Joe Rogan Flap Proves That If There Is Dis- and Misinformation, There Must Be A Ministry Of Truth
And they're not happy with you
Let's today emphasize the rather obvious point that if there is such a thing as official disinformation and misinformation, then there must a Ministry of Truth to define "the truth", such that departures from "the truth" are officially error, falsehood, disinformation or misinformation.
There does not have to be an actual minister in a fixed office, though that helps. But there still must exist a list of "truths" held by a government or regime, and known to be held by them. The list is allowed to be in flux: what was officially "false" yesterday can be officially "true" today, and vice versa.
The information insisted upon by the regime must be of a special nature, too. It is only that information that the regime uses to justify policies, especially "solutions", that becomes official "truth".
For instance, there are a large number of people who believe the earth is flat. I don't mean the comedians at the Flat Earth Society, but internet randos who are sincere in thinking the earth is a disc, and who are convinced the government knows this and is hiding it for some reason.
There are podcasts, websites, and social media posts galore on this topic. Yet the government and the oligarchs never move to quash this movement. There are no denouncements or speeches about mis- or disinformation. The flat earthers are allowed their strange belief---and nobody in power cares.
Because, of course, there is no consequence to elites if some believe the earth is flat. No government or oligarchic "solution" is opposed. There is no political friction. Even regime scientists ignore the topic.
What topics don't they ignore? Again, just those that might lead the people to question "solutions." "Solutions" for the global cooling, a.k.a. global warming, a.k.a. climate change, "solutions" for Russia, "solutions" for the coronadoom.
Take coronadoom. The regime truth ministers, typified in the form of a died-hair red head, demanded Spotify censor Joe Rogan, who had on at least two people who questioned various aspects of the coronadoom panic. These questions walked into "solutions" territory, and therefore the questions became official mis- and disinformation.
Older readers will recall when science progressed by open argument over facts and which evidence counted in discovering the cause of things. Mistakes, errors, misdirections, blind alleys, stupidities, stubbornness and other maladies of thought were corrected, to varying degrees of success, by bloody acrimonious desperate-at-times nasty loud public fights.
It was rare for those gripping mistakes to let go of them. Instead, new converts were won because they believed mistakes had been sufficiently well demonstrated. This is key. If we do not allow for the creation of dissidents, science dies. You may, even must, substitute any field of intellectual endeavor for science into this sentence, of course.
That was before our somewhat fluid, and to a large extent global, Ministry of Truth existed. Science now flows from regime "solutions". A "solution" to some perceived, real or imagined, crisis is proposed. Evidence backing both the "solution" and the crisis itself is provided by scientists eager to become important. I don't mean to suggest all these scientists are whores, though there are plenty. Many are true believers. As I say often: scientists love their models. Again, substitute for scientists the relevant professional in any other intellectual endeavor.
Regime-supporting scientists become Experts. Their regime-supporting theories become, officially, "The Science", which is "settled", and of which only "deniers" question.
When any man's questioning voice on "The Science" becomes loud enough for others to hear, he must be silenced. Even a man who is, on most other things, a regime supporter. Like Joe Rogan.
The excuse censors use is that Rogan's questions, which are now officially dis- and misinformation, cause harm, or cost lives. This, as you will recognize, is a circular argument from the regime, a fallacy.
Rogan and his guests question the "solutions" and claim non-regime-supported methods will lead to superior life-saving results. The regime disagrees and says methods that are not "solutions" must be wrong because they are not official "solutions." They are not "The Science." The circle is complete.
Spotify sort of supported Rogan, not having much choice with all the money they have invested in him. But they also---and many still do not know this---censored him.
There is a site that tracks the episodes Spotify already removed. As of this writing (Saturday evening), 113 episodes have been whacked. This is up from 70 on Friday evening. Among them with guests Alex Jones, Owen Benjamin, Gad Saad, Milo Yiannopoulos. It will be interesting if they quietly drop the Robert Malone, Robert Epstein and Peter McCullough episodes.
The "controversy" over Rogan accounts for the frenzy of soulless pitiless merciless bottom-feeders and spiritual vampires who rushed to their computers to condemn Rogan's official misinformation. These are propagandists and simps too ignorant to judge the evidence itself, but know they must, for their own benefit, loudly support the regime.
You mustn't think this only applies to the coronadoom. Rogan has strayed into global warming territory, too, which accounts for this telling headline: "Scientists stunned by climate denialism from Joe Rogan podcast guest".
Now if the scientists said they were "stunned", and this was not an invention of the propagandist, we know we are likely dealing with whores and not true believers. Because it is impossible to be a working scientist at this late date and not understand there are a vast number of dissenters to official "The Science".
Still other scientists, propagandists claim, say Rogan allowing global warming questioning is "'absurd' and 'dangerous'".
The "absurd" might not have been a slur, it could have represented the old spirit of open questioning. But it was ruined by the "dangerous." That means the regime-backing scientists cared nothing about causes of global warming, and only wanted to support "solutions."
For how else can it be dangerous to hold a different view of the cause of some thing?
Anyway, as far as Rogan himself goes, he might have weathered his dissent on coronadoom "solutions", but his apologizing for saying "nigger" could be his undoing. (He should have said he was quoting rap lyrics. People remembering his use of the magic word accounts for the 70 to 113 increase in episode bans, I'm guessing.)
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Not to spam your comments, but one more thing. I do not find the proliferation of conspiracy theories to be random. I see it as a symptom of a system corrupted by lies and manipulation. It seems people have this intuitive sense when they are being lied to. Unfortunately, its often hard to prove the lies, so they are commonly just left with this feeling of distrust and a vague sense something is off or untrue about the official narratives. Unfortunately, suspecting a narrative is false is not particularly helpful, because the best lies are mostly true, and good luck finding the error in sophisticated claims that are outside of your direct experience. How in the world do I know what is actually happening in China, for instance? I don't. I have no ability to detect the lie in anything China might say on the basis of possessing direct knowledge of the truth. Instead, I am merely able to detect patterns attendant to lies and deception. But suspecting a narrative is false does not mean the prevailing counter narrative is truth, and so often the absolute most you can conclude from a false narrative is that the false narrative is not what is happening. But being able to exclude one narrative does not necessarily help you find the true one. With only one narrative excluded, the truth could possibly be anything else. Literally anything else is possible, and the problem is compounded by not knowing who you can trust to give you a greater perspective, especially in a time of deceit, lies, and information control.
That is the problem with authoritarian lies of the type where only the regime knows the whole truth. It forces the general public to speculate, with the only effective limit on each person's speculation being the neurotic makeup of the speculator, their creativity and power of their imagination, their intellect, and the breadth of their perspective. Thus, people will tell these elaborate stories based on their extremely limited observations and understanding of the world, and so crazy theories begin to proliferate. But truth slowly emerges the more such stories are shared and aggregated, through a process that somewhat resembles regression analysis. That is why free speech is so vital to the truth, and why censorship is equally vital to the liar.
So it appears to me the manipulative, lying mouthpieces in the media and government create the conditions under which conspiracy theories flourish, and then they gaslight and undermine the crazy conspiracy theorists they helped to create, which is demonic to its core.
Thank you for this insightful piece, particularly the connection between the list of truths and government solutions.
Not sure what to do with this thought, and it is currently in the category of ideas that I call "this is possibly true but needs more research" but the flat earth phenomenon has been bugging me for a few months. Not enough to do anything about, but just something causing dissonance, inviting me to explore further. Something about seems off, and I am not talking about the theory itself (although it appears to follow a pattern common to conspiracy theories). Instead, there is something inorganic about the whole movement. Something fake. Like a con-job. Something as insincere and inauthentic as so many galvanizing culture-war front line moments, like the BLM riots or Rittenhouse or the Ivermectin story or Rogan. All of those moments felt contrived and orchestrated, where a grand narrative was pushed based on only a handful of real facts and a bunch of made up ones. As if each of these contrived issues needed to come with the standard Hollywood disclaimer "based on a true story" or, as the movie American Hustle disclaimed, "Some of this actually happened."
Anyway, I've seen some legitimate news articles recently about several "scientists" or experts in Britain confessing the government waged a psych-ops fear campaign on its citizens. I saw one for another government too, maybe Canada. I can't remember. And then a few weeks ago I was deeply troubled by the final section of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s "Fauci" book where he discussed CIA and other similar government propaganda campaigns. Even if only 1/10 of the picture he was painting is true, the implications are truly disturbing. And the problem is that the theory that someone (or several someones - either in concert or separately using similar tactics, methods, and means) are orchestrating disinformation / propaganda campaigns is a hypothesis that is both (a) possibly true and (b) has considerable explanatory power. To put it differently, I can't prove it false yet. More importantly, it is a theory based on demonstrably real and true facts.
So it occurred to me that an authoritarian agenda needs some way to control independent thinkers - people like Joe Rogan. And since overtly authoritarian control is not currently possible in the west (such as governments exercising complete control and censoring all communication mediums, including podcasts, the internet, email traffic), the next best thing is to undermine independent thinkers as a whole, especially the group that is reflexively contrarian and counter-cultural. And where do such types tend to congregate? Youtube, podcasts, and Reddit type environments. So all you have to do is sow sophisticated conspiracy theories that are based on hard to detect falsehoods and subtle fallacies. This isn't hard to do for skilled manipulators, as any magician knows how foolproof misdirection is.
Once I read Kennedy's book, the question just naturally appeared: what if the flat-earth phenomenon is intentional - a way to marginalize the contrarians and independent thinkers. A way to create a clearly false, loony category that all questioners and independent thinkers can be cast into, thus automatically discrediting them. Have you not noticed how anyone who questions the obviously manipulated covid mainstream narratives gets quickly marginalized as a flat-earther and conspiracy theorist? You think that is just a coincidence?
Based on cursory research yesterday, some tinfoil hat websites claim the flat-earth conspiracy has its origins with Eric Dubay's 2014 flat-earth book and documentary. Since then, flat-earth theory has exploded on the internet under what is described as a sustained disinformation campaign using trademark mind control tactics. Eric Dubay has also apparently been outed as a CIA operative. I haven't gotten to the bottom of these claims nor examined the source evidence, but either this is a nice case of confirmation bias, or there is indeed something to explore further. I'm betting on the latter, as there seems to be patterns to many cultural phenomenon that make the most sense if something like this is afoot - things like Qanon and pizzagate.