>The day after JD Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, he received a congratulatory text from Charles Johnson, a blogger and entrepreneur who has zealously promoted right-wing conspiracy theories.
>
>[…]
>
>Their correspondence over the next 20 months — extending into the weeks before former president Donald Trump picked Vance as his running mate — offers a glimpse of the Republican vice-presidential nominee’s off-the-cuff musings, often matching his public expressions but voiced with much less polish. Vance was just as casual in discussing America’s foreign alliances as he was in evaluating his own private alliances with the GOP’s moneyed class. With Johnson, he pondered responsibility for the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines and crudely described his aversion to the Ukrainian government and refusal to consider its pleas for U.S. assistance.
>
>“Dude I won’t even take calls from Ukraine,” he told Johnson in October, about three weeks after House Republicans blocked additional aid to help Kyiv repel the Russian invasion. “Two very senior guys reached out to me. The head of their intel. The head of the Air Force. Bitching about F16s.”
>
>[…]
>
>The texts, sent over the encrypted messaging app Signal and provided by Johnson to The Washington Post, show the 40-year-old senator engaged in the kind of freewheeling communication ordinarily tightly controlled by congressional staff.
>
>As a newly minted senator, Vance solicited Johnson’s views on many topics, including UFOs (“What is your read”), the Republican Party’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (“What is GOP Bibi problem?”) and the death of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein (“Do you think Epstein actually killed himself?”). When Johnson suggested that the senator should work to restrict foreign ownership of U.S. housing, Vance responded with a “thumbs up” emoji.
>
>The mostly friendly conversation with Johnson reflects how Vance gravitates to people on the political fringe — a cohort emboldened by Trump’s insurgent campaign in 2016 and highly active online in the years since. After Trump picked Vance as his running mate on July 15, Johnson has been criticizing his onetime interlocutor and threatening to release their communications. He said he has grown disillusioned with Vance, especially over the senator’s favorable view of the Israeli prime minister, and now supports President Biden and Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee.
>
>[…]
>
>Vance is perhaps the most high-profile emblem of a new breed of conservative politician willing to entertain and endorse provocative or offensive figures. Trump has displayed similar impulses, including in 2022 when he [dined](https://archive.fo/o/QZMJ2/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/25/trump-fuentes-ye/) at his Mar-a-Lago Club with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken Holocaust denier.
>
>Unlike Trump, however, Vance has turned his ideological permissiveness into a political philosophy — an open embrace of the unvetted and the indecent aimed at undermining conventional norms of truth and decorum. Vance has defended his vision as a big tent representing how many Americans actually think. Democrats have described his approach as “weird,” a label that Harris allies have increasingly applied to the Trump ticket.
>
>Vance has[ bragged](https://archive.fo/o/QZMJ2/https://www.businessinsider.com/chuck-schumer-nicotine-zyn-republican-right-wing-2024-1) about being “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures.” He wrote a positive blurb for a book by Jack Posobiec, the far-right activist who advanced the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory. And he has[ defended](https://archive.fo/o/QZMJ2/https://x.com/JDVance1/status/1434552375117860870) Alex Jones, the right-wing radio host who spread lies about the Sandy Hook school shooting.
>
>“Believing crazy things is not the mark of whether somebody should be rejected,” Vance said in a 2021 speech to the conservative Teneo Network that was recently [published by ProPublica](https://archive.fo/o/QZMJ2/https://www.propublica.org/article/jd-vance-alex-jones-leonard-leo-teneo-maddow-video). “Believing important truths should be the mark of whether we accept somebody, and if they believe some crazy things on the side, that’s fine. We need to be okay with nonconventional people.”
2 Comments
Bro will never beat the weird allegations
Archived version: [https://archive.fo/QZMJ2](https://archive.fo/QZMJ2).
Summary:
>The day after JD Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, he received a congratulatory text from Charles Johnson, a blogger and entrepreneur who has zealously promoted right-wing conspiracy theories.
>
>[…]
>
>Their correspondence over the next 20 months — extending into the weeks before former president Donald Trump picked Vance as his running mate — offers a glimpse of the Republican vice-presidential nominee’s off-the-cuff musings, often matching his public expressions but voiced with much less polish. Vance was just as casual in discussing America’s foreign alliances as he was in evaluating his own private alliances with the GOP’s moneyed class. With Johnson, he pondered responsibility for the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines and crudely described his aversion to the Ukrainian government and refusal to consider its pleas for U.S. assistance.
>
>“Dude I won’t even take calls from Ukraine,” he told Johnson in October, about three weeks after House Republicans blocked additional aid to help Kyiv repel the Russian invasion. “Two very senior guys reached out to me. The head of their intel. The head of the Air Force. Bitching about F16s.”
>
>[…]
>
>The texts, sent over the encrypted messaging app Signal and provided by Johnson to The Washington Post, show the 40-year-old senator engaged in the kind of freewheeling communication ordinarily tightly controlled by congressional staff.
>
>As a newly minted senator, Vance solicited Johnson’s views on many topics, including UFOs (“What is your read”), the Republican Party’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (“What is GOP Bibi problem?”) and the death of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein (“Do you think Epstein actually killed himself?”). When Johnson suggested that the senator should work to restrict foreign ownership of U.S. housing, Vance responded with a “thumbs up” emoji.
>
>The mostly friendly conversation with Johnson reflects how Vance gravitates to people on the political fringe — a cohort emboldened by Trump’s insurgent campaign in 2016 and highly active online in the years since. After Trump picked Vance as his running mate on July 15, Johnson has been criticizing his onetime interlocutor and threatening to release their communications. He said he has grown disillusioned with Vance, especially over the senator’s favorable view of the Israeli prime minister, and now supports President Biden and Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee.
>
>[…]
>
>Vance is perhaps the most high-profile emblem of a new breed of conservative politician willing to entertain and endorse provocative or offensive figures. Trump has displayed similar impulses, including in 2022 when he [dined](https://archive.fo/o/QZMJ2/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/25/trump-fuentes-ye/) at his Mar-a-Lago Club with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken Holocaust denier.
>
>Unlike Trump, however, Vance has turned his ideological permissiveness into a political philosophy — an open embrace of the unvetted and the indecent aimed at undermining conventional norms of truth and decorum. Vance has defended his vision as a big tent representing how many Americans actually think. Democrats have described his approach as “weird,” a label that Harris allies have increasingly applied to the Trump ticket.
>
>Vance has[ bragged](https://archive.fo/o/QZMJ2/https://www.businessinsider.com/chuck-schumer-nicotine-zyn-republican-right-wing-2024-1) about being “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures.” He wrote a positive blurb for a book by Jack Posobiec, the far-right activist who advanced the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory. And he has[ defended](https://archive.fo/o/QZMJ2/https://x.com/JDVance1/status/1434552375117860870) Alex Jones, the right-wing radio host who spread lies about the Sandy Hook school shooting.
>
>“Believing crazy things is not the mark of whether somebody should be rejected,” Vance said in a 2021 speech to the conservative Teneo Network that was recently [published by ProPublica](https://archive.fo/o/QZMJ2/https://www.propublica.org/article/jd-vance-alex-jones-leonard-leo-teneo-maddow-video). “Believing important truths should be the mark of whether we accept somebody, and if they believe some crazy things on the side, that’s fine. We need to be okay with nonconventional people.”