Luongo: And The Rock Cried Out, You Can’t Hide From Yourself

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

“There’s no hiding place down here,
There’s no hiding place down here,
Oh I ran to the rock to hide my face
The rock cried out, ‘No hiding place’
No hiding place down here.”

— TRADITIONAL GOSPEL SONG

It seems there’s a whole lotta hidin’ goin’ on out there, folks. While I’d like to spend a thousand words chronicling my disappointment with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson for his hypocrisy over the Joe Rogan controversy, that would miss so much of the point.

Not that Dwayne doesn’t deserve our derision for abandoning Rogan. He does. For a guy who’s built his persona around embracing everything that came before, good or bad, watching him reconsider his friendship with Rogan publicly is the ultimate betrayal of that carefully crafted persona.

Respect is hard to earn and very, very easy to lose.

Especially since it took the internet all of five minutes to dig up performances as “The Rock” which are cringe-worthy by any recent standard and him deleting tweets which were, by his own standard today, unacceptable.

So, how many rocks do you have to hide behind in your glass mansion, Dwayne?

But, again, this article isn’t about Dwayne’s flirtations with mendacity. I could literally give zero shits about his past, even though what he did as The Rock in the ring was far more venal and debasing to himself and his audience than anything Joe Rogan ever said on his podcast about black people.

Because there are no good guys in this scenario. Johnson should have stuck by Rogan. Rogan shouldn’t have apologized.

Everyone is making mistakes left and right and it will cost them more than millions of dollars.

Casting Stones

But it wasn’t because Rogan used the word that rhymes with bigger in honest inquisitions on racism and the fearlessness of those comics who blazed a trail before him.

It was because he vastly underestimated the scope and scale of the operation being run on him.

Rogan handled the initial onslaught well. As Jordan Peterson pointed out a few days ago:

That was early last week. But then the next hammer dropped. He committed the unforgiveable sin.

He apologized.

Joe caved to the pressure. His self-image and basic decency was cynically used against him to get that apology for being a successful white guy who doesn’t know his subordinate place in the new order.

This is both a strategical and tactical error on his part that will hurt him more than Peterson sees here. Because they won’t stop until he’s destroyed, now that he’s given them something to throw at him. They know his weakness now.

I’m sure that Rogan thought, “I’ll just tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may.” That is consistent with his personality and his persona, since they are one and the same, unlike apparently Dwayne.

Never Give Up, Never Apologize

But there’s no hiding from the mob, especially an unforgiving mob obsessed with power and the need to take Joe Rogan down now that he nearly single-handedly destroyed the COVID-19 vaccine narrative with the truth and a couple of podcasts.

It’s easy for those behind this targeted smear campaign to gin up some fake outrage which empowers the false virtue of their cult members to attack Rogan and Spotify. When all you believe in is power, when humanity is nothing but a wall to project your own self-loathing onto, then there are no restraints on your behavior.

My intuition here is that this is not just Davos at work, but specifically this bus is being driven by Obama, who pulls the strings of the Biden administration and who, it looks like, has now corrupted Dwayne Johnson since Dwayne’s being courted as the Democrats’ 2024 savior.

(and I’m happy to have Dwayne disabuse me of this accusation)

One only has to look at the arc of Johnson’s character in the latter seasons of Ballers to see where he’s personally headed: to take on the “old boy’s club of the NFL (Wall St.) and be a champion of the people.” If there was ever a job interview masquerading as entertainment you couldn’t have asked for a better example. (Again come at me bro! mahalo!)

The difference between these two guys couldn’t be clearer. Johnson was chosen by the Old Boys’ Club while still thinking he’s the one making the choice to be a leader of the people.

On the other hand, Rogan was chosen by the people to be their proxy for keeping the lights on in the cave, screwing up the shadow play on the wall so they can make up their own minds.

Leaders are Made, Not Born

And while Joe can deny that responsibility, or more importantly, refuse to play the game, the game came to him when he signed a $100 million contract with Spotify last year.

I told you then that he blew up the Death Star with that contract. He moved off YouTube and gave his content to Spotify to distribute, validating them and providing a counterpoint to Apple, Amazon and everyone else.

But he had to know spitting in their eye repeatedly would bring the hammer down.

Joe Rogan has now told the entire country that he’s had enough. And we needed someone like Joe to do this.

That said, Rogan is only one half of the story, however. Because at the same time, one of these platforms needed to break away from the herd and welcome the dissenters.

For Spotify, Joe Rogan is the ‘killer app’ they needed to differentiate themselves as non-partisan and begin the exodus away from the big platforms who have become nothing but partisan.

I don’t know if the board at Spotify know what they’ve just unleashed but they better realize it quick. They’re Echo Base and the walkers will be landing real soon now

And this is why Rogan’s apology is so damning. He had the world ready to follow him. But he did the one thing you can never do in this Age of Rage, apologize to them for who you were or who you are.

If they can’t handle all of you then they can’t have any of you.

So, Joe, I know you feel terrible about this, but why? No one owns any word. Words are not violence if they aren’t meant that way. Anyone who thinks that is the one with the problem.

No matter how big your voice, you can’t be responsible for people’s reactions. Their emotions are their own to process. And if they choose to process them as temper tantrums on Twitter or Instagram then let their actions be their judge.

You gained my respect speaking honestly. You lost it, apologizing because that honesty hurt the feelings of people who already despise you.

A Race Already Run

The truth is that this was a fight lost two generations ago when it became verboten for white people to use that word out of deference to try and heal a real divide within society.

It was an apology for a past that many of us did not engage in nor are proud of. But, it was never about that. It was always the camel’s nose under the tent. Political correctness and self-censorship are the very essence of totalitarianism. It is Marxist power theory 101.

But, where does it end? Should I, as a second-generation Italian immigrant (with black curly hair when I had any and a dark complexion), be held accountable for U.S. slavery which ended legally 40 years before my grandparents fled their homeland’s poverty for a better life in Brooklyn and Queens?

That apology then has grown into the virus we have today, where everyone left of Karl Marx is a fascist and we’re taking our societal cues (this week) from the people who believe men can have babies.

It’s not just that we shouldn’t apologize for who we aren’t but that apologies based on any kind of collective identity is antithetical to civil society. Joe Rogan knows that. Dwayne Johnson was supposed to know that.

Joe. You apologized to people without shame or conscience.

And what is missing in all of this frustration and fake outrage is that everyone, all of us, are being played for even reacting to this nonsense in the first place.

Keep on Truckin’

Controversies like this are meant to drive a reaction, to grant legitimacy to a non-issue and give people a chance to be self-righteous. The NPC’s screaming for Rogan’s censorship refuse to admit they are just pawns in Davos’ ugly game of division while the #ungovernables are disappointed that Rogan didn’t rise to the occasion and give them a little more courage.

Ultimately, though, none of this Rogan nonsense matters. I would have loved for Joe to stand tall, but he didn’t. He’s to be commended for taking the ball this far.

Because while Obama and Davos were busy attacking a podcaster for being a bigger-man than anyone in the dying media space, Canada’s truckers provided that leadership to the world.

And that has truly lit the fire of resistance in a way that Rogan standing up to false accusations of racism cannot douse.

Canada’s truckers are not domestic terrorists or white supremacists or menaces to society. They are simply people who have no other options left given that Davos’ lil’ buddy, Prime Minister Justin “Blackface” Trudeau has mandated, extra-constitutionally, a two-tiered society that even his RCMP personal guard cannot abide.

There is no amount of fake sincerity for the well being of the people you govern that can cover the naked authoritarianism of cretins like Trudeau. The ‘Freedom Convoy’ was en route for days and what does he do the moment the trucks show up in Ottawa?

He runs into hiding while leaving his civil servicemen to deal with the problem. It isn’t just that Trudeau is a venal little prick who can’t stand tall and lead his cadre of government thugs into battle against a bunch of peaceful protestors. I’d almost respect him for that.

If you act on beliefs that strongly and can lead men to action, that counts for something. But leading from behind the shadows is the most shameful act of all. Joe Rogan’s mistake was not grasping leadership when it was presented to him.

Trudeau’s mistake was in accepting the leadership in the first place when he wasn’t strong enough to wear the crown when things went a little off script.

Now the City of Ottawa and the “laptop set” are angry they can’t get a good night’s sleep after they took away the rights of people whose only crime was not obeying an unlawful edict from a over-reaching government.

You can’t take everything away from someone and expect them not to react to it. These people have had their lives ripped from them and you can’t sleep because their honking their horns?

How about trying to listen to them as opposed to acting like you have the right to tell them to shut up?

Trudeau can hide from the truckers but he can’t hide from us. He can talk down to them (and us) all he wants but he stands naked (shudder) in the light of something far worse than The Rock’s weakness, his lack of shame.

No matter how many jerrycans of diesel fuel the cops confiscate, or millions of dollars GoFundMe steals or traffic citations issued, what’s happening in Ottawa is beyond their control.

This is the real issue, not The Rock’s 10-year-old transphobic tweets or Joe Rogan triggering a bunch of self-obsessed ninnies. The real issue is that we see them for what they are and now that they’ve crossed the line their legitimacy is gone.

The truckers in Ottawa have already moved far past just lifting the vaccine mandates or anything having to do with COVID-19 restrictions.

They want Justin Trudeau’s government to resign. They want the globalist shills that infect the upper echelons of all the major Canadian parties unemployed like they are. After all, fair is fair, right?

They’ve already gotten one scalp, Conservative leader Erin O’Toole. The only move left for Trudeau is violence.

And they’ve done something Joe Rogan wasn’t willing to do, inspire people to get past the fear of losing something in order to truly gain something the Trudeaus and the Obamas of the world don’t want them to ever have, their self-respect.

I can only hope that the police and military there see this for what it is, an opportunity to stop hiding behind their badges and their ‘duty’ and remember who they remember themselves being.

The truckers have done the heavy lifting. They lifted rocks. Now it’s time to move mountains.

*  *  *

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