Monthly Archives: April 2025

20 Years Without Mitch


“I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.”

Mitch Hedberg died twenty years ago. That sentence reads wrong—like he just went out for a sandwich and forgot to come back.

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, site of my transplant, Mitch wasn’t built for the job market. He wasn’t built for much of Earth, really. He had a surfer’s drawl, a curtain of hair like he was hiding from the 1990s, and a stage presence that suggested his mind was already halfway through the next dozen punchlines.

He looked at the world like it owed him laughter—small, weird laughter. And he paid it back in full.

“I bought a seven-dollar pen because I always lose pens and I got sick of not caring.”

That wasn’t just a joke. It was syntax from another planet. Hedberg didn’t deliver jokes so much as he delivered angles—twists on the banal so sharp they drew blood.

He hated confrontation. Wore sunglasses on stage not for coolness, but camouflage. The spotlight didn’t energize him—it interrogated him.

“My fake plants died because I did not pretend to water them.”

He made absurdism feel like wisdom. There was no aggression in his act. No rage, no moral scoreboard. Just observational comedy from a man who saw the world through a cracked kaleidoscope and liked it better that way.

“I saw a sign that said ‘Watch for children.’ I did. It seemed like a fair trade.”

He once tried to pitch a sitcom to network TV called Hedberg, in which he’d play himself. He told the execs: “The show starts when I get out of prison for a crime I didn’t commit. But then, I get committed for a crime I didn’t prison.”

They passed.

Hedberg was a writer, whether he wore the label or not. The literary bent was always there—compressed, subtle, and stoned.

“I haven’t slept for ten days. That would be too long.”

“I like rice. It’s great if you’re hungry and want 2,000 of something.”

“I used to play sports. Then I realized you can buy trophies. Now I’m good at everything.”

He died in 2005 of a drug overdose. Thirty-seven. It didn’t feel like a cautionary tale. It felt like losing the weirdest angel at the party.

Twenty years later, no one’s filled the silence he left behind.

“An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You should never see an ‘Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order’ sign, just ‘Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience.’”

Joe Rogan Stops Asking Questions


It’s no longer a question of curiosity. It’s complicity.

Joe Rogan, once a meathead philosopher whose podcast flirted with the conspiratorial fringes, has now blown past the boundary into something far darker: a pipeline for antisemitism, medical disinformation, and revisionist history masquerading as “free thought.” And he’s doing it with a smirk, a shrug, and a platform bigger than any news network in America.

Fifteen million Spotify followers. Hundreds of millions of monthly downloads. And lately, a guest list pulled straight from the sewers of the internet.

Let’s start with Ian Carroll. Presented as a “narrative analyst,” Carroll used his Joe Rogan Experience appearance to claim Jeffrey Epstein was part of a global Jewish crime syndicate, that Israel was founded by mobsters, and—without evidence—that it helped orchestrate 9/11. Rogan didn’t push back. He leaned in.

Then came Darryl Cooper, known to Twitter as @MartyrMade. Cooper isn’t just a conspiracy theorist. He’s a Holocaust revisionist. He paints Hitler as misunderstood, suggests Kristallnacht was a false flag, and frames Nazi antisemitism as a response to Jewish manipulation. On Rogan’s show, Cooper recited this garbage in long, uninterrupted stretches. Rogan listened, nodded, and changed the subject.

As if that wasn’t enough, Rogan gave a two-hour platform to Dr. Suzanne Humphries, a discredited vaccine denialist who argues the polio vaccine caused more harm than the disease itself. Again, no real challenge. Just “fascinating stuff.”

And then Douglas Murray sat across from Rogan last week and called him out—gently. Murray, a conservative British intellectual, warned Rogan he was laundering extremism under the guise of balance. Rogan deflected, of course. He always does. “Just letting people talk,” he says.

But when “just talking” includes giving airtime to people who deny the Holocaust, spread vaccine lies, and blame Jews for global crises, it’s not discourse. It’s propaganda.

Rogan is no longer the stoner Socrates he once pretended to be. He’s a culture-shaping megaphone for disinformation, and he’s playing footsie with fascism while raking in Spotify cash.

This is how rot spreads: not with a bang, but with a bro. With a laugh. With plausible deniability and a Spotify exclusive.

No one man should have this mic if he’s going to use it to whisper poison into millions of ears. But here we are. And he’s only getting louder.