Joe Rogan called for Ye to be reinstated on Twitter during a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience while discussing how he does not support people being banned on social media.
Rogan was discussing free speech on the internet with entrepreneur Adam Curry.
West was banned from the platform permanently in December after he tweeted a mashup of a Star of David and a Swastika. He had been making the rounds on various shows and podcasts discussing the concept of “radical love” and urging Jewish people to “forgive Hitler.”
During Rogan’s podcast, he and Curry were laughing about Ye calling Twitter owner Elon Musk a “half-Chinese clone.”
“Let him back on Twitter. Jesus Christ, enough already,” Rogan said. “I mean, if you have a person like that speaking, you can always block them. You don’t have to listen to anything they say. You also don’t have to read it.”
Rogan explained that even if someone is saying things that you disagree with, “there’s a great value in pushing back” to change their minds.
“There’s a thing, though, when a person is like that, that I think there’s a great value in pushing back against him. And if he was a person that could learn from that, maybe there’d be a great value of him reading some of the pushback against him and altering the way he thinks,” Rogan continued.
“Essentially, we’re programmed by life and our decisions and our interpretations of things. And I think part of that is like when you put stuff out there and people really f-cking severely disagree with what you’re saying, you should experience that. You should learn from it, and you can’t if you ban a guy,” he asserted.
Rogan later said that “one of the things that Elon saw like very quickly is like the idea that you’re just gonna let people just go wild. No. You have to have some restrictions.”
“He has restrictions,” Curry noted.
“Yes. Because he had to ban Kanye West. Like Kanye West was — I mean, which is the craziest thing ever, right? You have a rapper, who’s one of the most famous people alive, and he decides to make a Star of David with a swastika inside of it,” Rogan said.
“He touched the third rail, you know?” Curry said. “And he has his reasons. And these are long-rooted reasons that we are, neither of us are qualified to discuss.”
“I think the correct thing to do is to let him talk and then for people to talk sh-t about the dumb things that he’s saying — that’s normal,” Rogan said.
“It’s not normal to say you can never make these squiggly lines with your pen because it freaks me out because 100 years ago, or 80 years ago, a horrible thing happened. Yeah, a horrible thing happened. We’re all with you. What he’s saying is wrong. We’re all with you. But people should be able to say that to him. And the only way they can say that to him is if he’s actually on there,” Rogan stated.
