Joe Rogan spent years telling anyone who would listen that Bernie Sanders was the only Democrat worth a damn.
That loyalty just hit a wall.
And what Rogan said about the Vermont senator on his own show will leave a lot of former Bernie Bros stunned into silence.
Rogan Says The Democratic Establishment Ran Sanders Over
Joe Rogan used to be one of Bernie Sanders’ loudest media allies, and he never hid it.
Rogan recalled telling someone on his podcast that if he was going to vote for anybody, he would probably vote for Bernie, calling him the one who makes the most sense and the only guy who is anti-war and wants to take a small amount of money from stock market speculation to fund social programs.
He said, “I’m like, ‘let’s see!'”
But that admiration soured fast once Sanders folded and threw his support behind Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democrat primary.
Rogan said he was turned off by Sanders backing Clinton as the Democrat nominee in 2016, following his strong showing in the primaries.
For context, Clinton won about 4 million more votes than Sanders in the primaries and had the support of the vast majority of superdelegates, though that establishment math never sat right with the millions of voters who felt Sanders got steamrolled anyway.
Rogan didn’t soften it when he circled back to the topic recently.
“This was a long time ago, I don’t necessarily think that I would feel the same way anymore about him,” Rogan explained, adding that “one of the reasons being he kind of gave into the Democratic Establishment, he let them run him over during that whole thing with Hillary where they rigged the primary.”
He went further, laying out exactly where he thinks Sanders should have fought back.
Rogan said, “He let them get away with stuff, when I think he should’ve put his foot down and said, ‘This is f*cked up. You guys are rigging the primary.'”
Rogan also pointed to a pattern that has stuck with the Democrat Party ever since.
He asked, “They haven’t had a legit primary in like, what, more than a decade?” before adding, “That’s not good,” and continuing, “That’s not good if you wanna be the party that’s the solution, the change.”
And Rogan made clear who he thinks was really pulling the strings the whole time.
“The Democratic establishment did not want that guy,” Rogan said of Sanders.
Rogan noted the fallout was personal for him too, recalling how quickly he became a target simply for saying he liked Sanders.
“That was the first time that I ever got attacked, when I had Bernie on,” Rogan recalled during his podcast.
Vaccine Mandates And Open Borders Get The Blame Too
Sanders wasn’t the only target on Rogan’s mind.
He took a hard look back at the Biden years and didn’t find much to defend.
Rogan said flatly, “Like the open borders were INSANE. The COVID mandates were INSANE. Forcing people to get vaccinated was INSANE. All that stuff was INSANE,” adding, “That stuff scared the sh*t out of me.”
That’s not a small thing to say out loud on a show with Rogan’s reach.
Millions of Americans who never got a straight answer from federal health bureaucrats about vaccine mandates, school closures, or masking flip-flops have been saying the exact same thing for years, and they’ve been branded conspiracy theorists for it.
Rogan didn’t stop at the mandates. He also reframed the entire political fight in a way that cuts against the standard left-right script.
Rogan also said the problems in America aren’t “left-wing, right-wing,” but rather between “rational and insane.”
That’s a framing worth sitting with, because it’s not really a partisan complaint. It’s a description of what happened to millions of parents who just wanted informed consent before a needle went into their kid’s arm and instead got lectured, fired, or deplatformed.
Rogan’s broader disillusionment with the socialist wing of the Democrat Party didn’t come out of nowhere either.
Rogan’s pivot away from Sanders comes a month after he bashed democratic socialist candidates for being “f*cking nuts.”
That’s a notable turn from a guy who once gave Sanders his full-throated public backing.
What Rogan’s Reversal Says About The Old Democrat Coalition
Rogan is not a lifelong Republican and he’s never pretended to be one.
But his slow break from Sanders tracks with a much bigger story that’s been unfolding across the country since 2016: the Democrat establishment has never actually wanted the socialist wing of its own party to win anything.
Sanders ran twice, generated real grassroots energy both times, and got outmaneuvered by the same party apparatus each time.
Rogan’s complaint isn’t that Sanders was too far left. It’s that Sanders rolled over instead of calling out what he plainly believed was a rigged process.
That’s a different critique than the one usually offered by conservatives, and it’s worth taking seriously precisely because it comes from someone who spent years in Sanders’ corner.
Socialism as an economic model has a track record, and it’s not a good one. Every time a government promises to redistribute wealth and centrally plan an economy, the result has been shortages, stagnation, and a shrinking middle class rather than the utopia promised on the campaign trail. Sanders built a career pitching exactly that model to young voters who never lived through its failures elsewhere.
Rogan’s newfound skepticism of “democratic socialist candidates” fits a broader pattern of buyer’s remorse among independents who flirted with the Sanders coalition in 2016 and 2020, only to watch the party’s actual governing agenda under Biden produce open borders, COVID-era mandates, and the kind of top-down bureaucratic overreach Rogan says scared him.
None of that happened because Sanders won. It happened because the establishment Rogan says ran Sanders over got exactly what it wanted instead.
And that’s the real thread connecting all of it: an independent media figure with one of the largest audiences in the country looked at the last decade of Democrat Party behavior, from the 2016 primary fight to COVID mandates to open borders, and concluded the whole operation runs on the same instinct to crush dissent and protect the establishment’s preferred outcome.
Voters who spent years being told their concerns about vaccine mandates or a rigged primary were fringe conspiracy theories might feel a little vindicated watching Rogan say it himself, in plain language, on the biggest podcast in the country.
Sources: Mediaite, “Joe Rogan Suggests He No Longer Supports Bernie Sanders: ‘He Let Them Run Him Over!'”; BizPacReview, “Joe Rogan explains why he’d no longer support Bernie, blasts ‘insane’ woke nonsense under Biden”; Jingletree, “Joe Rogan slams Bernie Sanders for kowtowing to Dem establishment”
