Joe Rogan Threatens to Sue CNN Over Ivermectin Lie

CLAY: One of the guys that I think is helping to bring more people to the sane side of the political aisle is Joe Rogan. We talked about last week, Buck, the fact that there were so many people out there, as soon as Joe Rogan tested positive for covid… We’ve gotten into this era now — and I think you agree with me, Buck — where people want for people like you and me, Joe Rogan, whoever it might be… People who have been saying, “Hey, we gotta get on with our lives,” if we get covid, it’s like, hey, they want us to die from it, right?

BUCK: Yes! They do!

CLAY: To try to prove how wrong we were to say we could have normal lives.

BUCK: They say this online. We can see comments. We’re not surmising. We’re not theorizing they want us to die. People said horrible things in the beginning about what they wanted to happen to older family members of mine to me because I was an advocate for not locking down and doing things that now we all know did nothing, but they will never accept that.

CLAY: But you got covid, I got covid, and people would have been very happy — a lot, especially on the left — if we could have died and they could have put a picture of us up in the hospital like, “Oh, look at this guy! He’s on ventilator and he said that we had to live normal lives!” Yeah, I still think that. Even if I were to get covid and die, I would still be of the opinion that we have to live normal lives.

Just as if I were to die in a car accident tomorrow, I wouldn’t say, “Man, I should have never gotten behind the wheel.” No, you have to live. Life requires a certain measure of risk. We’ve got the biggest radio show in the country. Joe Rogan has got, right now I think, by most measures, the largest podcast audience in the country.

And he went on talking about the coverage that CNN put out about him and questioning whether or not he should sue CNN. And I think this is a big deal, Buck, ’cause it cuts through. We always talk about, “How do we reach that persuadable 20%, right?” the people who might be reasonable. They’re not gonna far left-wingers. How do we reach them? I think a guy like Joe Rogan has the opportunity to reach a lot of people.

BUCK: I don’t think he’s gonna be able to do very much if he were to sue CNN. Also, I don’t think he’s going to sue CNN. Right?

CLAY: But it’s an interesting part of the discussion.

BUCK: I guess. First of all, CNN, even with its low ratings… Unfortunately, I know a little bit about this. I actually have some friends who are secret conservatives as producers over at CNN, so I have pretty good sources over there.

CLAY: Oh, that’s a treat.

BUCK: Yeah, and CNN makes so much money on digital and CNN International that they could run — and also they get a premium from advertisers ’cause CNN is considered a gold standard brand.

CLAY: Of course they do.

BUCK: So even though their numbers are less, you’ll see a lot of Mercedes commercials, et cetera, on CNN’s airwaves, where you won’t see that with anything that’s even remotely aligned with conservative media, at least not the same way. So look, I think that Rogan’s… This moment just goes to show you that even somebody who is generally… First of all, he’s also a Hollywood and sports crossover.

He exists in these different worlds where he has substantial following. But this issue is so important to leftist orthodoxy that they will like a pack — I guess a school — of piranhas, go after Joe Rogan when the guy is sick. A normal, emotionally healthy and stable American adult, sees there’s a fellow human being, never mind a fellow American celebrity podcaster is after I can and wishes them well right away. But that’s not what you get on this because your point they want to make an example out of him, and it was on the ivermectin thing in particular —

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: — why does this send them into such a frenzy, and they say — by the way, this is why I got so upset about the Jimmy Kimmel joke, just because I think that’s it’s really unfair. By the way, I said before millions of people’s lives have been saved. It might be more like hundreds of thousands, but it’s hundreds of thousands of people who have been saved from river blindness, among other things, from actually going blind, since ivermectin came on the scene.

And to downplay not only that as an important medical achievement but then also to be just constantly slamming people. Clay, where’s the humility on the left from any of this? I read the headline. Fauci is a moron who’s wrong all the time, but people still think if they cling to Fauci like a little intellectual safety blanket they’re being wise and they’re the good people. This is guy is wrong all the time. How is it possible to have been wrong so often, as the lockdowners have, and not at least have a moment of, ‘You know what? Maybe we should at least be willing to engage the other side.” They don’t want to engage. They want to dictate.

CLAY: Yeah. That’s where I think the Joe Rogan impact could be significant in terms of opening up the eyes to some people who are persuadable, and in particular the ivermectin which you were prescribed as we talked about earlier when you had covid and which Joe Rogan was prescribed. And they made it sound like Rogan had gone to like a vet clinic — at CNN they did, and MSNBC as well as — and stolen, like, horse deworming pills.

BUCK: Can I just say also when I prescribed it by a doctor here in New York, I wasn’t told… He didn’t say, “Take the ivermectin. It’s a miracle cure, it’s a silver bullet, you’ll be better in an hour. ” He said, “Look, if you want to, there’s been some studies.” He actually has read the scientific studies, the real the scientific studies. “There have been some in the lab studies of this done that it actually seems to show some effect against the virus replicating itself.” But he basically said it to me as if, “You can take it. It may not do anything, but it’s really not gonna hurt you.”

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: “So it’s your call.”

CLAY: It’s a drug cocktail, basically.

BUCK: “So it’s your call.” So it was like he was giving me something where he said, “If you want to, or you can just sit there and suffer and hope it goes away,” which is what I ended doing, right? I took the ivermectin. It took me about a week to get better. But, Clay, they’re not even honest about how when it is prescribed the people the circumstances under which it’s done. They were trying to spend for a while… What was the name? I’m forgetting. It’s not Regeneron. What was the drug?

CLAY: Hydroxychloroquine?

BUCK: No, no, no, no. There’s that. But remember there was the thing that… It was very expensive.

CLAY: The monoclonal whatever?

BUCK: Not the antibodies, monoclonal antibodies. There was a treatment that you could only get in the hospital in the early days. I’m forgetting what it was. (interruption) What was it called? (interruption) Remdesivir! Thank you, team here. Remdesivir. We were giving people that. Remdesivir ended up, at best they think, maybe it limited people’s hospital stays like a day or two. But we were trying stuff —

CLAY: Which is what since is about!

BUCK: — because we don’t know, and the application of ivermectin from MDs to people isn’t, “Oh, hey, guys, I read on the inner webs there’s a secret cure for covid.” It’s, “This is safe, it’s well tolerated. It’s early. It’s worth a shot if you want. It won’t hurt you.” It’s as safe as taking something like a Tylenol or whatever, and people act like, to your point, well, we’re going in and stealing horse injectables or something and stabbing ourselves in the aorta with it. They’re just out of their minds.

CLAY: Yeah, right. Here’s Joe Rogan talking about the inaccuracies in the way his covid treatments were covered. Play cut 3.

TOM SEGURA: (music) Well, well, well.

ROGAN: Well, well, well.

TOM SEGURA: If it isn’t old horse worm Rogan!

ROGAN: (laughter)

TOM SEGURA: I’m glad you’re… I’m glad you’re well, man.

ROGAN: Do I have to sue CNN? They’re making s(bleeped)t up. They keep saying I’m taking horse dewormer! I literally got it from a doctor. It’s an American company.

TOM SEGURA: Mmm-hmm.

ROGAN: They won the Nobel prize in 2015 for use in human beings, and CNN is saying I’m taking horse dewormer. They must know that’s a lie!

BUCK: That’s the point, Clay. They must know it’s a lie.

CLAY: Yes. Yes.

BUCK: And they must know that this is — and that’s why, again, I get so mad about the Kimmel thing because he gives additional oxygen by making jokes about the horse dewormer. It’s not a horse dewormer primarily. It’s for human beings and it saved a lot of lives.

CLAY: Yeah. And look, I think what this is a function of, I think a lot of people just take headlines and presume that they’re true. We saw this with the ivermectin story in Rolling Stone, which was 100% false, but spread like wildfire throughout the internet. And if your team is sharing a story, the presumption is, “Oh, that story must be true,” and there’s very little behind-the-scenes research or analysis that goes into, “Is the underlying story true?” A lot of this stuff can turn into complete lies. Look at Joe Biden said he based his entire campaign on the fact that Donald Trump called the two sides at the rally in Charlottesville good people.

BUCK: If you read the transcript, Clay, it’s 100% a lie. It also feels like a lot of this stuff, it’s just malignant. I mean, there’s a malice, and now we could actually use some of what the terminology would be if you were gonna bring a defamation lawsuit, right? There has to be malice as well as it being untrue statements — you know, intentionally untrue. But I think that what you have is the people that are in charge of our covid policy, after all, at some level know — I mean Biden but also your medical establishment, not your MD in your neighborhood but the people who run the CDC, the medical bureaucracies at the federal government level, Clay, they’ve failed us.

CLAY: They know it. And they know it.

BUCK: They have failed over and over, and they know it, and there’s a lot of anger and anxiety, and there’s a lot of I think mass mental illness and neurosis that have come from this. And instead of the medical establishment — and, again, I mean by that the CDC and everything; so not any MD who happens to be listening to this, but the medical establishment that’s pushed all this government control being honest with us, which would involve accountability for them for being wrong? Clay, I think they just channel all that rage, all that bile as a preferred political target, which is the unvaxxed Trump-supporting only of course —

CLAY: Even though they’re the largest group of unvaxxed people in America are black and would be supporting Joe Biden like in terms of looking at, you know, the socioeconomics and look at their racial groups.

BUCK: For Fauci and the rest of them, it’s either go along with the CNN narrative that the bad guys are you and me and anybody out there who stands in question of — never mind even just against — this stuff, or admit, “What the heck have we been doing here this whole time? How have we made this better than it would otherwise be?”

CLAY: We’ve done zero. We’ve destroyed our economy. We’ve undercut and destabilized massive amounts of American institutions. And in the end, we would have been far better off — I really do believe this — if we had done nothing at all. We would have a herd immunity by now, and kids would have never been out of school as long. People would have not have lost their jobs. It’s chaos.