Podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan is getting slammed after viewers of his Burn the Boats Netflix standup special couldn't help but call out his "unfunny" attempt at appealing to conservatives with jokes mocking transgender people and COVID-19 vaccines.
The jokes themselves are all the more egregious given Rogan has became the focus of a Spotify controversy after multiple artists threatened to cancel their contracts over his podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, which they said was spreading false information about vaccines.
He has also been criticized for platforming white nationalists and conspiracy theorists, including far-right transphobes like Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire, who once claimed on Rogan's show that "millions" of young children are on hormone blockers even though only a few thousand children in the United States have been placed on puberty blockers within the last five years.
At one point during his special, Rogan criticized transgender representation, suggesting the community has been accepted too quickly for comfort:
“I’m open-minded. I just want to know what happened. It’s almost like a pervert wizard waved a magic spell on the whole world. With a wave of this wand, you can walk into the women’s locker room with a hard c*ck and anybody who complains is a Nazi.”
“And everyone just accepts this new reality, and it’s fucking weird. I just think we need standards. You can’t just put lipstick on and now you can shit in the women’s room!”
Oddly, Rogan went on to say that he does "believe" in transgender people and that they have the "right as an adult to do whatever you want that makes you happy." However, he later joked that he does "believe in crazy people!" He later said he doesn't "want to be surrounded by" gay men in particular.
He also lashed out at critics who've accused him of promoting COVID-19 vaccine information, saying:
“If you’re getting your vaccine advice from me, is that really my fault?”
“After COVID, I’m like, ‘I don’t think we went to the moon. I think Michelle Obama’s got a d**k. I think Pizzagate is real. I think there’s direct energy weapons in Antarctica.’ I’m just kidding — I don’t think Michelle Obama’s got a d**k, but I believe all of that other s**t.”
You can hear what he said in the video below.
Rogan was harshly criticized.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rogan hasn't limited his vaccine conspiracies to COVID-19.
In 2022, he came under fire after tweeting a false story claiming that Ivermectin, a toxic anti-parasitic used to treat parasitic worms, lice, and skin problems mostly in livestock, was shown to be effective against COVID-19's Omicron variant in a Phase III clinical trial. Rogan, who had mere hours earlier apologized for spreading misinformation about COVID-19, later deleted the tweet.
Adding to the litany of controversy that's surrounded Rogan since he became a conservative darling, that same year he was swiftly called out after a compilation video of him saying the N-word more than two dozen times went viral. Rogan, of course, insisted that his words were "taken out of context."
Rogan claimed he's "not racist," though critics might beg to differ considering the members of the far-right, many of them quite openly racist, he's featured on his program.
@LeeMerrittesq/X
@bob_moss/X
@jelanijones/Bluesky
@Aurkayne/X
@sadcommunistdog; @froglok/Bluesky