Joe Rogan on Pepe the Frog Meme Outrage

Hello freak bitches. I talk about this in much detail because it's really complicated but the anti-left spectrum, let's say, is very confused and it could easily tilt very rapidly into the hard right anti-left, which is the danger that you are describing. And partly what I'm hoping is that I can talk to people who might conceivably be on that developmental pathway because they're tired of being accused of implicit racism, let's say, and say, look, you can be anti-radical left without falling all the way into the far right and here's how you might do it, but that means I have to talk to them and then if I talk to them that means I risk association with them and that risks being tainted. It's a very tricky line to walk. It's also one of the big problems with this hard stance of the left, of the hard left, like this Pepe the Frog thing. One of the things that I tweeted was some guy that called me, you just admitted you're a Nazi because I posted a meme that someone had created of me as Pepe the Frog and apparently this Pepe the Frog of everybody. And so this guy was like, well, you just admitted you're a Nazi. And I'm like, see, this is a part of the problem and this creates a massive blowback. People are getting angry because that frog for the most part is used humorously. Yeah, actually you used the phrase defensive humor when you were talking. And it really is. And I think, I mean, this is, I didn't mean to interrupt you, Joe, but there's something about the idea that the effectiveness of this meme is that it tangles people with no sense of humor in knots. And that's a huge part of why those things are generated. That's why they like it. That's exactly right. They love it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm fearing that I'm saying something about this frog and that there's going to be something that's going to emerge that I should know about that somehow I'm admitting something. But all I'm saying is what I see is a lot of people using it to taunt people who can't figure out. Yes. I think that's the vast majority of it. I do believe that. And I think the same thing about the Kekistani types is that that's almost all humor. Yeah. And there's a massive problem with pushing back against that and calling those people Nazis and racists, especially when they're just using humor, and especially when it's very clear if you look at all the memes online, and I went thoroughly through Google to find them, there are some abhorrent ones. There are some horrible ones. There are some ones that are with the Nazi uniforms. There's some anti-Jew ones. There's some horrific ones. Most of them are not that. Most of them. The vast majority of them are humorous. And again, these people are not coordinating. So if one person decides to make a Mickey Mouse racist meme, which by the way, a lot of the early Mickey Mouse cartoons, you could just take a screenshot, and they're fucking tremendously racist, because dealing with the sign of the times. I mean, images of black people that were extremely cartoonish, giant lips, black faces, the whole deal, horribly racist, you could say Mickey Mouse is fucking racist. Don't go to Disneyland. No one's saying that, right? But they could. And this is the slippery slope. You start with the frog, you know? And, you know, first they came for Pepe, and I didn't say anything. Yeah, well, if the frog is racist, you start wondering what isn't racist. Exactly. Because it's a bloody cartoon frog. Well, you can make a cartoon about everything that has ever existed and make that racist. It doesn't mean that the frog is racist. This is where it's crazy. It's like, what percentage of people are making the frog racist? And then for the Southern Poverty Law Center to say that this is a symbol of hate now, this frog, well, guess what? You just back these fucking people up against the wall, and you shored their offenses, because now they're realizing, oh, well, these people are mad. They're crazy, not just mad like angry, but mad, like insane. Like, you're not looking at this thing rationally at all. You're saying that a frog, where 99 percent of the memes are just humorous or silly, now the frog is a hate symbol. Not only a hate symbol, but Nazi, white supremacist. I mean, they're just drawing up all of the space between their preposterous perspective and the nightmare at the other end of the spectrum. And the point is, almost all of us live in that intermediate space. Almost all thoughts live in that intermediate space. There's a variability of all thoughts. There's flexibility of all ideas. And when you're talking about something that's extremely humorous, you're talking about a humorous frog. I mean, goddamn, to call that all hate when sometimes it's hate. And by who? By whoever the fucking people are that did that hateful thing, those are the people that are hateful, not the other ones that are using that frog for humor. I mean, the fact that this is an argument at all just shows how lost we are in these ideological arguments, this left versus right extreme end of the spectrum on one end of the field, throwing rocks at the far end of the field. Most of us are in the middle somewhere. It's hopeless if we cannot have discussions about a frog. About a frog. About a cartoon frog. A cartoon frog! I mean, Jesus Christ, it's so weird. Well, that's a nice conclusion. Yeah, it might be. It might be.