Vice Co-Founder Shane Smith Seeks Pivot Toward Conservatives

Vice co-founder Shane Smith is apparently returning to his roots and attempting a major rebrand at his company to appeal to conservatives in the age of Donald Trump.

Producers for Shane Smith’s podcast, “Shane Smith Has Questions,” have recently courted conservative podcasters and media personalities to sit down for interviews on his show, Semafor reported Nov. 17. Over the past several weeks, Vice News has uploaded videos of Smith’s podcast, on topics ranging from the border crisis to the Deep State, to its YouTube channel, seemingly as part of its strategy to engage more conservative viewers.

“Shane has always been a centrist, and his podcast books guests from both sides of the aisle,” a Vice Media spokesperson told Semafor. “He’s too left for the right and too right for the left, and that’s exactly how his audience prefers it. After only a month, the episodes have over five million views and counting.”

I’m not at all shocked by Smith’s pivot, and it’s a smart move if he wants Vice to thrive in the age of Trump, as wokeness is in full retreat mode. Before the election in October, Smith sat down with legendary music producer Rick Rubin and revealed how wokeness ultimately killed his company. (RELATED: Why Wokeness Is Retreating In The Age Of Trump)

“Vice started moving into this sort of weird woke era or whatever. But it was young people writing for themselves to the audience. It was like our audience went from Millennials to whatever that is — Gen Z — and they were writing for themselves, to themselves. By the way, traffic was through the roof, but the old Vice audience, including me, was like, ‘What are we doing here?'” he told Rubin.

“One of the mistakes was Vice News was over here, which I was concentrating on, and it was still killing it and doing awards and all that stuff, but people didn’t differentiate between Vice.com and Vice News. There was just Vice, and so I think that was a fuck up. We should have had a lot more differentiation. I mean, the ‘Go woke, go broke’ thing, I’m well aware of, and a lot of times I’d see stuff and you would be like, ‘What the fuck?’ Then you go to give someone shit, and they’re like, ‘Okay, this is the one you liked; 10 people saw it. This other piece got 100 million, that’s just what fucking young people want, you old man.’ And you’re like, ‘Oh, well.’ It’s a problem with digital media, in that it changes with the audience. The audience now, that young digital-consuming audience, is that audience, and that’s the content they want,” he said.

As a former fan of Vice, I’m here for the rebrand. I also don’t think Smith is being disingenuous. He was truly allergic to the woke nonsense his company produced during the first Trump presidency, and he deserves credit for admitting it was a mistake and trying to fix it in the future.

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