George Monbiot: How One Conversation W. Joe Rogan & Mel Gibson Embodied Everything Stupid That Is America Today
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Halfway through the interminable interview, Gibson, while disputing evolution, launched a typically detailed attack on the scientific method. “Yeah, well, there’s a lot of money in, you know, claims, and I don’t know.” Anyway, he mused: “What difference is it going to make to me?” Then he suddenly swerved to climate science, and started reciting one of the oldest denialist tropes.
“Ever have a glass full of ice and watch it melt? Did you ever see the glass flow over?” “No.” “Takes up less room, you know.” In reality, sea levels are rising not because sea ice is melting, but through the thermal expansion of seawater, and meltwater flowing off the land. But Rogan happily took up the theme. “Well, there’s a lot of horseshit that’s involved in climate change for sure … a narrative gets established and then there’s a profit attached to the solution.” He referred to a study he has since cited repeatedly, claiming it shows “the temperature on Earth is plummeting”. As the authors keep pointing out, it shows the opposite. But that seems to make no difference.
So what did they blame for the fires? Mostly Gavin Newsom, governor of California. Rogan remarked: “How crazy it is that they spent $24bn last year on the homeless, and what do they spend on preventing these wildfires?” “Zero.” “Zip.” “He didn’t do anything.” Needless to say, this is completely untrue: California tripled its wildfire resilience spending between 2016 and 2024. The true figure it spent on homelessness in 2024-25 was $2.5bn. But who gives a damn? Here we see another of the grand themes of 2025: everything is now a partisan issue, and no fact can stand in the way of polarisation.
This became even starker when they turned to one of Rogan’s favourite themes, the former US chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci, who has been widely and unjustly blamed by the radical right for a remarkable range of ills, from Aids deaths to the Covid pandemic. Rogan suggested Fauci’s actions were “evil”. In response, Gibson said something to the tens of millions of listeners that, in Fauci’s position, I would find highly threatening: “Well, I don’t know why Fauci’s still walking around.” “How is that guy still walking around?” Rogan echoed. This theme led to another of the year’s motifs: the whining self-pity of powerful men. Talking of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s wildly inaccurate book The Real Anthony Fauci, Rogan remarked: “They kept that book off bestseller lists … they hid it. That’s when you find out that bestseller lists are actually curated.” “Yeah,” Gibson replied, “it’s censored. It’s all censored. Everything’s censored.” In truth, depressingly enough, Kennedy’s rubbish book spent 20 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/27/mel-gibson-denies-climate-breakdown-home-burns-joe-rogan
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