Joe Rogan says multiple sitting and former US presidents personally contacted Spotify to get him removed

Joe Rogan says US presidents, plural, called Spotify directly and tried to get him kicked off the platform for talking about COVID vaccines. Not staffers. Not advisors running a quiet pressure campaign. Presidents. That is the claim, stated flatly, on a clip circulating from PBD Podcast, and Rogan does not appear to be exaggerating for effect.

I can’t even talk about it, but there was presidents involved and former presidents involved that were contacting Spotify. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, trying to get me removed for vaccine misinformation.

He can’t talk about it, and then he talks about it. That is a Joe Rogan special. The hedge lasts about four seconds before he is fully into the story, which is really the only thing you need to know about how seriously he takes the embargo. The hosts around the table, including Fox News anchor Bret Baier, land immediately on Biden and Obama as the two likely culprits. Bush is dismissed because nobody thinks George W. is monitoring podcast metrics. Bill Clinton gets a pass and a compliment, the table agreeing he would be a great Rogan guest, which is a strange pivot but not entirely wrong.

Not a single apology from anybody. Not a not a single retraction. Not a single you know, mea culpa. Not a single we were wrong.

The Apology That Never Came

Rogan’s real grievance is not the pressure campaign. It’s the silence afterward. He lost sponsors. He got his skin color changed to green by CNN in footage from a UFC event. He watched people he interviewed, including Robert Malone, get branded as dangerous cranks. And then, quietly, the consensus shifted. Ivermectin went from horse paste punchline to something doctors acknowledge has human applications. The mRNA inventor got his reputation back. Nobody called Joe Rogan to say sorry. That asymmetry is legitimately worth being angry about, and it is the thing that gives this clip its legs beyond the presidential name-dropping.

Whether the coordination was as direct as Rogan describes is a different question. He says he can’t talk about it, which usually means either a legal agreement, secondhand information, or both. The claim is not sourceable from this clip alone. What is documentable is that the Biden White House publicly pressured social media platforms to remove COVID misinformation in 2021, a campaign that became part of the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit and produced a lot of embarrassing internal communications. Whether that extended to personal calls to Daniel Ek at Spotify is a bigger leap, and Rogan does not offer anything to bridge it.

Daniel Ek, Unlikely Free Speech Hero

The table’s affection for Spotify’s founder is genuine and a little funny. The argument is that because Ek is Swedish and Spotify is headquartered in Stockholm, the US government could not get to him the way it could a domestic platform. The FCC does not regulate podcasts. Tax tools are harder to deploy against a foreign company. So the protection Rogan enjoyed was essentially geographic, which is less a stirring defense of free expression than a lucky accident of corporate structure.

God bless Daniel Ek. And thank God he wasn’t in the US for they could get him with tax and other tools.

Baier’s contribution is to flag that he is working on a special report about the coordination story, which is either a sign that there is something substantive here or a sign that Fox has found its next three weeks of programming. Probably both. The clip ends with a Friday reference and a webinar ad for a fatherhood course, because this is still the internet in 2024. Rogan’s presidential pressure claim will outlast all of it. Whether anyone ever produces the receipts is the only question left.