Joe Rogan questioned the legitimacy of a march that took place over the weekend, suggesting that participants looked too suspicious to be white supremacists.
On Sunday, more than a hundred members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front marched through the National Mall in Washington, D.C., wearing masks and holding upside-down American flags.
Commenting on a video of the march during Monday’s podcast episode, Rogan said, “Look at these guys, where’s the fat people? How come they’re all wearing the same clothes?”
He went on to ask, “Have you ever seen anything that looks more like feds?” and promoted the conspiracy theory that the marchers were federal agents in disguise.
“How do they all have like uniform outfits on? They have the same color pants for the most part. Very little variation. They’ve tan or brown pants, dark blue shirts with a f****** stupid flag on it,” Rogan said.
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Similar sentiments were made on Reddit over the weekend, as users speculated that the march could not have been organized by white supremacists because there were “no morbidly obese people among the crowd.”
“You know how I know they are feds?” one social media user commented on a thread. “No beer bellies. Not saying every gun-loving American has one but statistically there should be a couple at least.”
There has been a massive rise in activity among white supremacists group in the last year, according to Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which found a 38 percent increase between 2021 and 2022.
The Patriot Group is a Texas-based group that was founded in the wake of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is allegedly “responsible for the vast majority of white supremacist propaganda distributed in the United States,” the ADL states. Members are described as “American fascists or American nationalists who are focused on preserving America’s identity as a European-American one.”
Rogan is known to be a controversial figure. Last year, he made a public apology after clips circulating on social media showed him repeatedly using the n-word on his podcast. The videos prompted calls for Spotify, one of the biggest streaming services in the world, to remove Rogan’s podcast from its lineup.
“I know that to most people, there’s no context where a white person is ever allowed to say that word, never mind publicly on a podcast, and I agree with that now,” Rogan wrote in an Instagram post, adding that “I haven’t said it in years.”