Joe Rogan, who endorsed Trump and cheers his administration, complains about Media Matters’ study that labeled him right-leaning
Rogan says he supports Trump, but claims his positions are “way more ... left-wing than right-wing” and says he supports “having some sort of a social safety net” and “healthcare 100% should be socially funded”
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Citation
From the March 21, 2025, edition of The Joe Rogan Experience
JOE ROGAN (HOST): There was some really fucking stupid graph that someone put up of how right-wing social media and new media people dominated —
CHRIS WILLIAMSON (PODCASTER): That was the Media Matters study. Yeah —
ROGAN: Yeah.
WILLIAMSON: This is interesting. Jamie, can you [UNINTELLIGIBLE] —
ROGAN: I was at the top of the list. I was at the top of the list and I was like, I feel like the way Caitlyn Jenner must have felt like when she won woman of the year. Like, it's so quick I got to the top of the list. I'm not even right-wing. Just because I support Trump. I supported him over the rest of the fucking nonsense that was going on when you're trying to push through someone without even a primary.
WILLIAMSON: There it is.
ROGAN: This is it. I'm number one, bitch. It's kind of funny.
...
WILLIAMSON: What do you think of the — if you go to proposed reason for why this — is it just a judgment criteria, that they're judging shows that aren't right-wing as right-wing? Or is it genuinely that for some reason the left is struggling to make progress in independent media?
ROGAN: Well, they're struggling to make progress in independent media, for sure. They're trying to figure out why. They're trying to figure out why these, what they are calling right-wing — I think if you looked at all my positions, I think way more of them are left-wing than right-wing.
WILLIAMSON: What are the left-wing positions that you still hold?
ROGAN: Well, the big one is having some sort of a social safety net. I was on welfare when I was a kid. My family was on food stamps. We were fucking poor as shit and I remember that helping us a lot. We had food, where I don't know what we would be doing if we — I mean, we were in a bad place, and there's social safety nets for people. My family got out of that, and my stepfather and my mother wound up doing well. They did really great, and they they got out of debt and bought a house and great job and the whole deal. But when I was a little boy, we were fucked. And I think social safety nets are very important for people. It's very important for society. If you care about people, you care about the whole society, you don't want people starving when there's ways to develop government programs to make sure people have food. And I think that's — this idea of pull them up by their bootstraps is horseshit. Some people don't have boots. They don't have straps. They don't have nothing. They're fucked. They're fucked from the moment they were born. They were born into a bad family environment in a bad neighborhood and crime and gangs and drugs and it's not even playing field.
WILLIAMSON: Where are you at with healthcare?
ROGAN: I think healthcare 100% should be socially funded. I think that Medicare and Medicaid, having programs where people who are hurt can get an operation and it's not going to bankrupt them for the the rest of their life, is another thing that I think society should be — it should be a part of our agreement to take care of each other as a community, that we chip in money for what people would think of as socialist positions. And I always bring up the fire department because the fire department is one of the best examples that everybody sort of agrees. It's a socialist sort of thing. You give your tax dollars, the tax dollar supports the fire department, the fire department fairly puts out fires for everybody. They don't not put out your fire if you don't have any money.
WILLIAMSON: They don't discriminate —
ROGAN: It's not like they don't, the fires don't —
WILLIAMSON: It's such a good example, but when you compare that to the way that medical access is done, at least in this country.
ROGAN: Yeah.
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ROGAN: But there's also a lot of very good doctors who would be very happy to do something that helps the overall greater good of the community. Just like you have really good criminal defense attorneys that are, you know, assigned to you if you're, you know, if you're getting unjustly tried and you want a really good one that can help you. You know, there's state-appointed attorneys that are just good people that want to help people.
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I mean, there's nothing wrong with giving people health care. Like, if you know anybody that's been injured and was bankrupt because they didn't have insurance, and then they had to get some crazy operation and now they have this enormous debt and they wind up going bankrupt or they're getting chased down for the money for the rest of their life. It's horrible.
WILLIAMSON: It's the number one cause of bankruptcy in America: medical debt.
ROGAN: Yeah.
WILLIAMSON: I mean, coming from the U.K., where we've got the NHS, it feels fucking barbaric.
ROGAN: It is a little barbaric.
WILLIAMSON: It really does feel barbaric.