Tulsi Gabbard on the Joe Rogan Experience #1599, fact-checked

What the evidence shows: Gabbard's account attributes to Rep. Steve Cohen the claim that only 20% of white males nationally voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Exit poll analyses of 2020 voting behavior put that figure much higher: a University of Virginia Center for Politics analysis of 2020 exit poll data found 58% of white men voted for Donald Trump, meaning roughly 42% voted for Biden, not 20%. The underlying 20% figure is roughly half the actual share, so the derived inference that the military (which is disproportionately white and male) voted for Trump at a correspondingly extreme rate is not supported by the cited statistic, though white men as a group did lean Republican in 2020. Notably, Gabbard herself flags in the same exchange that she has not verified the figure independently.

What the evidence shows: Rep. Steve Cohen made this argument on CNN on January 18, 2021, reasoning that because the Guard is roughly 90% male and, in his estimate, only about 20% of white men voted for Biden, at most 25% of Guard members protecting the inauguration would have voted for Biden, leaving the other 75% as people who "might want to do something." Cohen's underlying statistic was wrong: validated 2020 exit-poll and post-election data put Biden's share of the white male vote at roughly 38-42%, not 20%, meaning Trump's share was closer to 58-60%, not 80%. Because Cohen's 75% figure rests on that incorrect starting number, it is a mathematical extrapolation built on a false premise rather than any actual survey or data about how Guard troops voted; no such data exists, since individual troops' votes are not publicly tracked. The FBI and National Guard did conduct enhanced insider-threat vetting of all 25,000 troops ahead of the inauguration, a routine precaution following the January 6 Capitol riot, but officials reported no evidence of any threat and vetting was not based on party affiliation.

What the evidence shows: Rogan claimed there was "no evidence" that COVID-19 spreads outdoors, criticizing a California outdoor-dining shutdown as baseless. Contemporaneous research contradicts the "no evidence" framing: a peer-reviewed systematic review (Bulfone et al., Journal of Infectious Diseases, published online in November 2020, around the time of this episode) found that fewer than 10% of documented global SARS-CoV-2 transmission events occurred outdoors, and that the odds of indoor transmission were about 18.7 times higher than outdoor transmission (95% CI 6.0-57.9). That means outdoor transmission was not zero: the review's own data confirms real, documented outdoor spread, just at a much lower rate than indoors. So the evidence available at the time showed outdoor transmission risk was real but substantially lower than indoor risk, rather than there being no evidence of any outdoor spread. Whether a specific outdoor-dining ban was well-calibrated policy is a separate, more debatable question, but the categorical claim that no evidence of outdoor spread existed is not supported by the scientific literature.

What the evidence shows: A peer-reviewed study does exist showing that quercetin, like EGCG, acts as a zinc ionophore, meaning it can help transport zinc across cell membranes, and zinc itself has documented antiviral activity in laboratory settings by inhibiting viral RNA polymerase. However, that ionophore evidence comes from in-vitro (cell and liposome) experiments published in 2014, not a clinical trial, and it was not conducted in the context of COVID-19. Clinical evidence for quercetin (with or without zinc) against COVID-19 in humans is limited to small, open-label pilot trials, such as a 42-patient Italian study, that reported faster viral clearance and symptom improvement but were not blinded, placebo-controlled, or adequately powered to establish efficacy. A 2022 review in Phytotherapy Research concluded that despite plausible mechanisms and preliminary clinical signals, the hypothesis that quercetin plus zinc benefits COVID-19 treatment or prophylaxis has not been clinically tested, and larger high-powered randomized controlled trials are still needed to confirm quercetin's clinical benefit. As of the time of this claim, no robust clinical trial had demonstrated that quercetin plus zinc prevents or treats COVID-19 in humans, so the underlying cell-biology mechanism Rogan describes is real but the implied protective benefit remains unproven.