Ben Shapiro on Thursday slammed Vice President JD Vance’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast this week, saying the likely frontrunner for the 2028 GOP presidential nomination “did not sound very conservative.”
The vice president sat down with Rogan for a podcast interview on Wednesday, as the U.S. and Iran resumed strikes following the dissolution of a peace deal that Vance himself helped negotiate. Vance and Rogan discussed the vice president’s role in overseeing the Iran negotiations, his belief that the Trump administration “screwed up” its communications on the Epstein files, and the rise of socialism on the Left.
In a Thursday episode of The Ben Shapiro Show, Shapiro hit Vance particularly over his comments on the latter topic and his views on Americans’ frustration with the country’s economic system over the past few decades.
“If I want a big, intrusive, anti-free-markets government or a foreign policy rooted in both moral relativism and weakness, if I want baseless conspiracy slop, I can just vote Democrat. But of course, that’s why I don’t vote Democrat because I oppose those things,” Shapiro said. And listen, I hope the vice president opposes those things, too. That’s why I’m concerned about the stuff he said on Joe Rogan. This is the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2028.”
Shapiro clipped several comments from Vance about the GOP’s duty to counter the rise of socialism among young people in the United States. The vice president said it’s the job of Republicans “to give people a sense that the system is not rigged and that the American dream is attainable.”
“Man, we ran the experiment. We ran the experiment of offshoring all of our industrial jobs, of becoming a services and finance economy, and allowing Wall Street to come in and buy every asset of modern life and turn it into an investable, line-goes-up asset,” Vance said on The Joe Rogan Experience. “And what has that done? It’s created a generation of kids who, kind of, are attracted to socialism. You have to fix that problem.”
Countering Vance’s point, Shapiro argued that Vance was giving “credence to all of the straw men and lies of the socialists” about the offshoring of U.S. industries and the state of the service economy.
“When you keep giving credence to that, and then you say … we, the government, we must step in and convince people the system is not rigged? I don’t know how that sounds any different than Gavin Newsom, frankly,” Shapiro said.
Rogan and Shapiro, for what it’s worth, have different regular audiences on their platforms and differing personal viewpoints. Vance and President Donald Trump, who each went on Rogan’s podcast in the lead-up to the 2024 election, have engaged with Rogan in hopes of reaching his anti-establishment audience and non-traditional voters.
W. JAMES ANTLE III: JD VANCE AND THE ROGAN DEMOCRATS
Rogan’s viewership spans from staunch Make America Healthy Again advocates to more socially liberal viewers who agree with his opinions on marijuana legalization. While Vance has been vocal about his distaste for pacts such as the North American Free Trade Agreement — something Rogan has also expressed skepticism about — Shapiro, on the other hand, supports free trade and has much more traditional, conservative viewpoints.
Shapiro has also had a mixed history with the MAGA movement, supporting Trump in 2024 and 2020 but not in 2016.