This article appears as part of the Unspun: Scottish Politics newsletter.

Only the psychopathic or sadistic could remain untroubled by the depths to which the hard-right politician Rupert Lowe sank when he appeared on the lumpen podcast The Joe Rogan Experience.

For the rest of us, it was a stomach-churning display: a sneering extremist toff debasing the memory of the 16 schoolchildren and their teacher murdered at Dunblane whilst a man cosplaying as a journalist nodded along.

The guest, like the host, is a shabby, nihilistic disgrace. But there’s more to this than offence, shock, shame and disgust.

The Lowe/Rogan double-act speaks directly to the disintegration of both the media and politics. 

Hand-in-hand these two pillars of democracy have crumbled this last decade, so quickly that it’s been hard to chart the collapse at times.

Joe Rogan is a ‘comedian’ and fight commentator. Rogan is, as some would say in the American heartland, a knucklehead. He is unfit to be a journalist, just as any journalist I know is unfit to get in the ring.

But in the 2020s, it doesn’t matter if you’re an idiot. What matters is clicks. And what makes clicks? Outrage. The business model is simple.

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Until Rogan helped propel Donald Trump into the White House by providing him with a platform to preach to America’s........

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