This article appears as part of the Unspun: Scottish Politics newsletter.
Only the psychopathic or sadistic could remain untroubled by the depths to which the hard-right politician Rupert Lowe sank when he appeared on the lumpen podcast The Joe Rogan Experience.
For the rest of us, it was a stomach-churning display: a sneering extremist toff debasing the memory of the 16 schoolchildren and their teacher murdered at Dunblane whilst a man cosplaying as a journalist nodded along.
The guest, like the host, is a shabby, nihilistic disgrace. But there’s more to this than offence, shock, shame and disgust.
The Lowe/Rogan double-act speaks directly to the disintegration of both the media and politics.
Hand-in-hand these two pillars of democracy have crumbled this last decade, so quickly that it’s been hard to chart the collapse at times.
Joe Rogan is a ‘comedian’ and fight commentator. Rogan is, as some would say in the American heartland, a knucklehead. He is unfit to be a journalist, just as any journalist I know is unfit to get in the ring.
But in the 2020s, it doesn’t matter if you’re an idiot. What matters is clicks. And what makes clicks? Outrage. The business model is simple.
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Until Rogan helped propel Donald Trump into the White House by providing him with a platform to preach to America’s disaffected male youth, the standard show featured childish stunts like the host offering Elon Musk a joint.
Now Rogan thinks he’s a political player. Enter the aptly named Lowe, leader of the hard-right Restore Britain party.
Lowe is Elon Musk’s British pet, favoured by the extremist tech oligarch along with the likes of the street thug Tommy Robinson.
And so we come to Rogan’s latest podcast. Lowe began attacking Britain’s handgun ban - a subject clearly close to the heart of America’s MAGA fanatics.
Lowe said: “They don’t want the public to have guns. As you probably know they banned handguns in the late 90s because there was a murder up in Dunblane.”
Rogan asked: “One murder?”
“One murder,” Lowe replied.
He then whined about his father shooting pistols at Oxford University and having his guns taken away.
“He’s dead now, bless him,” Lowe said, whilst trampling on the memories of murdered children.
Rightly, there was near-universal outrage, including from the father of one of the little girls who died.
Dunblane was not one murder. Sixteen children and their teacher were massacred. It scarred a nation; shattered families. It left its mark on every police officer and medic who picked up the pieces.
No journalist who covered the atrocity will ever forget that day. My first child was just about to be born on the day of the killings. That night I remember crying at my kitchen table.
Lowe should be cast out of society for his loathsome behaviour. He’s a reptile.
Now deconstruct that podcast. Set this ‘new media’, this ‘new politics’, against what’s sneeringly called ‘old media’ and ‘old politics’.
The new media players don’t need to understand their brief. Indeed, they take pride in doing no preparation, no research. They’re without hinterland, or knowledge.
In the new media, a dolt brays into a mic pontificating about everything and anything yet knowing nothing.
Rogan didn’t challenge Lowe because he didn’t have the brains or background to challenge Lowe. So he let lies out into the world about the murder of children.
And Lowe? He didn’t appear on the show to talk policy. He appeared to further Culture War. There are no ideas, no plan, just hate and stupidity.
He doesn’t care about the facts of Dunblane. The guest wants outrage as outrage means clicks, and clicks mean attention. And the show wants outrage for the exact same reasons.
Both guest and host are desperate, pathetic attention-seekers.
Yet the outrage isn’t even scrutinised in an intelligent manner. Instead, it’s ‘consumed’ - because people don’t read news anymore or watch TV bulletins. People ‘consume’ clips like burgers, ultra-processed Americanised garbage.
Moments of outrage are packaged into neat 40-second clips and posted online where we can scream about it for a day but never truly sit and think ‘what does this mean? What does this say about us, our society, our media and politics?’
And don’t for a moment think Rogan’s show is insignificant. It’s the biggest podcast on Earth. It’s hugely influential.
That’s what makes this a moment of such deep despair. The most significant ‘news source’ on the planet just disgraced the memory of murdered children for clicks.
Read more:
- Dunblane 30 years on: ‘It’s a wound that’s there forever’
- Dunblane: 'The phone call I will never forget'
- Ambulance worker recalls ‘shellshock’ of emergency workers at Dunblane shooting
And it was a British MP - for that despicable oaf Lowe sits in the Commons - who is at the centre of this corruption of truth and decency.
That this passes for media and politics today is astonishing. How have we fallen so low - again, such a fitting term - that Rogan is more powerful than the BBC or CNN?
And Lowe, a man who would have been chased off the streets in years gone, now commands such attention.
Perhaps we should look to ourselves for blame. If this filth didn’t have such a market - because that is what this is, the marketing of squalor for money - then we wouldn’t be discussing the dirt that Rogan and Lowe have smeared over the memory of dead children.
People watch this poison, so the poison keeps getting pumped out. We’re building the gallows of our own decency.
Neil Mackay is the Herald’s Writer-at-Large. He’s a multi-award winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, extremism, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics
