This Must Be the Year Leftist Authoritarianism Loses Big

CLAY: Late last night — for some of you who may have missed this — Spotify’s CEO came out and basically wrote a long-form piece where he essentially said, “Hey, we’re gonna contribute $100 million more towards different” I guess less distributed potentially “minority programming.” But I was having a conversation — like I bet a lot of you were as well — about cancel culture in the wake of Whoopi Goldberg and sort of the chaos of the past week and everybody coming for Joe Rogan.

The Rock, who a lot of you know — Dwayne Johnson — initially comes out and says that he’s supportive of Rogan and then he changes his mind and then people start going through all of the Rock’s comments over the years and pointing out that he said a lot of “questionable” — and I’m using my quotation mark fingers there — things over the years in WWE and online. A lot of clips.

Buck, I know you saw this. Howard Stern — who now is in the good graces of the woke community — wore blackface and used really kind of unbelievable language in multiple skits. Those video feeds were circulating on Twitter. So, I had this conversation with my wife, and I bet a lot of people out there did as well. Spotify is interesting. Are you a subscriber to Spotify, Buck? Do you pay for a subscription on Spotify right now?

BUCK: I do.

CLAY: Okay. So, they have like 100 million people out there who subscribe to Spotify. My wife —

BUCK: I greatly prefer the iHeart app, however.

CLAY: (laughs) My wife will look a lot of times — because she does training and everything else — to see what songs are trending. And she pointed out that while people are supposedly outraged by Joe Rogan, well over half of the top artists on any given day use the N-word in their songs or their rap music or whatever else with virtually no discussion of it at all, and even if you want to take a step back and say, “Okay, let’s avoid the use of the N-word,” the lyrics of many rap songs are wildly misogynistic.

What was so fascinating was, the left, if you remember, Buck… Remember the 2 Live Crew battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court over what was and was not considered to be explicit lyrics? Even back in the day, if you remember, NWA and their song Cop Killer and what was permissible and what was not. And if you remember, creative artists at that time stood up for other creative people and said, “Music shouldn’t be censored.”

Now you have those same artists coming out against Joe Rogan and saying not only should this guy be censored, many of them are saying that his product itself shouldn’t even be distributed! I just think it’s an interesting window into the transition in the creative space over what is considered to be acceptable and even what creative people are willing to say that now they are the censorious forces in our culture.

BUCK: Yeah, ’cause I don’t believe, Clay, that these were ever rooted in any of these individuals in actual principle. I think that they were, one, benefiting from it at the time — and, two, they were trying to tear down a power structure that they then seek to supplant with their own. You look at leftists… By the way, we’re talking in some places about people — whether it’s Joni Mitchell or Howard Stern — who became incredibly wealthy by attacking the establishment.

Under the idea that it was about free speech and freedom, who are now the same people — I’m not even just saying the same political party, the same people — who are advocates of that censorship. So I think that there was a falseness to it. It’s a little bit like somebody who advocates for democracy — One vote, one person, one time, right? Once they’re in power, all of a sudden the rules all change.

I think you’re seeing that with the way that a lot of people who, as I said, became very rich and very influential have now decided that it wasn’t really about freedom. It was about the freedom that they want and now denying freedom to other people in what they’re able say and just to on the usage of “the word” that we’re all not allowed to say — or, rather, some people are not allowed to say.

This is a little bit like the way that you have to mask up on planes or else. You can’t say this word in any context if you are outside of the black community or else you risk the destruction of your career, being kicked out of public life and everyone saying you’re horrible and a racist. When I say, “In any context,” as you have and I have talked about, a court stenographer reading back people will get upset at someone?

You are to replace the word you’re not allowed to say. I disagree in principle that there can be words that some people are allowed to say in any context always and however they want, and other people — if they even say the word, not in a context as a pejorative or to attack somebody — if they merely quote someone, their life should be destroyed. This is about power, friends. This is about who has it and who doesn’t.

But you cannot believe in the First Amendment and free speech as a principle and think that there can be words that people are banned from using in any context entirely on pain of, you know, destruction of who they are as a person and in society. It’s crazy when you think about it, and there’s no other word for which this is the rule.

CLAY: Right. We have FCC restrictions as the biggest radio show in the country. So there are all different sorts of words that we’re not allowed to say on the radio, based on that. But, Buck, when I wrote my most recent book, I quoted Muhammad Ali. It’s called Republicans Buy Sneakers Too and it’s about how left-wing and woke ideology took over the world of sports which used to unite us all. My editor said, “Hey, are you sure you want to quote Muhammad Ali?

“You’re a white guy, but he uses the N-word,” and I said, “That’s a famous Muhammad Ali quote. (laughs) Yes! I mean, it distracts. “If I curse in the book…” and I didn’t curse that much in the book, but I’m like, “We don’t do dash, dash, dash on the pages of the book. The goal is to talk to people as adults.” And, Buck, where I would say I’m so fascinated by — sort of let’s say — the interplay between Joe Rogan and Howard Stern.

Howard Stern, if you watched Private Parts, if you studied anything that he did, was wildly more offensive than anything Joe Rogan has ever said. I think what happens is, the culture has evolved. Howard Stern knows all the things that he did in his past. He sees the power of cancel culture, and I believe a guy like Howard Stern has made a calculated decision to go far left wing as an effort to try to get what we’ll call “woke insurance.”

Because if he’s out there saying Donald Trump is the worst human being who has ever lived — even though, by the way, he had Donald Trump on his radio show all the time back in the day — then he believes that the cancel culture maniacs are not going to come for him, because he’s on the right team. I see this all the time in creative industry.

I see it in the sports world where people privately will say, “Hey, Clay, I agree with everything you say,” and then publicly they are a part of the woke sports community because they are all afraid that at some point, the woke universe is going to come for them. So even if they don’t believe it, they genuflect at the altar of wokeness to try to protect the jobs that they have. And I think that’s why so much of our society today is complete BS, because people say lies all the time.

BUCK: When I speak to friends of mine about this — and taking into account everything we talk about today, Clay, whether it’s covid madness or cancel culture and the impact of it. Remember, the woke control the apparatus of communication in this country more than at any time, honestly, in living memory with social media and now even something like Spotify, which is supposed to just be a platform for music and podcasts but, you know, now they’re supposed to act as editors. They pulled dozens of Joe Rogan episodes already.

CLAY: Hundreds! They pulled over a hundred episodes.

BUCK: I see it and I wonder. I ask the question within just in general, “Are we really a free country anymore?” You have to really think about that a little bit more now than we have in a long time after the shutdown of churches during covid, after the mask restrictions and the stay-at-home orders and people now losing their jobs for this or that, whether it’s not getting a vaccine or saying the wrong thing.

You know, we think of ourselves as a free country. Is Australia — and this is what I say to them. Is Australia a free country? ‘Cause I would argue no. I think that that’s pretty clear. So why do we think that we are still a free country? And I really mean this. I want to push people on this. I want them to think more about it, because going back to just getting some crumbs from the freedom table here is not good enough.

We need a full-on counterpunch. We need a counterstrike against the madness of the last few years, and I really think in many ways the left was broken by Trump, and then as a result of it, it’s very hard to find common ground. Even someone like a Bill Maher, for example, is almost an aberration these days. He’s a lib. He’s climate change-obsessed guy, in many ways right along with the Democrat Party, obviously very pro-choice and all these other things and was a fan in the early days of Biden and he’s gonna shut down covid.

Clay, he just says things that should be painfully obvious to anyone now, and mainstream Democrats look at him like he’s crazy because I think we have fallen into a place where we are certainly not as free a country as we used to be. And I’m not even sure you could say these days it really is a free country.

CLAY: Well, that’s why 2022 is so important, Buck. That’s why 2022 has to be an utter destruction, because there have to be consequences for your kids having to wear masks for two years even though it made no sense. There have to be consequences for the labeling of essential and nonessential businesses. There have to be consequences for all of the failures of the Biden administration.

Because if there are not, then lies — defund the police, all of these things that were 100% wrong, then we don’t have a civil society because you have to hold politicians accountable when they make poor decisions. That’s the entire purpose of democracy. And so, to me, 2022 has to be a destruction. And, by the way, think about how far we’ve come, Buck.

Remember George Carlin, seven words you can’t say on TV? That was what comedy was. It pushed boundaries of acceptability, and the masses embraced them. Now the same people of that George Carlin era are arguing the Joe Rogans of the world or the Buck Sextons or the Clay Travises are not able to say everything that they believe because it makes some people out there feel a little bit sad or it forces them to examine the cognitive dissonance underlying much of their belief system.

That’s what the marketplace of ideas should do. That’s why regardless of whether you agree or disagree with someone… I don’t agree with Whoopi Goldberg. He was an idiot, Buck, but we had a discussion as a nation point out her idiocy, and I think as a result the nation grew. I don’t think she should be suspended. I don’t think she should be canceled, but I think the marketplace of ideas should flourish.