For those unfamiliar with Charles Johnson, this week’s Washington Post report on his texting relationship with Sen. JD Vance might not have had a significant impact, but the closer one looks at the details, the worse the story appears.
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. Johnson assumed the posture of a wise mentor, cautioning the first-time officeholder to choose his staff carefully and repeatedly pressing him on his committee assignments.
At first blush, some readers are probably shrugging their shoulders. A far-right senator texting with a far-right media personality? This must happen all of the time.
But Johnson isn’t just some random conservative blogger. A Semafor report described him as “a notorious Internet troll [whom] the Republican Jewish Coalition had labeled a ‘Holocaust denier.’”
And when candidates for national office have texting relationships with someone like this, it’s worth paying attention to.
A spokesperson for the senator told Politico this week that Johnson “spam texted” Vance, and the Ohio Republican “usually ignored him.” Similarly, Vance told Semafor, “He’s kind of a crazy person. He’s kind of pathetic, and I just largely ignored him.”
This might also seem plausible. Just because some fringe figure obtained the cellphone number of a prominent GOP official doesn’t necessarily mean that the Republican officeholder actually interacted with the figure in a direct and meaningful way.
The trouble, however, is that the Post’s reporting tells a very different kind of story.
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 and more profanity. 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.
The Post’s report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, went on to note that the texts reflected a senator “engaged in the kind of freewheeling communication ordinarily tightly controlled by congressional staff.”
This reportedly included the Ohioan asking Johnson for his thoughts on alien spacecrafts, the Republican Party’s position on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the death of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
We can probably all think of people in our lives whom we’ve “largely ignored.” We also haven’t sent them a series of texts like these.
The more reporting like this comes to light, the tougher it is for Vance to avoid the “weird” label he doesn’t appear to like.
