First Amendment Lawyer Floyd Abrams and Dax Shepard Defend Joe Rogan Against Censorship

First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams and actor Dax Shepard expressed their support for Joe Rogan flexing his constitutional rights when it came to discussing Covid during a recent interview.

Abrams, the father of Mediaite founder Dan Abrams, was a guest on Thursday’s episode of Armchair Expert to promote his new First Amendment podcast Speaking Freely. The conversation turned to Rogan and censorship when Shepard asked Abrams, “I want your opinion on Joe Rogan, this is a great point to symbolize this broader conversation of who can step in, when should they censorship virtually.”

“Keep in mind we’re exclusive to Spotify,” co-host Monica Padman added.

“Yeah — disclosure,” Shepard said. “Claims of a scientific nature, that was the kind of attack on it. ‘Well these are scientific claims.’ Now, how do we distinguish between a person in the town square saying ‘the vaccine will kill everyone’ and no one cares. And an entertainer — and media. How are we siloing these things and how do the rights differ within those silos?”

“The legal answer in general is you can say what you want,” Abrams replied. “There’s very broad protection even in this area of extreme danger. When you’re talking about medicine or the like, sometimes they’re not only wrong, they’re killing people [but we still] lean over backwards to protect free speech and to keep the government — the government includes the courts too — from being in the position of deciding truth or false on issues like that.”

Shepard replied, “we can look at history as to why that’s so important. Microscopic pathogens were posed as a scientific thought, at the time that was hearsay, that was threatening. So had we silenced that, which at the time seemed insane –”

Abrams said, “Doctors lost their licenses and some doctors went to jail for, in good faith, creating what turned out to be disease ending.”

“Right!” Shepard said. “We have to guess that the medical claim could be the next one of those.”

“We have to act as if — we don’t have to believe that, that crank over there with these crazy views, who’s misleading his listeners into doing something terribly harmful. Our decision has been, as a society, we can’t got there. We shouldn’t go there.” Abrams corrected.

“It’s not like Joe Rogan’s show is the only source of information we have in this country,” Padman added.

“It’s not state media,” Shepard retorted.

“Exactly! So you can just choose no to listen.” Padman said.

“Yeah, I don’t know why you need it removed,” Shepard said. “I have differing views from him on the pandemic but if your claim is that you can’t say anything unscientific without a banner then we must immediately go through every religious podcast. We can’t allow anyone to say that the earth is five thousand, seven thousand years old.”

“It get’s tricky though,” Padman stated. “Ours is obviously entertainment, I think Joe Rogan would consider his entertainment as well.”

“We’ll let me be clear,” Abrams said. “Entertainment is protected too, under the First Amendment.”

Listen above via Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard.

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