Joe Rogan called New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani "a fucking psychopath" after examining the details of his recently announced budget proposal for the city. The podcaster zeroed in on the spending earmarked for migrants, delivering a verdict that millions of Americans would echo without hesitation.
Rogan made the remarks on Thursday's episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, with author Michael Malice joining as a guest for the tenth time.
"The amount for migrants is crazy. There should be zero dollars for illegal immigrants."
That's Rogan, saying plainly what elected officials in New York have spent years dancing around. The city has hemorrhaged resources on illegal immigrants while its own residents endure crumbling infrastructure, rising crime, and a cost of living that bleeds working families dry. And now Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist, has handed taxpayers a budget that apparently doubles down on the approach.
According to Breitbart, Rogan's exchange with Malice quickly moved past the headline and into the deeper dysfunction. When Rogan argued that a fix would be to "get them jobs," Malice pushed back with a question that exposes the entire contradiction of sanctuary city economics.
"How are you going to get a migrant a job?"
Malice went further, pointing out a tension that progressives refuse to acknowledge.
"Wouldn't you rather give them food than a job? I don't want them taking American citizens' jobs."
There it is. The impossible loop that sanctuary city advocates have constructed for themselves. You can't simultaneously champion open borders, demand taxpayer-funded services for illegal immigrants, and claim to stand for American workers. These positions collide, and no amount of progressive sloganeering papers over the wreckage.
Malice also conceded the practical reality that even enforcement carries a price tag. "Even if you want to put them in jail, that's not cheap," he noted. And when Rogan suggested simply getting migrants jobs, Malice offered the bluntest possible redirect: Rogan retorted with "Get them a job in Guatemala."
Mamdani took office as a Democratic Socialist in a city that was already buckling under the weight of its own generosity toward people who entered the country illegally. The specific figures of his budget proposal weren't detailed in the discussion, but the fact that Rogan could look at the plan and call the migrant spending "crazy" tells you the direction Mamdani is steering the ship.
This is the natural endpoint of the ideology. Democratic Socialists don't see a budget as a set of tradeoffs. They see it as a vehicle for redistribution, and illegal immigrants have become the most politically fashionable beneficiaries in progressive circles. Never mind the taxpayers footing the bill. Never mind the legal immigrants who followed the rules and received nothing close to the same solicitude.
Both Rogan and Malice eventually landed in the same place. Malice said flatly, "The whole thing's a mess." Rogan conceded the same, then cut to the core of it.
"Unless you're going to remove them from the country."
Malice agreed: "Right, unless you remove them."
Remarkably, a podcaster and an author can arrive at this conclusion in a five-minute conversation while New York's entire political class spends billions pretending the option doesn't exist.
Rogan's audience dwarfs the viewership of any cable news program or city council hearing. When he looks at a municipal budget and reacts with blunt disgust, that sentiment reaches tens of millions of people, most of whom already suspect their government is spending their money on people who have no legal right to be here.
Malice, for his part, framed the dilemma with a realism that progressive policymakers lack. He acknowledged that you can't simply ignore people who are physically present in the city.
"I don't think you could have zero, because if they're gonna be there, you have to feed them, you have to do something with them — if you don't feed them, they're gonna be robbing stores."
That's not a defense of the spending. It's an indictment of the policies that created the problem in the first place. If your city invited a crisis it cannot manage and now faces a choice between subsidizing illegal immigrants and watching them turn to crime, the failure didn't start with the budget line item. It started with the sanctuary policies, the welcome mats, and the politicians who treated illegal immigration as a moral virtue rather than a legal violation.
Malice also added, "You can't just throw them away," which is true. Nobody serious is suggesting otherwise. But there is a vast gap between "throwing people away" and spending untold sums of taxpayer money to sustain a population that should never have been encouraged to settle in the city to begin with. That gap is where actual policy lives, and New York's leadership has refused to occupy it for years.
In a detail that perfectly captures the absurdist energy of the episode, Malice appeared on Thursday's show wearing peculiar face paint. He explained at the start that "I just wanted to have a fun look," and later posted on X, "Tenth time's the charm."
At least someone in this story has a sense of humor about the situation. Mamdani's budget certainly doesn't.