Joe Rogan Backs Keeping Confederate Statues With a Lesson on Why They Went Up

Joe Rogan said Confederate statues should stay up but that Americans should be taught why they were built, in an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience.

The remark was a brief aside near the end of a nearly three-hour conversation with biblical scholar Dan McClellan, author of The Bible Says So and host of a podcast called Data Over Dogma. Still, it stakes out a middle position in a fight that President Donald Trump's administration reopened in 2025, when it restored Confederate-linked base names.

What Joe Rogan Said About Confederate Statues

The exchange grew out of a discussion of the Ten Commandments in public schools. Rogan opposed the idea, saying "freedom also means freedom to not be indoctrinated with other people's ideology." He also credited a past guest, Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, with arguing that school displays are "going to push people away from Christianity."

McClellan then brought up Confederate monuments. "These came up in the early 20th century, and we know explicitly the goal was to terrorize the black population, to let them know who was in charge around here," he said.

Rogan agreed with McClellan's history but not with removing the statues.

"I don't think they should be removed, but I think people should understand why they were put there in the first place." — Joe Rogan

He opened that answer with a verdict on the statues themselves: "Not only that, they were shitty statues." Later in the exchange, Rogan added: "That conversation was lost in the outrage over the removal of the statues."

McClellan replied: "Well, it had to be, for the removal to be defended. They couldn't allow that conversation to happen." Rogan did not say who should provide that context or how.

What the Record Shows About When the Statues Went Up

The record broadly supports McClellan's timing. The Southern Poverty Law Center's Whose Heritage? study, which catalogs public symbols of the Confederacy, identifies two waves of dedications. The first "began around 1900, amid the period in which Southern states were enacting Jim Crow laws" to disenfranchise Black Americans. The second ran from the early 1950s through the 1960s, during the civil rights movement.

The 2018 edition of the study counted 1,728 Confederate symbols in public spaces, including 772 monuments in 23 states and the District of Columbia. It also counted 10 U.S. military bases named for Confederate figures.

Trump Administration Reverses Removals

After years of removals, the Trump administration has moved the other way. In February 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered Fort Bragg's name restored, and in March he reversed Fort Benning's renaming. On June 10, 2025, the Army said seven more bases, including Fort Hood and Fort Lee, would return to their original names, hours after President Trump previewed the move in a speech at Fort Bragg, the Boston Globe reported. To get there, the Army found service members with the same surnames as the Confederate officers and named the bases for them.

Where Public Opinion Stands on Confederate Monuments

Americans have shifted on the question. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted July 9-12, 2020, found 51 percent of voters supported removing Confederate statues from public spaces and 47 percent opposed it. Two years earlier, voters had favored letting the statues stay, 63 percent to 35 percent.

The same poll offered a menu of options, and Rogan's view resembles the second most popular. In the poll, 31 percent favored keeping the monuments with plaques that add historical context. A larger group, 41 percent, preferred moving them to museums. Only 16 percent wanted them left unchanged.

What Happens Next

Rogan did not say in the episode whether he would back any specific policy on the statues. Whether his large audience takes up his position is an open question.