Washington Post: JD Vance in texts with far-right figure: Profane and off-the-cuff

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.
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He was banned from Twitter in 2015 for soliciting donations aimed at “taking out” a Black Lives Matter activist. ... His account was restored under the platform’s new owner, Elon Musk.
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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.
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“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.”
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When Johnson suggested that the senator should work to restrict foreign ownership of U.S. housing, Vance responded with a “thumbs up” emoji.
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Vance has bragged 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 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
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Vance said he thought more of Netanyahu’s government than of Americans who support interventionist foreign policy. “Publicly and privately not a single rep of the Israeli government has sounded as insane as our neocons,” he wrote.

His defense of Israel and scorn for neoconservatives shows Vance saying privately what he often says publicly.
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