Joe Rogan Sums Up LA Riots With One Profound Word

Rogan hits the nail in the head again.

When Joe Rogan sat down with country artist Oliver Anthony, what started as a conversation about music and culture quickly turned into a deeper look at the chaos unfolding in Los Angeles.

Rogan wasn’t vague about what he believes is happening.

He dropped a bombshell.

In his view, the riots aren’t organic—they’re astroturfed.

“We are better off today than anybody else in human history and this is a struggle and it is a battle,” Rogan said.

“But I think we come out of this on the other side if we can all realize that we’re being played against each other.”

Rogan described what he sees as the machinery behind the unrest: protests that aren’t spontaneous but funded, coordinated, and staged for political impact.

“You know, when you’re paying people to protest, you’re leaving pallets of bricks around and you’re organizing the whole thing and you’re shipping people in on busses and you’re making sure that all the people show up at a certain amount of time and they’re all compensated and you give them water and snacks…”

He paused, then added, “Like, we got to realize what’s going on here. This is not for you.”

To Rogan, the strategy is clear: create disorder, spark outrage, and damage public trust—while offering no real solutions.

“When you light your city on fire and you burn cop cars—it’s never good,” he said.

“It’s not good for you, it’s not good for the cause. They’re not going to change the laws.”

That’s when Anthony blew Rogan’s mind.

He mentioned an ICE raid at a Facebook data center near his home in rural Virginia—an anecdote that made Rogan’s eyes widen.

“There was a big ICE raid at the Facebook data center job, not far from my place,” Anthony said.

Rogan blinked. “ICE raid—what??? Facebook data center ICE raid?”

“Yeah,” Anthony nodded, “the Facebook project. It’s in, it’s not far from me in Virginia. I think it technically would be in South Boston.”

Rogan shook his head, half-laughing.

“Facebook didn’t bribe ICE? If I was Facebook, I would have f*cking bought ICE some new cars.”

Anthony said the scene was chaotic.

“Somebody was sending me pictures there from the other day—People were just escaping the job, like running away from the job and stuff. It was nuts.”

That theme carried forward when Anthony opened up about his own history with protests.

Long before his viral fame, he had been one of the young people marching in D.C.—but for very different reasons.

“Like when I was younger, I would go to some of these protests in D.C. and stuff, and I would always stay at George Washington University with these kids,” he recalled.

“We were all in our early 20s probably and at that point there wasn’t any like real political identity to it.”

The mood was exploratory, not radical. But over time, something changed.

“I don’t think those people would have called themselves Left back then, but you better believe most of them ended up going to all of the Black Bloc and the Antifa and the Black Lives Matter and every other protest there was just because they wanted to go protest.”

There wasn’t always a cause—just a craving to revolt against something. Anything.

“It’s a thing of like rebelling against the system—it doesn’t really matter what part of the system it is or if it really makes any sense.”

And that’s where the conversation shifted from the riots themselves to the mindset driving them.

That mindset—disconnected from facts, driven by emotion—was something Rogan had been watching for years.

He explained how protests, particularly among young people, often function as a shortcut to purpose in a world where genuine meaning is harder and harder to find.

“They feel like they’re fighting against something bad,” Rogan said.

“If they’re uninformed, and who the f*ck who’s 21 is informed?”

He wasn’t trying to insult anyone—just pointing out how easy it is to be swept up in groupthink.

Especially on college campuses, where social credibility is earned through outrage, and nuance is the first casualty.

“Most people who are young, especially if you’re going to college, you’re around a bunch of like minded people in an echo chamber and you’re all trying to like, get social credit by being the most woke and the most activisty’,” he said.

“And you feel like you’ve got a sense of purpose.”

But that so called purpose is being redirected.

Not toward building something better, but toward tearing down whatever’s convenient.

In the final stretch of the conversation, Rogan tied it all together with a warning.

The right to protest—one of the most sacred rights in a free society—has been TOTALLY hijacked.

“But there’s a big difference between protests and organized protests where you’re paying people and then you’re leaving bricks around!”

He called it what it was with one word that hit the nail on the head.

“This is—it’s like—it’s a bastardization. They’ve taken over the thing, the virtue of this thing, like this part of the First Amendment, your right to express yourself. The right for the people to get together and say, hey this is not cool.”

That right, Rogan said, has been distorted. Not just by money, but by those who see chaos as a tool.

“And they’ve distorted it with money, like everything else... and they’ve used it as a political tool.”

Anthony agreed—and suggested this kind of manipulation might not be a new problem, just one that’s harder to ignore now.

“I would think maybe that that’s happened a lot though, even in the past with like Civil Rights and everything else,” he said.

“A lot of that was much more organized. Every thing in history has this whole backstory to it that we don’t really know much about.”

Rogan nodded, and offered one last thought—perhaps the most unsettling of all.

“Most things have been manipulated if they can be manipulated,” he said.

“Once they realize they can manipulate people, they started. And they probably started that a LONG time ago.”

Rogan made it clear: the real story isn’t just about protests or riots.

It’s about how easily people searching for meaning can be turned into pawns in someone else’s game—and how often, they never even realize it.

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