Here Is Seth Rogen’s RFK Jr. Joke That Mark Zuckerberg Censored From the Breakthrough Prize Livestream
The international award ceremony that controversial tech mogul Mark Zuckerberg co-founded with his billionaire buddies just censored Seth Rogen like they’re our Health and Human Services Secretary covering up measles cases.
Back on April 5th, the comedy film giant and star/creator of The Studio was one of numerous A-list entertainers to participate in the annual Breakthrough Prize ceremony where Zuckerberg, Russian-Israeli entrepreneur Yuri Milner and Google co-founder Sergey Brin honor the greatest scientific advancements of the past year. This year, the Breakthrough Prize’s billionaire co-founders find themselves in the awkward position of simultaneously cozying up to the blatantly anti-science Trump Administration while pretending to champion the advancement of life sciences, a contradiction that became painfully obvious when they uploaded the politically edited livestream of the event earlier this week.
While presenting a special Breakthrough Prize to Dutch theoretical physicist Gerardus ’t Hooft alongside Edward Norton, Rogen pointed out the hypocrisy of the event’s founders, commenting, “It’s amazing that others in this room underwrote electing a man who, in the last week, single-handedly destroyed all of American science.”
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“It’s amazing how much good science you can destroy with $320 million and RFK Jr. very fast,” Rogen added — and, just like that, he found himself unfriended.
Following Rogen’s not-so-veiled criticism of the event’s politically opportunistic co-founders, the official Breakthrough Prize YouTube account edited his “jabs” at the tech moguls’ continued support of a regime that gutted federal science funding and put an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist in charge of public health against the urging of 75 Nobel Laureates out of the livestream recording before posting it online. Even the clip of Rogen and Norton presenting the award, shown above, contains no mention of the HHS Secretary who continues to defy overwhelming scientific consensus on topics such as vaccines and autism.
In a laughably mendacious and completely cowardly statement for The Hollywood Reporter, a spokesperson for the Breakthrough Prize Foundation claimed of the decision to cut Rogen’s critical comments out of all official recordings, “This year’s ceremony lasted longer than the prior few years, and several edits were made in order to meet the originally planned run time.”
Considering that the Breakthrough Prize ceremony was a livestream and the internet famously doesn’t have time slots like TV, this excuse doesn’t hold up to a single ounce of scientific skepticism.
Additionally, if the move to edit out Rogen’s defense of American science from the science prize ceremony’s livestream really was an issue of runtime, why, then, did the Breakthrough Prize Foundation also censor Rogen in the sub-five-minute clip of him and Norton presenting the award to Hooft?
It would be marginally more respectable if Zuckerberg and his cronies stuck to their guns and admitted that they cut Rogen’s unexpected outburst to maintain the guise of apoliticality. But to surreptitiously cut a comment calling out your hypocrisy is almost as bad as secretly cutting your CFO out of Facebook.
