Rogan’s Race-Traitor Rant
By Rob Redding
Editor & Publisher
NEW YORK, May 30, 2026, 1:30 p.m.— Talk show host Joe Rogan escalated the fallout from Kevin Hart’s roast when he used the word “traitors” to attack comedians who criticized Tony Hinchcliffe’s George Floyd joke.
Rogan said, “Comedians that are getting upset about these roast jokes, fuck all the way off.” He said, “You fucking traitor. You know what this is. You know exactly what this is.” He never explained whether he meant traitors to comedy or traitors to a racial order, but the term has a long history as a racial loyalty test in white supremacist language.
Shane Gillis was fired from Saturday Night Live in 2019 after video surfaced of him calling Chinese people “chinks” and mocking Chinese accents on a podcast, a controversy widely reported by The New York Times, CNN, and Rolling Stone. Tony Hinchcliffe went viral in 2021 after he opened a set by calling an Asian American comic a “filthy fucking chink” and then launched into more accent based mockery, as documented by Variety and NBC News. Hinchcliffe later drew national condemnation at a 2024 Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden when he referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” a line reported by BBC, PBS, Politico, and WHAS11; in the same routine he stereotyped Latino immigration with crude remarks about high birth rates and not practicing birth control, invoked a racist trope about Black people and watermelons, called Palestinians “rock throwers,” and used an antisemitic trope about Jewish people and money. Additional reporting from The Daily Beast, Latino Rebels, and Complex noted that both Gillis and Hinchcliffe have performed “racially charged jokes about Puerto Ricans, immigrants, and crime” and “bits about Latinos and Puerto Ricans.” These incidents form the documented basis for the sustained criticism of their racist material about Asians, Puerto Ricans, and other marginalized groups.
Rogan's race-traitor comments were aimed at Chelsea Handler, who was the only major white comic to say directly that the jokes were “racist,” that the comedians were “bigots,” that the roast was “ick,” that it was “gross,” and that “lynching is not a joke. That’s worse than rape.”
Rogan also emphasized that Hart defended the comedians, which he used to argue that they should, in essence, get a pass.
The history of the word “traitor” matters here. For more than a century, white supremacist groups used “race traitor” to describe white people who supported civil rights, opposed segregation, defended Black victims of violence, dated or married Black people, or challenged white racial solidarity. It was a way to enforce racial loyalty. In the 1990s, the journal Race Traitor flipped the meaning with the slogan “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity,” which made the term even more politically charged. Today the word still carries racial weight when a white figure attacks another white figure in a dispute centered on racist speech.
Rogan said, “You fucking traitor,” while defending Gillis and Hinchcliffe and attacking Handler who called the jokes racist. The question becomes what Rogan meant by “traitor” in this context and what kind of loyalty he was demanding.
The final cut of Hart’s Netflix show itself adds another layer. Seventeen jokes were nixed from the Netflix Roast of Kevin Hart due to their shock value nature, vulgarity, or time constraints. These cut punchlines were leaked by comedy writers who worked on the live special. Variety, The Daily Beast, BroBible, and Entertainment Weekly all published lists of the jokes that never made it to air. Most of the unaired material consisted of harsh, rapid fire digs aimed at Hart, Hinchcliffe, and Handler. Some of the cut material relied on darker premises that the production team decided not to broadcast. The fact that seventeen jokes were removed raises the obvious question: if the production was already cutting material, why did the George Floyd joke stay in?
The joke at the center of the controversy was delivered by Tony Hinchcliffe. He said, “Right now George Floyd is looking up at us all laughing so hard he can’t breathe.” That was the line. That was the moment that ignited the backlash.
Handler responded with her own clarity. She said, “It’s just everything we know. That they’re racist. That they’re bigots.” She said, “It was ick. It was gross.” She said, “Lynching is not a joke. That’s worse than rape.”
There is a precedent for intervention. During the Tom Brady roast, Brady reportedly confronted a comic backstage and said, “Never say that shit again.” That moment has become the example people use when they argue that Hart should have stepped in.
Hart rejected that idea, taking no responsibility for providing the platform to two people his friend Handler called racists. He said, “Remove me from it. I didn’t say it.” He said, “It’s a live production.” He said, “Would I tell those jokes. No. But do I get why they’re being told. Yes.” He said Hinchcliffe “arguably had the best set or one of the best sets.”
The divide between Blacks and whites is now clear. Rogan believes everything is fair game and that Black death is a punchline. He believes that a roast has no rules. Further, he believes that white women like Handler should get in line with racist white men. And Hart is a mess for stepping and fetching for racist like Rogan. While none of this is shocking to me it is shocking that they - too many racist whites - are still out and loud with this type of race traitor rhetoric in 2026.
(Rob Redding is the author of the forthcoming book Graphic Graphite: Bucking as a Challenge to Racial Narrative, a study of how some Black men have been labeled “race traitors” for having sex with white men. The book will be available on Amazon on Juneteenth, Monday, June 15, 2026).