous stuff.“There’s a point at which ‘I’m just raising questions’ isn’t valid anymore,” he told Rogan. “You’re not asking questions — you’re telling people something.”
And with the host’s fans it landed … nowhere. Reactions on YouTube, X and other forums were spiritedly pro-Rogan. Glenn Greenwald, perhaps the best cautionary tale for Rogan of a once-respected indie outsider, described Murray as “fall[ing] apart.” The troll-y Fox-owned sports site Outkick said Murray had been “humiliated” and acted “absurd.” Scores of posters — as of this writing it totaled some 110,000 — flowed onto YouTube, many to pile on Murray. No matter how trenchant his argument or needed his message, it seemed to move neither host nor follower.
Rogan’s new tilt is, if nothing else, a boon to listenership. The Carroll episode drew 3.5 million views on YouTube alone, one of the most popular episodes of the year. Conspiracy theories sell, and conspiracy theories from people who head-feint that they’re not conspiracy theorists sell even bigger. And if something goes viral, all the better; the content that the Murray episode spun off, in quarters ranging from Piers Morgan to The Hill — the debate ABOUT the debate — only further sends cash into Rogan’s pocket, ensuring more conspiracy theorists in the future. The only real fact to take away from these episodes is that sober truth-telling is bad for business.
What seems to be emerging here is nothing less than a new kind of mainstream infotainment, a genetically mutated Frost-Nixon, in which instead of public officials squirming in the chair at questions from well-informed journalists, one-eyed armchair provocateurs show up to peddle juicy stories that go encouraged by the dollar- (or chaos-) minded hosts who invite them there.
But what also is emerging is something more dangerous and specific to the man peddling it. With many of his episodes, Rogan reaches more people than all three network nightly news shows combined. Those networks have also reported on fringe conspiracists, of course. They just haven’t given them three-hour primetime specials.
Rogan isn’t just platforming hateful voices; that would be bad enough. His is an active way of denying basic truths about history and science through the clever curation of guests. Almost as important as who Rogan has had on is who he hasn’t had on. Carroll, Cooper and Humphries each got their limitless screen time, feature films of truthy-sounding “facts” to back up their agenda-driven action sequences. But there exists no sequel, no set of scenes to countermand them at the intellectual box office, leaving millions of people with the idea that reasonable people can believe that global Jewish billionaires run sex-trafficking rings with the help of the Israeli government; that Hitler had no interest in exterminating Jews; and that polio was and future epidemics could be eradicated by little more than a few extra paper towels.
An X uservoicedwhat at least some longtime listeners instinctively feel about a 15-year-old podcast whose past guests include the likes of Neil de Grasse Tyson and Bernie Sanders: “When Joe first began his show, he showed legitimate curiosity.Listening to people of all perspectives.I wonder what happened in recent years to cause him to have firmly entrenched beliefs.” Rogan’s conspiracy episodes are red-pill moments, all right, but not in the way he intends: Once you see what he’s peddling, you can’t unsee it.
In some ways, of course, we have been here before with Rogan. The podcaster had a friendly interview with infamous vaccine skeptic Robert Malone that was deemed littered with falsehoods, prompting Neil Young and Joni Mitchell to exit Spotify in response. But that was in 2022, when misinformation seemed to matter to platforms. Where we haven’t been before is here, in 2025, when Spotify wouldn’t even dream of censuring Rogan, lest it send the manosphere into an uproar over “free-speech suppression” that no one is trying to suppress.
Any hope that artists will save us should be quickly snuffed out too; even icons know their power barelymatters anymore in the shadow of Silicon Valley. As Young himself admitted when he returned to Spotify two years after Rogan’s Malone episode, the platforms are simply too big to fight.“Apple and Amazon have started serving the same disinformation podcast features I had opposed at Spotify. I cannot just leave Apple and Amazon … because my music would have very little streaming outlet to music lovers at all.”How can you run when you know?
On Friday, Donald Trump appeared to back Murray,promoting the author’s new book on Truth Socialat a moment when Murray was taking fire from many MAGA supporters over the Rogan appearance. But coming from a president who has playedcozy with electionconspiracy theoristsandantisemiticconspiracy theorists, appointed a vaccine skeptic to run Health and Human Services and a 9/11 conspiracy theoristas a close adviser, such a post hardly played as a noble stand for facts and research. More likely it was a clapback at Rogan for hiscriticism of Trump’s handling of Venezuelan deportations.
Trump’s ulterior motive won’t surprise anyone who’s followed him the past 10 years. But it does underscore how hard up the truth is for friends right now. An Oval Office boost for a man calling for basic sanity on the Holocaust is nice — until you realize the boost was happening because the occupant of the Oval Office wants to round up people and ship them out of the country.
Murray went on Sky News Australia on Tuesday to offer his recap of what happened with Rogan. “When you get pseudo-historians talking, for instance, on Winston Churchill claiming Adolf Hitler wasn’t openly antisemitic in the 1930s … you are in very dangerous territory if you leave such ideas out there and leave them unchallenged. I’m all for debate,” he added. “But what I see in certain realms of the right is not actually a debate.” Of course, that assumes anybody in those realms wants one.
The good news is that when people go off the deep end conspiracy-wise, they tend to see their influence drop too, and if you don’t believe that just ask Glenn Beck. The media has a self-regulating mechanism in place; the further flung the theories, the narrower the audience.
At least it had a self-regulating mechanism in place. We’ve never seen the quality of conspiracy-theory storytelling this high (Carroll and Cooper are, if nothing else, compelling speakers); these once-alternative platforms so large; and the susceptibility of people to disinformation so great. So has wrought two decades of active disinfo-peddling by online and cable news opportunists and (far less often) trust-eroding messups from legacy media outlets.
So it leaves us in this place, with a Joe Rogan who believes, or at least believes his audience believes, that Ian Carroll and Daryl Cooper are the proper voices to center, and a fact-oriented thinker like Douglas Murray little more than the foil and sporting fool.
Few signs of an easing await either — Rogan’s most prominent upcoming political guest appears to be Glenn Greenwald. Rogan is just talking to people. But given a personality who can reach nearly as big an audience as Walter Cronkite in his heyday, we should probably make sure we’re doing plenty of listening.
