The Bulwark Podcast - Peter Callaghan and Isaac Stanley-Becker: Veep Peeks

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

Tim talks to a local Minnesota reporter to get the low-down on Tim Walz's recent political history, including where he falls on the progressive-to-moderate spectrum—as well as his weak spots from his tenure as governor, like the 2020 riots in Minneapolis.  Plus, JD Vance, as a senator, has been texting with a Holocaust-denying far-right fringe character, but won't take calls from high-ranking Ukrainian officials.  MinnPost's Peter Callaghan and the Washington Post's Isaac Stanley-Becker join Tim Miller. show notes: Peter's story on how Walz beat the odds to become the VP pick Isaac's story on Vance's texts with Charles Johnson Tim's book, "Why We Did It" 

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to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P, dot com. So we got 91 days. My God, that's easy. We'll sleep when we're dead. Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. That was newly minted Democratic VP nominee Tim Walz last night in Philly. His hair was not perfect, but he was drawing some blood on Donald Trump.

Let's admit it. We've had some strong views about Tim Walz here here at the bulwark also you the listeners but the vast majority of us barely know him at all so i wanted to bring on somebody that does peter callahan a staff writer for min post which is a great independent news outlet if you care of connections to minnesota highly recommend supporting them non-profit newsroom. He covers the Minnesota Statehouse and has been doing so since Tim Walz was governor. How you doing, Peter? Thanks for coming on. Very good. Thanks for having me. It's fun. So yeah, give us the backstory here. So Tim Walz was in Congress, I guess, from 06 through 16, then decided to run for governor. And so that's

when you intersected with him. So just give us a little bit of the origin story of you kind of covering and following Tim Walz. It's interesting because he was a member of Congress in the southern corner of the state. So that is somewhat rural, has Mankato, and it's Mankato, not Mankato for all of you out there, and Rochester, which is Mayo Clinic and a lot of farmland. And he was able to win that seat from an incumbent Republican and hold it for six terms. And he was able to win that seat from an incumbent Republican and hold it for six terms. And as soon as he left, they lost that seat. So that's sort of his story when he gets to Congress. He's a moderate Democrat who can win in rural areas, one of the few Democrats who was representing a rural area. And that's really kind of where he then ran for

governor. It's interesting, he ran for governor in 2018. And he did not get the DFL. And I'll say DFL, and I'll save you the time of saying what the hell is the DFL, Democratic Farm, Farmer Labor Party is what the party in Minnesota calls itself because they have to be unique. It's Minnesota after all. And he didn't get the endorsement. I mean, a St. Paul liberal, more liberal than him, House member got the DFL endorsement. He was not necessarily trusted by the progressive wing of the party. One of the reasons he selected Peggy Flanagan as his running mate that election is she is a Twin Cities suburban, very well credentialed in the sort of Senator Paul Wellstone wing of

the party. So he felt he had to bring someone like that onto his ticket to provide some entree to the progressives. Reverse balance from what the projection is right now, kind of. Who had the DFL endorsement in the primary? It was now a Senate Majority Leader, Erin Murphy. Oh, okay. And she was the endorsed candidate that year. He did not, and it's not uncommon in the Democratic side in Minnesota to not abide by the endorsement. So he entered that primary anyway and won it quite handily. When trying to decode, you know, the Tim Walz, you know, ideology, you know, it's funny, we played on yesterday's show, Nancy Pelosiosi talking about him and in congress he really was kind of a median democrat maybe even maybe even a little

towards the middle from the median he's on ag committee vets committee so a lot of not the more traditional you know kind of progressive social types of issues but he gets in in 2018 and he has this very progressive record as governor. And so like what I'm trying to figure out is, is that he's evolved? Is that that, oh, there was just this pent up demand for progressive governance in Minnesota, and he happened to be the governor that got the trifecta? Like, how do you sort of judge that question? Maybe he wasn't a blue dog Democrat in Congress, but he was blue dog adjacent, certainly. And his first term, though, remember, was not a trifecta. He had divided government.

He had a Senate run by Republicans. That was my fault. I started it. We're using political nerd terms. A trifecta for the normies that are listening is when you have the state house, the state Senate, and the governorship all of one party. And so traditionally, that's when, you know, the parties can, you know, advance more in this sort of partisan legislation. So anyway, he did not have that in 2018. That's what you're saying? Correct. He had divided government, and he had to work with the Republican controlled Senate. And while that would normally be a recipe for doing nothing, and they did a lot of nothing during those years, they also passed budgets that brought

in Republican requirements and Democratic requirements. So those years were certainly not a progressive sweepstakes. And to me, that's almost more interesting because of the way he was able to work with a Republican Senate and get things done. Yeah, let's focus on that era for a second, because very possibly that, I mean, you know, if Harris and Walls win, very likely there'll be a narrow Republican Senate majority, you know, so that would be something that they'd be having to deal with in DC. How are his relationships cross party? Was it contentious? Was, you know, was he a glad hander? Like, what was that? How did that first term go? It's always contentious. Nowadays, you know, we talk about a trifecta. Trifectas

themselves are more common because states are either Republican states or Democratic states. The fact that this state kind of had that transition and may, in fact, potentially go back to a divided government makes Minnesota kind of interesting across the country for that reason all by itself. But he worked with a majority leader named Paul Gazelka, otherwise would be a conservative Christian, but not a real partisan in my view, and thought that governing might still be a good idea. And so he did work with him, but they fought. Melissa Hortman was the House Speaker and remains the House Speaker, and she used to talk about how she was the adult in the room when the three of them would be having these meetings because they did sort of fight and argue about things. And that really worked very well until COVID. When COVID came, there was a unified government for about, oh, six weeks. And then

once shutdowns and executive orders came in, the Republicans completely went away from that. And we had a series of monthly special sessions, which were required to give the legislature the opportunity to not extend the emergency powers. And so they were just nothing but attempts to reverse his actions, attempts to cancel the executive declarations of emergency. They even started going after and unconfirming his commissioner picks in the middle of the term and what he called the middle of a emergency and you're taking away my commissioners. So it then, it deteriorated certainly, but that was, I think, attributable to COVID more than anything. During the divided government, were there any other

signature accomplishments, legislation? Like what was he really focused on during that period? You mentioned budgets. Yeah, I think that's the main thing, that they were able to get budgets passed without government shutdowns. The Republicans actually came around and Paul Gazelka got a lot of criticism from his own party for extending a health tax, essentially a tax on health bills that paid for a lot of health programs. He was able to do that with Paul Gazelka. They may have been the only combination that could have done it. Gazelka was replaced by a majority leader later who did not have the same willingness or ability to reach deals. I can say there was not a lot passed. There was a lot of gridlock on other areas of government, but the things that needed to get done got done.

And him working with Melissa Hortman and Paul Gazelka, I think, should be part of his story. It was overwhelmed by the dozens and dozens and dozens of bills that were passed once the DFL, Democratic Farmer Labor Party, won full control and narrow control at that. That's kind of the story. And that's the story he tells when he goes around the country and did the chicken dinner circuit before he emerged as a vice presidential, hopeful. But that's what the D's want to hear around the country is that, see, we can pass this super progressive agenda and nothing bad happens to us. And you all should be trying to do what Minnesota does. Don't waste your trifecta by kind of mincing around and not going and passing your bills. I think there are two potential trouble areas for them within those bills. Well,

maybe three, actually. There's the COVID, which is sort of related to the riots and the fought from George Floyd, and then maybe some of the social issues. But so let's kind of put those in one bucket for a second and talk first about just all of the progressive items that passed that they are going to run on, paid leave, et cetera. Like what are some of the ones that I think he would consider signature or the most important in the state? Well, it kind of depends on the audience he's talking to.

Okay. Paid leave. He's a politician, Peter. He does some politics sometimes. We'll maybe talk about the Tim Walls who ran and won in a rural district and the Tim Walls who ran and won statewide, where suddenly he had to appeal to the Twin Cities progressive population. His issues changed and the way he approached these things changed pretty significantly in those times. But I would say paid leave gets a more universal acceptance. Certainly the Republicans opposed the bill as it was created because it's like an unemployment insurance type program. They wanted a kind of a tax credit based program that was voluntary on the part of business, but they didn't say we shouldn't have paid family leave. That was not the position they took. So I think that one can resonate a

little wider with pro-choice audiences. Minnesota has, I think, about the most progressive set of abortion laws in the country, meaning they didn't just codify the right to abortion, which a state Supreme Court ruling had done and found in the privacy provisions of the state constitution. But they repealed almost every restriction that was in state law, meaning not after 24 weeks, must be in this type of a medical setting. There were lots pregnant, and they make that decision on their own. I can tell you that no one is likely to do a late-term abortion in the state, meaning you wouldn't find a facility that would do that. But if you could, it would not be illegal. And then on the economic side, I do think that it's worth mentioning,

and maybe this is wrong, I don't know. I've been sort of reading, trying to read up, you know, about what they've done with various economic reforms. And a lot of it, to me, read more kind of like, you know, free market progressive reforms, you know, things like the right to repair law, which, you know, gives people right to fix the right to fix their own equipment without having to have onerous regulations on it. Obviously, they passed a lot of money for various green initiatives, but also had permitting reform. There were some tax cuts mixed in with all that. So talk about all that. There's the one clip of him going around saying like, socialism is just friendliness.

But if you look at his record, I wouldn't really call it a socialist record. I'd call it kind of a progressive capitalist record. But I don't know. How would you speak to it? The agenda is set by the Democrats in the legislature, meaning as far as where they go. And one of the tenets is corporations are awful. It really is.

I mean, that's the boogeyman. And Walls has picked up on that, that greedy corporations and they want tax cuts. And I'm not going to give tax cuts to greedy corporations. I'm going to give them to working families. I mean, that's sort of one of their basic tenets. The other one is everything is means tested with one exception that we'll talk about. And that is the free universal school lunch. So everything's means tested. Tax cuts, those were means tested. Once you had a certain income level, you didn't

get tax cuts. Rebates from the surplus, sorry, you make too much money, you're not going to get any tax rebates. When they had the largest surplus in, God, by percentage, it's got to be up there for any state, you know, $19 billion on a two-year budget in the $58 billion range. I mean, it tells you how large that surplus was. Relatively small amounts went to tax cuts, relatively small amounts went to tax rebates. Some of it was spent in sort of one-time spending because they did realize that this was not a sustainable revenue situation, but some was spent on ongoing. But in the midst of that, they did actually increase taxes on high earners and increase

some corporate taxes based on how much money a corporation was doing. So at a time of the highest surpluses, the one place that you could get tax votes was if it was on rich people and corporations. So that fits very well into sort of the national progressive messaging that, you know, we're for poor people and we're for lower income working families. The child tax credits, though, were pretty significant. And that's what they did with a lot of the money, which was you not only have to make a fair amount of money to pay any state income taxes, the tax credits are refundable. So even if you don't have a tax liability, you're getting payments. And they started a program this year that rather than wait to do your taxes, you can actually be getting that refundable money on a monthly basis to help

with the bill. So that's something that's fairly unique to Minnesota. But I can tell you the one thing he wants to talk about the most, and that's that universal school lunch program. That's maybe a more progressive economic agenda than maybe what I've been seeing from some of the outside analysts. So I do like the child tax credit thing is going to be a very important one in this election because J.D. Vance kind of pretends like he's for that and acts like he's an economic populist. So I do think there'll be sort of a contrast on economic populism, talking versus walking. On the school lunches, I think that one's universally popular.

What we've seen though from the right already is the tampons in the boys' bathroom. Tampon Tim, they've started to call him on the mega media. So talk about that issue and kind of the trans issue and where he's been on LGBT issues. The same thing. If it was on the agenda of LGBT community, it had sponsorship in the legislature, it likely passed, and he would have likely signed it. I mean, really top to bottom,

not just protections, but protections on healthcare,, on transgender health care, to the point where there is some indication that people are coming here from other states to get health care and transition help here because it was protected. And there was some talk in the past session about requiring insurance coverage for that care, which did not pass, but was talked about. So Minnesota is probably the most progressive state. So why would you have tampons in boys' bathrooms? Because you don't necessarily know that all the people using boys' bathrooms are identifying as boys. So rather than having someone say, you know, let's not give them that argument. Let's not include that. That would not hold water with this caucus. Was there any point where he was like, all right, guys in the legislature, this is too much for me. It's interesting. And I wish I knew this better. He doesn't say that sort of thing publicly. His chief of staff is communicating sort of like, you know, don't bring

me that. Yeah, right. That's too far. He would not say it publicly. He would not embarrass or pick a fight with that wing of the party. And he vetoed the very first bill that was going to provide income and employment security for Uber Lyft drivers. That was his first and only veto. And that was a lot of the Uber Lyft drivers in this community are Somali and Somali immigrants. That's a significant, I wouldn't say significant, but an important part of the Democrats' constituency, particularly in the cities. And Uber and Lyft said, we'll leave Minnesota if you sign that law. So he vetoed it and got a lot of grief from the left for that. Ultimately, something not quite as sweeping, but pretty

sweeping past this last session, and he ended up signing it, but with the agreement that Uber and Lyft would accept some of the changes. So that was his only veto, and that was the only time he really stood up. Another one, he stood up on some hospital changes that the nurses union wanted and the Mayo Clinic asked, ordered, threatened that if he signed that bill, there would be consequences. They wouldn't do an investment that they were planning in Rochester, Minnesota. And he basically said, don't bring me that. I won't sign it. Very rare publicly. Yeah. So some basic concerns about making sure there's job creation in the state, economic capital formation. So just on that, generally, I mean, in California, even among Democrats, there are people that are like, some of this has gone too far for me,

you know, and in Colorado, where I'm from, it's kind of the opposite, right? Like even among some Republicans, people are like, I actually think that Polis is doing a good job. What's the sense among Minnesota voters? Is it straight down partisan lines? Are people happy with it? Yeah, I would say it's straight down partisan lines, pretty much. I mean, the Twin Cities is, you know, the majority of the population is in the seven counties. Now, even out into the second ring suburbs are becoming more democratic as elections

go by. There's some pockets of democratic support in the sort of the second cities, Duluth, St. Cloud, Rochester, even Mankato, where he was from. But other than that, it's a pretty red state. I mean, we just recently did a races to watch, which we do, we couldn't come up with more than 14 races. And this is a state that has 67 Senate districts and double that for House districts, and we couldn't come up with 14. And we were cheating. I mean, a couple of those 14 really weren't racist. Out of 200 some odd state legislative states, like, you know, maybe not even 5% of them. Right. And we mapped it. And the ones that are contested are around the cities,

the suburbs, those two spots I mentioned. The rest of it is all red. Largely because of COVID, he became very unpopular out in those areas of the state. But he still shows up there. He still does events there. He still gets yelled at by people there. There's an event here and maybe other states have it called Farm Fest, which is sort of a, I don't want to say a state fair because it's not, they don't

display animals, but it's the Farmers Convention. It's every summer out in rural Minnesota. And it's become kind of the place where politicians go. And they dig out their blow through caps and their jeans and they show up at Farm Fest. They speak like Iowa has a soapbox where they speak and then people do kind of yell at them. There's a little exchange. I think it's one of the nice things about Iowa. And they have that in Kentucky, too. Does that happen? Does he have exchanges with people?

What will happen is that that's one of the very first debates, for instance, of a gubernatorial campaign or a Senate campaign. The debate at Farm Fest would be the first one. And he shows up and then he wanders around and we kind of will walk around with them. And it's not a solo spot, but as he moves around, a circle will form around him and people will argue with him about some policy or some environmental regulation that they think is onerous. And he'll stand there and to the sort of concern of security, he'll stand there and argue with them. Yeah. I mean, how does he do in those environments? And I think that's one of these big questions. You know, some, my colleague Sarah Longwell was saying this, I think it's kind of fair that maybe

there are some city slicker Dems who are like, this guy feels like he's going to really resonate out in rural America when it's kind of like, you know, conservatives in rural America know the local liberal and it doesn't mean that they hate him or whatever, but that like, you know, conservatives in rural America know the local liberal. And it doesn't mean that they hate him or whatever, but that they, you know, know the type. And so I do wonder how, like, how has he received in that world when he's out in the redder parts of the state? He will have hostile reactions if he's somewhere that's hostile. There's also, you know, the governor's fishing opener is a big tradition. And it's obviously somewhere where there's a big lake and they move

it around the state. And, you know, there'll be people who say, I don't want him here. We don't want him here. He shouldn't, we don't want the fishing opener here because of that guy. There is that reaction, but he's not going to fold his pizza in half when he goes out to those areas. I mean, he's, he was ag chair. He knows those parts of the state. He is probably a little bit weaker in the mining areas of the state because that has drifted from Democrat to Republican as environmental regulations have come in. I think he's comfortable in those areas and he does not seem to shy away from engaging in those areas. He doesn't have to buy the t-shirts and blow through caps. He's got them.

He wears them all the time. I think at least to them, he might come off as somewhat more one of them, but politically they're not buying it. This message comes from BetterHelp. Can you think of a time when you didn't feel like you could be yourself? Like you were hiding behind a mask at work and social settings around your family? BetterHelp Online Therapy is convenient, flexible, and can help you learn to be your authentic self so you can stop hiding.

Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P, dot com. What's he like to engage with? I mean, some governors, some politicians do the off-the-record thing with reporters and are affable.

And Josh and some of them keep things close to their vest. I don't know. What's he like to deal with? You know, kind of what you see is what he is. That's kind of how he is. Yeah. There's not a big off the record, on the record difference for him? No. The kind of funny thing he'll do is he'll be more forthcoming in sort of one-on-ones than the staff would like him to be. So the press hall is down in the basement of the Capitol and

more so early days. But even this last session, he'll just do a walkthrough and he'll just come in and sit down and he wants to basically BS more than anything. Then we, you know, we'll ask him about stuff and he'll start answering. And the staff is like, oh, governor, I don't know that we want to go there right yet. Or can this part be off the record? It's more staff that try to get him off the record or try to get him to not say certain things publicly. It's never really been him. I can't remember a time when he has said, can I tell you something off the record? It's usually staff. Do you have any funny stories hanging out with him? You know, I'll come up with some. Again, what he is is kind of what you see.

I mean, he's kind of goofy. He's generally affable. I think what you will start to see is he can get angry. He can get flustered. You know, we joke about, you know, the guy doesn't use punctuation. You know, give me a period here somewhere. When he gets going, it's a series of clauses, sometimes related to the previous clause, sometimes not. I joke that when he gets flustered,

he goes from half sentences to quarter sentences. And he can get angry and frustrated. And that sort of affable jokey, cutting remarks becomes just plain cutting remarks. So I think you'll start seeing that certain politicians here get under his skin. He hasn't been that good when kind of surprised with a controversy or surprised with a question that he isn't expecting. That's when he sort of gets more flustered. The opposite of slick. Is Vance the type that you think could get under his skin? You know, it's hard to say he could, but the Republican who ran against him last time, Scott Jensen, who had been kind of a moderate maverick type Republican doctor, just went all in on COVID denial. Did the full Lindsey Graham flip from John McCain to MAGA? Yeah, and it wasn't MAGA as much as it was COVID. Almost his whole

campaign was COVID, and this was a couple of years after. And his handlers are like, chill on the COVID stuff. Go with economics. Go with extreme. Go with these talking points we've given you. But he had a way of getting under Walz's skin. And I have a photo that we use a lot, which was at Farm Fest. And they're at a table in the front.

And he's wearing his blow-through cap and T-shirt. And the moderator's in the middle. And and Scott Jensen on the other side. And he's pointing down at Scott Jensen as he's making some point. And you see his face is red. He's angry. So he can get there and he can lose it. So I think that'll be something that people won't expect. Do you know what got under his skin?

Was there personal attacks or if he feels like he's he's been caught with on something or you failed the state on covid defensiveness defensiveness on policy more than anything minnesota politics don't get certainly off candidate personal you don't talk about his wife or his kids i forgot to do the george floyd thing so we'll end with that but but let's talk about his wife and his kids what's's she like? Are they together a lot? Is she the kind of governor's wife that you see a lot of? Any little anecdotes about the family? Yeah, Gwen does her own appearances. Initially, she kept an office right down the hall from the governor. She also was a school teacher, very interested in gun safety. That's one of the issues she carved out. But she

doesn't really have a political persona like even a first lady of the country might have, you know, pick some issues and go with those. I sense that it's a very close relationship. I was listening to him yesterday, and I heard him start to lose his voice in Philadelphia. And at that 2018 convention that he ultimately lost the endorsement, his supporters go outside the convention hall, but he can't speak anymore because he's lost his voice. So Gwen does the whole rally the troops, you know, we fought hard, we're going to go to November and she gave the campaign speech really as well as he could, because he couldn't speak anymore. So I think that's the relationship. I sense it's a very close partnership. She can handle herself and she would

be fine on her own. I don't know whether they'll use her. I don't know whether she is interested in that, but she could do it if she wanted to. That's good. So the final, the big potential controversy, I think, is his handling of the riots after the George Floyd murder. And somewhat unfortunate coincidence, because it's one of Kamala's vulnerabilities that she had sent out that tweet about the Minnesota bail fund. The pushback from defenders that I've seen online is he actually deployed the largest National Guard deployment in the state since World War II. People criticizing him say maybe he did so too late. How do you kind of adjudicate the truth of that controversy? Well, the first one, which is, you know, Tom Emmer, Congressman Tom Emmer did yesterday was, Walsh was nowhere to be found. I can tell you that's not true because I was at

the Emergency Management Center in St. Paul for the briefings early, most mornings in the middle of all that. And that's where he was. And that's maybe where he spent the night. So he was fully engaged and trying to figure out what the hell was going on. So that part is not true. He was in the middle of it. Did the Guard deployment suffer from lack of communication with the mayor, with a lack of mission at some point in the early days? Absolutely. There was riots in the streets. We have a briefing with State Patrol, with the General of the National Guard, with the governor, and they have decided they're going to deploy the National Guard. National Guard insists on being armed, which was a big decision to allow them to be armed.

They did not have arrest authority, so they were going to have to be with police officers or with state patrol officers, but they were going to deploy. And that was the night that the riots reached the third precinct, and the third precinctinct was torched and the police had to flee. And there, stationed but not deployed yet, was these National Guard contingents. So that's where he's most vulnerable. It was that night. However, Minneapolis wasn't Portland. This did not go on for weeks and weeks and weeks. They got a unified

Democratic front and even Republicans if they needed to, Keith Ellison, the Attorney General, Ilhan Omar even, and they said, go home tonight. And their rationale and their explanation was that out of state provocateurs are the ones who are doing all this. Is that true? No, it wasn't. But they believed it at the time that there were these influx of proud boys and others who were the ones who were instigating it. And they said, you're hiding them. By you being out on the street, you're giving them cover. So we need you to follow the curfew tonight and stay home. And then that'll expose them and we'll be able to go get them. And that worked. On Saturday night, the crowds were lower and the state police, with the

help of the National Guard, did sweeps through the areas where there were still protests and it sort of ended it. Was it slow? Was there miscommunication? Absolutely. But then those next couple days, and I'm watching it, I'm stunned. I'm saying this worked. But it did work because they had a good, you know, religious community, these very progressive Democratic members of Congress, Keith Ellison, who's very well thought of in progressive circles, they cleared the streets. So they'll talk about that. And you probably need to go all the way through. Now that's probably not a 30 second TV spot because burning buildings show up really well on TV ads. Peter Callahan, thank you so much for the

people out there who are walls pilled and want to love Tim Walls. Plenty there for them to like, for those who are a little wary, some stuff there for them to be continuing wary about and i appreciate you uh coming on the bullock podcast and educating us folks support the men post they do great work i appreciate your time on the other side we've got my favorite story of the day from the washington post quick little update we gotta hear we gotta hear what's going on with jd vance who he's been texting. Stick around. And we're back with isaac stanley becker investigative reporter at the washington post how you doing man good tim thank you we were just discussing the green room i think our last encounter might have been at carrie lake's victory night party that turned out to be a victory night party in arizona time is. You've been monitoring these guys and

you have my favorite story of the day. So I'm going to get you in here. It's titled JD Vance over text crude, dismissive and friendly with far right fringe. And you got, I guess, a series of signal messages between him and Charles Johnson. Is that correct? That's right. All right. So I'm just going to start by interviewing myself. If you'll indulge me. This is not typical, you know, good hosting material, but I feel like I need to get this on the table. For folks that read my book, I know Charles C. Johnson very well. Back in the day, back when I was an oppo man, we used to kind of trade tips, trade material. He was deep, deep in the alt-right, maybe before alt-right was even a popularized term in Bannon world. You know, at the time I was kind of a moderate Republican

working for more moderate candidates. And so, you know, occasionally we would have common foes in Republican intraparty fights or sometimes Democrats. And so Charles and I had a relationship for a while where we would trade info and give him stuff for his crazy fucking blog and um it was maybe the thing that i expressed the deepest regrets over in the book he ended up burning me anyway long story short people can read the book the whole story of me and chuck but to sum it up i mean he was mega alt-right even before it was real he's about my age kind of came up in the mean, he was mega alt-right even before it was real. He's about my age, kind of came up in the Bush years and was just this radicalized, frankly, a lot of times,

dabbling with the sort of white supremacist world, you know, activist and quasi-journalist. And he broke a lot of fake news. He broke a couple of real stories. And so I give that background because that is all known now when i started to talk with him he was just kind of a weird gadfly i stuck around with him way too long but we all know that he is a conspiracy monger and and in bed with the alt-right and now he claims that he's an fbi informant and yet jd vance while he's senator this is not 2016 while he's senator is signaling back and forth with him. How's that

for a summary? Do you have anything to add? No, I think that final point that you made is what I would pick up and start with, which is many stories I've done, you'll get text messages, private messages leaked from a politician or something. But oftentimes, it'll be from 10 or 15 years ago, or old emails, before they were in their current role and they were being much less careful about their associations and their communications. This was while he was a sitting U.S. Senator. It was 2022, November 2022, you know, that moment when we were talking about when we were last in Arizona with one another until the weeks before he was picked as Trump's running mate. So this is current, present-day J.D. Vance. And as you also say, it's with all of this information about Charles Johnson, very much known and very much public.

One thing that you point out in the article, I should mention you wrote with Beth Reinhart, who's an old friend of mine. We love Beth and the work she's doing over there also on the investigative side, is J.D. admits to this in a lot of ways, right? Like that he deals with figures in the far right fringe. And you reference a couple of times like where he says, you know, sometimes you got to deal with people who have conspiracy minded ideas because they are focused on one or two things that are unpopular truths or whatever. But he's defended Alex Jones.

Talk about how the Johnson, you know, this isn't a one-off, right? What's J.D. Vance? Yeah, I'm glad you picked up on this. This was one of the things that thematically I thought was really interesting about this. So Trump obviously has all kinds of associations with fringe figures, has met with them, has endorsed them, has refused to condemn them, et cetera, et cetera. He had this famous dinner in Mar-a-Lago with Nick Fuentes, who is, I mean, maybe the most kind of extreme far-right person who is known to many people, you know, outspoken Holocaust denier. But Trump hasn't really turned this into a kind of political philosophy in the way that

Vance has. Vance has turned this kind of permissiveness almost into a kind of principle and political philosophy where he says, I do engage with the fringe. I'm plugged into these weird right-wing subcultures. And that's a good thing. And I think that's interesting. And I mean, you know, clearly he sees a political upside to this, or at least this to be a coherent and defendable position. Because I think it's some version of a kind of big tent that this is how many Americans think. And so you can't dismiss it out of hand, just because someone believes fringy ideas. And, you know, it's just interesting the way that that philosophy is running up against this coalescing messaging by the Democrats calling him weird, because in many ways, he has embraced that label. In fact, in this quote

that we put in the story, he actually used that very word. So we'll have a kind of referendum on weird this November, it seems. The quote you use, Vance is probably being plugged into a lot of weird right wing subcultures. And then you mentioned the other name that we should put in here, Jack Posobiec, who unfortunately I've had to encounter a bunch as well, not as much as Charles C. Johnson, who I like to call Pizzagate Jack, one of the big proponents of the Pizzagate conspiracy, that there was some child sex ring in the basement of a pizza parlor in dc it ended up a person brings a gun to the pizza parlor so it's menacing people looking for the child sex ring there is no basement in this pizza parlor and um vanth blurbed his book it's not like lance

like hangs out with him like he blurbed the bookate. Yeah, a book that calls liberals or progressives subhumans. So the content of the book also matters. I mean, it's particular views that Vance is endorsing. It is surprising. And of course, we published this piece just as Harris was rolling out Walls as her VP pick. And we're doing lots of background reporting, research, accountability work on Walls as her VP pick. And we're doing lots of background reporting, research, accountability work on Walls and would absolutely, you know, if our reporting yielded similar types of messages, publish them. And I was trying to think about what the parallel would be. I mean, the type of figure who Walls would be communicating with, that would be a parallel. And it's kind of stunning to consider. And you have to think that it would be immediately disqualifying if as an elected official he were engaged in a long-running

text exchange soliciting the views of someone of an equivalent figure on the left yeah somebody who's like yeah doing the pro hamas stuff or something i don't even know right like what that would be um okay let's talk about these exchanges with Chuck. There is the weird and then there's the policy. So let's focus on the policy first. Ukraine, it's the one that stands out to me. I mean, J.D. Vance apparently is saying to this Chuck Johnson that he doesn't even take calls from people that are affiliated with Ukraine or want to make arguments to him for defending Ukraine. Talk about that.

Yeah, we led with this quote because this is really the one that jumped out to me when I was first looking through the messages. It's no secret that he does not support U.S. assistance to Ukraine. And there's a policy disagreement about that within the Republican Party and within the country at large. What really struck me was the way that he talked about this and the possible future of vice president not saying he doesn't support US assistance, but saying he will not take calls from high level officials in an allied country. That's a remarkable thing to say about an allied country in the midst of a war with Russia. So it's a striking thing to say. And the way he described the appeals for

assistance, you know, using using extremely profane language to talk about the specifics of the requests for F-16. So I thought that added a lot of important context about the nature of his, you know, foreign policy views. Yeah, the context is also funny in that, like, I won't even take a call from our ally to talk about a very serious national security issue. And I'm saying that in a text, I will have freewheeling text exchange with a alt-right or formerly alt-right gadfly who claims to be an FBI spook. And there was just one other moment about Ukraine and the messages that jumped out to me that we make brief reference of lower in the story. But I think worth mentioning, in part, actually, because it deals again with Jack Posobiec, though there just wasn't room in this, in the story to get at this. But there was an exchange where Vance sends to Charles, again,

of his own volition, not responding to something Charles said, but he outright sends it. And it's a tweet from Jack Posobiec, again, this person who advanced the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and is called Progress progressive subhuman. described himself as a kind of government foreman or working with U.S. intelligence agencies, suggesting that he should up the doses of Xanax for a kind of cohort of pro-Ukraine activists on the internet. So again, we have a sitting U.S. senator who is on Twitter, I guess. He follows Jack Posobiec. He sees this tweet mocking a pro-Ukraine activist for their gender presentation. He sends it to Charles Johnson and makes a joke about this person's medications and the possibility that they are somehow being propped up by the American deep state. I think that you hit on a key point there too, because the advanced

people's defense of this is Chuck Johnson is spamming JD with texts and he's sometimes replying. I will say, as being a recipient of Chuck Johnson's texts, that's true. Chuck Johnson does spam strangers. But your point is the key one here. Like there are multiple times where he just reaches out to Chuck himself. He's not being responsive. Some of the other ones, I guess I don't remember which one of these were him initiating. Was it the UFOs ones that he initiated? I think that's right. That's right. Yeah, he wanted his take on this Air Force whistleblower who came forward saying that the US had information about alien spacecraft. There were other moments too.

I mean, we didn't hide in the story that parts of this conversation were one-sided, that Charles was often reaching out, sending lots of messages, and there wasn't a response. That's in the story, clear as day. But it is absolutely untrue that there was no engagement from Vance and that he, in fact, sometimes took the initiative. Yeah. I guess I will say the one other policy thing is it does seem like Vance is defensive of Bibi in the exchange. Yeah.

That is something that divides sort of this alt-right nationalist right world where there's, you know, some anti-Semites and then there are people that are just anti-Israel and then there are kind of the pro-Israel populist right types. I think that's kind of interesting. Right. It is interesting. And, you know, we haven't gone into the full complexity of Charles's politics, which have veered and morphed and, you know, most known for his associations with the alt-right, but also now says he supports certain Democrats. But the kind of defining principle of his politics in the present day is opposition to Israel and a set of claims about Israel's undue foreign influence, which very quickly get into kind of Soros-type conspiracy theories about, you know,

Israel's role in the world. But so, this was the most spirited disagreement between them, where Charles is very much attacking Israel and Vance is defending the Netanyahu government in a pretty forceful way, but also in a way that plays fast and loose with some of the facts about kind of Netanyahu's positions and views in the region. He tries to position Netanyahu as more of a nationalist himself and less of a neocon or whatever, to use a shorthand, of wanting to engage in battles outside of Israel. And that's not really right.

That's right. He's a kind of astute tactician who's actually trying to prevent regional conflict when, in fact, Netanyahu eagerly supported the U supported the US invasion of Iraq, has supported regime change in Iran. So he's off on some of the facts here. Yeah, there are some other exchanges also about conspiracy theories, Epstein and such, but it's anything else that stands out? I mean, obviously, you have sometimes limits in the paper. Was there just anything about kind of the nature of the exchange or how often it was happening or things you didn't have space to get into that's worth kind of sharing? No, I think that sums it up pretty well.

I mean, one other moment that we highlighted, which I thought was kind of interesting, was one of the really important figures in J.D. Vance's life has been his Yale Law School professor and mentor, Amy Chua, who is a kind of known person in her own right. She wrote this book about being the tiger mom. And as I understand, you know, continues to be supportive of him and proud of her mentorship of him, though she has not engaged much, has not spoken about this and declined to comment for our piece. But there's this odd moment, because again, you have to understand a lot of this exchange is Charles kind of saying that there are malign Chinese and Israeli interests everywhere and acting on Vance. And in one of these moments, Vance pushes back on an assertion by Charles that he is holding to Chinese interests by saying that Chua doesn't tell him anything.

And in fact, he doesn't even know another Chinese American, which would be a sort of surprising fact if that were true about a sitting US Senator, a Yale Law School graduate, an Ohio State graduate, and a 40-year-old person living in the United States. Doesn't know any other Chinese Americans. Wild story. And it's just, I think, just so revealing about the types of people that J.D. Vance is, even though maybe he's not taking advice from Charles, the types of people that his ears are going to be open to if he gets in to the vice presidency. Isaac, thanks so much, man.

Let's have a longer chat sometime soon. Thanks a lot. I appreciate it. See ya. Thanks to Isaac Stanley Becker. Thanks to Peter Callahan of the Minn Post. Thanks to Warren Zeevan. We'll see you all tomorrow for another edition of the Bulwark Podcast.

Peace. I'm drinking hot spring Borderois and Bombay gin I'll sleep when I'm dead Straight from the bar Twisted again I'll sleep when I'm dead Straight from the bottom twisted again I'll sleep when I'm dead Alright Well I've tasted this medicine All right. The Bored Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.