You keep saying “accountability”. Let’s have the courage to call it what it is, shall we? We’re talking about retribution. Taking a “pound of flesh.” In this case, for a shi**y joke that Rogan made on his podcast nine years ago.

So what is a reasonable retribution for this mistake? Who gets to decide? How are you quantifying the "negative deleterious impact" he caused? Or is this just you projecting your personal feelings onto black people as a whole? Does his apology and the fact that he’s clearly grown up since then figure at all in this? And finally, of course, it goes without saying that if we delved nine years into your past we wouldn’t find a single impeachable comment for which you needed to be “held accountable.” Right?

Also, given that you claim to consider accountability to simply be "the flow of responsibility from your actions", why aren't you satisfied? Rogan apologised, he keeps his podcast and his millions, and everybody will move on to the next news cycle soon enough. This is the responsibility that flowed from his actions in this case. Do you feel satisfied with this? Or is there a particular type of "accountability" that you were hoping for? Is your definition perhaps not entirely honest?

Rogan got famous from working hard at something he wanted to do and turned out to be good at. Same goes for Rowling. Same for Chappelle. Same for Goldberg. This doesn't give members of the public any kind of entitlement to them. They still maintain their personhood and their rights to basic decency. It doesn't stop you from being a stranger to these people. It's a stalker mentality that would claim any differently.

I don't know what point you're trying to make about his subscribers. I wasn't suggesting that he somehow had a small audience now. He lost subscribers when he moved to Spotify originally, because some of his fans don't want to use Spotify and they removed his old episodes from YouTube as part of the exclusivity deal. If he went back to YouTube and just regular, all-platform podcasting, his audience would almost certainly increase. As for him profiting from "racist and scientific muck" I'll ask you if you've ever actually watched an episode of the show or if you're generating all of this hyperbole purely from your imagination.

And yes, framing it as centering “white redemption over black personhood and agency” is literally (in the good old-fashioned sense of the word) zero-sum thinking. Do you think there's any way we can consider people's feelings and allow for the possibility that those who harbour casually racist attitudes can learn and become better human beings? Do you allow for the possibility that you might still have room to become a better person?

Honestly, it’s like talking to a a modern-day puritan. Which I guess is what it is. You’re so star-spangled certain of your moral rectitude that you’re incapable of seeing the hypocrisy.