Joe Rogan Is What Happens When Confidence Replaces Thinking

The good news is that anti-intellectualism has never been unbeatable.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.

We are past the point of giving Joe Rogan the benefit of the doubt. At this point in the summer of 2026, the only intellectually honest way to listen to the man is to assume going in that he is an idiot, and let him prove you wrong if he can. This isn’t a take born out of one bad week. It’s the conclusion of an entire summer of watching him flip his own positions faster than a judge changes a scorecard, and it’s the only theory that actually accounts for everything that follows.

This isn’t new behavior, either. Go back to election night 2024, when Rogan posted on X that Elon Musk made the most compelling case for Trump he’d ever heard and called it, in his own words, an outright endorsement. Within days he was photographed embracing the president-elect at a UFC card at Madison Square Garden, and not long after that, he was in the crowd at the inauguration. Endorse, embrace, attend, repeat. That arc used to take him weeks. By this summer he could run the whole cycle in about seventy-two hours.

In February, he was already calling Trump’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files crazy, asking out loud why the administration seemed so determined to protect people connected to a dead sex offender.

Somewhere along the way, “I haven’t thought this through” got rebranded as intellectual courage. Contradicting yourself every seventy-two hours became evidence of open-mindedness. Getting duped by the same conspiracy theory for the fifth time became proof that you’re asking the hard questions.

By March, he was telling journalist Michael Shellenberger that the war in Iran doesn’t make any sense, that the bombing campaign felt so insane based on what Trump actually ran on, which was an end to exactly this kind of endless war.

By late May he had moved on to ripping the plan to host a UFC card on the White House lawn for Trump’s eightieth birthday, calling the whole idea odd and telling Trump through the microphone to build a roof if he had the money for it, grumbling about bugs and humidity loud enough that you’d think he’d talked himself out of attending. Then, within that same week, he reversed completely, mocking the people losing their minds over the very same event and declaring there was no more American thing than a cage match on the White House lawn.

Then came the week that should embarrass him most, because the entire arc happened in seventy-two hours in front of an audience numbering in the tens of millions. On Friday, June 12, Rogan told outdoorsman Cameron Hanes that we’re all pissed, airing grievances about Trump’s second non-consecutive term that ranged from redacted Epstein files to unanswered questions about the Kennedy and Charlie Kirk assassinations to a war in Iran he said never should have escalated a second time. He even suggested Trump should stick to UFC rather than basketball, after Trump got booed during the Knicks’ playoff run.

Two days later, on Trump’s eightieth birthday, Rogan was ringside at UFC Freedom 250 on the White House South Lawn, calling it the greatest night in the history of combat sports. When fighter Josh Hokit grabbed the microphone after his win and told the crowd Michelle Obama is a man, Rogan’s entire response was, “Ladies and gentlemen, Josh Hokit,” and the broadcast rolled on as if nothing had happened.

By Wednesday, three days after that, he was back on his own show telling critics of the event to shut the fuck up, insisting the whole thing was nonpartisan, apparently forgetting he had dismissed the same event as nothing more than a publicity stunt on his other show only months earlier.

So what the hell is actually going on here? Either the man genuinely cannot make up his mind from one Friday to the next, or he lost track of who, exactly, he is grifting. Pick whichever explanation comforts you more. Neither one is flattering, and by the end of this piece, I don’t think it will matter which one you land on, because both versions describe a man whose outrage and whose contrition should be taken equally unseriously.