Rogan blasts Kamala Harris, Tim Walz on First Amendment
Joe Rogan shared an ominous prediction about the state of free speech if Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz win the November election, arguing the Democratic ticket poses a grave threat to the First Amendment.
Rogan offered his thoughts on the troubling trend of censorship in the US in a conversation with former Navy Seal, ex-CIA contractor and podcaster Shawn Ryan in an episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” released Thursday.
“I don’t think it turns around if Kamala Harris gets into office,” Rogan said of the censorship trend, “I think they clamp down more.”
“I think the same stuff they were trying to do with Twitter they’ll try to do with other things,” Rogan added, “They’ve already openly discussed it. She’s openly discussed the same rules have to apply to Facebook have to apply to Twitter. And that Elon Musk could lose his privileges.”
Elon Musk echoed Rogan’s sentiment on X.
The Tesla CEO reposted a clip of the podcast adding the message, “Joe is absolutely right.”
In a 2022 appearance on the podcast, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed to Rogan that the federal government – including members of the FBI – had pressured the social media giant to censor certain content in the lead-up to the 2020 election.
The government influence reached a crescendo following the The Post’s exclusive reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The coverage was infamously censored on both Facebook and X, formerly Twitter.
In 2023, the Twitter Files revealed the extent to which federal employees were influencing content moderators at the social media site – especially the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Rogan, in his Thursday podcast episode, skewered Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
“There’s so many wild things that they’re saying. Tim Walz said that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to misinformation or hate speech. Okay, well it certainly does. It does. People will say things wrong. The goal of the First Amendment is ‘you say something wrong and this guy who is the expert says the right thing’ and then you correct them.”
Walz, in a 2022 appearance on MSNBC’s “The Reid Out” said, “I think we need to push back on this. There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”
Constitutional scholars maintain that “hate speech” is in fact protected by the First Amendment.
Rogan’s criticism of the Harris-Walz ticket comes after the podcaster called out MSNBC for deceptively editing a video to make it appear that he had picked the vice president as the inevitable winner of the election.
The left-leaning outlet spliced together two separate clips – one in which Rogan discussed Harris favorably and another in which the podcaster lauded praise on former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.
“I’m not suing MSNBC,” Rogan said at the outset of an August podcast, “But this is what MSNBC: They took a clip of me talking about Tulsi Gabbard and they edited it up and made it look like I was saying great things about Kamala Harris.”
Rogan added of MSNBC, “But they don’t care about the truth. They just want a narrative to get out there amongst enough people because more people are just surface readers.”
Rogan has yet to endorse a political candidate for president in the 2024 election.