Tucker And Joe Rogan Are Lying To Their Own Audiences About Masks And Vaccines

Sinister White Nationalist Tucker Carlson and 'King of the Bros' Joe Rogan are doing their best to undermine public health in America.

by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC -- The past five years have amplified my cynicism and disgust with Americans. Since the 2016 election and culminating with the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s become clear to me that way too many of us have become disconnected with reality, reason, and responsibility -- superseded by recklessness, selfishness, and unfiltered dumbfuckery.

74 million of us tried to re-elect the worst human being to ever step foot in the national spotlight, much less the American presidency. They voted for him despite four years of chaos, death, and disasters, most of which were entirely man-made and turbo-boosted through his malicious incompetence and self-serving politics. 

Many of the suckers who tried to re-elect Donald Trump did so because they were either tricked by the Red Hat entertainment complex (Fox News and company) or they were drawn in by the QAnon hoax. Either way, this phenomenon emphasized how badly deluded, gullible, and impressionable around one-third of America happens to be. Not one of them possesses a firm grasp on the difference between fact and fiction, driving us closer and closer to fascist idiocracy.

Call it brainwashing, call it indoctrination, call it a cult. It’s all manifested in me a perpetual sense of dread for the future of our democracy. 

With COVID-19, we were relatively lucky. While nearly 600,000 Americans have died so far, due mostly to presidential incompetence starting more than a year ago, the next pandemic might be far worse. And if that happens, what will Americans do? 

How many of us will die because a third of us no longer trust science, experts, or facts? The climate crisis, for example, which could be the catalyst for another pandemic among other things, is surely going to steamroll our world unless the usual suspects wise up. But I seriously doubt a Red Hat epiphany is possible, which means any action to avert the endless roster of global climate disasters will be met with propaganda, lies, and bro-science, crippling any action to mitigate it.

That brings us to Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan. 

This week, Tucker, with his twerpy plaintive voice and vacant prep-school scowl, delivered a rant in which he begged his fanboys to harass anyone wearing a mask outdoors, vaccination or not. 

He described outdoor mask-wearers as “zealots and neurotics” while comparing masks to wearing pins worn by communist North Koreans to honor Kim Il Sung. He went on to say liberals are mentally ill, citing a cherrypicked Pew survey. Tucker’s incitement to action reached full shitgasm when he demanded that his viewers call child protective services on (responsible) parents of children who wear masks outdoors. He said forcing your kids to wear masks is as abusive as “beat[ing] a kid at Walmart.”

To back up his marching orders, Tucker explained that Dr. Anthony Fauci said masking outdoors was medically unnecessary. “Science shows there’s no reason to be wearing it.” That, of course, is a whopper lie, and it’s going to kill people. The truth is, Dr. Fauci said mask-wearing outdoors would eventually be unnecessary among fully vaccinated people -- a concept the CDC and President Biden endorsed 48 hours later when issuing new guidance. The new protocols now include this: If you’re fully vaccinated, and either alone or gathered in a small group of other vaccinated people, you don’t have to wear a mask outside. Tucker, naturally, didn’t say anything about being vaccinated. He sneered, “[Mask wearing outside] is repulsive, don’t do it around other people. That’s the message we should send because it’s true.” Tucker tags all kinds of awful shit with the “because it’s true” line. It’s not. 

Tucker doesn’t want his audience to know that wearing a mask will save the lives of the people his viewers interact with. Therefore someone should ask him point blank: Why do you, Tucker, want your viewers to infect their friends and family? And why is he enlisting an army of Mini-Tuckers to do his bidding in parks and on bike trails?

He’ll never answer that question, but get ready for your Twitter feed to be filled with all new Karen videos featuring Red Hats hectoring strangers about, you know, doing the right thing. 

Meanwhile, Joe Rogan explained on his Spotify podcast that young people don’t need to get vaccinated because as long as they’re in good shape, they won’t get COVID. But then he went on to explain that both of his kids tested positive. Don’t worry, though. They didn’t get clobbered by it, so it’s not a big deal -- more insufferable bro-science from a show that’s become the Johns Hopkins of bro-science, dishing it out to his allegedly 190 million monthly listeners.

Real science, as opposed to the bro-science backed up by the sasquatch enthusiasts and bitter standup comics on Rogan’s show, is still evolving on the long-term impact of COVID. While perhaps Rogan’s kids had mild cases of COVID, we don’t know for sure whether they’ll experience long term damage from the virus. Why? Because it’s novel. It’s new and somewhat mysterious. Not enough time has passed to evaluate the health ramifications in years or decades to come. But experts at the CDC are already warning of something called multisymptom inflammatory syndrome. While it can be found in adults, too, epidemiologists are studying its impact on children:

Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) is a condition where different body parts can become inflamed, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes, or gastrointestinal organs. Children with MIS-C may have a fever and various symptoms, including abdominal (gut) pain, vomiting, diarrhea, neck pain, rash, bloodshot eyes, or feeling extra tired. We do not yet know what causes MIS-C.

The CDC added: “[M]any children with MIS-C had the virus that causes COVID-19, or had been around someone with COVID-19.”

I assure you, Tucker and Rogan will never tell their audiences about MIS-C. Ever.

Look, if Rogan’s okay with taking the risk, and if Tucker’s okay with it, too, in terms of his own children, fine. We can’t stop them. Yet given the choice between letting your kids get COVID or making them wear a mask, wearing a mask is far from the abusive option here. But as influencers, it’s not just about them or their kids -- they’re toying with the lives of their audiences for ratings and profit. And we’ve witnessed the gullibility of too many Americans who will take them both at their word, some to the point of being outwardly combative about it. 

The rational approach, on the other hand, would be to exercise an abundance of caution -- caution that’s really not that much of a hardship. In the grand scheme, wearing masks and getting vaccinated are about as effortless as it gets. It’s not like we’re asking people to die at Normandy or Peleliu -- you know, how American society used to sacrifice for the greater good. The collective efforts of those days are sadly long gone.

If the 33 percenters did the right thing by ignoring Tucker and Rogan, our society would rapidly generate herd immunity, allowing us to return to a new version of normal. But Tucker and Rogan are making too much money pandering to the shirkers and refuseniks. They’ll never stop until they’re forced to. So, because of these dinguses, we can count on many more years of life with COVID.

This isn’t a game. If allowed to flourish, the irresponsibility of these two reckless bastards will go a long way toward dragging us back to the death and mayhem of 2020. Not a single thing they’re saying is backed by legitimate science, leaving nothing but a populist cash-grab as justification for risking more lives. And for that alone, much less other trespasses, I hope history torments the hell out of them both.

Read an excerpt of this week’s Members Only piece:

Confession: I'm Into Bitcoin...

Don't judge! One Bitcoin is now worth $54,994 and is revolutionizing the way we think about money. Here's why you need to know about it ASAP.

(image: Getty images)

by Ben Cohen

“Blockchain-based market networks will replace existing networks. Slowly, then suddenly. In one thing, then in many things.” - Naval Ravikant

Over the last few years, I have become increasingly interested in crypto currencies. Given the stigma associated with the community surrounding it, I haven’t really been public about this. To the outside world, Bitcoin appears to be dominated by weirdos, computer geeks, and highly aggressive libertarian “cointrepreneurs” trying to sell you their latest crypto scam. This is partly true.

However, behind the scenes there are a lot of incredibly smart people who have been taking crypto currencies and blockchain technology very, very seriously — and for good reason. Crypto is now a trillion dollar market, and Bitcoin bigger than Britain’s Sterling Pound. Whether you like it or not, Bitcoin and crypto is here to stay.

Before we get started, I’d like to make a couple things clear. Firstly, I am not a crypto evangelist. I wouldn’t advise anyone get into crypto without serious research and generally don’t think it is a good idea to invest in something you don’t fully understand.

Secondly, I want to make my interest in it clear: I find the space fascinating because of the ingenuity and the speed with which it is expanding. I have no particular feelings about blockchain technology, or any broader libertarian fantasies about unfettered free markets. I am merely observing a phenomenon — just like the birth of the internet — that I think everyone should be paying attention to.

Thirdly, while I’m fairly savvy about the technology and how it works, I am not an investing/finance/crypto expert. I have a few coins I bought as an experiment, and pay fairly close attention to innovations in the space. I am not here to give you any investing advice.

What I would like to share is why I think this is so serious.

The very basics

The internet has revolutionized business and the way we communicate with each other. It has never had a native currency or financial system, and banks have layered applications on top of it. We can send money to each other and pay for things online using debit cards, credit cards, wire transfers, Paypal, Venmo and so on. The underlying technology that does this has evolved rapidly, but the traditional banks have not. We still need banks to hold our cash, borrow from them to buy property, pay off credit cards and receive our wages etc, etc. As seamless and useful as applications like Paypal and Venmo are, they still require us to link our bank accounts. So while we are still using dollars, pounds, Euros and Pesos, we are tethered to institutions we (broadly) trust that can hold, lend, and send them.

Crypto has the potential to do away with all of this.

The best way I have found to think about crypto is that it is bankless money that is native to the internet. Just as we only need a mobile phone to communicate with anyone, almost anywhere in the world for no cost, now we can send money too — and without banking institutions or fees.

How to become bank

In the world of crypto, I could potentially have all my assets in an online encrypted wallet that I own completely. If I want to buy something, I can safely send assets from my wallet to someone else’s via the blockchain with no intermediaries. Here’s how this works:…

This is an excerpt of today’s Members Only piece. Continue reading here and get a 2 month free trial on a Banter Membership!: