Controversial Spotify podcast host Joe Rogan is once again under fire after making another easily refutable and baseless claim on his show "The Joe Rogan Experience."
This time, Rogan's claims center around a proposed new law in Australia that would outlaw citizens growing their own food in home gardens, which he implied is intended to retaliate against those who refuse to get vaccinated.
The problem is: not a word of it is true.
And as NBC News reporter Brandy Zadrozny broke down in a Twitter thread, it all stems from an article Rogan admitted he didn't read--likely the same viral fake news article circulating on social media from which this conspiracy theory stems.
Rogan claimed the Australian government's proposed food safety bill was aimed at home gardeners, and that the whole thing was a ploy to gin up fear of future pandemics and root out anti-vaxxers by isolating them from participating in everyday life.
In a mocking Australian accent, Rogan said:
"They were saying, ‘Whoa, you could grow your own food. And what else? The disease was from your food. It infects the population, kills us off. Oh, we can’t have that.'..."
"...[T]hese fu*king creeps, they got a good grip on people during the pandemic..."
"...That’s how you motherfu*king smoke out an anti-vaxxer, you can’t even go to the grocery store anymore and you can’t grow your own food."
So where on Earth did Rogan get this ridiculous information?
As Zadrozny details in her thread, this story has a huge presence across social media platforms, and it all links back to a fake news site called Apex World News.
As Zadrozny makes clear, the site has no credentials--not even a functioning website.
So she went to the Library of Congress's Wayback Machine to find Apex's origins, and it took very little research to figure out it is linked to an evangelical preacher of the "prosperity gospel," Uebert Angel.
And a deeper dive into Apex's stories in the past revealed what Zadrozny calls "Misinformation Madlibs–story after story sharing disinformation, conspiracy theories, vaccine skepticism, and character attacks on figures like Dr. Robert Fauci.
Zadrozny sums up her analysis with a very simple directive to Rogan (and to all denizens of the Internet):
"don't get your news from here."
On Twitter, many people shared Zadrozny's exasperation with Rogan and his acolytes' gullibility.
And of course, some couldn't help but make fun of Rogan a bit.
In the end, it didn't even require all the research Zadrozny did to figure out the story was fake.
After Rogan's producer alerted him he'd Googled it and found nothing, Rogan did the same. And sure enough, after just moments of searching, Rogan said:
"Damn it, it better not be fake... It might be fake."
Narrator:
It was fake.
See how easy that was, Joe?
