Joe Rogan implored listeners of his popular podcast to “vote Republican” after what he and guest Aaron Rodgers deemed were “serious errors” made by Democratic leaders in handling the Covid-19 pandemic.
The remarks from the TV-personality-turned-podcast host arrived after a Saturday episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Spotify’s most popular show, was released over the weekend with guest Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers.
“I hope there’s lessons learned in this because this is a new thing,” Mr Rogan said, before the pair entered into a tirade against lockdown measures and Covid-19 policies which were largely enforced in Democrat-led states, zeroing in at one point on the efforts made by California’s Governor Gavin Newsom.
“We had never had this before. No one that was alive today had ever experienced a true pandemic and I’m hoping that now that this is over, people are going to recognise that some serious errors were made and not repeat those.”
Mr Rogan then turned the conversation to the people who were forced to close shop “and lost everything they had worked for decades to build”, assuming that all of these individuals were “going to be angry”.
“So what do you tell those people?” the professional football player asked the host, to which Mr Rogan responded without seeming to give much pause for thought: “Vote Republican.”
“That’s what a lot of them are going to do,” he added.
Both Mr Rogan and Mr Rodgers are not stranges to courting controversy when it comes to questioning elected officials’ pandemic-related policies.
For Mr Rogan, that presented itself as a major blowback from within his podcast’s hosting platform when he was accused of helping spread Covid-19 misinformation.
This came to a flashpoint after a December 2021 episode aired where Mr Rogan hosted a scientist who worked on early research into the mRNA technology, but who is now critical of the vaccines and made false and baseless claims that getting the Covid-19 vaccine would put people who have had the virus already at a higher risk.
This led to several prominent scientists, doctors and members from within the scientific community penning a letter that urged the streaming platform to crack down on misinformation being spread on its podcasts, and boiled over to even include musicians like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell both asking for their music to be removed from the platform.
Mr Rodgers drew controversy around the Covid-19 vaccines similarly last year after the Green Bay Packers star missed a game last season after testing positive for the virus, just a few months after he’d told the media that he’d been “immunised”.
The 38-year-old quarterback addressed the incident over his vaccination status on Mr Rogan’s podcast last week, admitting that his comments had indeed been purposefully misleading.
“I’d been ready the entire time for this question and had thought about how I wanted to answer it. And I had come to the conclusion I’m going to say: ‘I’ve been immunised.’ And if there’s a follow-up, then talk about my process,” the four-time NFL Most Valuable Player explained to Mr Rogan.
“But, I thought there’s a possibility that I say ‘I’m immunised,’ maybe they understand what that means, maybe they don’t. Maybe, they follow up. They didn’t follow up. So then I go into the season them thinking – some of them – that I was vaccinated.”
In addition to addressing Mr Rodgers’ vaccine history, the pair continued to prop up Republican figures response to the pandemic, specifically narrowing in on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s lax policies.
“You look at guys like Ron DeSantis, who kept Florida open and had some pretty reasonable policies in terms of what to do about Covid,” Mr Rogan said. “He mapped it out on television. He was widely criticised for this.”
The podcasting giant also cited an Associated Press article that had discussed how 1 million voters throughout 43 of the country’s states had changed party affiliations in the past year.
Mr Rogan, who has previously expressed enthusiasm for the Republican Florida governor running in the 2024 presidential election, has avowedly avoided being labelled a supporter of the GOP’s current frontrunner, former President Donald Trump.
“I’m not a Trump supporter in any way, shape or form. I’ve had the opportunity to have him on my show more than once — I’ve said no, every time. I don’t want to help him. I’m not interested in helping him,” said Mr Rogan in a recent episode of Lex Fridman’s podcast.
