Tulsi Gabbard on the Joe Rogan Experience #2143, fact-checked

What the evidence shows: On May 21, 2024, the Department of Justice and DEA published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking proposing to transfer marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act, consistent with an August 2023 HHS recommendation. As the Federal Register document makes clear, this was a proposed rule opened for public comment, not a final or completed rescheduling. Rogan initially says the DEA officially rescheduled marijuana, then corrects himself in the same breath to they're gonna reschedule to Schedule III, which accurately captures the proposal stage. The move was still pending as of the episode: DEA later received over 42,000 comments and scheduled an administrative hearing, and no final rescheduling rule had taken effect at the time.

What the evidence shows: The final signed Declaration on display at the National Archives was engrossed on parchment (animal skin), not hemp paper. The claim about the drafts also lacks support: conservators and the Papers of Thomas Jefferson project concluded that the paper Jefferson used for his rough draft, which is Dutch in origin, was most likely made from linen rags with flax as the primary component, not hemp. The idea that the drafts were on hemp traces largely to hemp-advocacy writing (notably Jack Herer) rather than to any conservation analysis. PolitiFact rated the statement that the Declaration was penned on hemp as False (2016) and a related meme as Mostly False (2019), noting Monticello's position that the hemp-paper claim is, as far as is known, not true.

What the evidence shows: The famous article does exist and its core framing is correct: it hailed hemp as the New Billion Dollar Crop on the strength of a new fiber-stripping machine called the decorticator. Rogan gets two details wrong, both of which he flags as uncertain. The piece ran in Popular Mechanics, not Popular Science, and appeared in the February 1938 issue, not 1930. Coverage of hemp history in Forbes confirms that in 1938 Popular Mechanics wrote about hemp's economic potential and deemed it the billion-dollar crop. The article famously appeared just months after the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 effectively curtailed the domestic hemp industry, which is why its optimism is often noted as ironic.

What the evidence shows: The 90 percent figure traces to retired California game warden John Nores, but Rogan restates it in a way that conflates two different claims. Nores has used 90 percent to describe the share of black-market cannabis grown domestically by criminal enterprises, and separately to describe how much of that domestic black-market crop was historically grown on public land, not 90 percent of all marijuana sold in states where cannabis is illegal. Nores himself says that share has since shifted heavily toward private property, with roughly 70 to 75 percent of black-market grows now on private land rather than public land. Independent enforcement data supports the cartel-on-public-land phenomenon but at a much smaller scale: federal eradication figures show about 43 percent of marijuana plants eradicated in 2012 came from public and tribal lands, and law enforcement estimates that 95 percent or more of the grows found on public lands are run by foreign drug trafficking organizations (a share of public-land grows, not of the total illegal market). The underlying problem is real, but the specific 90 percent framing about the entire illegal-state market is not supported.

What the evidence shows: The 100,000-plus figure describes total US drug overdose deaths from all substances, not opioid overdoses specifically. CDC and NIDA data show total drug overdose deaths peaked at 107,941 in 2022 and declined to 105,007 in 2023, while opioid-involved overdose deaths were lower, 81,806 in 2022 and 79,358 in 2023. Opioids (chiefly illicit fentanyl) are involved in roughly three-quarters of overdose deaths, so they are the leading driver, but the annual opioid-specific total was closer to 80,000 during this period, not 100,000-plus. The claim overstates opioid-specific deaths by attributing the all-drug total to opioids alone.

What the evidence shows: CBP tracks nationwide encounters, which combine Border Patrol Title 8 apprehensions, Office of Field Operations Title 8 inadmissibles, and Title 42 expulsions across land, air, and sea. This episode aired in February 2024, and cumulative nationwide encounters since President Biden took office in January 2021 were near 9 million by then, reaching more than 9.5 million by the end of April 2024 per a House Committee on Homeland Security factsheet, so the roughly 9 million figure is in line with the reported data. The framing is imprecise, however: an encounter is an enforcement event, not a unique person, so a single individual crossing repeatedly is counted multiple times, and a large share of those encounters resulted in expulsion or removal rather than release into the country. The nationwide total also includes ports of entry and northern and coastal borders, not only unauthorized southwest crossings.

What the evidence shows: A CDC-authored study published in JAMA (Mercado et al., 2017) found that emergency department visits for nonfatal self-inflicted injuries among adolescent girls rose sharply starting around 2009, while rates for boys stayed flat: for girls aged 10 to 14 the rate climbed 18.8 percent per year, from 109.8 per 100,000 in 2009 to 317.7 per 100,000 in 2015, and girls aged 15 to 19 rose 7.2 percent per year. This objective self-harm trend is the kind of evidence Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge cite when arguing that adolescent-girl mental health worsened as smartphones and social media became widespread. Rogan's core point that these measures rose for girls around the time social media became widespread is supported by the data. Two caveats: the phrase exactly when social media is invented is loose (the inflection is roughly 2009 to 2012, and the causal link to social media remains debated among researchers), and the argument Rogan describes is in Haidt's later work (The Anxious Generation and his 2021 writing), not The Coddling of the American Mind.

What the evidence shows: Gabbard's description of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is accurate. The statute authorizes the government to target non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States in order to acquire foreign intelligence, including on threats such as terrorist plots, and it explicitly prohibits intentionally targeting Americans. Because targeted foreigners often communicate with people in the United States, Americans' communications are swept up through what the government calls incidental collection: the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board states that U.S. persons' communications may be incidentally collected when a lawfully targeted non-U.S. person communicates with or talks about a U.S. person. The government's own joint statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee likewise acknowledges the privacy interests of Americans whose information may be incidentally acquired when collecting foreigners' communications. Gabbard's summary is consistent with these primary sources, though the phrase capture all of the conversations somewhat overstates the targeted (rather than bulk) design of the program.

What the evidence shows: This paraphrase overstates Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's actual statements. In her most-cited remarks she called climate change one major factor fueling global migration (2019) and, in 2021, framed the border situation as an imperialism crisis, a climate crisis, a trade crisis, and a carceral crisis, presenting climate as one of several interacting drivers rather than the reason most migrants arrive. She never said that most people come to the country because of climate change. The underlying science supports a real but partial link: research finds dry growing seasons helped predict Central American migration to the US from 2012 to 2018, alongside violence and economic factors, and the World Bank projects that climate-driven movement is overwhelmingly internal within countries (about 17 million in all of Latin America by 2050), not a majority driver of cross-border arrivals. As paraphrased, the claim attributes to AOC a stronger single-cause statement than she made, and the majority framing is unsupported by the evidence.

What the evidence shows: The figure traces to Myers and Worm, Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities, published in Nature in 2003, which estimated that large predatory fish biomass today is only about 10 percent of pre-industrial levels, with industrialized fisheries typically cutting community biomass by 80 percent within 15 years of exploitation. That maps to the widely reported 90 percent decline over roughly 50 years, so the number is a real published finding rather than an invention. Two caveats matter: the study concerns large predatory fishes (tuna, swordfish, marlin, sharks, cod, groupers) specifically, not all large fish, and the 90 percent is a meta-analytic estimate, not a direct census. The estimate drew methodological criticism (for example over the use of catch-per-unit-effort trends for tuna), but the authors' 2005 follow-up defended the roughly tenfold decline as a general and in many cases conservative figure, noting it is too optimistic for sensitive species like sharks, which have fallen to about 1 percent in some cases. Current status: the 90 percent claim reflects a genuine, influential study, though Rogan's phrasing generalizes predatory fish to all large fish and states an estimate as a settled fact.

What the evidence shows: Around the time this episode aired, China was in the middle of a large coal buildout. Global Energy Monitor and CREA reported China permitted roughly two new coal power plants per week in 2022 and 2023, with construction starting on about 70.2 GW of new coal capacity in 2023, nearly 20 times the rest of the world's 3.7 GW. NPR, citing the same tracking data, noted China had about six times as much coal capacity starting construction as the rest of the world combined, and CNBC reported China accounted for roughly two-thirds of new global coal plant capacity added in 2023. Given tens of gigawatts of construction each year (each large plant is on the order of 1 GW) and a pipeline of hundreds of plants, the description of hundreds of new plants and doubling down on coal is accurate, though China was simultaneously the world's largest builder of new solar and wind.

What the evidence shows: On October 19, 2021, Rachel Levine, the Assistant Secretary for Health, was ceremonially sworn in as a four-star admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, becoming that corps' first female four-star admiral. The distinction is scoped specifically to the USPHS Commissioned Corps, one of the eight uniformed services and not a military branch. The unqualified phrasing (first female admiral) is imprecise, since the U.S. Navy commissioned its first female four-star admiral, Michelle Howard, in 2014. Within the Public Health Service, however, the summary is accurate.

What the evidence shows: The figure of roughly 1,200 people killed matches Israel's official government estimate for the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. Israel's Foreign Ministry revised the toll down from an earlier count of about 1,400 to around 1,200 in November 2023, after officials concluded that some previously counted unidentified bodies were likely Hamas attackers rather than victims. Officials described 1,200 as an updated estimate that includes Israeli civilians, security personnel, and foreign nationals, not a final tally. The approximately 1,200 figure has since become the standard number cited by governments and major news organizations.

What the evidence shows: No part of France operates under Sharia law: the country has a single secular legal system (laicite), and there are no zones or communities governed by Islamic law. The 25 percent figure is also wildly off for France's Muslim population itself. Pew Research Center estimated France was 8.8 percent Muslim (about 5.7 million people) as of mid-2016, the largest Muslim share in Western Europe but roughly a third of the claimed number, and Pew projects it would reach only 12.7 to 18 percent by 2050 depending on migration. The claim appears to conflate opinion polling on support for applying Sharia (a minority view among French Muslims) with people actually living under a parallel legal system, which does not exist in France.

What the evidence shows: The core of the account holds up. After the October 17, 2023 blast at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, The New York Times ran a top-of-site headline saying an Israeli strike had killed 500, attributing the figure to the Hamas-run Palestinian Health Ministry, and on October 23 published an editors' note conceding its coverage relied too heavily on unverified Hamas claims. Analysis of video and imagery, including experts cited by BBC Verify, indicated the explosion struck the hospital car park (parking lot) rather than the main building, consistent with a failed rocket section and propellant fire rather than a large air-dropped bomb. US intelligence assessed with high confidence that Israel was not responsible and that the blast came from a misfired Palestinian militant rocket, with a lower-confidence attribution to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and put the death toll at roughly 100 to 300, well below the initial 500. Rogan's phrasing of a very small casualty count understates those revised estimates, and the ultimate cause remains contested by some independent investigators, so the specifics are imprecise even though the broad narrative is supported.

What the evidence shows: The underlying claim that opinion turned sharply against Assange after the 2016 releases is well supported: former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger told NPR that Assange went from being regarded as a champion of press freedoms to a virtual pariah, attributing the shift to the 2016 leaking of the DNC emails, after which people felt Assange had changed into more of an activist than a journalist. The specific phrase Hillary Clinton's emails is imprecise, however. What WikiLeaks published in 2016 was internal Democratic National Committee staff email (July 2016) and roughly 20,000 messages stolen from the personal account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta (October to November 2016), not messages from Clinton's own private State Department server, which was a separate FBI matter. A 2018 federal indictment attributes the DNC, DCCC, and Podesta thefts to Russian military intelligence officers, who released the material via DCLeaks, Guccifer 2.0, and another organization. So the reputational shift is real and tied to that episode, but the emails were the DNC and Podesta files rather than Clinton's own emails.

What the evidence shows: The figures match Piper Sandler's Fall 2023 Taking Stock With Teens survey (its 46th semi-annual, released October 10, 2023, based on 9,193 US teens surveyed September 4 to 27, 2023). That survey found 87 percent of teens own an iPhone and 88 percent expect an iPhone to be their next mobile device, both described as near record highs. The same 87 and 88 percent pairing also appeared in the Spring 2023 survey. By the Spring 2024 survey (released April 2024), reported ownership had shifted slightly to 85 percent, so the exact numbers quoted correspond to the 2023 waves rather than the most current reading at the time.

What the evidence shows: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) does approve the large majority of government surveillance applications, and the 'rubber stamp' criticism is widely made, but the specific 99.999999 percent figure is far higher than the actual record. The most-cited historical rate is roughly 99.97 percent (about 11 to 12 outright denials out of roughly 34,000 applications over the court's first three decades), not the eight-nines Gabbard cited. Recent official data further undercut the near-total-approval claim: the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts reported that in 2022 the FISC received 358 applications and granted 249 outright, modified 87, denied 16 in part, and denied 7 in full, so a meaningful share were changed or rejected rather than rubber-stamped. The directional point (a very high approval rate) is accurate, but the exact percentage is invented and overstates the case.

What the evidence shows: In a November 2023 post, Signal disclosed that it expected to require approximately 50 million dollars a year to operate by 2025, so that projection is accurate, but the same post put current (2023) infrastructure spending near 14 million dollars and total operating costs closer to 33 million dollars, making the 40 million figure for 2023 somewhat high. It is true that Signal's protocol grew out of Open Whisper Systems, and that the Open Technology Fund helped incubate Signal: OTF was a program of Radio Free Asia under the US Agency for Global Media and remains dependent on US government funding. Moxie Marlinspike (legally Matthew Rosenfeld) did characterize the project as never seeking venture capital or investment, which is technically consistent with receiving grants rather than equity. The framing that this funding was hidden is misleading, however, since OTF publicly listed Signal as a supported project.

What the evidence shows: The Open Technology Fund did begin in 2012 as a pilot program within Radio Free Asia, which is one of the networks overseen by the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM); USAGM's history page confirms OTF was originally a program under Radio Free Asia, a USAGM network, before it became an independent grantee in 2019. The claim's founding year and parentage are therefore accurate. The funding figure is overstated: USAGM's own FY2024 Agency Financial Report reports the agency received appropriations totaling 866.9 million dollars for FY2024, and it cites an FY2023 enacted level of 884.7 million dollars. USAGM's annual congressional appropriation in recent years has run below one billion dollars, not over it, so describing it as over one billion annually is inaccurate.

What the evidence shows: The 700 dollar figure is accurate: after the August 2023 Maui wildfires FEMA activated Critical Needs Assistance, a one-time payment of 700 dollars per household for immediate needs like food, water, clothing and transportation. But the framing that this was the only or total aid is misleading. FEMA reported the same funding round included more than 2.3 million dollars in rental assistance for nearly 2,000 households and said it would cover survivors staying in hotels, plus home repairs and personal property reimbursements. FEMA publicly labeled the claim that survivors got only 700 dollars per household a rumor, stating the payment was just one of several types of federal assistance available. So the number is right, but calling it a single one-time payment misrepresents a broader package of disaster aid.

What the evidence shows: The Maui Police Department released a preliminary after-action report on its response to the August 2023 Lahaina wildfire in February 2024. That 98-page report made 32 recommendations, not 92, and a final version released in 2025 added three more for a total of 35. The framing is otherwise accurate: the report dealt exclusively with the police response, and MPD stated it would be shared with law enforcement agencies across the nation so they could benefit from the lessons learned. The count of 92 is roughly triple the actual figure.

What the evidence shows: Herman Andaya, administrator of the Maui Emergency Management Agency, appeared at a news conference in Wailuku on Wednesday, August 16, 2023, where he defended his decision not to activate the island's warning sirens as the Lahaina fire approached (he answered no when asked if he regretted the choice). The fire had devastated Lahaina on August 8, 2023, so his public appearance came eight days later, not the roughly seven Gabbard cited (she hedged with like). One day after that press conference, on August 17, 2023, Andaya submitted his resignation effective immediately, citing health reasons, and Mayor Richard Bissen accepted it. The core sequence Gabbard describes, a single public press conference defending the siren decision followed almost immediately by resignation, matches the record; only the exact number of days is slightly imprecise.

What the evidence shows: Tulsi Gabbard's book, whose full title is For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind, was published by the conservative imprint Regnery and released on April 30, 2024. Forbes describes it as a blend of memoir and political manifesto centered on her break with the Democratic Party, matching Gabbard's description of it in the interview. The claim as stated (a book called For Love of Country about the experiences that led her to leave the party) is accurate.