Blocked and Reported · Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal

Episode 301: Because He Got Raided

March 30, 2026·1 hr 1 min·3 clips

A $6 million lawsuit against Instagram just found a way around the law that protects free speech online.

The anniversary bit starts messy. Jesse has forgotten they were recording, Katie has forgotten the podcast anniversary, and the whole celebration lurches into exactly the kind of six-year marker this show would have. Stuff from the house keeps intruding. A coffee grinder in the next room becomes, absurdly, part of the case file for the hard life of anniversary podcasters. Then they try to pin down when the show actually started. The pilot lands around March 24, after some March 23 confusion, and that may also run into an actual wedding anniversary remembered with about the same confidence. The mood stays loose, but it has teeth. Before Afroman takes over, they wander through the old ritual of calling radio stations and asking a DJ to play a song again. Childhood nostalgia does not stay cute for long. One story about local radio DJs wisely stops after the phrase "someone was arrested." Another memory lands on Smash Mouth. "All Star" becomes a small relic of 1999, before the meme layer took over and before hearing a song again meant anything more complicated than luck or a phone call. Then Afroman becomes the point. The hosts treat him as a huge early-2000s presence who mostly left the mainstream but kept making music on his own. The joke has a real edge. A career built around weed humor can go far, but they are not sure that kind of fame always converts into lasting mainstream attention. The cops change the room. By the end, the hosts are balancing the comedy of the raid story with the fact that the officers are still people. That sympathy only goes so far. Once the officers sue him, the story stops being just embarrassing and starts looking like a free speech problem. The ending stays compact: funny outcome, human caveat, legal line.

As heard by us

Afroman's raid saga gets treated as ridiculous spectacle with a real free speech fight underneath.

Afroman's return to the news gives Blocked and Reported a story that is funny on its face and still sharper than a novelty segment. Katie traces him as an early-2000s weed-rap figure who kept making music after the mainstream moved on, then lands on the 2022 raid and the…

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Why you'd press play

Play if you want an Afroman episode that turns a goofy nostalgia tangent into a real free-speech fight.

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