Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• Inside the High-Stakes Fight to Control the Narrative on Ukraine - As Putin searches for a false pretense to invade Ukraine, the Biden Administration has moved to release, in real time, what it knows of Russia’s war plans. - link

• CNN’s Problems Are Bigger Than Jeff Zucker - How an upcoming merger at WarnerMedia could upend life at the cable news network. - link

• The Sandy Hook Settlement with Remington and the Road Ahead on Gun Violence - Gun manufacturers had considered themselves all but immune, thanks to a 2005 law, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. - link

• The Day I Declared Myself a Cartoonist - I was well aware that, until I told my father that I had dropped out of school, I would have only one foot in my new life. - link

• Protecting Louisiana’s Coastline with Oyster Shells in “What Remains” - Paavo Hanninen’s documentary looks at a surprisingly simple intervention with the potential to slow runaway land loss along the state’s fragile coast. - link

From Vox

• The absurd Supreme Court case that could gut the EPA -

  

  Nothing is at stake in West Virginia v. EPA — yet somehow everything is at stake.

  West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency is a case about an environmental regulation that no longer exists, that never took effect, and that would not have accomplished very much if it had taken effect. If the plaintiffs prevail in their case, they will be in the exact same position they are in right now. It is a case about nothing.

  Yet West Virginia could also be the most consequential environmental case to reach the Supreme Court in a very long time. The plaintiffs in this case, and in three other consolidated cases, seek an opinion from the Supreme Court that would do considerable violence to the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to, well, protect the environment. And if the Court indulges them, the fallout from this decision could wreak havoc throughout the federal government.

  The cases involve the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era effort to fight climate change. When this plan was announced in 2015, it was widely touted as President Barack Obama’s most ambitious climate policy initiative. Obama’s EPA predicted that, by 2030, the Clean Power Plan would lower carbon emissions from power plants by about a third below where they stood in 2005.

  When the Clean Power Plan was announced, the coal industry and many red states treated it like the apocalypse, warning that the plan would cause “tens of millions of tons of lost coal production, thousands of lost jobs in the mining industry, and rippling unemployment effects for those dependent on the coal industry.” Four days before Justice Antonin Scalia’s death temporarily deprived Republicans of a majority on the Supreme Court, the Court voted along party lines to suspend the plan.

  Less than a decade later, however, things look — well, different. Although the Clean Power Plan was blocked too fast for it to accomplish anything, the energy sector achieved its 2030 goals for emissions reductions by 2019. As the EPA explained in 2019, many power companies retired older, dirtier coal-fired plants because they were more expensive to operate than technologies such as natural gas or renewable energy. (Coal executives also complained that unrelated Obama-era rules restricting mercury emissions also led them to shut down coal plants.)

  As it turns out, the plan’s original goals were too unambitious to matter. Market forces and other regulations achieved those goals, and they did so much faster than anticipated.

  Nevertheless, a small army of litigants are now in the Supreme Court asking the justices to strike down the Clean Power Plan — which, again, is not in effect right now, which never really took effect, and which President Joe Biden’s administration does not plan to reinstate.

  But while it’s not at all clear that the Supreme Court has any business hearing this case — federal courts do not have jurisdiction to hear lawsuits where there is no live dispute between the two parties — the stakes in this case are still quite high. The plaintiffs challenging the nonexistent Clean Power Plan rely on arguments that, if taken seriously by the Supreme Court, could permanently strip federal agencies like the EPA of much of their authority to regulate.

  And so we wait, to see whether the Court will use a case about nothing to ensure that the Biden administration never does anything meaningful to fight climate change.

  The Supreme Court is not supposed to hear cases about nothing

  As a general rule, a plaintiff who wishes to challenge a federal policy must show that they were injured in some way by that policy, or federal courts are not allowed to hear their case. This limit is supposed to bind all levels of the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court. If, the day before the Supreme Court hands down a major decision, the policy that animated that suit ceases to exist, then the Court typically must dismiss the case (with a few complicated caveats).

  In Lujan

22. Defenders of Wildlife (1992), the Supreme Court laid out several hurdles that all plaintiffs must overcome if they wish to bring their case before a federal court. Among other things, a plaintiff must not only show that they are injured in some way by the defendant’s actions, this injury must be “actual or imminent” and not “conjectural” or “hypothetical.“

    The West Virginia plaintiffs’ best argument that they clear the bars established by Lujan flows from an opinion a federal appeals court handed down the day before President Joe Biden took office, in January 2021. That lawsuit, American Lung Association v. EPA, challenged a Trump-era rule, euphemistically named the “Affordable Clean Energy” (ACE) rule, which replaced Obama’s Clean Power Plan with weaker standards.

    In American Lung Association, the appeals court determined that Trump’s EPA relied on a “mistaken reading of the Clean Air Act” when it repealed the Clean Power Plan and replaced it with a different policy. This decision didn’t simply strike down the ACE rule, moreover, it also arguably struck down the Trump administration’s decision to repeal the Clean Power Plan. Thus, for a brief moment, the American Lung Association decision appeared to breathe life into the Obama administration’s zombie plan.

    But if Clean Power Plan stans hoped to see this policy implemented, their hopes were swiftly dashed. Shortly after American Lung Association was handed down, Biden’s EPA announced that it did not read that decision to reinstate the plan. “As a practical matter, the reinstatement of the CPP would not make sense,” the EPA explained in a very brief memo, in large part because, as already mentioned, its goals were already accomplished.

    Then, to cement this understanding, the EPA asked the appeals court to stay the parts of its decision that arguably reinstated the Clean Power Plan while the EPA writes an entirely new rule — and the appeals court granted this request in a February 22, 2021, order.

    The result is that there is currently no rule in effect governing the power plants that would have been regulated by the Clean Power Plan. Trump’s rule is dead, and the only court order that could be read to reinstate the Obama-era rule has now been stayed.

    In theory, the appeals court could lift its stay — although the EPA has given no sign that it will ask the court to do so. And it is still possible that whatever new rule the EPA comes up with will injure the West Virginia plaintiffs in some way.

    But recall that Lujan does not permit plaintiffs to bring a federal lawsuit if their injury is merely “conjectural” or “hypothetical.” All that the West Virginia plaintiffs have right now is conjecture that, at some point in the future, either the EPA or an appeals court might take some hypothetical action that might injure them in some way.

That’s not a valid basis to sustain a federal lawsuit.

If the Court doesn’t dismiss the West Virginia case, it could fundamentally alter the balance of power between the elected branches and a GOP-controlled judiciary

The West Virginia plaintiffs ask the Court to answer a few closely related questions: Does the federal Clean Air Act permit the EPA to implement the Clean Power Plan (assuming, of course, that the EPA actually wanted to do so)? And does the Constitution permit Congress to delegate such authority to a federal agency?

The Clean Air Act requires certain power plants to use the “best system of emission reduction” that can be achieved with currently available technology, while also accounting for factors such as cost. But the question of what the “best system” is to reduce emissions at any given moment is a moving target — the technology that exists today is a great deal more sophisticated than the emissions-reduction technology that existed in the 1970s.

So Congress tasked the EPA with monitoring technological advancements, and imposing stricter emissions standards on power plants when new developments make it possible for those plants to achieve more ambitious emissions reduction goals.

The Clean Power Plan was supposed to be the Obama-era EPA’s best effort to comply with this obligation, but the coal industry and red states argued it had overstepped the Clean Air Act’s bounds.

Now the West Virginia plaintiffs raise several different legal arguments against the nonexistent Clean Power Plan, several of which could permanently hobble the federal government’s power to regulate if adopted by the Court.

A brief filed by several senior red-state officials, for example, rests heavily on the “major questions” doctrine, a legal doctrine that is currently fashionable among Republican judges but that was also invented entirely by judges and has no basis in any statute or provision of the Constitution.

The major questions doctrine claims that there are fairly strict limits on federal agencies’ power to hand down particularly impactful regulations. As the Court most recently stated in NFIB v. OSHA (2022), “we expect Congress to speak clearly when authorizing an agency to exercise powers of vast economic and political significance.” And several of the plaintiffs in West Virginia argue that the Clean Air Act isn’t sufficiently clear to justify a regulation like the Clean Power Plan.

One problem with this major questions doctrine is that it is vague. The Court has never explained what constitutes a matter of “vast economic and political significance,” or just how “clearly” Congress must “speak” to permit an agency to issue significant regulations. So, in practice, the major questions doctrine largely just functions as a veto power, allowing judges to justify blocking nearly any regulation they do not like. If a judge doesn’t like a particular regulation, they can just claim that it is too big.

The unusual history of the Clean Power Plan, however, should give the justices some pause about their ability to determine which regulations have vast significance. Seven years ago, the argument that the Clean Power Plan would require much of the energy industry to remake itself in order to comply with a new government mandate seemed plausible. Now the Clean Power Plan looks like a dud.

If the army of policy experts, industry analysts, advocates, and coal executives who all evaluated the likely impact of the Clean Power Plan in 2015 were so wrong, why should we trust nine lawyers in black robes to get this answer right?

Other briefs in the West Virginia case suggest that the Clean Power Plan violates the “nondelegation doctrine,” another judge-created doctrine that limits Congress’s power to delegate the power to issue binding regulations to federal agencies. This doctrine is even more vague than the major questions doctrine, and even more capable of being applied selectively to strike down regulations that a particular panel of judges do not like.

As Justice Neil Gorsuch described nondelegation in 2019, a federal law authorizing an agency to regulate must be “‘sufficiently definite and precise to enable Congress, the courts, and the public to ascertain whether Congress’s guidance has been followed.” How “precise” must the law be? That’s up to judges to decide.

Notably because this doctrine outright forbids Congress from delegating certain powers to an agency, a Supreme Court decision that struck down the Clean Power Plan on nondelegation grounds could permanently strip Congress of its power to authorize the EPA to issue major regulations in the future. Indeed, depending on how broadly the Supreme Court worded such a decision, it could impose drastic new limits on every single federal agency.

In any event, the issues at stake in West Virginia can be summarized fairly concisely. It is a case about a regulation that does not exist, that never took effect, and that would have imposed obligations on the energy industry that it would have met anyway. It also involves two legal doctrines that are mentioned nowhere in the Constitution, and that have no basis in any federal statute.

And yet, West Virginia could wind up permanently hobbling the government’s ability to fight climate change.

• How do you solve a problem like Joe Rogan? -

  

  The problem of Joe Rogan is a problem of the modern internet.

  2022 has not started off well for Joe Rogan — even before the headline-grabbing Spotify controversy that has made him a perhaps unwitting figurehead for extremist rhetoric. First, hundreds of health experts complained that he was frequently spreading Covid-19 misinformation through his massively popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. Then a jaw-dropping compilation video of Rogan saying the n-word 24 times in his 12 years hosting the podcast surfaced.

  These things seem like the hallmarks of a far-right ideologue, but Rogan, who called Barack Obama the “best president we have had in our lifetime,” can’t easily be pigeonholed as racist. He also can’t be easily pigeonholed as an anti-science bigot, despite having made misogynistic, anti-feminist, fatphobic, homophobic, transphobic, and anti-vax statements. It’s not even easy to peg the podcaster, who famously endorsed progressive candidate Bernie Sanders in the 2020 election (before anti-endorsing Biden), as right-wing.

  In fact, one of the things that makes Joe Rogan so popular among his millions of fans is that his politics are so difficult to pin down. Rather than simply and easily slotting into a box labeled “conservative,” “liberal,” or even “reactionary,” he mainly holds both the far right and the far left in contempt; depending on which day you check in, he’s either a left- leaning centrist or a right-leaning libertarian. But his contrarian tendencies lead him to embrace and toy with lots of ideas, including those from the fringe.

  As his critics are quick to point out, in portraying himself as open-minded, Rogan platforms a lot of people whose ideas are dangerous. And without a background in journalism or seemingly any type of journalistic editorial oversight, Rogan, who has spent most of his podcasting career as a fully independent media host, hasn’t always been the best person to critique or fact-check his highly influential guests.

  When Rogan’s more polarizing guests and their unchecked influence join with his own long history of saying offensive things, the results can be grim. Alongside the reasoned political debates and philosophical arguments, his massive audience of primarily mainstream, middle-American men gets dosed with toxicity and extremism. Rogan is always quick to defend his show’s content in the name of free speech and preserving the voices of straight white men. But as the New York Times noted in a 2021 profile of Rogan, while his self-deprecating brand of authenticity has made his listeners view him as just another regular guy, his influence has grown “hulking,” enough to make him one of the most formidable single voices in media to exist — maybe ever.

  What we have, then, is a problem that is both unique to the internet and reflective of the giant problem of the internet as a whole: Like the internet itself, Rogan and whatever dangerous misinformation, conspiracy theories, jerky bigotry, or offensive views he wants to serve up today are all unstoppable and essentially answerable to no one. He has all of the audience, money, attention, and prestige of a traditional gatekeeper, but with barely any real pressure to assume responsibility for repeatedly making high-profile mistakes on the job.

  The public’s growing lack of trust in traditional journalism and legacy media outlets — a wariness evinced by media throne usurpers like Rogan himself — has made it even less likely for him to be effectively held accountable or face real consequences for repeated mistakes. After all, fans who are already prone to distrust the media are hardly going to support the journalism they dislike for trying to call out the podcaster they do like — especially not for what they see as foibles rather than serious flaws.

  That, too, is a unique problem: If Rogan’s audience doesn’t agree that his guests or his rhetoric are problems to begin with, or that his pattern of platforming bigotry and misinformation is an issue, then who’s to say they’re wrong?

  Rogan’s tenure at Spotify has been beset with controversy

  Rogan’s exclusive Spotify deal, announced in May 2020, should have been an easy win for the company, which has been investing heavily in expanding its podcast content across a wide variety of genres and target audiences. The deal, which was initially reported as netting Rogan around $100 million but was recently reported as closer to $200 million, placed the vast majority of Rogan’s staggering episode vault — currently up to nearly 1,800 eps — exclusively on the Spotify platform.

  But from the beginning, there were issues. Spotify quietly had Rogan remove about a dozen episodes — interviews Rogan had done with alt-right figures like Milo Yiannopoulos and with Gavin McInnes, founder of the extreme-right Proud Boys movement. The Times recently reported that Spotify staff had vocalized their concerns about Rogan’s content as early as September 2020.

  Then came Rogan’s increasingly skeptical views on generally accepted Covid-19 medical advice. On the show, Rogan advised young adults not to get vaccinated, claimed to be treating himself with harmful rogue treatments including an animal dewormer not recommended for Covid-19, and hosted anti-vax guests. The scientific community’s response to his spread of misinformation peaked in January with the open letter to Spotify. In response to the physicians’ criticism, legendary rock musician Neil Young protested Rogan by pulling all of his music from Spotify.

  It was a jarring callout for Rogan, whose fans say they love him for being a moderated, reasoned voice in the middle of an increasingly polarized media space. And that fan base is enormous: By some estimates, he draws as many as 11 million regular listeners per episode, though the numbers aren’t confirmed. Even modest estimates make the show’s regular listening audience big enough to rival the Super Bowl, even after his core listenership declined since moving to Spotify.

  The Neil Young controversy had barely been doused — Rogan apologized, sort of, explaining, “I’m not a doctor, I’m a fucking moron” — before another erupted. This time, another musician, India Arie, threatened to pull her music from Spotify over Rogan, sharing on her Instagram the video of Rogan saying the n-word 24 times on the podcast. In his subsequent apology, Rogan admitted that he’d previously had a long history of saying the actual racial slur instead of saying “the n-word.”

  “I thought as long as it was in context, people would understand what I was doing,” he said. “But it is not my word to use. I’m well aware of that now … I never used it to be racist because I’m not racist, but whenever you’re in a situation where you have to say, ‘I’m not racist,’ you fucked up.”

  In response to the video and Rogan’s apology, Spotify asked Rogan to remove an additional 70-ish offensive episodes from the platform, including episodes where he made racialized remarks and joked about sexual assault. With that unpleasantness out of the way, the company stood firmly by Rogan. “We should have clear lines around content and take action when they are crossed, but canceling voices is a slippery slope,” company CEO Daniel Ek told the New York Times.

  Rogan stressed that the video — which has been floating around the internet for a while — had been taken out of context, compiled over his show’s 12-year history. Still, the implication that Rogan “only” said the n-word on-air an average of two times a year (as The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah described it, “like he bought it in bulk at Costco”) is pretty galling by itself. It doesn’t help that the video also included the time Rogan described entering a Black neighborhood as like entering the “planet of the apes” — a statement Rogan claimed he only made to be “entertaining,” not to be racist.

  As Rogan himself admitted, all of this looks and sounds horrible. But with zero consequences being laid at his door and his fan support unwavering, does any of it ultimately matter?

Rogan’s evolving influence is as unwieldy as it is massive

Rogan got his start in comedy and still primarily identifies as a comedian — though that may be difficult for people who are mainly familiar with his more recent career to parse. As a standup comic, he performed in Boston, then moved to Los Angeles and scored roles on the ’90s sitcoms Hardball and NewsRadio. His comedy career continued around his entertainment jobs, including the role that launched him into stardom: the often confrontational host of NBC’s “eat these worms” reality show Fear Factor. Rogan has said he took the job as Fear Factor host so he’d have more material for his standup routines. But in fact, his hosting abilities would pave the way for a career in podcasting.

When Rogan began The Joe Rogan Experience on Christmas Eve in 2009, the landscape of podcasting looked hugely different from how it looks today. Some legacy media had forayed into the podcasting world, most notably This American Life, which began distributing episodes as a podcast in 2006. But barring some rare exceptions, podcasting was almost entirely an independent, amateur, grassroots space — not an industry at all, but rather a community of predominantly high-income, extremely online tech nerds, mostly men, flocking to the audio equivalent of a blog. The small-town intimacy of podcasting in those days allowed podcasts like Rogan’s to do well, not only because of listener loyalty but also because they were the only game in town. If you wanted to listen to a funny, comedian-centered chat show, or a meaty, lengthy interview, Rogan was right there with plenty of content to chew on.

Rogan was fast, prolific, and consistent, putting out long weekly, then biweekly, then multi-weekly episodes like clockwork. These initially featured long interviews with other comedians like Dane Cook or Bill Burr, but it didn’t take long for other high-profile interviews to sneak in: Kevin Smith, Anthony Bourdain, Melissa Etheridge. Rogan’s wide-open approach to guests was effective but unwieldy: By 2013, he was chatting with scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson, but also courting fringe conspiracy theories of every variety, ranging from his long-held belief that the moon landing was faked to the existence of DMT elves.

Rogan’s podcast debut coincided with the introduction of Google’s Android into the smartphone space, a development that exacerbated the rise not only of modern social media but also of the podcast as a ubiquitous smartphone presence. It also coincided with the increasing obsolescence of traditional media; between 2006 and 2016, awareness of podcasting doubled while trust in media on the whole plummeted, reaching new lows year over year.

Even more crucial to Rogan’s success was YouTube: Rogan filmed and released his podcast episodes on YouTube as well, giving him access to two growing online ecosystems. These were increasingly united not only by a common DIY ethos but a sense that influence and authority, if not expertise, could be earned through nontraditional pathways.

For Rogan, that authority took the form of embracing his masculinity and encouraging his listeners — the vast majority of whom were and are young men — to do the same. He offers “a motivational shove in the general direction of success and happiness,” a clarion call for audiences to step up and take control of their own lives that fits somewhere between a Tony Robbins seminar and Reddit’s favorite “lawyer up and hit the gym” mantra. In his bio, Rogan highlights his longstanding side gig as an MMA commentator and notes that he had a black belt in tae kwon do as a teen. It’s perhaps significant that he lists those accomplishments before his Fear Factor hosting gig — the latter might be a more recognizable achievement to the general public, but the former underscores the stamp of authentic machismo that his fans value.

But Rogan also, perhaps surprisingly, eschews toxic masculinity (even as Rogan himself eschews the whole idea of “toxic masculinity” and a potpourri of other progressive buzzwords). He urges listeners to be vulnerable, to forge close male friendships, to celebrate “male energy.” As Andrew Sullivan recently observed, “He readily admits when he’s wrong and often self-deprecates. He’s not afraid to show emotion and choke up — whether it’s over the triumph of female fighters or putting down a puppy or the death of Chadwick Boseman. … His masculinity is unforced, funny and real.”

While a desire to uphold men and masculinity might make Rogan more relatable to his audiences, however, it also leaves them more receptive to Rogan’s wide-ranging social and political views — and the extremist views of some of the guests he platforms. For example: Even after the 2018 collapse of his Infowars empire, right-wing extremist conspiracist Alex Jones continued to reach a massive mainstream audience as a guest on Rogan’s show, thanks to a 2019 appearance that was downloaded more than 30 million times before its eventual Spotify removal. Rogan’s most recent episode with recurring guest and right-wing philosopher Jordan Peterson was over four hours long; excerpts of it have already been viewed millions of times on YouTube alone. That’s a lot of potential new eyes and ears turned toward a man whose reactionary politics have won him a huge following among white supremacists.

Rogan has also increasingly faced charges of being an alt-right gateway drug, despite and perhaps even because of his progressive political endorsements — and research into YouTube’s ballooning far-right sphere of influence has borne out some of that alarm. Though Rogan has never overtly courted the internet “manosphere,” with its long tail of toxicity and function as an introduction into harder extremism, many of his fans are drawn to his podcast for the same reasons they’re drawn to the manosphere: Rogan’s permissive, understanding approach to being a man in a world increasingly critical of masculinity.

None of this context fully explains how Rogan arrived at the “injecting himself with dewormer” stage of Covid-19 conspiracies. But it does imply that unlike, say, a right-wing news anchor who might preach vaccine wariness while being fully vaccinated themselves, Rogan’s mistrust of authority and anti-establishment contrarianism are more than just words. The complicated reality is that Rogan seems to genuinely dislike “woke” progressive politics and what he perceives as the hypersensitive, overly semantic identity politics of leftism, while also despising Donald Trump and everything he represents. Recognizing that the two aren’t mutually exclusive moral vectors is arguably one of Rogan’s strengths; he won’t cancel you for disagreeing with him. “I disagree with myself all the time,” he’s said.

His fans likewise see his self-deprecating openness about his own ignorance as a value rather than a flaw. And all the racist language? That, too, is a nonstarter with fans as a serious criticism of Rogan — which makes sense when you consider that one of the main ways modern racism flourishes is through a reliance on nuance that skirts the line between ironic racism and actual racism, between intent and effect. NPR critic Eric Deggans calls Rogan’s “I’m not X-ist, despite doing these many literally X-ist things” approach to these topics “bigotry denial syndrome,” which he defines as “the belief that, because you personally don’t view yourself as a bigot, you don’t believe that you can say or do something that is seriously bigoted or damaging.”

“The problem here isn’t just that Rogan may have hurt feelings or given offense,” Deggans writes. “The bigger issue is the way such jokes foster acceptance of stereotypes that are damaging and persistent. … In fact, you can argue that — by providing more palatable ways for fans to use a horrible racial slur and laughing off a joke he admitted was racist — Rogan did damage that is tougher to address than an admitted racist openly advocating white supremacy.”

Deggans is focused here on Rogan’s history of racist language usage. But he’s also pinned the slippery, bigger problem with Rogan as a public figure. Rogan is the influencer’s influencer — a new-generation media mogul whose fame is predicated less on being accurate or being professional than on being popular and relatable. Paradoxically, that allows him not only to get away with professional-level mistakes — errors that might have ended his career if he had a boss, worked in an office environment, or had anyone to hold him accountable — but also to claim ownership of those glaring mistakes as a part of his brand of relatability and honesty.

Instead of being canceled (he’s “too big to cancel”), Rogan has dragged us all in the opposite direction: He’s just respectable enough, and more than powerful enough, to have helped shift the Overton window of acceptable, respectable social views toward a messier, uglier roundtable that, sure, includes Bernie Sanders and Neil deGrasse Tyson, but also includes Alex Jones and a bunch of alt-light right-wingers. Spotify might have been the driving force that could have attempted to hold Rogan accountable for his decision to consistently platform extremists, but Spotify, battling its own set of problems in the podcast space, kowtowed to Rogan and graciously gave way.

In other words, Rogan, one of the most powerful voices in the world, now may have more freedom than ever to dictate the terms of public conversation — to decide who and what gets to be listened to, and why. As Deggans notes, that sort of influence is much harder to fight than out-and-out extremism.

It’s in that gray space that Rogan flourishes. It’s in that gray space that his listeners, exhausted by the endless polarization of sociocultural discourse, find comfort in Rogan’s ambiguities and contradictions and uncertainties. But it’s also that gray space that harbors bad actors, bad science, misinformation, and disinformation. By playing host to them all but claiming it all as fair game in the name of free speech, Rogan has taught his followers a simple but effective playbook for how to appear balanced without actually being balanced.

Whether Rogan himself believes his dedication to cultivating a moderate and open viewpoint is almost beside the point: It only takes one bad seed to yield a lot of bad apples. And for every Roganite who gravitates to his show because of his more moderate guests, there are the Roganites who come for the Elon Musks but get drawn to the Jordan Petersons and Ben Shapiros. That’s all part of Rogan’s appeal, no matter how much his fans might insist that it isn’t. And the more he teaches his followers how to weaponize that denialism, the harder it gets to pass off Rogan’s brand as that of a relatable guy who’s just royally fucking up once in a while.

Yet what if Rogan were to drop the artifice? If he were to actually admit that there are limits to the acceptable nature of the views he’s been platforming? For all Rogan’s shows of authenticity, that level of honesty seems almost unthinkable.

Rogan, and people like Peterson alongside him, have been able to stretch the Overton window because not enough of his followers and the general public are convinced that what they’re preaching is socially unacceptable discourse. But if Rogan admits that it is, then he’s turned his show into yet another moral line in the culture war sand — and another hill for his fans and far-right reactionaries to die on. If Rogan admits that amplifying abhorrent views in the name of free speech isn’t worth the trade-off, then the safe comfort zone he’s spent 12 years constructing for his audience comes crashing down.

And if Rogan admits, out loud, that the safe zone he built hides monsters, then we all have to reckon with having allowed him to build it. And to reckon, not just with Joe Rogan but with the past decade of our cultural conversation constricting itself in knots in order to establish a legitimate platform for white supremacy, white nationalism, and a bottomless cauldron of hate. For ideas that should never have been treated as legitimate to begin with.

Surely, rather than unpack that mess, it’s easier for everyone to let Joe Rogan keep Joe Roganing — for Spotify to sidestep a distasteful canceling, and for fans to continue viewing Rogan as a vanguard of moderated discourse.

The only problem is one of attrition: The more we let Rogan get away with it, the more we set ourselves up for something worse down the line — for something even more unacceptable to slowly become acceptable.

What’s more unacceptable than 24 n-words? We can barely imagine. But one thing already seems like an inevitability: The next Rogan-esque influencer who comes along may have even less pretense, and even more fans who are willing to follow him into the dark.

• The chaotic, irreplaceable Wendy Williams -

  

  Wendy Williams’s rise, reputation, and absence from her talk show, explained.

  Centuries ago, those accused of gossip, primarily women, were locked into metal headpieces that restrained the mouth. Imagine what those medieval haters would think about Wendy Williams.

  The 57-year-old host has been rattling off her opinions into millions of American living rooms since 2008. But The Wendy Williams Show kicked off its 13th season this past October without Williams as its host. After many delays due to medical complications from Williams’s ongoing thyroid condition and a Covid-19 infection, guest hosts and panelists such as Michael Rappaport and Kym Whitley occupied Williams’s seat. It was unclear when Williams would return, if at all, but it now seems that she is being permanently replaced by previous guest host and former co-host of The View, Sherri Shepherd. This fall, the new daytime show Sherri will take over Williams’s typical time slot. According to Debmar-Mercury, which syndicates the show, Shepherd was the most popular substitute for Williams during her stint as a guest host, and was able to maintain the show’s ratings.

  Season 13 was scheduled to begin on September 20, then was suddenly pushed back to October 4. In an Instagram statement, it was announced that Williams had tested positive for a “breakthrough case” of Covid-19. This came as a surprise to many of her fans, since she had previously been outspoken about not wanting to get vaccinated. (Even the controversial Dr.  Oz tried to convince her to get the shot.) Then, the premiere got pushed back again to October 18, but by October 12, her team released another statement announcing that Williams would not be returning, as she remains under daily medical supervision. The Wendy Williams Show did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

  The guest hosts were meant to be a stopgap. Williams’s fans find her pretty irreplaceable — Williams’s ranking as a top daytime host has long been solid, competing only with the soon-to-depart Ellen DeGeneres and the women of The View. While Shepherd has received positive feedback, the lack of a goodbye and sudden changes have been met with mixed feelings in Williams’s Instagram comments, where her loyal fans have been vocal throughout her latest round of health issues.

  For over a decade between smirking laughter and sips from her mug, Williams has calmly eviscerated celebrity goings-on, razing their mishaps to the ground to lay at the feet of her live studio audience. She has kept her original mission through changing times and through her own struggles. Even early on, her penchant for showing no mercy was documented by the New York Times, in a 2008 article that described her as capable of being “startlingly mean-spirited.” This is what helped her amass a legion of fans, and also what has irritated her critics for so long; of late, the infractions have piled up.

  The tide has turned on the kind of lurid gossip Williams traffics in; just look at the way the pop culture news cycle of the early aughts is being reevaluated. Still, her mix of bravado and vulnerability keeps her on our screens. Who is this woman anyway, and who let her onstage?

  Wendy Williams built her career on saying things other people wouldn’t say

  Williams, born in New Jersey, got her start in radio in the late 1980s. She worked her way up through DC- and New York-based stations, and by 1993 had earned a Billboard Radio Award, honoring her as the R&B Major Market Radio Air Personality of the Year. She gave her listeners candid advice and shared the details of her own life dramas. Williams was known for her fiery, unapologetic personality. According to a 2005 New York magazine profile, during her run at WBLS, her interns were instructed not to speak to her unless spoken to. She bounced around different stations into the 2000s, discussing pop and rap stars on-air. She’s also struggled publicly: with being fired and ostracized, with a cheating husband who was also her manager, with substance abuse issues and her chronic illnesses.

  Williams made a name for herself by getting immensely personal with her listeners, which is perhaps why her fanbase is so enamored with her. Marie Nerestant, a 43-year-old in New York City, has been a Wendy fan since high school. Now, she watches The Wendy Williams Show every single day while her kids are at school.

  “She speaks her truth,” Nerestant told me about why she is drawn to Williams’s commentary. “She says what everybody wants to say, but is too afraid to say.” This, she theorizes, is why so many people are put off by Williams.

  “She has her flaws, and she’s not afraid to say it. She has Graves’ disease. She has lymphedema. She went through a terrible divorce. She’s said everything. What else does she have to prove to anybody?”

  Wendy hasn’t only spoken her own truth, though — and a fair share of celebrities have taken issue with Williams over the course of her career. In the ’90s, she had a habit of “outing” various rappers and pop stars, making claims that Sean Combs, Whitney Houston, and others were gay. These accusations were not taken lightly. Houston’s friend Robyn Crawford admitted that the pair planned to confront Williams over the gossip. Williams has also implied that Combs sent a girl group from his record label to assault her and intimated that he got her fired from Hot 97. Tupac even threw a diss at her in his music, after she made claims about his time in prison.

  Despite the drama, Williams’s brashness attracted television execs, and in 2008 she was asked to do a trial run of her own syndicated talk show. It was a sweeping success. Immediately the show resonated, in particular with women between the ages of 18 and 54. Fox and BET jumped on the chance to broadcast the program, and the rest is history.

  Her appeal to many Black women and gay men was crucial to her success, even though it is arguable that they should be most offended by her. And that is the strange magic of Wendy Williams.

  Aside from her talk show, Williams has done standup, acted in movies, written books (fiction and nonfiction), and appeared in a Broadway production of Chicago. Just this past January, she simultaneously released a biopic and a documentary through Lifetime. In the fall of 2020, she was revealed as a performer on The Masked Singer, costumed as a big mouth, which is, well, pretty on the nose.

  Williams’s daytime gig, however, was more than enough job for most. Her typically tireless schedule meant that everyone with cable has likely come across her at some point or another. Stay-at-home mothers, children home sick, patients in doctors’ waiting rooms, and the like have all crossed paths with Wendy. Her celebrity gossip segment, aptly titled “Hot Topics,” dissected the latest entertainment news and might have been the purest expression of the Wendy Williams persona. She talked, and the audience listened.

  Williams’s fans love her, but they don’t always agree with her

  The intimacy of The Wendy Williams Show was its main strength; Williams lounged in her purple armchair not just before her audience, but as if they were sitting at the same table together. When she gossiped, notoriously unscripted, it felt like chatting with a friend. She called her fans her “co-hosts.”

  While a host like Ellen DeGeneres speaks to celebrities the way a friend would, Williams spoke to and about them as if she were not also a celebrity. She had no issue prying or having guests on the show that she had previously gossiped about. She separated herself from the celebrity tribe and put herself at the level of the viewer, ignoring the tension that might exist between her role and her own fame.

  The format of The Wendy Williams Show never changed much over time. Neither did its host, who remained often brutal toward celebrities. According to her fans, this is part of the appeal — but also, not always their favorite thing.

  “I prefer when she keeps it light,” says Tracy Turner, a 54-year-old fan who watches Wendy a few times a week. For the past eight years, Turner has been tuning in to see what Williams has to say, whether it’s for her recurring celebrity lookalike segment or giving advice to audience members. What Turner is less interested in is when the commentary turns a little nasty, as in Williams’s unsolicited “advice” on the rocky relationship of Love & Hip-Hop stars Safaree Samuels and Erica Mena.

  It seemed like a randomly fired shot, but in Turner’s opinion, there are some people who Williams just does not like, and it affected her coverage of them. “She used to come for the Kardashians, but then she met them, and then she changed the narrative,” Turner said. While Williams’s opinions could flip-flop — much to the annoyance of some of her fans — they also reflected a very human impulse. Her feelings are allowed to change, regardless of how forcibly she expressed them, even for, as Turner points out, sometimes indiscernible reasons. These shifts made her that much more unpredictable, which is compelling to those who have watched the nature of her fame change over time. When your audience doesn’t take you 100 percent seriously, it makes you much harder to cancel.

  What follows is a brief synopsis of Wendy Williams’s most-cancelable hits: There was her explosive conversation with Whitney Houston in her radio days, where she asked Houston how her drug use affected her family (Williams has detailed her own issues with cocaine). Houston hung up on her. On the radio in 2006, Williams leaked that Method Man’s wife had cancer before some of the couple’s own family members even knew. She’s had to apologize for claiming that gay men “should leave skirts and heels to women.” When Terry Crews spoke out about being sexually assaulted, she said he was “not brave.”

  In 2018, she complained about the Me Too movement and defended R. Kelly, who had long been accused of and was just last month convicted of sexual abuse. She later changed her mind, calling him “sick” and condemning his actions. She has misgendered a trans athlete and made ill-informed, transphobic jokes.

  In July 2021, Williams implied that the marriage of actress and vegan influencer Tabitha Brown, who recently was able to help her husband financially so he could retire from the LAPD, was doomed to fail, and reminded Williams of her own situation with her ex-husband Kevin Hunter.

  “That was out of anger. I don’t think she meant what she said,” Nerestant said. Perhaps Williams’s comments came from a place of projection due to her own romantic pains, Nerestant suggested, but said Williams was out of pocket nonetheless. “I didn’t agree with what she said. She was reaching a little bit, but she’s hurt and she’s still hurting. It’s just a process that she has to deal with.”

  Over the years, Williams repeatedly mocked Britney Spears, but in a twist that was so out of left field it was comedic, she declared “death to them all!” in reference to Spears’s conservators. The clip has since been scrubbed from her YouTube channel but lives on in TikTok audios.

  Williams’s most recent and arguably worst offense was a takedown of 19-year-old TikTok user Matima Miller, known to fans as Swavy. Williams delivered the news of Miller’s murder by comparing her follower count to his and proclaiming that she had “no idea who this person is, and neither does one person in this building.” It was a stomach-turning, senseless blow to his family, who are not famous by any means. The list of controversies goes on and on.

  Despite Williams’s often crude commentary, advertisers never seemed dissuaded (Chevrolet once dropped her for complaining about historically Black colleges and universities, but that’s about it), and viewers tuned in throughout her run. She was simply a natural at being on television. She glided from segment to segment as if she was just catching up with her viewers — did you hear so-and-so did this? What do you all think about this, that, and the other that what’s-his-name was caught doing last week?

  Even if fans didn’t always approve of her approach, they wholly believed in her right to have a platform, regardless of who it bothered. They may be frustrated by her, but they also feel a kinship, even a kind of ownership, over her.

  “She just wouldn’t be who she was today without stepping on some people’s toes and hurting some people’s feelings,” Nerestant said.

  The internet loves Wendy Williams … kind of

  Wendy Williams, the person, isn’t very online. On Instagram, she merely posts recaps of her show, blurry photos of her meals (her commenters don’t hesitate to tell her when the food looks gross), and the occasional selfie. The account itself isn’t strictly business or personal, but it mostly operates as a promotional account for the show itself.

  Even if Wendy Williams isn’t really on the internet, in some ways she embodies its attitudes. Conversations about celebrities are always rude and outlandish online, with or without Wendy on the air. It is so easy to dogpile on Williams — a person who has said some awful things and has the nerve not to cower afterward, even though she is in the spotlight herself. In an interview with the New York Times Magazine back in 2019, Williams was asked why people are interested in celebrity gossip. Her response was simple: “Celebrity lives are something that people can live vicariously through,” she said. “It takes people’s minds off their own troubles. Everybody has troubles.”

  Williams got paid to be judgmental, which is what a lot of people spend all day doing for free. Online, we’re all talk show hosts who can fire off a hot take tweet, go on a live rant, or create a slideshow of opinions theorizing on a celebrity romance. In fact, many online comment sections, threads, and forums use Williams as a tool — between user clapbacks and questions, her image dances, stares, and grimaces in GIF form through it all. Her relevance continues because Williams’s image has arguably become bigger and more significant than her actual show — maybe even bigger than Williams herself.

  As one TikTok user put it, she comes off as “a caricature of a woman.” Her baritone “How you doin’?” catchphrase is instantly recognizable. There’s the unfortunate clip of her fainting on-air while dressed as the Statue of Liberty for a Halloween episode. There’s an endless arsenal of pouty, shocked-looking photos of her, and internet users gravitate toward them as reaction GIFs and pics. There are countless edits of her body, warped to make her appear bug-eyed like an alien or contorted to make her torso as thin as a rail. Her being is primed for virality because there are so few famous people who are as theatrical or as unnerving.

  Her television audience was a loyal bunch, but her internet audience is much less kind. They see her as sort of a joke of a figure. Her memeification both proves and reinforces her popularity, but her meme status is complicated — there is real adoration and endearment there, but it’s also mixed in with casual, unfamiliar “fanship” which sees her as less of a three- dimensional person and more of, for lack of a better term, a human emoji.

  On a sociological level, it’s fascinating and revealing, but it’s also somewhat dangerous when one considers the social implications of making a Black woman so separate from personhood. As Bea Forman wrote for The Goods, the online adoption of memes and slang from Black people is “committed so casually and frequently that it feels like the default mode of shitposting.”

  It’s no fault of her own, but Williams’s image has often been used as an instrument in that appropriation as the internet forges a world built in the likeness of Blackness. Her prevalence on Black and gay Twitter has parlayed her into wider consciousness, as such things go. In the public imagination, she is not a person but an idea. She is camp. She is, as she once said of Lil’ Kim, “an icon, a legend, and she is the moment.”

  David Livingston/Getty Images

  Now, that’s all come to a somewhat inauspicious end. Williams had only taken a few brief hiatuses before — due to Covid-19 production stops, to deal with health issues from her Graves’ disease and lymphedema, and to mourn the death of her mother.

  That’s why it was so unusual when the new season of Wendy was postponed.

  “I hope it helps to put things in perspective,” Turner said of Williams’s current health issues, prior to the show’s official cancellation. “But there is a place for what she does. She is loved by pop culture.”

  In the months leading up to the announcement of the show’s ending, there was a lot of speculation about what exactly was going on with Williams. Despite her illness, she was seen by the paparazzi vaping in a car in New York City in September, and tabloid rumors are circulating that she may have fallen out of sobriety. In 2019, after discovering that her ex-husband was having a child with his girlfriend, she checked into a sober living home to prevent herself from relapsing. Additionally, she was recently admitted to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. Her brother stated that the anniversary of their mother’s death may have made the time of year particularly difficult for her.

  Still, it seemed as though nothing could stop The Wendy Williams Show until she decided to end it. Now that it’s over, it’s hard to completely hate the player. We can moralize and debate about whether her work served our society, but as with so much of television, it just served to entertain — and Wendy did the job with more flair than most would dare to muster.

  Update, February 22, 2022: This story has been updated to reflect news of Wendy Williams’s Covid-19 illness and Sherri Shepherd replacing the Wendy Williams Show timeslot.

From The Hindu: Sports

• India vs Sri Lanka T20I series | More opportunities for India’s new batting hopefuls - Coming off a 3-0 whitewash of the West Indies, the in-form Indians will look to do an encore against the visiting Sri Lankans, and the Rohit Sharma-led squad has a realistic chance of achieving that

• Ruled out of India series, Sri Lanka leg-spinner Wanindu Hasaranga remains in isolation - Sri Lanka and India will play in a three-match T20 series beginning with the opener in Lucknow on Thursday

• Suryakumar, Venkatesh Iyer make massive jumps in ICC T20I rankings - K.L. Rahul dropped two places to be sixth while senior batter Virat Kohli remained static on 10th in the batters' list.

• Suryakumar Yadav, Deepak Chahar ruled out of Sri Lanka T20Is due to injury - The three-match T20 series against Sri Lanka starts in Lucknow on February 24

• Roma coach Jose Mourinho given 2-game ban after red card - Roma coach Jose Mourinho has been banned for two games as punishment for his outburst during the latest setback when his team drew 2-2 with Verona in the Italian league

From The Hindu: National News

• Supreme Court reserves judgment on Vanniyar quota law - Madras High Court decision was erroneous in law, say petitions

• Nadigar Sangam election held in 2019 valid, rules Madras High Court - It orders declaration of results within four weeks after counting votes from ballot boxes kept in a bank locker

• German experts inspect Muvattupuzha-Theni road widening -

• PM Modi bats for timely implementation of schemes, vibrant border villages - PM Modi suggested touring border villages and organising tehsil level competitions in such hamlets to make them more vibrant

• HC quashes arrest warrant against Swamy -

From BBC: Europe

• Ukraine conflict: Putin tells Russians security is non-negotiable - The Russian president praises the military as the US warns an invasion of Ukraine is beginning.

• Ukraine crisis: UK ready to escalate Russian sanctions, says Truss - The foreign secretary defends measures imposed on Russia, describing them as “severe”.

• Ukraine crisis: Uefa likely to move Champions League final from St Petersburg in Russia - Uefa is almost certain to switch the this season’s Champions League final away from St Petersburg amid the Ukraine- Russia crisis.

• Amsterdam Apple store: Hostage praised for ending Dutch drama - Police say they knocked down an armed man with a car after his hostage, reportedly British, escaped.

• Martin Kok: Jurors shown footage of crime blogger’s murder - Christopher Hughes, 33, is accused of the murder of Dutch crime writer Martin Kok near Amsterdam in 2016.

From Ars Technica

• COVID’s spread within hospitals hit all-time high amid omicron wave - Hospital risk was still relatively low, but surge speaks to omicron’s transmissibility. - link

• Chiwetel Ejiofor plays an alien named Faraday in Man Who Fell to Earth trailer - “There’s a door in front of you. On the other side is something I could never imagine.” - link

• Missouri governor’s wild claims about journalist debunked in police report - No “hacking” required: State website exposed teacher SSNs in HTML for 10 years. - link

• Apple’s AR/VR headset isn’t just a prototype anymore, sources say - Supply chain sources say Apple is looking to ship in August or September. - link

• RIP Bethesda Launcher: Here’s how its nearly full transfer to Steam will work - Warning comes ahead of game-transfer process, which kicks off in April. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• A beautiful woman went up to the bar in a quiet rural pub. She gestured alluringly to the bartender who approached her immediately. -

  The woman seductively signaled that he should bring his face closer to hers. As he did, she gently caressed his full beard.

  “Are you the manager?” she asked, softly stroking his face with both hands. “Actually, no,” he replied. “Can you get him for me? I need to speak to him,” she said, running her hands beyond his beard and into his hair.

  “I’m afraid I can’t,” breathed the bartender. “Is there anything I can do?” “Yes. I need for you to give him a message,” she continued, running her forefinger across the bartender’s lip and slyly popping a couple of her fingers into his mouth and allowing him to suck them gently.

  “What should I tell him?” the flustered bartender managed to stammer.

  “Tell him,” she whispered, "There’s no toilet paper, hand soap, or paper towels in the ladies room.

  submitted by /u/graphicc_yt
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• Homemade dildo -

  A man had just recently gotten into woodworking. He had made a nice table, some chairs, and a few other things around the house.

  One day, his wife came up to him and asked if he could try to make her a dildo. He found the request to be a bit odd, but being the great husband he is, he agreed. He spent a long time sanding and coating it, because, well… splinters.

  After several days of tedious work on this homemade dildo, he finally gives it to his wife and they take it up to the bedroom for a test drive. Instantly, she loses control and has an orgasm.

  I guess the old saying is true.. “if you build it, they’ll come.”

  submitted by /u/degen_king
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• A lost dog strays into a jungle. A lion sees this from a distance and says with caution “this guy looks edible, never seen his kind before”. -

  So the lion starts rushing towards the dog with menace. The dog notices and starts to panic but as he’s about to run he sees some bones next to him and gets an idea and says loudly “mmm…that was some good lion meat!”.

  The lion abruptly stops and says " woah! This guy seems tougher then he looks, I better leave while I can".

  Over by the tree top, a monkey witnessed everything. Evidently, the monkey realizes the he can benefit from this situation by telling the lion and getting something in return. So the monkey proceeds to tell the lion what really happened and the lion says angrily “get on my back, we’ll get him together”.

  So they start rushing back to the dog. The dog sees them and realized what happened and starts to panic even more. He then gets another idea and shouts “where the hell is that monkey! I told him to bring me another lion an hour ago…”

  submitted by /u/ThatOnePogger
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• A man went to the doctor… -

  He said, “Doc, you gotta check my leg. Something’s wrong. Just put your ear up to my thigh, you’ll hear it!”

  The doctor cautiously placed his ear to the man’s thigh only to hear, “Gimme 20 bucks, I really need 20 bucks.”

  “I’ve never seen or heard anything like this before, how long has this been going on.” The doctor asked.

  “That’s nothing Doc. put your ear to my knee.”

  The doctor put his ear to the man’s knee and heard it say “Man, I really need 10 bucks, just lend me 10 bucks!!”

  “Sir, I really don’t know what to tell you. I’ve never seen anything like this.” The doctor was dumbfounded.

  “Wait Doc, that’s not it. There’s more, just put your ear up to my ankle,” the man urged him.

  The doctor did as the man said and was blown away to hear his ankle plead, “Please, I just need 5 bucks. Lend me 5 bucks please if you can.”

  I have no idea what to tell you," the doctor said. “There’s nothing about it in my books,” he said as he frantically searched all his medical reference books.

  “I can make a well educated guess though. Based on life and all my previous experience I can tell you that your leg appears to be broke in three places.”

  submitted by /u/CrimsonAvenger_ZA
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• The police came to my house tonight holding a picture of my wife. -

  They said, “Is this your wife, sir?” Shocked, I answered, “Yes.”

  They said, “I’m afraid it looks like she’s been hit by a bus.”

  I said, “I know, but she has a lovely personality.”

  submitted by /u/ThatOnePogger
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