We said nothing, and then they came for us

To put this in perspective, he gets roughly the same size audience as the next four shows combined (all on Fox) and is five times larger than Rachel Maddow, the first non-Fox contender, and nine and 13 times larger than MSN Primetime and CNN Primetime respectively. Adjusted for population size, this is about the same size audience as Nine and Seven news in Australia, and much larger than that of the ABC news.

Spotify liked the cut of his jib so much they paid $100 million to have the exclusive rights to broadcast the Joe Rogan Experience for an unspecified period of time.

So what does Rogan do? Talks … anywhere up to five times a week to a wide variety of guests at length – two hours and more of talk. He seems to have only one producer, and he has conversations rather than posing a series of gotchas to guests.

The conversations aren't partisan and neither is he. One election he was Libertarian, another he voted for Bernie Saunders, and in 2020 he said he would vote for Trump.

He doesn't sound like a Culture War hero, but he is because he asks guests the questions that are in his head. Being an average Joe, some of them aren't politically correct. They happen to be the same questions as are in a lot of other people's heads. Not tough questions, just searching, but if you're the wilting flower type you might not feel in safe space listening to them.

He's made the news lately because a number of ageing rockers – Neil Young and Joni Mitchell to start with – gave Spotify an ultimatum, 'Take his podcasts down or take ours down. We don't want to be associated with him.'

Spotify has 36 per cent of the streaming market so that is a pretty strong statement, so why?

In December last year, Rogan had the gall to spend three hours and six minutes chatting to Dr Robert Malone MD – one of the patent holders for the mRNA vaccine technology – and in a separate podcast to Dr Peter McCullough – a cardiologist and academic – which ran for only two hours 45 minutes.

Both men were accused of spreading 'misinformation' during the course of those interviews. Misinformation is the vogue, all-purpose word to shut your opponent out of the argument by implying they are being deliberately misleading. Say 'you are telling lies' and I sound shrill, add a few syllables and call it 'misinformation' and you sound shrill.

Out of almost six hours' worth of interviews the censors have managed to distil one 'misinformation' for Malone – a proposition that the population is being subjected to what he calls Mass Formation Psychosis, a term invented by a Professor of Clinical Psychology Mattias Desmet, and largely in tune with what I understand about mass hysteria and political movements. You might disagree with the theory, but an academic theory is hardly misinformation.

McCullough did get a few things wrong. Recovery from Covid does not give you 100 per cent immunity (but according to studies it gives you much better immunity than the vaccines) and Covid can be spread asymptomatically. The other alleged misinformation was that a vaccine in Australia had to be abandoned because it turned people into AIDS positive. He did say that, but it comes under the category of 'misspeaking' rather than 'misinforming' because he corrected it later in the interview. It was false positives to AIDS tests, rather than being AIDS positive.

So that's it. That's the entire case against Malone and McCullough, and suddenly the bonfire of ancient rockers flares into flames.