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Joe Rogan argued against tech platforms banning Kanye West’s latest song praising Adolf Hitler, noting that the millions of downloads the “kinda catchy” tune has racked up on X “kind of supports” the rapper’s antisemitic views that there’s a “concerted effort” by Jewish people to remove him from everything.
West, who has openly expressed his love for the leader of the Third Reich in recent years, uploaded the songs “Heil Hitler” and “WW3,” another tune that glorifies Hitler, to X earlier this month. While Spotify and SoundCloud rushed to remove the song from their platforms, Heil Hitler proliferated across the Elon Musk-led social media site and racked up millions of views.
“Ye’s most recent repost is of a video mixing historical clips of Hitler together with his song as a backing track. He also shared a video on X of influencer Andrew Tate — a self-described misogynist — playing the song in his car. That video has been viewed over 3 million times,” NBC News reported last week. “Ye’s account is verified as an organization on X, meaning it could be eligible for monetization and ads. It’s not clear if Ye’s account uses those features.”
With the pro-Nazi tune continuing to spread across right-wing social media accounts, Rogan attempted to thread the needle this week between denouncing West’s hateful and trollish rhetoric while also defending the lack of censorship on X. At the same time, he argued that the song’s popularity on X could be seen as proving some of what West is saying about Jewish people.
Speaking to comic Tom Segura during an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience earlier this week, Rogan brought up the song and quickly pointed out that it’s “kinda catchy,” prompting Segura to declare “that’s the problem with it.”
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Noting that West has “never lost a step” when it comes to production, Segura then tackled the subject matter itself. “There is a thing where that song is like, what are you doing, dude? Like, what are you doing, for real?” Segura wondered.
“It’s the ultimate pushing back,” Rogan responded.
Segura, meanwhile, felt that “making a catchy song” about shouting “Heil Hitler” only serves to give permission to others to do that very thing in public. “Like, you’re just getting at a minimum, you’re just going to get more people that think it’s cool to say, ‘Heil Hitler.’ Like, that’s at the minimum,” he added.
“Well, I think that’s part of the program. I think that’s what he’s trying to do,” the popular podcaster replied.
Rogan’s guest would go on to wonder if that’s “cool to do,” noting that while “it’s fun to troll the masses,” you are now going to “get less educated people” who think it’s “a fun thing to say” on he streets. “You really want people just walk around, be like, ‘you know what’s tight, man? Heil Hitler.’ It’s f*cking insane,” he exclaimed.
“It’s also kinda like the sign of the times,” Rogan insisted before going on a tangent about the “benefits” of allowing anything to be published online.
“I want to say this carefully because I…want to say real clearly I don’t support people saying that. I don’t think it’s a good thing to say. I don’t say it. I don’t think any racism is good. I don’t think antisemitism is good,” he said.
“There’s a benefit to just letting people talk,” Rogan continued. “Like let people say whatever the f*ck they wanna say even if it sucks. This is the benefit of Twitter, but this is also the bad part. It’s like the f***ing song has so many millions of hits on Twitter. It’s been banned from every platform. But is it good to ban things from platforms, or is it better to let it be out there and let people talk about it?”
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He argued that banning the song then makes “people want to hear it more” and thus makes it “more popular.” From there, Rogan asserted that the millions of views the song has received on X also appeared to prove West’s antisemitic remarks about Jewish people.
“And then it kind of supports what he says, which is that there’s this concerted effort if you talk about Jewish people, that they’re going to remove you from everything, remove you from banking, which is what he’s saying, they run everything,” Rogan proclaimed.
Piggybacking on that argument, Rogan pointed to the controversy over Kill Tony star Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke about Puerto Rico at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. In his observation, you can “just talk s*** about Puerto Ricans” and nothing will happen to you, noting that Hinchcliffe has only seen continued success since that moment.
“There are certain people you are allowed to pick on and make jokes about or mock or say something, and you can get away with it,” Rogan added. Wrapping up his thoughts on the song, the “Intellectual Dark Web” member described the first time he heard “Heil Hitler” and how it made him wonder what the endgame was for West.
“I’m watching on my phone like, yoooo! And then my first thought was, ‘How does this end?’ Because this ends,” he stated. “This is going end. There’s going to come a time when they’re going to realize this is a problem, so how does it end? Does it end in assassination? Does it? Does it end in financial ruin?”
When Segura said he wasn’t sure about the rapper’s current financial situation, Rogan insisted that “they can’t steal your money, but they can de-bank you.”
Rogan’s deep thoughts on West’s “kinda catchy” pro-Hitler song come a month after neoconservative commentator Douglas Murray took him to task for his “just asking questions” philosophy and platforming of extremists such as Ian Carroll and Darryl Cooper, both of whom have peddled antisemitic theories.
“I feel you’ve opened the door to quite a lot of people who now got a big platform, who have been throwing out counter-historical stuff of a very dangerous kind,” Murray told Rogan and his guest, comedian turned foreign policy pundit Dave Smith. “These guys are not historians; they’re not knowledgeable about anything!”
As The Hollywood Reporter senior editor Steven Zeitchik observed recently, “the world’s biggest podcaster is slowly moving from conspiracy-curious to a launderer of antisemitic and anti-scientific ideas right before our eyes,” adding that his show is “an active way of denying basic truths about history and science through the clever curation of guests.”
