There’s been a lot of controversy surrounding Joe Rogan but he has a supporter in Brazilian President Jair M. Bolsonaro.
The Joe Rogan Experience is a polarizing podcast. The endeavor has been quite lucrative for Rogan, earning him a $100 million deal with audio streaming platform Spotify. The service reached over 406 million monthly users at the end of 2021 and many credit a good chunk of that to Rogan.
With that said, not everyone is loving the UFC color commentator at the moment. First, a medical coalition sent an open letter to Spotify urging the platform to mitigate Rogan’s “misinformation” on COVID-19 and vaccines.
Then, musicians such as Neil Young pulled their songs from Spotify in response to the platform’s lack of action.
Rogan has a lot of detractors at the moment but many have been showing their support. One of the supporters is Brazilian President Jair M. Bolsonaro.
https://twitter.com/jairbolsonaro/status/1489036177189572609?s=21
“I’m not sure what Joe Rogan thinks about me or about my government, but it doesn’t matter. If freedom of speech means anything, it means that people should be free to say what they think, no matter if they agree or disagree with us. Stand your ground! Hugs from Brazil.”
Rogan has also been under fire after a video surfaced of him saying the n-word multiple times on his podcast. Grammy Award-winning R&B singer India Arie is the one who brought the video to life and announced she has also pulled her music from Spotify.
Joe Rogan issued a statement after the clip surfaced and apologized.
“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. I haven’t said it in years,” Rogan said. “But for a long time when I would bring that word up, like if it would come up in 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. Like that context was (in) part of the clip we were talking about was Redd Foxx, how Redd Foxx said that word on television in the 1970s and how times have changed so much since then; or about how Richard Pryor used it in the title of one of his albums; or how I was quoting a Lenny Bruce bit; or I was quoting a Paul Mooney bit; or I was talking about how Quentin Tarantino used it repeatedly in ‘Pulp Fiction’; or I was talking about how a Netflix executive ironically used it because he was trying to compare it to another offensive word, he said it out loud, and they fired him – not calling anybody a word, just saying the word out loud.”
Those who side with Rogan believe people have been trying to cancel him for years. The supporters feel that his past use of the n-word is being spun into something it isn’t and insist Rogan doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.