Joe Rogan is once again under fire.
It’s been more than a week since a wildfire in Southern California broke out, destroying 40,000 acres of land from the Pacific Palisades to the greater Los Angeles area. More than 12,000 homes and businesses have been burnt to the ground and dozens of lives have been lost.
Thus far, no cause has been identified, but the long-time UFC color commentator and popular podcaster sent listeners into a frenzy when he placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of homeless people, suggesting that the “losers” are lighting fighters to “get their anger out” and loot multi-million-dollar homes.
JOE ROGAN: “Liberals are saying this is climate change. No, it’s arson you f’ing idiots. The homeless are doing it. They’re more inclined to sue fire to get their anger out. Huberman actually caught people lighting things on fire. You’ve got 100,000 losers just camping on your… pic.twitter.com/MQbxwq0Hxa
— Autism Capital
JOE ROGAN: “Liberals are saying this is climate change. No, it’s arson you f’ing idiots. The homeless are doing it. They’re more inclined to sue fire to get their anger out. Huberman actually caught people lighting things on fire. You’ve got 100,000 losers just camping on your… 
(@AutismCapital)
“This is your whining liberal, ‘It’s f*cking climate change, wake up.’ No, it’s arson, you f*cking idiots… The homeless are doing it,” Rogan said on a recent episode of his JRE podcast. “They’re more inclined to use fire to get their anger out… You have 100,000 losers just camping on your street… What do you think is going to happen when there are people with $50M houses, and you’re camping out just a block away?… They’re looting people’s houses… Swarms of organized gangs are showing up.”
Rogan also slammed California Governor Gavin Newsom’s handling of the situation, claiming that the state had spent “zero” on preventing wildfires last year while dumping billions of dollars to help the nearly 200,000 “losers” that reside in the state.
“We were just talking about the wildfire situation and how they spent $24 billion last year on homeless,” Rogan said. “What did they spend on preventing this wildfire? Zero! Zip!… The whole state is so poorly managed. It’s so frustrating and confusing.”
Joe Rogan echoes false report shared by our next president of the United States
On social media, President-elect Donald Trump amplified a claim that Newsom had slashed the state’s fire budget by $100 million just months before the outbreak of the recent wildfires. While Newsom did approve cuts to several supplemental funding initiatives in the wildfire budget last year, the state’s multibillion-dollar firefighting budget and workforce actually increased.
Of the cuts that were made, the largest was $46 million related to a pilot project to create hydrogen from biomass. Another $35 million was cut from wildfire resilience projects on state-owned land and $28 million from projects undertaken by various state conservancies.
“We have doubled the size of our firefighting army, built the world’s largest aerial firefighting fleet, and increased the forest management ten-fold since taking office,” Newsom wrote on X in response to the false reporting. “Time to serve these folks the facts.”
Since 2019, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has seen a budget increase from $2 billion to $3.8 billion according to FactCheck.org. The number of CalFIRE personnel has nearly doubled in that same timeframe, going from 5,829 to 10,741.
