Popular podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan said that he will most likely vote for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the upcoming Democratic presidential primary, saying the White House hopeful has been “insanely consistent his entire life.”
“Him as a human being, when I was hanging out with him, I believe in him, I like him, I like him a lot,” Rogan said on “The Joe Rogan Experience” while speaking with New York Times columnist Bari Weiss.
“Look, you could dig up dirt on every single human being that’s ever existed if you catch them in their worst moment and you magnify those moments and you cut out everything else and you only display those moments,” Rogan continued.
“That said, you can’t find very many with Bernie. He’s been insanely consistent his entire life. He’s basically been saying the same thing his whole life. And that in and of itself is very a powerful structure to operate from.”
Sanders is touting the video clip of the interview on social media.
The significance of Rogan’s apparent endorsement caused the clip to begin trending in the United States, with more than 111,000 tweets using his name.
Some criticized Sanders for accepting the endorsement given past comments Rogan has made mocking the transgender community and feminists.
Others criticized Rogan interviewing far-right commentators, such as former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulous and InfoWars founder Alex Jones, and giving them access to his wide platform.
Additionally, a clip of a 2013 Rogan podcast began to circulate on social media in which he talked about his experience going to see the movie “Planet of the Apes” in a black neighborhood.
“We get out, we’re giggling, ‘We’re going to go see Planet of the Apes,’ We walk in to Planet of the Apes. We walked into Africa,” Rogan said, before clarifying that there was “no white people in the theater.”
“Planet of the Apes didn’t take place in Africa, that was a racist thing for me to say,” he added.
In response to the criticism, Sanders spokeswoman Briahna Joy Gray said it will take “a big tent” to beat President Trump in November.
“The goal of our campaign is to build a multi-racial, multi-generational movement that is large enough to defeat Donald Trump and the powerful special interests whose greed and corruption is the root cause of the outrageous inequality in America. Sharing a big tent requires including those who do not share every one of our beliefs, while always making clear that we will never compromise our values,” Gray said in a statement to The Hill.
“The truth is that by standing together in solidarity, we share the values of love and respect that will move us in the direction of a more humane, more equal world.”
New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg said it “seems obvious” why Sanders would share Rogan’s positive comments.
“One premise of his campaign is that he can win some number of alienated men with reactionary social views to the left, and this is proof of concept,” she wrote.
Sanders has previously been a guest on Rogan’s podcast, which has more than 7.29 million subscribers and reportedly gets 190 millions downloads a month.
The pair got into a quippy conversation in August in which Sanders pledged to tell American public anything he learns about aliens or UFOs if elected into the White House.
Fellow Democratic presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) have also appeared on the program.
—Updated at 3:08 p.m.