Episode 1276: Ben Shapiro | The Brogan Report

A friendly platform for partisan talking points

TL;DR: Rogan hands over three hours to a partisan commentator who delivers polished, ideologically motivated claims on climate policy, transgender people, and Israel-Palestine, with minimal pushback and no fact-checking.

Ben Shapiro is editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire and host of “The Ben Shapiro Show.” He is a political pundit, not a scientist, physician, climatologist, or historian. On JRE #1276 (April 3, 2019), Rogan platforms Shapiro’s views on subjects far outside his expertise and largely takes them at face value.

The framing problem

Shapiro is a skilled debater who specializes in “owning” college students with rapid-fire rhetorical moves. Rogan repeatedly praised this skill on-air.

“You have well-formulated ideas… You’ve thought these things through.”

The episode treats rhetorical fluency as a proxy for being correct. It isn’t.

Transgender people

Shapiro has built a substantial portion of his media career around opposing the social and medical recognition of transgender people. On this episode and in his broader 2019 messaging, he framed acceptance of trans identity as a “breakdown of societal norms” and rejected the use of preferred pronouns as a matter of biology.

Why this is misinformation, not just opinion:

The major medical organizations in the United States — the American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, and Endocrine Society — recognize gender-affirming care as evidence-based and medically necessary for many trans people.
AMA (2021 letter to governors): Gender-affirming care is “medically necessary, evidence-based care.” AMA letter
APA (Resolution on Gender Identity Change Efforts, 2021): Affirms gender-diverse identities as a normal variation of human experience. APA resolution
Media Matters has documented the empirical problems with Shapiro’s “social contagion” framing. Media Matters analysis

Real-world harm: Anti-trans rhetoric correlates with elevated risk of suicidality and depression in trans youth. The Trevor Project’s 2022 national survey found that LGBTQ youth who reported access to gender-affirming spaces had significantly lower rates of attempting suicide. Trevor Project survey

Rogan, by his own admission elsewhere, has limited expertise here. He did not push back.

Climate change

Shapiro nominally accepts that the climate is warming and that humans are involved, but spends his airtime attacking proposed solutions, mocking the “Green New Deal,” and downplaying urgency. This is a common rhetorical move — not denial, but obstruction.

What the evidence says:

IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report (2023): Human activities have unequivocally caused approximately 1.1 C of warming. Without rapid, deep cuts to greenhouse gases, warming will exceed 1.5 C. IPCC AR6
NASA: Multiple independent lines of evidence show human-caused warming. NASA evidence page
Yale Climate Connections (2025): Documents the pattern of Rogan’s podcast spreading climate misinformation to millions of listeners. Yale Climate Connections
Sentient Media (research summary): JRE is among the top podcasts identified for spreading climate disinformation. Sentient Media

Why it matters: Delay rhetoric (“yes it’s real, but the solutions are bad”) functions identically to outright denial in policy terms. It buys time for continued emissions.

Israel and Palestine

Shapiro is a longtime, unapologetic partisan on this topic. On the episode he addressed his 2014 tweet contrasting Israelis who “like to build” with Palestinians who “prefer to live in sewage,” which he conceded was “a bad tweet.”

Conceding one tweet does not undo a long record of inflammatory framings of Palestinians as a population. Independent historians and journalists have repeatedly fact-checked Shapiro’s broader narrative.

OnePath Network — historical rebuttal: Documents factual errors in Shapiro’s standard talking points about the history of Israel and Palestine. OnePath analysis
Human Rights Watch (2021): Israeli authorities are committing the crimes of apartheid and persecution. HRW report
Amnesty International (2022): Reached similar conclusions. Amnesty report

Rogan did not introduce any of this counter-evidence on air.

Joe Rogan’s role

This episode is a case study in Rogan’s failure mode with ideologically polished guests:

He flattered Shapiro’s debate skills rather than testing his claims.
He did not raise mainstream medical consensus on trans healthcare.
He did not raise IPCC findings or push on the “delay, not deny” framing.
He did not raise major human rights organizations’ findings on Israel-Palestine.
He treated three hours of partisan messaging as a neutral conversation.

A skeptical interview would have asked Shapiro to engage with the AMA, the IPCC, and Human Rights Watch. None of those organizations came up.

Why it matters

JRE reaches tens of millions of listeners per episode. When Rogan platforms a partisan pundit on medicine, climate science, and Middle East history with zero counterweight, his audience walks away with the impression that contested partisan claims are settled. They aren’t.

Shapiro is entitled to his views. The problem is the format: three hours, no fact-checking, no opposing voices, and a host who treats rhetorical skill as evidence of being right.