QUESTION ASKED: Did Douglas Murray break Joe Rogan?

Who gets to call themselves an expert? That’s the big question featured in a bruising episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, in which Rogan hosts The Spectator’s Douglas Murray and the libertarian comedian Dave Smith. Murray accuses Rogan of opening “the door to quite a lot of people who’ve now got a big platform, who’ve been throwing out counter-historical stuff of a very dangerous kind.”

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Murray also comes after Smith, who self-identifies as both a libertarian commentator and a comedian – monikers that other libertarians and other comedians would contest. Murray is aghast when he learns that Smith has never been to the Middle East. “You can’t time-travel but you can travel,” he says, after Smith points out that he’s not “been to Nazi Germany” either. “If you’re going to spend a year and a half talking about a place, you should at least do the courtesy of visiting it… I think it’s a good idea to see stuff, particularly if you spend a career talking about something. If you’re insistent that you’re an expert of some kind, or not claiming you’re an expert but still talking about it, about the provisions going into Gaza or not, if you’ve never seen any of this going on.”

I don’t agree that you have to physically visit an area to opine on it, but it certainly seems like quite a Kinsley gaffe for Smith to seemingly equate Israel with Nazi Germany.