Joe Rogan said that what it means to be a liberal has changed, arguing that the term had come to be all about “people that want censorship,” “people that are intolerant of other people’s ideas,” and more.
During “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast on Tuesday, Rogan spoke to his guest MMA fighter Jake Shields, and Rogan definitely sounded like he was unsure exactly what group he belonged in anymore because he said he had identified his whole life as a liberal. He explained that being liberal now means thinking it’s “fine to insult people and to be like really aggressive” to them. It starts at the 1:27:16 minute mark here.
Shields agreed and said the “current liberals have turned really weird.” He explained he doesn’t consider himself “conservative still” but instead independent because he said these “parties they do things” he just can’t associate with.
“They seem a lot more intolerant,” Shields said.
“My parents were hippies,” Rogan explained. “It’s like there’s a difference between what liberal meant then and what it includes now. It includes now people that want military action. It includes now people that want censorship.”
“It includes now people that are intolerant to other people’s ideas,” he added. “And people that think it’s fine to insult people and to be like really aggressive and sh***y to people online.”
Shields interjected and said they appeared to believe it was acceptable to “physically attack” a person too. He said he first started following politics after a visit to Berkeley, California, recalling that “antifa were there…beating people up” over Milo Yiannopoulos’ speech.
Rogan said during former President Donald Trump’s time in office, “antifa” and militant activists were “tolerated by people on the left” — and he added that at times they had seemed to be the “thug branch of the left.”
Later in the show, the host swung back around to the topic and pointed out another crazy thing these “lefties” wanted — to “defund the police.” Rogan referred to calls to defund police as something “white liberals” thought was “cute to say.” It starts at the 1:30:10 minute mark.
“That’s the thing too, right, all this defund the police thing,” Rogan shared, noting the rise in crime in response. “That was one of the weird things about lefties, is that all of the sudden they wanted to defund the police. I was like, what are you talking about?”
“It was also a lot of white liberals, it was a cute thing to say,” he added after his guest said it was Black Lives Matter that was really pushing that narrative. “They wanted to say ‘defund the police.'”