The effort to take down podcast king Joe Rogan is increasingly being seen as a coordinated campaign to silence an influential figure with a massive audience and an independent streak.
That campaign seemingly started in mid-January, when a group of scientific experts sent a letter to Spotify accusing Rogan of spreading misinformation on his podcast episodes about COVID-19. It escalated this week with the emergence on social media of a video splicing together racist language Rogan had used in the past, drawing fierce reactions from both Rogan’s defenders and detractors.
Social media users and political figures, including GOP pollster Frank Luntz, raised the prospect this week of a connection between the latest broadside against Rogan and a left-wing political action committee known for its social media sensationalism.
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MeidasTouch, a Democratic super PAC that sprang up to oppose former President Donald Trump, has denied involvement with the distribution of a montage showing, without context, Rogan using the N-word.
But its close relationship with a Twitter account that first amplified the Rogan montage has raised doubts that Rogan’s troubles sprang up organically.
A Twitter account called PatriotTakes landed at the center of questions about who is targeting Rogan when it shared clips of the podcaster, in keeping with the account’s practice of sharing clips and posts from right-wing platforms and conservative media.
A profile on PatriotTakes in the Atlantic, written in August of last year, noted that the operator of the Twitter account had “insisted on anonymity” during an interview and described themselves to the magazine only as a “concerned citizen.”
PatriotTakes filed forms as a political action committee with the Federal Election Commission last year and reported having raised roughly $52,000 by June 2021, according to its filings.
On its Twitter profile, PatriotTakes claims to be “partnered with” MeidasTouch — an arrangement that MeidasTouch announced from its own Twitter account in April of last year.
PatriotTakes provided the same address as MeidasTouch did in its FEC forms — an address in Macomb, Michigan.
The scrutiny of PatriotTakes and its connections to MeidasTouch caught the eye of another high-profile media iconoclast: Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy.
Portnoy requested to appear on MeidasTouch’s podcast this week, and he demanded answers about whether the PAC was behind the spread of the Rogan clip.
MeidasTouch was founded by Ben, Brett, and Jordan Meiselas, three brothers who have raised millions for their group off Democratic causes.
During their interview with Portnoy, the Meiselas brothers denied that PatriotTakes had created the video, instead attributing the original source of the video to Alex Jones.
“The video that was cut up that went around about Rogan that’s gone viral was actually created by Alex Jones,” Brett Meiselas said during the interview with Portnoy. “So Alex Jones and Joe Rogan had a feud with each other — and this video he had put on InfoWars.”
The brothers argued that PatriotTakes had simply continued its practice of surfacing clips from conservative sources and had amplified the Rogan clip because the podcaster was already making headlines due to the scientific experts’ open letter to Spotify.
The timing of the two coordinated efforts to erode support for Rogan, both the letter and the video clip, has continued to fuel theories about whether they were the result of a politically motivated campaign.
The letter and the clip emerged within several weeks of each other, and both prompted statements from Spotify and outcry from celebrities.
Spotify responded to scrutiny of Rogan’s COVID-19-related episodes by agreeing to place a content advisory on all podcasts that discuss the pandemic, and it responded to Rogan’s past racist language by condemning his use of the slur but declining to pull Rogan from the platform.
The origin of the original letter to Spotify, which began the firestorm over the enormously popular podcast, has received less scrutiny than the dust-up over Rogan’s racially charged episodes.
The push for doctors and scientists to sign on to a letter criticizing some of Rogan’s COVID-19 conversations appears to have originated not from the medical community but from a liberal TikTok personality who comments extensively on internet misinformation.
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Rolling Stone reported in its Jan. 12 article breaking the news of the open letter that Abbie Richards, who researches misinformation, “gave [Stanford University postdoctoral fellow Ben] Rein the idea of penning an open letter to Spotify.”
Richards has continued to focus on Rogan on social media and in commentary since the letter.
