Ron White sat across from Joe Rogan this week and did something that rarely happens on ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’: he pushed hard against a Republican candidate. White used his airtime to lay out a case against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is running for the U.S. Senate, and the exchange that followed has become the subject of considerable mockery on “Morning Joe.”
White did not hold back. He told Rogan that Paxton pushed out several staffers after they reported him to authorities.
“They fired four of the eight people that turned him in. He did, fired them,” White said. He went on to describe how Paxton tried to resolve the fallout quietly. “And then he realized that he was going to get sued over it and he came up with a solution he was going to give them $3 million to settle this case.”
According to White, Texas lawmakers refused to foot that bill themselves, which pushed the final cost even higher and left taxpayers holding the tab.
“And then the House said, no, it’s not coming from us. And then they sued [for] $6 million. And guess who paid that $6 million? You and me!”
White summed up his view of the attorney general bluntly, calling him “a criminal, just a piece of s[]t,” and telling Rogan flatly that he considers Paxton too corrupt to hold higher office.
Rogan’s reply was notably muted given how pointed White’s accusations were. Rather than engage with the specifics, he pivoted to polling. “I don’t know enough about him, but I do know that they’re surprised that Talarico is ahead of him in the polls,” Rogan said, referencing Democratic candidate James Talarico. White wasn’t having it, telling Rogan he was not surprised at all by that polling gap.
That brief moment of deflection is what caught the attention of Joe Scarborough on “Morning Joe,” which airs on MS NOW. Scarborough zeroed in on how odd it seemed for someone as plugged into current events as Rogan to claim ignorance about one of the most talked-about Republican figures in Texas politics.
“That is such a classic move. That is such a classic move. It’s a, ‘I don’t know enough about him,'” Scarborough said, before pressing the point further. “‘I don’t know enough about Ken Paxton.’ You don’t know enough about Ken Paxton? You live in Texas? You do this every day, you talk for 80 hours a day?”
Scarborough then broadened his critique, drawing a parallel between Rogan’s answer and a pattern he says he has noticed among certain Trump supporters when confronted with facts that challenge their assumptions.
He circled back to Rogan directly afterward, still sounding somewhat baffled by the response. “It’s like, yeah, this whole thing about I don’t know about Ken Paxton. Did Joe Rogan really just say that?”
Mika Brzezinski joined in, needling Rogan’s supposed unfamiliarity with a candidate who has dominated Texas headlines for years. She paraphrased his stance dismissively, saying it amounted to, “I just don’t watch, I just haven’t been keeping up with things,” before delivering her own verdict on the exchange: “That is not genuine at all.”
Willie Geist took a similar view, arguing that Rogan’s level of engagement with news and politics makes the claim hard to swallow.
“Joe Rogan is a smart guy who’s engaged in this stuff? I don’t buy it for a minute that he doesn’t know about Paxton,” Geist said. He then raised the question of why Rogan would sidestep the topic at all, pointing to how other journalists have assessed Paxton’s record. “Why he would carry the water for Ken Paxton, who David Drucker says is the most corrupt politician he has ever covered in his long career.”
