Spotify Joe Rogan.
Is Joe Rogan a Republican? No, the host of the popular “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast is not a Republican, and he’s also not a Democrat. Rogan has said he is a true independent, with some of his beliefs matching up with traditional conservative values and others matching with liberal views. Rogan has often also leaned to the libertarian side.
On a March 2021 podcast episode, Rogan talked about his political views. Rogan told former CIA officer Mike Baker, “I don’t give a f*** if you’re a Republican or a Democrat. I share ideas from both sides. … I’m kind of a hybrid in a lot of ways. … I don’t buy this idea that I have to be a part of one party or another party.”
Rogan previously said in January 2020, “I’ve been liberal my whole life.” During his March 2021 conversation with Baker, Rogan added, “I’m very liberal. I’m socially very liberal.” Rogan added that he is a “big supporter of the military, big supporter of the 2nd amendment.”
Rogan, talking to comedian and progressive political commentator Jimmy Dore, “I’ve never voted right wing in my life. I voted Democrat, I voted independent. I’m not right wing at all. There’s nothing about me that’s right wing. I think there’s a lot of right-wing family values that I admire. But when it gets to homophobia, when it gets to women’s rights, that’s where I break.”
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Rogan Has Been Outspoken Against ‘Cancel Culture’ & ‘Wokeness,’ but Says He Supports Equal Rights for Everybody, ‘but Not at the Expense of Other People’
Rogan has in recent years been outspoken about issues that many see as associated with Republicans, including ranting about “cancel culture” and “wokeness.” Rogan said, “people get a sense of who a person is without actually communicating with them, without being there with them and you can define someone or have this like distorted perspective of who someone is without actually communicating with them.”
During a March 2021 podcast conversation with futurist Jamie Metzl, who is a Democrat and former Clinton administration staffer who also worked for President Joe Biden in the Senate, Rogan said, “We’ve fallen into this very strange situation where we really have two sides of America. We have a left side and a right side. And I don’t understand how it happened this abruptly.” Speaking against polarization, Rogan added, “We just have such a tendency to buy into narratives, I think now more than ever. There’s too much information out there to pay attention to everything, so we find the information that fits our narrative, we lock into it, we hold onto it and we just stick with it and argue against anything that opposes it.”
But Rogan told Baker, “I 100% support gay rights, I 100% support women’s rights, civil rights, trans rights, across the board. But not at the expense of other people.”
Rogan, talking to Dore in 2020, said, “There’s got to be some new action taken to clean up a lot of these crime-ridden communities. The idea we can spend all this money overseas, but we can’t spend money on Flint, Michigan, or Detroit, or the Southside of Chicago, that to me is insane. That doesn’t make any sense. And this idea that we’re all on the same starting page is so f***** stupid too. That is a very non-right-wing way to look at it, because everyone is like, ‘you’ve got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, there’s a lot of people who came out of bad neighborhoods but they didn’t f***** cry woe is me they just went out there and kicked a**.’ That is nonsense.”
Rogan added, “You have no idea what it is like to grow up in a crime-ridden, poverty-infested drug-addled neighborhood. … If we want America better, the best way to start is to clean up all the spots that suck and make people that are coming out of there have a real chance at making something with their lives. Don’t make it so they’re starting out from the time they’re a child with a massive deficit.”
Rogan said he grew up around gay people, hippies and anti-war protesters when his family lived San Francisco from when he was 7 to 12. “I’ve been liberal my whole life,” Rogan said. “I just look like a Republican. I like some violent things, and I have guns and there’s a lot of things that you could make an inference.”
Rogan Says He Voted for the Libertarian Presidential Candidate in 2020 & 2016
During the 2020 presidential election, Rogan first supported former Democratic candidate and then-congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, of Hawaii. He also had Gabbard on his show multiple times. Rogan later endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and had him on his show. Rogan said about Sanders, “I think I’ll probably vote for Bernie. … He’s been insanely consistent his entire life. He’s basically been saying the same thing, been for the same thing his whole life. And that in and of itself is a very powerful structure to operate from.”
When Biden won the Democratic nomination, Rogan created headlines by saying he would rather vote for Trump than Biden. ” can’t vote for that guy. I’d rather vote for Trump than him. I don’t think he can handle anything,” Rogan said. “You’re relying entirely on his cabinet. If you want to talk about an individual leader who can communicate, he can’t do that. And we don’t know what the f*** he’ll be like after a year in office.”
But on Election Day in November, Rogan revealed he had voted for the Libertarian candidate. “I voted Jo Jorgensen,” Rogan said on a livestream. “I knew she didn’t have a shot. Legalizing drugs. I knew California was going to Biden no matter what and I couldn’t. I was looking at the whole thing like ‘what is this?” Rogan previously said he voted for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson in 2016.
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