When Joe Rogan says on the world’s biggest podcast that America might be at “step seven on the way to a bona fide civil war,” people notice.
Within a day, TV panels and online commentators were arguing not just about whether Rogan is right, but about what “civil war” even means in 2025.
Fox News’ Outnumbered crew treated his warning as a serious sign of rising political hatred.
On The Hill’s Rising, hosts Robby Soave and Niall Stanage questioned the civil-war framing but agreed something ugly is brewing beneath the surface.
Rogan’s “Step Seven” Warning
Both Fox News and The Hill played the same clip from Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Rogan reacted to online celebrations after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, saying people cheering a murder in front of Kirk’s wife and child showed the country was in “dark territory.”
He then asked, “Where are we right now on the scale of one to civil war? Are we at seven? Because I thought we were five… after the Charlie Kirk thing, I’m like, we might be like seven.”
On Rising, Soave summed up Rogan’s point: the assassination itself was bad enough, but the reaction online convinced Rogan the divide is even worse than he thought.
Rogan also stressed that the only healthy path forward is argument, not violence. He said nobody “knows what’s right” by themselves, and that the only way to figure things out is to talk, listen to other people’s logic, and sometimes admit, “You’ve got a good point, I never thought about it that way.”
That last part actually gets lost in a lot of the headlines. Rogan was clearly disturbed, but he was also pushing for more conversation, not less.
Fox Panel: Is Rogan Right Or Irresponsible?
On Fox’s Outnumbered, co-host Emily Compagno introduced the clip by reminding viewers that Rogan has “millions of followers” and, in her view, a curiosity-driven, not party-driven, audience.
She framed his comments as a “warning for the left” about celebrating the killing of political opponents.
When the clip ended, she asked Fox News contributor Leslie Marshall directly: “Is he right?”
Marshall answered bluntly: “No.”
As a broadcaster, she called it “irresponsible” to even float the idea that the U.S. is close to civil war. Marshall argued that what makes the country great is that people with different ethnicities, religions, and ideologies can still live together.
She reminded viewers that there aren’t only two camps — “left” and “right” — but shades of both, and said talking about civil war feeds a narrative that Americans can’t coexist.
At the same time, Marshall was crystal clear about the murder itself. She said violence is always wrong, “for any reason,” and that while she doesn’t agree with “anything Charlie said,” he absolutely had the right to say it.
She condemned people speaking ill of someone “cut down in the prime of life” and said she was raised not to “speak ill of the dead.”
That mix is important: she rejected Rogan’s civil-war talk, but she also rejected the gleeful reaction to Kirk’s killing.
Berkeley, Free Speech, And A “Tiny Faction”
Marshall also tried to push back on the idea that an entire campus is rotten.
She said she recently toured UC Berkeley with her kids and walked the grounds freely, without any sense of being stopped or threatened.
On her radio show, Marshall said, she sent a “man on the street” to talk to students and found that many didn’t even know about the violent protest and attack tied to Kirk’s event.
With a 98-acre campus and 46,000 students, she argued, it’s wrong to brand the entire student body as violent. She noted that some of the people in the protest footage looked older and likely weren’t students.
Brian Kilmeade backed her up, pointing out this sounded similar to Columbia’s protests, where officials said many agitators were outside organizers, not enrolled students.
There’s a real point here: fringe extremists can define the public image of a place most people there don’t control.
But for people watching the attack on Kirk and the chaos outside, those details don’t make the images any less disturbing.
Kayleigh McEnany: “This Was Not Mostly Peaceful”
Kayleigh McEnany took a different angle on Outnumbered.
She said that even if the violent group at Berkeley was a “tiny faction,” the reality is that it happened – and that the reaction from some adults in the culture was just as alarming.
McEnany pointed to a social studies teacher who said “Bye Charlie, what a piece of garbage” and essentially celebrated the assassination.
“That’s not an isolated example,” she said, arguing that people with that mindset “belong nowhere educating our children.”
She also mocked media attempts to call the Berkeley unrest “mostly peaceful,” comparing it to the infamous 2020 clip of a reporter standing in front of burning buildings under a “mostly peaceful” chyron.
According to McEnany, there were “fireworks, tear gas” and “a bloody face” in Berkeley. To her, that’s not “mostly peaceful” by any common-sense meaning.
McEnany then reminded viewers that one of the speakers with Kirk, pastor Frank Turek, was simply quoting the Bible about trials producing patience, character, and hope – yet that was labeled “hateful speech” by some protesters.
She closed by praising Bill Maher, who said Kirk was shot under a banner that said “Prove me wrong,” and that too many people now think the way to “prove you wrong is to eliminate you.”
McEnany praised Maher and Leslie Marshall for standing up for free speech across political lines. For once, there was some bipartisan agreement on at least one thing: celebrating political murder is grotesque.
Rising: Civil War Or Just Dangerous Political Violence?
On Rising, Robby Soave and Niall Stanage took Rogan’s warning seriously but questioned his wording.
Soave argued that “civil war” is probably the wrong term for what people are imagining. Historically, he said, civil wars involve standing armies, leaders, and organized rebellion against the government.
Right now, Soave doesn’t see any armed force capable of taking on the federal government, or any credible figure organizing such a rebellion.
If someone tried, he said, it would “last hours” before being crushed.
Stanage agreed there’s unlikely to be a successful armed uprising that overthrows Washington. But he said when people talk about “civil war” in modern America, they may really mean something closer to the political sectarian violence seen in Northern Ireland’s Troubles.
He described a scenario where extremists on the far right attack people on the left, and extremists on the left retaliate, with the number of attacks slowly climbing.
He said he doesn’t think it breaks out “tomorrow,” but he doesn’t dismiss the idea that such violence could become more common.
Both hosts pointed to the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the recent attempt on Donald Trump’s life as real inflection points.
Stanage noted that the U.S. hasn’t seen many political assassinations of major figures in decades, and that targeting someone as prominent as Kirk is “undeniable” proof that a line has been crossed.
At the same time, Soave reminded viewers that the 1960s and 1970s actually had far more organized political violence, bombings, and assassinations than we see today.
So the question he posed was simple: are these recent events outliers, or “dots on a graph” that signal a rising trend?
Online Pushback: Retaliation, Hypocrisy, And Responsibility
Rising also highlighted critical reactions to Rogan’s comments from social media.
Influencer Khalil Underwood wrote that while he doesn’t agree with celebrating anyone’s death, some people see their reactions as “flipping the script.”
He pointed to the mocking of George Floyd and Trayvon Martin’s deaths years earlier, saying that for some, this feels like retaliation and “anger that’s been building for years,” not pure celebration.
Another critic, Tom Welborne, argued Rogan is acting startled by violent rhetoric that he helped normalize.
Welborne wrote that Rogan’s show has often been a “megaphone” for extreme voices, and that it’s “rich” for him to now measure the distance to civil war as if he had no role in turning up the volume.
Whether that’s fair or not, it hits a nerve.
Big hosts on both left and right have made careers out of pushing emotional, sometimes apocalyptic content. Now many of those same people are worried that the country feels like a powder keg.
Fraying Bonds And Higher Stakes
Stanage went even bigger-picture toward the end of Rising.
He said what really worries him is the erosion of the “institutions and practices that bind countries together.”
He pointed to media bubbles, social media echo chambers, attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and growing accusations that courts and law enforcement are being weaponized for partisan ends.
All of that, in his view, frays the basic trust that keeps people with different views in the same national family.
Soave added that part of the problem is how much is now at stake in federal politics.
A hundred years ago, he said, national elections didn’t decide as much of daily life. Today, the federal government has far more power, so the stakes of each election feel existential.
When people believe every election is do-or-die for their values, it becomes easier to justify extreme language – and, for a small minority, extreme actions.
Where Does That Leave Rogan’s Warning?
Put together, these reactions paint a complicated picture.
Leslie Marshall thinks Rogan’s civil-war talk is irresponsible, but she agrees that celebrating assassination is disgusting and dangerous.
Kayleigh McEnany and Emily Compagno see Rogan’s warning as a symptom of something real – a violent faction willing to use force to silence views they hate.
Robby Soave and Niall Stanage think a literal civil war is unlikely but worry about rising political violence and crumbling civic norms.
Even Rogan, despite the “step seven” line, is ultimately calling for more speech and less violence.
The uncomfortable truth is that everyone in these conversations, across networks and ideologies, seems to agree on one core point: cheering a political murder is a bright red line.
If there’s any hope of stepping back from Rogan’s “seven,” it probably starts there – with a shared refusal to excuse violence, whether it comes from “our side” or “theirs,” and a stubborn commitment to fight with words instead of bullets.
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