The recent disagreement on The Joe Rogan Experience—between journalist Douglas Murray on one hand and Rogan and comedian Dave Smith on the other—has exposed a problem with the populist media ecosystem: the casual normalisation and celebration of opinions untethered to knowledge. In what follows, I offer eight brief reflections on this trend and its hazards.

I. Ortega y Gasset and The Revolt of the Masses

Ortega y Gasset’s La Rebelión de las Masas offered one of the most enduring diagnoses of modernity’s afflictions. The Spanish philosopher identified the emergence of the “mass man”—not merely the working class, but any individual who believed that competence was unnecessary for opinion. The señorito, a term he used with stinging irony, is the self-satisfied amateur who regards his ignorance not as a defect to be corrected, but as a virtue to be celebrated.

In the world of populist podcasting, this archetype is frequently given centre stage in the name of heterodoxy. When Dave Smith declares his right to discuss Israeli-Palestinian history without deeply studying it, or when Joe Rogan defends such expressions as authentic and valuable purely for being unfiltered, they manifest the worst tendencies of the señorito.

Rogan’s open-door policy is not problematic in itself, but the framing of every viewpoint as equally valid—regardless of depth or rigour—aligns chillingly with Ortega’s vision of an anti-intellectual cultural slide. “The characteristic of the hour,” Ortega warned, “is that the mediocre soul, recognising itself as mediocre, has the audacity to assert the rights of the mediocre.” He foresaw our dilemma—when the only qualification for being heard is the will to speak.

II. Douglas Murray: Misunderstood Defender of Discernment

Douglas Murray’s position is easily caricatured by populists as “elitist” in our “everything goes” cultural moment. But his intervention on Rogan’s podcast was not a demand for censorship, it was a call for standards. Murray understands the need to distinguish between freedom of speech and the mere pretence of knowledge and understanding. His frustration was not directed at Smith personally, but at a broader phenomenon: the rise of what Atlantic contributor and former international-relations specialist Tom Nichols has called “the death of expertise” in his book of the same name.

Murray’s critics mistake rigour for suppression. But to argue that not everyone is qualified to speak on nuclear war or genocide is not to deny freedom—it is to protect meaning. Murray is not defending his own position, he wants to prevent the intellectual commons from being flooded by unchecked performative ignorance. He was protesting a mode of discourse that rewards spectacle over substance. His critique should be understood as a defence of a fragile ecosystem—where ideas must compete not only for attention, but for coherence and truth.

PODCAST 108: Conservative Intellectual Douglas Murray on the Newly Emboldened Radical Left and Why the Silent Majority Needs to Speak Up

Author Douglas Murray talks about the new Afterword to The Madness of Crowds, his best-selling book about identity politics, and the events of the last six months which have accelerated the toxic trends he warned about.

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III. Camus: The Rebel and the Moral Weight of Speech

Populist podcasters and their guests like to present themselves as vital voices of rebellious dissent in a media environment of stultifying and frequently mistaken consensus. But Albert Camus taught us that rebellion must be bound by ethics. In The Rebel, Camus distinguished between rebellion as a noble affirmation of justice, and revolt as mere destruction. Similarly, when we provide someone with a platform to speak with authority about topics they do not fully understand, regardless of context or consequence, we risk tipping from noble dissent into a form of discursive anarchy.

Speech, in this context, is an ethical act. In a world where misinformation fuels division, bad-faith arguments on massive platforms become acts of sabotage. Dave Smith’s uninformed claims about Jewish identity and geopolitics do not constitute an anti-establishment rebellion, they just constitute noise. Douglas Murray’s stance channels Camus’s ethic of measured resistance. It is not a reactionary suppression of free voices, it is a reaffirmation of the idea that speech must bear the moral weight of its consequences.

IV. Wittgenstein: Language, Limits, and Intellectual Honesty

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy offers a quiet but firm critique of the kind of discourse that now proliferates online. In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he concludes: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” This is not a call for censorship either, it is a call for intellectual humility—a principle now under siege.

Rogan’s show often mistakes verbal freedom for conceptual clarity. But Wittgenstein would have urged caution: when language is unmoored from understanding, it ceases to communicate and becomes theatre. The words may remain familiar, but the grammar of truth is lost.

By speaking without adequate preparation on matters of life and death—war, genocide, and ideology—guests like Smith cheapen the value of discourse. Wittgenstein would have called this a misuse of language and a betrayal of its seriousness.

V. Zylberberg: The Ethics of Not Knowing

Jacques Zylberberg argued that a speaker acquires moral weight when their words reach an audience. Public speech—particularly on massive platforms—creates ripples that extend beyond the moment. Ignorant speech to large audiences is not just an intellectual failure, it is an ethical failure as well.

Zylberberg was not just troubled by the ease with which falsehoods spread, he wanted to show that their transmission becomes socially sanctified through repetition and popularity. In this framework, Joe Rogan’s defence of “just asking questions” is suspect. It is a rhetorical device cloaking epistemic negligence in the garb of curiosity. Murray’s insistence on accountability is restorative. It demands that public intellectuals be stewards of understanding, not amplifiers of confusion.

VI. The Seduction of the Uninformed Opinion

The allure of uninformed opinion lies in its convenience. It demands no reading, no translation, no challenge to one’s prior assumptions. It is democratic in the most corrosive way: it replaces competence with confidence, and inquiry with assertion.

In the podcasting world, this dynamic is dangerous. Influence is not proportional to insight. Popularity is not merit. A well-framed falsehood reaches more ears than a nuanced truth. Murray’s position is unpopular precisely because it asks us to slow down. To read. To reflect. To think. To acknowledge what we do not know. In an attention economy, virtues like these are seen as liabilities. And yet they are the very foundations of a thinking society.

VII. Toward a Culture of Discernment

To recover a meaningful public sphere, we must not protect speech, but we must also be able to judge it. Discernment does not require suppression. It requires listening with care, with criteria, and with context. The elevation of every opinion to equal stature is not egalitarian—it is nihilistic. Douglas Murray’s protest is a signal of intellectual health. It is a boundary marker—a reminder that not all speech is equal, and that judgment is not exclusionary but essential.

VIII. The Courage to Speak Well or Not at All

So, let this be the call: not for silence, but for courage. The courage to say “I do not know.” The courage to wait before speaking. The courage to study before opining. And above all, the courage to stand, as Douglas Murray has done, against the flattening of discourse and the tyranny of opinionated ignorance.

In honouring Ortega, Camus, Wittgenstein, and Zylberberg, we do not retreat from free speech—we advance it. But we advance it into maturity. Into responsibility. Into the discipline without which thought becomes spectacle and truth becomes fashion. Let us not confuse the freedom to speak with the freedom to mislead. Let us defend not only the right to speak, but the duty to mean something when we do.