The Gerald Ford War Party Experience
Joe Rogan can choose his guests and his topics, but audiences ought to realize his show basically cuts and pastes narratives that he hears from others.
The hottest topic this past weekend was Joe Rogan’s episode hosting TikTok and X influencer Ian Carroll whose assertions about Israeli complicity in 9/11 I covered in January. They rehashed many of the same topics together that Carroll had written about back then as well, with a particular focus on Jeffrey Epstein. What grabbed my attention this time however my attention was grabbed by Joe Rogan’s own freewheeling interpretation of history. Only two minutes into the interview he and Carroll dumped on a US president. Was it Woodrow Wilson? FDR? LBJ? No, it was none other than Gerald R. Ford, the president most well known for the tumble that helped launch Chevy Chase’s career.
2:41 - JR: "one of the uh terms that he [Richard M. Nixon] had agreed
to to run for president was Gerald Ford who was on the fucking Warren Commission"
This is false on its face. Nixon ran for president three times, with US Ambassador to the UN Henry Cabot Lodge as his running mate in 1960 when he lost to JFK and in 1968 and 1972 when he won with Spiro Agnew as his running mate. In 1973 it was discovered that Agnew was taking cash bribes during his tenure as governor of Maryland and he had never declared his earnings on his income tax. Agnew’s saga is one of the few times such a senior official had to resign, but it was overshadowed by Watergate. It actually became an ethics case study for the American Society of Civil Engineers.
But they continued,
2:51 -
JR: . . . Gerald Ford as his VP so Gerald Ford becomes the first ever non-elected president he slips in he becomes president for kind of a bullshit term-
IC: Yeah . . .does a whole bunch of war party things and just a whole bunch of bullshit
JC: and we decide that Nixon was the real problem with the country.
IC: I mean how often is it that they're allowing someone that they aren't sure about to get to president and they're putting they're sticking them with a VP that is their guy right like LBJ with JFK . . ." 3:20
Rather quickly Rogan contradicts himself. Ford was not the first unelected president, there had been seven that had succeeded presidents who were deceased, of which four had been assassinated (Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy). Here Rogan and Carroll betray their ignorance of the details. Ford was the first president to have succeeded to the office without being elected as either president or vice president, which has been a trivia question for decades.
But the next thing Carroll says is also wrong. Ironically, Gerald Ford was not a president who did a bunch of "war party things". His record shows the opposite:
Ford continued Nixon's non-confrontational policies of detente with the USSR and increased engagement with the PR of China.
As part of detente he had the US sign the Helsinki Accords along with the USSR recognising the post-WWII boundaries in Europe as well as the Vladivostok Summit of 1974 that helped advance the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II (SALT II) talks with the USSR to a more co-operative phase.
When in December 1974 North Vietnamese forces violated the Paris Peace Accords and launched the Spring Offensive against the South, Ford did not not have US forces reenter the war and only sought an emergency package of $722 million ($4.23 billion in 2025) for South Vietnam, but it was refused. Ford ultimately authorized US forces to be involved in the ultimately chaotic withdrawal of the remaining US civilian presence in Saigon in late April 1975, before the capital fell to communist troops on the 30th. The Fall of Saigon ultimately helped define Ford’s legacy.
Of course the biggest topic that everyone is talking about during the Rogan podcast is Israel, which is truly ironic because in 1975 Gerald Ford actually was bold enough to suspend aid as part of a “reassessment” of the US-Israel partnership in light of Israel’s stubbornness on terms to a disengagement agreement with Egypt after the Yom Kippur War. In his own autobiography Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin included a quote from a message Ford sent to him:
Ultimately after Ford’s suspension Congress authorised sales of arms to Israel on favourable terms, but it was a clear message that no president since then has attempted to send that Israel would have to negotiate or else face consequences.
We can’t discuss the Joe Rogan Experience without raising something conspiratorial or occult in history, so here’s something that Joe and Ian “missed” if they wanted to actually place Ford in a conspiracy narrative.
On September 4, 1975 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger brokered the Sinai II agreement between Egypt and Israel.
The next day Pres. Ford was in Sacramento walking toward the state capitol in an impromptu moment during a tour when a woman in the crowd sprang forward and attempted to kill him with .45 Colt 1911 handgun. Her gun had been loaded, but she had not chambered a round, and a Secret Service agent ended up wrestling her to the ground. Her identity was later revealed to be Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a member of Charles Manson’s cult. There are endless different narratives about that group and the MK Ultra programme. Only seventeen days later Sarah Jane Moore, another member of the group, attempted to kill Ford again this time in San Francisco. She fired two shots from a .38 Special revolver and missed, before being apprehended by Marine Corps veteran Oliver Sipple. If either of them had succeeded in killing Ford, the next president would have been. . . Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, a member of the well known family of oil barons. Of course, I usually leave it to others to speculate on how this would have changed events in the Middle East, but unlike Carroll and Rogan I would not need to twist and distort President Ford’s legacy to do it. He’ll never be considered a great president, but history should remember him as anything but just another member of the “war party”.
