Podcaster Joe Rogan has weighed in on the debate around whether Elon Musk did a Nazi salute, unsurprisingly coming out fighting for the tech mogul and calling his detractors “a–holes.”
Rogan, who recently sidled up to Donald Trump, backed the president’s “First Buddy” after an awkward salute at a post inauguration rally on Monday. “This is the Donald Trump excuse: You’d do anything you can to stop Hitler,” Rogan told fellow podcaster and computer scientist Lex Fridman during his Wednesday show.
Lex Fridman was on the podcast. / Joe Rogan Experience / YouTube
He appeared to be referencing a popular thought experiment about whether killing a child version of Hitler would benefit society. “This is why they want to conflate and they always want to pretend that everyone’s Hitler. The problem with that, after a while, it’s crying wolf, and people are like, ‘Oh, this is a bulls— game you’re playing and you’re just using it as an excuse‘,” the 57-year-old declared.
He then railed against “woke ideology,” adding: “People use woke ideology as an excuse to be an a–hole, and it’s really just people that are a–holes that are attaching themselves to things that make them feel righteous.”
His argument seemed to leave no room for people who genuinely disagree with Musk’s actions. He continued his diatribe, stating that people “wrap themselves in this idea to give them virtue,” thus giving them a reason to “say the most awful things about other people that have different perspectives.”
“By nature, if you’re doing that, you’re doing the wrong thing. You’re a bad person,” Rogan said, comparing this with “intelligent, aware people who have control of their emotions recognize that.”
In a nutshell, Rogan’s argument is that if you don’t agree with him, Musk and their backers: You’re a stupid a–hole.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gestures as he speaks during the inaugural parade inside Capital One Arena, in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2025. / ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
Meanwhile, Musk’s deflection effort has mutated into the 54-year-old flat out making Nazi jokes on X. He took to the platform on Thursday and decided to roll off five gags about the Nazi party and its senior figures.
“Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations!” came the first gag, a reference to Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command, Rudolph Hess, followed by: “Some people will Goebbels anything down!”
Joseph Goebbels was the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945. “Stop Göring your enemies!” he said, referencing convicted war criminal Hermann Göring. “His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler!” he said about Heinrich Himmler, concluding his painfully cringe barrage with: “Bet you did nazi that coming.”
