“[A] lot of the people who are going and getting four-year degrees, they’re not like engineers and doctors. They have effectively fake jobs,” Vice President JD Vance told podcast host Mike Rowe last week. This is ironic, given that the Constitution doesn’t even give the vice president a full-time job. The position carries just two responsibilities: breaking ties in the Senate and not dying. Every vice president has to decide how to fill the rest of their time. Al Gore championed emerging technologies and the environment. Dick Cheney massively expanded the surveillance state. Vance goes on podcasts to spread conspiracy theories. 

In his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance denounces conspiracy theorists as “fringe lunatics.” But once a paranoid ethos became nonnegotiable for an ambitious Republican, he changed his tune. Now, Vance appears to be the administration’s chief conspiracy communicator. This week, Vance went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to discuss the big lie of voter fraud, aliens, the deep state, Jeffrey Epstein and why so many people have accused him of being an antisemite. 

Vance’s mission is to keep low-propensity male voters and their idols, like Rogan, in the MAGA fold despite Trump hiding the Epstein files, breaking his promise of no new wars and failing to release any juicy details about extraterrestrials or the Kennedy assassination. That means walking a delicate line between validating the paranoids’ worldview and praising his boss.

“What is it like being the vice president?,” Rogan asked, hard-hitting as ever, “Like how much access do you have to information?

“So I have, like, effectively unlimited access to information,” Vance boasted. But there’s a catch.

“I’ve said that I am going to look into the UFO thing,” Vance explained. “And I’ve been saying that for a year and a half and I haven’t done it yet because I haven’t had the time.”

Vance insisted that he had been too busy trying to make Trump’s war with Iran as successful as possible and calling senators about the housing bill.

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The vice president also agreed with his host that the Los Angeles mayoral race was “super sus.” The two men traded insinuations about Democrats recruiting homeless people to vote in the primary — without providing supporting evidence. (Even if that were true, homeless people don’t lose their voting rights, and it’s fair to assume those who did vote weren’t fans of Pratt, whose platform was putting the homeless in camps.) But proof was beside the point. This was an opportunity for Vance to champion the SAVE Act, Trump’s doomed voter ID legislation, and fume about how counting immigrants on the Census, as the Constitution requires, is stealing congressional representation from states with low immigration rates. 

Lindsay Beyerstein

Lindsay Beyerstein is an investigative journalist in Brooklyn, New York. She writes a weekly column for The Editorial Board and is working on a book about conspiracy theories and American politics. Follow her on Bluesky.