Joe Rogan: Dangerous Moron

There’s a point at which ignorance ceases to be harmless. It metastasizes—becoming something else entirely: a vector for poison, a carrier of rot. Joe Rogan, with his army of millions and his faux-everyman charm, has crossed that line.

In a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Rogan hosted Douglas Murray and comedian-turned-libertarian-commentator Dave Smith. What unfolded was not a battle of ideas, but a confederacy of dunces masquerading as philosophers. Smith, armed with Wikipedia-level history and a smug self-assurance, made a series of shallow and conspiratorial claims about COVID, geopolitics, and American imperialism. Rogan, as ever, nodded along. He is no interrogator. He is not a host of challenging conversations. He is a man lost in the fog of his own false moderation, intoxicated by contrarianism, and increasingly unable to distinguish bold thought from dangerous fantasy.

Douglas Murray, by contrast, is educated, thoughtful, and capable of nuance. While you may disagree with his conclusions, Murray’s arguments are grounded in history, literature, and serious moral reflection. He’s not interested in shock value or performance; he’s interested in truth—or at least in pursuing it earnestly. And it was Murray, notably, who had the clarity to confront Rogan on air. He challenged the podcaster’s lazy habit of platforming fringe theorists and cranks under the guise of “just asking questions.” But Rogan is not just asking questions. He’s offering legitimacy—co-signing, by platform and passivity, the toxic ideas of his guests.

Sam Harris, once a regular guest and sometime ally, echoed Murray’s concerns in a recent podcast of his own. “He’s in over his head on so many topics of great consequence,” Harris said. “The problem isn’t the conversation—it’s the lack of consequence.”

But if that were the extent of the problem, we might shrug and say: caveat emptor. Let the listener beware. Yet Rogan has taken things further, deeper into the pit. Recently, he featured Darryl Cooper—a man widely accused of Holocaust revisionism—on his show. Cooper’s narrative included the jaw-dropping suggestion that Adolf Hitler’s antisemitism was “understandable,” born of trauma and hardship. He implied that Hitler’s hate was a warped kind of love for the German people. This is not nuance. This is propaganda with an academic accent.

Rogan responded not with revulsion, not even with skepticism, but with admiration. He called Cooper’s views “valuable” and lamented what he described as an overreaction to antisemitism. Let that sink in. A man who reaches more Americans than most media networks is now downplaying antisemitism while giving Holocaust revisionists a warm seat and a long leash.

This is not a slip. This is not an accident. This is what happens when the pursuit of “interesting conversations” becomes untethered from moral responsibility. Rogan likes to pretend he’s a simple guy—just a dude with a mic and a curious mind. But simple guys with massive platforms and no editorial filter aren’t harmless. They’re dangerous.

Ideas shape people. They make them act, vote, protest, riot. And in an age when trust in traditional institutions has collapsed, voices like Rogan’s aren’t peripheral—they’re central. He is, for better or worse, a pillar of modern media. Which means when he gives oxygen to Holocaust deniers, conspiracy theorists, or meandering pseudo-intellectuals like Dave Smith, he isn’t just indulging free speech. He’s feeding the beast.

Rogan may not see himself as dangerous. That’s what makes him so. A man with no brakes cannot tell when the cliff is near. A moron with a megaphone becomes, not a fool, but a force. And when that force aligns itself with revisionist history and reckless pseudoscience, it ceases to be merely foolish. It becomes a threat.

The time for giving Joe Rogan the benefit of the doubt has passed. He is no longer an affable outsider poking holes in mainstream narratives. He is the mainstream. And he is helping to burn the house down from the inside.

Dangerous morons don’t wear warning labels. Sometimes they wear UFC hoodies, speak in dulcet tones, and chuckle their way through the decline of reason.