Joe Rogan Up Against ‘Powerful Interests,’ as More Musicians Threaten to Remove Music From Spotify
By Megan Redshaw | The Defender | Februry 1, 2022
Joe Rogan in an Instagram video Monday addressed the growing controversy surrounding his podcast — “The Joe Rogan Experience” — telling fans he’s not interested in talking to people who have only one perspective. He also said he has a problem with the term “misinformation.”
Rogan’s statement came as the streaming platform Spotify on Sunday announced new rules designed to “combat” the spread of COVID “misinformation” on its platform.
The new rules came after a handful of musicians, including Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen’s guitarist Nils Lofgren and Joni Mitchell, pulled their music catalogs from Spotify, in an effort to force Spotify to choose between their music or Rogan’s podcast. Author Brené Brown also joined the protest, stating she won’t release new episodes of her Spotify-exclusive podcasts “until further notice.”
Spotify last week agreed to remove Young’s music.
“We have detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to covid-19 since the start of the pandemic,” a Spotify spokesperson told The Washington Post in a statement. “We regret Neil’s decision to remove his music from Spotify, but hope to welcome him back soon.”
Saagar Enjeti, Washington correspondent at The Hill, said there could be more going on behind the scenes. Investment firms who own the music catalogs — and who also have ties to pharmaceutical companies — may be calling the shots.
“The people speaking out may be doing so organically, but it also happens to coincide with the financial or oligarchic interests of some very, very rich people,” Enjeti said in a “Breaking Points” episode that took a “deep dive into the hedge funds behind the campaign by Neil Young and others to cancel Rogan and boost other music services such as Amazon music.”
Rogan, Spotify’s star podcaster, signed a $100 million deal in 2020, giving the streaming service exclusive rights to his show. The podcast, available only on Spotify, reached No. 1 globally last year, the company said last month.
What used to be misinformation, now accepted as fact
According to Rogan’s 10-minute video, his podcast was accused of “spreading dangerous misinformation,” citing specifically his interviews with Dr. Peter McCullough and one with Dr. Robert Malone.”
Rogan said:
“Dr. Peter McCullough is a cardiologist and he’s the most published physician in his field in history. Dr. Robert Malone owns nine patents on the creation of mRNA vaccine technology and is at least partly responsible for the creation of the technology that led to mRNA vaccines.
“Both these people are very highly credentialed, very intelligent, very accomplished people and they have an opinion that’s different than the mainstream narrative. I wanted to hear what their opinion is.
“I had them on and because of that those episodes, in particular, those episodes were labeled as being dangerous, they had dangerous misinformation in them.”
Rogan said the issue he has with the term “misinformation” is that “many of the things we thought of as misinformation just a short while ago are now accepted as fact.”
Rogan explained:
“For instance, eight months ago if you said if you get vaccinated you can still catch COVID and you can still spread COVID, you would be removed from social media. They would ban you from certain platforms. Now that’s accepted as fact.
“If you said, I don’t think cloth masks work, you would be banned on social media. Now that’s openly, repeatedly stated on CNN.
“If you said, I think it’s possible that COVID-19 came from a lab, you would be banned from many social media platforms. Now, that’s on the cover as Newsweek.”
Rogan said all of those theories that “at one point in time” were banned, were openly discussed by McCullough and Malone who were accused of spreading dangerous misinformation.
Rogan said he wanted to make the video because he feels “people have a distorted perception” of what he does.
“I’m not trying to promote misinformation,” Rogan said. “I’m not trying to be controversial. I’ve never tried to do anything with this podcast other than just talk to people and have interesting conversations.”
Are Amazon and Hedge Funds trying to cancel Rogan?
In a video posted Jan. 31 on YouTube, Enjeti said there is more than meets the eye when it comes to musicians like Young pulling their catalogs from Spotify.
“The original impetus for Neil Young’s demand was a letter he posted on social media saying Spotify could either have Neil Young or Joe Rogan, but that letter was almost immediately deleted after it was posted,” Enjeti said.
“Who is demanding this? Enjeti asked. “Is it Neil Young or is it the people who own his music?”
Enjeti explained:
“You see a recent trend in the music business it that iconic artists such a Neil Young sell their catalogs to big-money groups who then reap the profits in perpetuity. Young actually sold his catalog in Jan. 2021 to a company called Hipgnosis. Now Hipgnosis is a $1 billion company that recently announced an ownership agreement with Blackstone.”
Enjeti said Blackstone is focused on taking over single-family housing and turning America into a nation of renters, but it also has interests everywhere.
“Blackstone, BlackRock and these big private equity giants are ruthless in their pursuit of profits and they’re savvy political players who know how to play the game,” Enjeti said. “They have all sorts of ties to the pharmaceutical industry, including announcing the former CEO and chairman of Pfizer would be joining Blackstone as a senior advisor.”
“Do you really think it’s a coincidence that days after Neil Young’s music was pulled off of Spotify he debuts a 4-month free trial to any person who wants to sign up for Amazon music — who has struggled to gain market share and has long-standing connections with all of the big money people in the game?” Enjeti asked.
“Open your eyes to see possibilities you may not have imagined,” Enjeti said. “At first it was simple, just Neil Young taking a stand.”
Now a lot of people with big money and a big agenda who would just so happen to profit if Rogan went down are speaking out, Enjeti added. “Joni Mitchell has come out and said she is going to stand in solidarity with Neil Young.”
Mitchell on Sept. 13, 2021, struck a publishing deal with Reservoir Media, Inc. (RMI). The top 10 owners of RMI are large private equity and investment firms.
Lofgren, who on Jan. 30 announced he was joining fellow musicians Mitchell and Young in their Spotify boycott, also does not own his music catalog.
Lofgren’s catalog was purchased on Dec. 16, 2021, by Sony Entertainment. The top 10 owners of Sony Group Corp. are large investment firms.
Enjeti said:
“You give into the mob, you give them an inch, they will keep coming. Will Spotify really be able to withstand up to the pressure? Who knows? Principles are not going to save you in this instance. Only money will.”
Enjeti said people better hold on to their seats and “hope that Joe prevails on this one,” as he is up against more powerful interests than many realize.
New Spotify rules don’t define ‘misinformation’
As part of its new rules, Spotify said it would add a content advisory to any podcast episode discussing COVID amid accusations it was allowing misinformation to spread on its platform.
The advisory will direct listeners to a “dedicated COVID-19 Hub,” which is described as a “resource that provides easy access to data-driven facts, up-to-date information as shared by scientists, physicians, academics and public health authorities around the world, as well as links to trusted sources.”
Spotify said this is the first content advisory of its kind and will roll out in the next few days.
The streaming giant also announced it will begin testing ways to highlight its platform rules to raise awareness around “what’s acceptable” and to help creators understand their accountability for the content they post on the platform.
The statement did not say who determines what is and is not misinformation and what is considered a “trusted source.”
Rogan said he supports Spotify putting a disclaimer on controversial podcasts about COVID and encouraging listeners to speak to their physicians.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
Somali court: Money confiscated from UAE plane in 2018 will not be returned
MEMO | January 31, 2022
A Somali court yesterday ruled that millions of dollars confiscated from an Emirati civilian plane in 2018 will not be returned, local media outlets reported.
According to reports, the Banadir Regional Court instructed the Central Bank not to release $9.6 million found in three unmarked bags aboard a Royal Jet plane that arrived at Mogadishu airport in April 2018.
The extent of the court’s jurisdiction on the government’s pledge to return the money is not clear and there has been no official comment from authorities.
The court’s decision coincides with the visit of the Somali caretaker Prime Minister, Mohamed Hussein Roble, to the UAE where he will hold talks with Emirati officials on bilateral relations.
It is unclear whether the money was intended for the military or to buy political leverage. Somalia’s relations with the UAE have been unsettled since June 2017 when the Emirates – along with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain – launched a blockage on Qatar. Somalia was pressured to support one of two camps.
Somalia, initially supported Qatar, but officially decided to ally with the UAE and Saudi Arabia in September last year after extensive lobbying by Abu Dhabi.
But last month, Somalia rejected a UAE port deal with Ethiopia and the self-declared state of Somaliland, claiming that it undermines its unity, sovereignty and constitution. Saudi Arabia offered to mediate between Somalia and the UAE but no diplomatic moves were made.
Rocketing Energy Prices Were Part Of The Plan All The Time
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | January 29, 2022
https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/sixth-carbon-budget/
The above excerpt comes from the CCC’s Sixth Carbon Budget. It shows conclusively that high energy prices have always been the official policy, in order that expensive renewables are made viable.
EU carbon prices have already risen from 32 to 80 euro/tonne in the last year, and the new UK ETS system tracks EU prices, with prices now at £75/tonne.
As it turns out global price rises for natural gas have brought the CCC’s dream to fruition a decade early.
Bougiecrats are headed for a fall-of-communism-style collapse
Sensing defeat they are lashing out in all sorts of weird ways
By Toby Rogers | January 30, 2022
Background and context
As far back as 2001, Democratic stalwarts John Judis and Ruy Teixeira began making the case, to anyone who would listen, that demographic trends in the U.S. (e.g. immigration and higher birthrates in the Latino population) would lead to a semi-permanent Democratic majority in government. Their book, The Emerging Democratic Majority created a cottage industry of pollsters and political scientists who showed, with fancy charts and graphs, how Democrats, particularly Progressive Democrats, were about to be in the catbird seat of American politics.
Democrats came to see this as their due — they had higher levels of educational attainment and they had been at the forefront of the movements for racial equality, women’s rights, LGBT rights, and environmental protection — and now the arc of history was bending towards justice and they were going to collect their reward. Electing Obama showed that America had turned the page and the 2016 Presidential election was going to cement their place in history as the new hegemonic majority.
And then the wheels came off the bus.
Hillary Clinton was a uniquely flawed candidate with a spectacularly flawed team (made up entirely of loyalists, not critical thinkers) and she lost to a guy who had never held elected office before. Fainting in public at a ceremony commemorating the 9/11 attacks (and following a pneumococcal vaccine) raised doubts about her fitness for office (regarding both her health and veracity) and probably cost her the election.
By the 2020 election, in the midst of a pandemic, Democrats came together with a singular goal — remove Orange Man Bad from office. They settled on a lowest-common-denominator, Weekend-At-Bernie’s-style candidate. If elected, Biden would function as a papal placeholder while the actual power brokers run the day-to-day operations at the White House. Dems barely captured the Presidency but exit polls revealed that their hoped-for demographic waves had evaporated. Latinos abandoned the Democratic Party in large numbers. Democrats still held on to the most highly educated voters but the rest of the electorate is now up for grabs.
So Democrats were already on edge and then the pandemic got worse under Biden after 500 million coronavirus shots were injected into Americans in 2021. Roe will be significantly rolled back by summer, Dems are going to lose the House & Senate in November, and Biden appears to be a one-term president if he can even make it that long.
But the scale of the collapse ahead is so much bigger than losing any one particular election. The coronavirus pandemic was a test, and the entire Democratic theory of the state has failed. The collapse ahead is more like the fall of the Soviet Union. Democrats are not conscious of what is happening yet but on some subconscious level they can feel the political earthquake, and they are lashing out.
The last few weeks have been ugly and it’s about to get a whole lot worse.
Dems are holding miserable cards and everyone knows it
Sitting at the poker table here are the cards in the Democratic hand:
Their most beloved public servant, Tony Fauci, funded the creation of a chimera virus that killed 5 million people.
After 10 billion doses, coronavirus vaccines are a complete failure as daily new cases have reached a record high.
The entire theory of the case about their most sacred product, vaccines, is now in tatters.
All federal regulatory agencies (set up by the progressive movement over the last century) — FDA, CDC, NIH — have made the pandemic worse.
Empathy — the foundational emotional impulse of the party — is gone. Blue check bougiecrats now resemble something out of Lord of the Flies as they gleefully block access to safe & effective medicines and taunt their victims.
The entire notion of the regulatory state is now discredited as all federal and most state regulators are captured by industry.
Nearly all bourgeois institutions (media, academia, science and medicine) have failed.
The entire notion of “meritocracy” is gone (our leaders are not the best, nor the brightest, but certainly the most corrupt).
Elite universities have been exposed as Potemkin Villages as they are unable to do even the most basic risk/benefit calculations and are completely unwilling to protect students in their care from the predatory cartel.
What remains
The Democratic worldview lies in shambles. The tribe that remains has abandoned all principles and only believes in holding on to power. The Democratic platform now consists of:
🚩 Censorship
🚩 Cancel culture
🚩 Tribalism
🚩 Jim Crow
🚩 Apartheid
🚩 Show-me-your-papers
🚩 Indefinite extrajudicial detention
🚩 State ownership of your body
🚩 Fascism
🚩 Corporate junk science and
🚩 As many useless toxic vaccines in as many bodies as possible, damn the results.
Self-inflicted harm
I’m struck by the fact that the defining characteristic of this crisis is self-inflicted harm. It’s the greatest show of pointless masochism in human history.
Democrats poison themselves and rush out to poison their kids on the first day that they are deemed “eligible” by the state.
Intellectual heroes of the left — Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Žižek — have thrown all of their ideals out the window and now go around mumbling about how they want more fascism.
Over the past week, “reporters” at the Washington Post seem to be engaged in a debase-a-thon to see who can humiliate themselves the most in defending the cartel.
In just the past few days, a handful of washed up former rock stars have cancelled themselves in a sort of ritual human sacrifice to honor their corporate overlords.
And now the rest of the tribe (*ahem* Brené Brown) are jumping into the volcano to prove that they will remain faithful to the discredited ideology to the end.
Here’s our hand:
The #1 cable news show in the country (Tucker Carlson) is with us.
The #1 podcast in the country (Joe Rogan) is with us.
The #1 book in the country (RFK Jr., The Real Anthony Fauci) is with us.
The best rapper in the country (Jimmy Levy) is with us.
The best athletes in the world (Novak Djokovic, Aaron Rogers, and Kyrie Irving) are with us.
We just had an incredibly successful March on Washington that showed that our numbers have increased by at least 10x over the last year.
Our independent media channels on Substack, Telegram, Rumble, Odysee, Bitchute, and Gettr, are thriving. Each episode of The Highwire now gets several times more viewers than any show on CNN or MSNBC.
Almost everything we have said about the pandemic has proved to be true:
◾️ SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab;
◾️ lockdowns cause more harms than benefits;
◾️ vaccines cause more harms than benefits;
◾️ existing off-the-shelf treatments are the best way to end the pandemic.
Our movement is the embodiment of “clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.” Our weapons are logic, reason, and common sense. We follow the scientific evidence, not any one particular leader.
And now, we have a model for how to overthrow these corrupt governments — trucker convoys.
But even more than that, our theory of the case has won in a landslide. To wit:
✅ the best check against corruption is to protect the sacred rights of individuals;
✅ the regulatory state is captured and too many “experts” work for the cartel; and
✅ the best way to solve problems is to leave them up to millions of individual citizens using their best judgement rather than centralized, corrupt, statist control.
It’s all over but the shouting.
GOP Doctors Caucus ‘infuriated’ with Fauci, White House
RT | January 29, 2022
Murphy, a practicing surgeon, says the GOP Doctors Caucus is “infuriated” with the White House and its chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, for promoting Covid-19 vaccinations too heavily while ignoring potential therapeutic treatments.
“I’m a vice chair of the GOP Doctors Caucus. We are infuriated – infuriated – that this has all been about vaccination. Fauci has been, ‘Vaccination, vaccination, vaccination,’ rather than therapeutics,” Murphy told Breitbart News on Friday, adding that he believes there is no way for the US to “vaccinate our way” out of the pandemic.
“There should be something that we should be able to write and prescribe that’s not $800 a pill for people who test positive to try to get them better, not only keep them out of the hospital, but get them better, get them back to work, and let society function, I think this is a major problem,” Murphy said. He suggested drugs like ivermectin – most famously taken by podcaster Joe Rogan when he tested positive for Covid – should be studied to find alternate treatments to Covid to avoid continuous vaccines and subsequent booster shots.
Public trust in health officials has deteriorated during the pandemic, Murphy went on to say, and he puts the majority of the blame on Fauci’s “arrogance.”
“Fauci, I’m going to blame [him] as the biggest reason, his arrogance, [that] the trust of the American people in health care, and in doctors, in particular, has plummeted,” the North Carolina Republican said.
The GOP Doctors Caucus is made up of 18 congressional members who are also medical providers, and focuses on policy related to healthcare.
While Fauci has remained popular among Democrats, his approval ratings have plummeted among Independents and Republicans as the infectious diseases expert has become a target of critics of vaccine mandates and pandemic-era lockdown orders.
The GOP Doctors Caucus even previously requested an apology from Fauci for referring to Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) as a “moron” in a hot mic moment following a back and forth about the doctor’s financial disclosures.
Fauci argued at the time that all of the information the senator was requesting was publicly available. The White House medical adviser has maintained that vaccines are the best way to combat Covid-19 and to prevent mutations.
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From the Archives
The Geopolitics behind the War in Yemen (I)
By Mahdi Darius NAZEMROAYA | Strategic Culture Foundation | 30.03.2015
The United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia became very uneasy when the Yemenese or Yemenite movement of the Houthi or Ansarallah (meaning the supporters of God in Arabic) gained control of Yemen’s capital, Sanaa/Sana, in September 2014. The US-supported Yemenite President Abd-Rabbuh Manṣour Al-Hadi was humiliatingly forced to share power with the Houthis and the coalition of northern Yemenese tribes that had helped them enter Sana. Al-Hadi declared that negotiations for a Yemeni national unity government would take place and his allies the US and Saudi Arabia tried to use a new national dialogue and mediated talks to co-opt and pacify the Houthis.
The truth has been turned on its head about the war in Yemen. The war and ousting of President Abd-Rabbuh Manṣour Al-Hadi in Yemen are not the results of «Houthi coup» in Yemen. It is the opposite. Al-Hadi was ousted, because with Saudi and US support he tried to backtrack on the power sharing agreements he had made and return Yemen to authoritarian rule. The ousting of President Al-Hadi by the Houthis and their political allies was an unexpected reaction to the takeover Al-Hadi was planning with Washington and the House of Saudi. … continue
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