But his contrarian tendencies lead him to embrace and toy with lots of ideas, including those from the fringe.

Rather than simply and easily slotting into a box labeled “conservative,” “liberal,” or even “ reactionary,” he mainly holds both the far right and the far left in contempt depending on which day you check in, he’s either a left-leaning centrist or a right-leaning libertarian. In fact, one of the things that makes Joe Rogan so popular among his millions of fans is that his politics are so difficult to pin down. It’s not even easy to peg the podcaster, who famously endorsed progressive candidate Bernie Sanders in the 2020 election (before anti-endorsing Biden), as right-wing.

He also can’t be easily pigeonholed as an anti-science bigot, despite having made misogynistic, anti-feminist, fatphobic, homophobic, transphobic, and anti-vax statements. These things seem like the hallmarks of a far-right ideologue, but Rogan, who called Barack Obama the “best president we have had in our lifetime,” can’t easily be pigeonholed as racist. Then a jaw-dropping compilation video of Rogan saying the n-word 24 times in his 12 years hosting the podcast surfaced.

First, hundreds of health experts complained that he was frequently spreading Covid-19 misinformation through his massively popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. 2022 has not started off well for Joe Rogan - even before the headline-grabbing Spotify controversy that has made him a perhaps unwitting figurehead for extremist rhetoric.

Joe rogan on spotify