Hollywood royalty doesn’t usually sit still for a lecture about the Democrat Party.

Michael Douglas has been a Democrat his whole life. He sat down across from Joe Rogan anyway.

Then Rogan unloaded years of pent-up frustration, and the old movie star’s response says plenty about where Democrats stand.

A Lifelong Democrat Asked the Wrong Question

Douglas, the man who gave America Gordon Gekko in Wall Street and one very bad day in Falling Down, joined Rogan for a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience.

The talk drifted to politics the way Rogan’s conversations always seem to. Douglas asked about Rogan’s old soft spot for US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the socialist Rogan once said he’d “probably” vote for back in 2020.

But Rogan had already walked that away. In an earlier episode, he said Sanders let the Democrat establishment “run him over” during what Rogan called a rigged 2016 primary for Hillary Clinton.

And once Douglas cracked that door open, Rogan kicked it off the hinges.

Rogan Tore Into Four Years of Border Madness

Rogan started at the southern border.

“First of all, the open border was INSANE,” he told Douglas.

He didn’t stop at the fence line, either. Rogan described a system that handed people instructions on how to get in, then hauled them to cities and set them up in hotels. “It was really clear that a game was being played,” he said.

Then he wondered out loud about the motive, floating two theories: “was it for cheap labor, was it to turn these people into citizens and have them permanently voting your side?”

“I don’t know what it is. But it was something,” Rogan added.

He didn’t have to look very far. New York City turned the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan into a migrant intake center in 2023. And the Biden administration expanded the CBP One phone app so foreign nationals could book their own appointments at the border, which is about as close to a printed instruction manual as a government gets.

Rogan put a number on the whole mess, too. “It seems crazy to have 10 million people of unknown origin enter into your country over a period of four years,” he said.

That figure is Rogan’s, and the exact count shifts depending on who’s tallying gotaways and parolees. But Customs and Border Protection logged more than two million southwest border encounters in fiscal 2022 and again in fiscal 2023, so he isn’t pulling it out of thin air.

Douglas kept answering with the occasional “yeah, yeah” as Rogan got more worked up.

Biden’s Missing Presidency and the Primary That Never Came

The border was only the warmup act.

Rogan moved on to how Democrats pick their nominees, griping about “the fact that they haven’t had a primary since 2012.”

Strictly speaking, Democrats held primaries in 2016 and 2020. But Rogan already considers 2016 rigged, and former interim DNC Chair Donna Brazile wrote in her 2017 book Hacks that a fundraising deal handed the Clinton campaign control over the party’s money and strategy long before most voters weighed in. And 2024 hardly needs a footnote. Kamala Harris walked off with the nomination without winning a single primary vote.

Rogan mocked the mindset of the party bosses: “If it’s like, ‘We have to win, so we’re just going to push that aside, and here’s your candidate!’”

“What the *** are you doing? That’s not how it’s supposed to be done . . . I’m not going to vote for that. That seems crazy. That seems dangerous,” he said.

Then came the line that will sting the folks who spent four years swearing Joe Biden was sharp as a tack.

“You know Biden wasn’t the *** president for four years. It’s really clear his mental ability was severely declined,” Rogan said.

Special Counsel Robert Hur saw it coming in 2024, when his report portrayed Biden as an elderly man with a poor memory who couldn’t pin down the year his own son died. White House aides, cabinet officials, and Democrat leaders kept vouching for Biden’s fitness anyway, right up until a debate stage in Atlanta made the act impossible to keep up. None of them get to claim surprise.

Rogan Hasn’t Forgotten Who Pushed the Mandates

Rogan saved some of his hottest fire for the pandemic years. He laid into Democrats over the “coercion” they used to push COVID vaccines and the rules that came along with them.

“It was all crazy!” he said, waving his arms around.

He has personal reasons to remember. When Rogan caught COVID in 2021 and took ivermectin under a doctor’s care, CNN mocked it as a horse dewormer. Months later, CNN’s own chief medical correspondent, Dr Sanjay Gupta, conceded on Rogan’s show that the network shouldn’t have described it that way.

Then came the pressure campaign. Neil Young pulled his music from Spotify in early 2022 over Rogan’s COVID episodes, and Biden press secretary Jen Psaki publicly nudged the platform to do more about what the White House called misinformation.

But regular Americans took the hardest hit. Biden ordered every employer with 100 or more workers to force the shot on staff or make them test weekly, until the US Supreme Court struck that rule down in January 2022. The Pentagon discharged thousands of service members who declined the shot, and hospitals showed the door to nurses who had worked the front lines through the worst of it.

None of that had anything to do with informed consent. Democrats decided Washington, DC knew better than ordinary people what belonged in their own bodies, and they treated anybody who asked questions like a public menace.

Why One Polite Hollywood Nod Should Worry Democrats

Douglas didn’t storm out. He didn’t scold Rogan about misinformation or demand an apology for the language. He seemed to go along with most of it.

Maybe that reads too much into a couple of “yeahs” from a polite guest. Then again, polite guests don’t usually nod along to the parts they find offensive.

And this is a man who grew up in Kirk Douglas’ Hollywood, where voting Democrat comes with the house. If the border, the coronation politics, the mandates, and the Biden cover-up land with him, the party has a much bigger problem than one podcaster.

But Democrats didn’t lose Rogan over a single issue. They lost him over a pile of them. The same guy who mused about voting for Bernie in 2020 ended up endorsing Donald Trump on the eve of the 2024 election.

Remember what happened when Sanders touted Rogan’s kind words back then. Left-wing activists demanded Sanders disavow him. The party treated a curious, persuadable voter like a contaminant.

Rogan hasn’t agreed with Trump on everything either. He’s hammered the Iran war on his show, saying it “just seems so insane, based on what he ran on.” That’s the same America First instinct that sent millions of voters to the polls against endless foreign wars, and Trump has since pushed for a negotiated end to the fighting, with the two countries reportedly reaching a tentative deal to wind it down.

But notice the difference. Rogan argues with Trump in the open and still trades texts with him. Democrats never offered their own dissenters on COVID or the border that kind of room. They offered a pink slip and a smear.

The 2028 crowd will come calling soon enough, and every one of them will swear they’ve seen the light on the border. Watch what they actually propose. The same party still talks up a “path to citizenship,” which is amnesty in a nicer suit and a blueprint for building the permanent voting bloc Rogan flagged from his own studio chair.

The man behind the biggest podcast in America laid that out to a lifelong Democrat’s face.

And the lifelong Democrat said “yeah.”

Sources: Mediaite, “‘What the *** Are You Doing?!’ Joe Rogan Goes on Nuclear Rant Against Democrats to Democratic Actor Michael Douglas”; BizPac Review, “Joe Rogan explains why he’d no longer support Bernie”; The New York Times via Boston.com, “Joe Rogan says Trump’s supporters feel ‘betrayed’ by Iran war”; Straight Arrow News, “‘People feel betrayed’: Joe Rogan criticizes Trump over war in Iran”; Newsweek, coverage of Joe Rogan and the Iran war; PinkNews, “Bernie Sanders blasted for touting support from anti-trans comedian Joe Rogan”; US Customs and Border Protection, southwest border encounter data; Special Counsel Robert Hur report (2024); Donna Brazile, Hacks (2017); NFIB v OSHA, US Supreme Court (January 2022)