Podcast hosy Joe Rogan is speaking out against what he describes as ideological pressure being placed on young children in California schools, saying that his own kids were subjected to a curriculum he never agreed to and never expected.
During a recent episode of the JRE podcast, Rogan opened up about why he ultimately pulled his children from their former school, pointing to a specific hire the institution made that left him deeply unsettled.
“One of the things that was happening to me in my school where my kids used to go is they hired some person to teach them that they have to be anti-racists,” Rogan said.
He continued, “It’s not good enough to not be racist. My kids aren’t racist at all. Like, what are you doing? Like, why are you putting that in their head that they have to be anti-racist and call out racism? They’re trying to make kids activists.”
For Rogan, the issue came down to age-appropriateness and what he sees as a fundamental misunderstanding of childhood. His children were five years old at the time.
“Hey, they’re five,” he said. “They don’t even care. They want friends. They don’t give a f**k what their friends look like. They’re trying to have a good time. They’re five. They’re just playing.”
Rogan framed the school’s approach as a form of ideological imposition, one driven by the personal convictions of educators rather than the actual needs of young students.
“You’re indoctrinating them into this woke, guilt-ridden ideology that you’re carrying around with you, and you feel like you have an obligation to impose this on children,” he said.
Rather than dismiss the conversation around racial equality, Rogan pointed to what he considers a more constructive historical framework, one rooted in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 70s.
“Our goals should have always been what the goals were that the liberals had in like the 60s and the 70s, which is a colorblind society,” he said. “The Martin Luther King notion that we should treat people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.”
He acknowledged that real disparities exist across communities and that those disparities deserve genuine attention. But his frustration lies in what he sees as a misdirection of energy, an approach that focuses on instilling guilt in children rather than tackling the structural problems that produce inequality in the first place.
“There’s inequities in communities. There’s inequities in how people grow up and where they come from, and some people are in places that have no hope, and none of that gets addressed. None of that gets fixed. None of that gets worked on. Instead, you just try to make kids feel guilty,” he said.
Rogan also took issue with other aspects of the school’s culture, including what he described as staff asking young children about their pronouns, a practice he found equally inappropriate for the age group.
