this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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tl;dr
Joe Rogan hosted RFKjr on his show, vaccine researcher Peter Hotez replied to the post on Twitter with the old article titled "Spotify is no longer even trying to staunch the flow on Joe Rogans vaccine misinformation" while commenting that all Joe does is "spread nonsense".
This prompted Joe to offer Hotez a large sum of money donated to his charity of choice, as a reward for publicly debating RFKjr on Joe's show, with no time limit. Hotez said he would go on the show, but that a debate with RFKjr would not be productive.
A twitter argument followed involving Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, and RFKjr on the topic of whether Hotez has an obligation or not to accept the debate with RFKjr.
Why it's a story: Things came to a head with Hotez being harassed outside of his home by Rogan fans. The individuals demanding that Hotez debate RFKjr recorded Hotez entering his home as they attempted to persuade him. Here's a time stamped link to a news story that shows the video the harassment accused posted https://youtu.be/Okd-f-0yD58?t=18
Jesus christ what an utterly toxic community JRE is. I always knew it, what with the way the guy enthusiastically platforms the likes of Peterson, but still, yuck.
There's definitely a divide in his fans. There are the old Opie & Anthony people who mostly just listened for comedy. The pandemic changed a lot, Rogan started with his vaccine stuff and that attracted a lot of MAGA types.
Comedy in general has taken a right-wing shift. During the COVID lockdowns touring comedians could only perform in areas that didn't have extreme restrictions, now comedians like Bill Burr and Tom Segura are incredibly popular with conservatives. I saw Bill a couple of years ago and he was making jokes about about conservatives and a large section of the crowd was unironically agreeing with his dumb caricatures.
Being a scientist and being a debater are different skill sets. In science debate is done via peer review and papers and in the case of medicine by doing trials.
RJK and Rogan are fucking morons and the only way to debate them would be to continually call them evil stupid fucks because that's what they are. Anything else is going to allow them to edit your comments to make them look like to their stupid evil audience.