Joe Rogan has stated he's refusing to travel to Canada while the nation's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau remains in power.
Rogan, who has been critical of Trudeau in the past, cited Canada's decades-old laws against hate speech as one of the main reasons why he's reluctant to journey north of the border. Under Canada's Criminal Code, hate speech can be considered a chargeable offense, although very few cases make it to court.
Speaking on a recent episode of his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, with comedian Sam Morril, Rogan and his guest bemoaned how people's political leanings have become defining factors of their identities in recent years.
"Some people, they're just always trying to define themselves to you," Rogan said. "They always want to define themselves in a very a nice way."
"I do kind of miss those types of people who are like, 'Hey let's [bond] over something else other than the world ending," Morril weighed in.
"Yeah, but you know when people don't have any legitimate conflict in their life they manufacture conflict," Rogan responded, before mocking people who say they have "PTSD from the last four years when Trump was in office."
"Not to mention like, 'I'm moving to Canada,' and I'm like, 'You think Canada just wants all of our f****** whiners?" Morrill said.
"Not only that, but Canada has like ridiculous [hate] speech laws," Rogan opined. "They can come down on you for a lot of things... The people that were donating to the truckers, they seized their bank accounts. That's not a good place—it's not a good place under this administration, at least. They went sideways."
Newsweek has contacted the Office of the Prime Minister of Canada via email for comment.
The Freedom Convoy began as a protest in January 2022 against requirements that truckers get vaccinated against COVID-19 or face possible quarantine or testing. Thousands of truckers took to Canada's highways, upending supply chains, choking major entry points to the U.S. and occupying a portion of the capital city, Ottawa.
Nazi-themed imagery was seen on some of the signs at the three-week protest. Some of those signs compared COVID-19 measures to the Holocaust.
"Freedom of expression, assembly and association are cornerstones of democracy, but Nazi symbolism, racist imagery and desecration of war memorials are not," Trudeau said at the time. "This is not the story of our pandemic, our country, our people. My focus is standing with Canadians and getting through this pandemic."
In efforts to stop the blockades, Trudeau became the first Canadian prime minister to use the Emergencies Act. It can be invoked in a national emergency that "seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada." The protest was subsequently ended by police on in February with 76 vehicles impounded and 191 arrests.
While Rogan was critical in his assessment of Canada's laws, the former Fear Factor host was more flattering about the country itself, saying: "Canada was an amazing place 10 years ago. You go to Canada 10 years ago, it was awesome. I was always saying that I love Canada."
"I love Montreal, Montreal's amazing," he went on. "I love Toronto, I love Vancouver, I love Canada. I don't go to Canada anymore."
When Morril asked comedian Rogan if he wouldn't do a gig in Canada, he responded: "Not while that guy's president. F*** you, or whatever he is, prime minister... Get rid of that guy, I'll come back.
"I just don't trust any of it up there. I just think they're so far into tyranny right now, like the laws that they're passing, the s*** that they're doing, the erosion of people's rights. Like, I don't want to support it. I think it's f****** horrible."
"Yeah, but I think a lot of people there just want to laugh. I think people need to laugh you know," Morril told Rogan.
"Oh yeah, they definitely need a laugh," Rogan said of Canadians. "They're in the middle of a full-blown communist takeover. It's a scary spot. It's scary, but it used to be amazing. I used to say that Canada's 20 percent less douchebags, like the people are 20 percent nicer than most people that you meet in America.
"That's that's why they get roped into all this s***. That's why they get roped into hate speech laws, because they want to be kind. They want to be good people. They don't realize, like, compelled speech has a terrible ending. It always ends in communism because someone has to compel that speech. Who does? The people with guns. And they tell you what to do and then you have violence that is enforced to get people to follow a doctrine that they may or may not believe in."
"I think you've just got to be pro-free speech," Morril stated. "I mean, for all the awful s*** people can say, you still just have to be pro-free speech."
"That's Elon's take on it you know, and that's what they're doing with Twitter," Rogan said of social media platform X, formerly Twitter, which was acquired by Elon Musk in 2022 and has undergone a number of policy changes.
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