Joe Rogan sees the country sliding toward a “bona fide civil war.”
“Where are we right now on the scale of one to civil war? Where are we?” Rogan asked as he discussed the U.S.’ deepening partisan split on the latest episode of his podcast.
The 58-year-old podcaster argued that swings to extremes are “usually” met with overcorrection, fueling a cycle of escalating tensions.
“It gets scary when there’s like hardcore ideological conflict, because people push back,” he said, before acting out a mock confrontation. “‘You’re gonna call me a b—h? Okay motherf—er, it’s on!’—that’s what people are doing on the left and the right.”
“The ultimate expression of that,” Rogan told his guest Brian Redban, a comedian and former producer for The Joe Rogan Experience, “is obviously Charlie Kirk.”
MAGA activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at a Turning Point USA event in September. Authorities, who have arrested 22-year-old Tyler Robinson as the suspected shooter, found what they described as anti-fascist messages engraved on bullet casings in the rifle used in the shooting. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
“Charlie Kirk gets shot and people are celebrating,” Rogan said. “Like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you want people to die that you disagree with?”
He told Redban that before the right-wing influencer’s assassination in September, he’d pegged America at “four or five” on his “one to civil war” scale.
“But after the Charlie Kirk thing, I’m like, ‘Oh, we might be like seven. This might be, like, step seven on the way to a bona fide civil war,” Rogan declared. “As soon as regular people [start] celebrating somebody getting murdered in front of their wife and kid on television in front of the whole world, as soon as you celebrate that, man you’re in dark territory.”
The UFC commentator, who endorsed President Donald Trump on the eve of the 2024 election, then launched into a bizarre tangent about “high-productivity people that are on amphetamines” who are “so mean.”
Joe Rogan greets President-elect Donald Trump during a UFC event on November 16, 2024. The podcaster had endorsed Trump on the eve of the election. Jett Bottari/Getty Images
Returning to the subject of partisan divisions, he announced, “Nobody knows what’s right. The only way to find out what’s right is you got to talk to people and you listen to their logical arguments about something.”
Rogan had been discussing the scandal engulfing the BBC over a deceptive edit the British public broadcaster made in a documentary about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol.
For all his grand theorizing, Rogan appears to be correct in suggesting that a significant number of Americans are accepting of political violence.
More than one in three Americans under 45 say political violence can be justified, according to a new survey by Politico and independent polling company Public First. The finding cuts across party lines but rises sharply among younger voters.
A wave of political violence preceded Charlie Kirk’s murder, including the murder of Democratic Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in June, the April firebombing of Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro’s residence, the attack on former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi in 2022, the assassination plot against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh that same year, and the Capitol attack in 2021.
