How Benny Johnson went from BuzzFeed plagiarist to MAGA’s chief content creator

Not long ago, plagiarist-turned-MAGA-influencer Benny Johnson stood in a parking garage underneath Chicago’s Trump International Hotel and Tower. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem emerged; the two embraced, then loaded into SUVs to drive outside the city to ICE’s Broadview detainment facility. Johnson filmed the road in front of him for a video, which he posted to his 6 million subscriber YouTube channel, snapping his fingers in excitement. Upon arriving, demonstrators—whom Johnson referred to as “left-wing orcs”—were being watched by armed, masked agents who looked, he said admiringly, “ready to conquer Baghdad.”

When the video cut to a group of handcuffed protesters, looking glum, Johnson beamed: “These are exactly the kind of people we want to be pissing off.” 

Johnson trailed Noem through the building as she spoke to underlings at their desks, “raising the esprit de corps,” he declared. Throughout his tour, Johnson repeatedly claimed that the facility had been “attacked” so many times that it had been necessary to install a “sniper’s nest.” A rooftop shot shows Noem, her mouth stretched into a deep frown, gazing at a turret-mounted gun aimed at the street. “These are very dangerous times,” Johnson added.

“What’s going on homie?” Johnson asked, turning to an ICE agent in a black balaclava and orange sunglasses, his face completely hidden. He shook the officer’s hand vigorously. “We’re here to support you guys.” 

Johnson’s role that early October day was somewhere between adoring observer and fringe participant, as captured in a video in his typical style: reasonably professionally produced, with the jumpy, fast-talking, quick cuts beloved by influencers; studiously provocative; and slavishly devoted to the Trump administration. 

In the journalism world, Johnson is best known for leaving two publications in disgrace after his plagiarism was discovered, and for taking—inadvertently, he has said—money from a Kremlin-backed media organization, and for being a hard partier, a difficult boss and colleague, and an almost surreally dedicated self-promoter. (“I met him once at a party,” says a colleague of mine. “His whole vibe is so weird that I thought at first he might be fucking with me.”) 

Now, he’s something like the administration’s propagandist and content creator in chief, with his work seamlessly blending fawning coverage, PR, rage-bait, and apologism. While ostensibly an independent vlogger and podcaster, Johnson’s role is premised on access to—and lavish posts about—both administration initiatives like Noem’s raids or touring Alligator Alcatraz with the president, and more social engagements, like watching UFC fights ringside with Trump, smoking cigars at the vice presidential residence, and a Christmastime tour of the White House with his family. All of this more or less lives up to Johnson’s social media tagline: “Your front seat to the golden era.”

Reporters and others who have watched Johnson’s evolution aren’t exactly surprised by where he’s ended up, describing him as “a charismatic motherfucker,” as one former colleague put it, a political and social chameleon, and someone whose work seems untethered by normal moral and ethical considerations. 

“It’s ended at the place where it was inevitable that he would end,” says one person who socialized with him in DC about a decade ago. 

His politics then were “sort of a libertarian inflected conservatism,” another person who knew him at the time says, “skeptical of power and government. And it’s absurd to look at him now.”  

“The thing you need to know about Benny is he’s a chameleon,” says a former colleague from BuzzFeed News. “Drop him into any environment and he’ll reflect that environment because he wants to be liked.”

Johnson’s particular notoriety is a useful key to understanding a core value of the Trump administration: shamelessness. The president’s circle is full of people with notable—and, in many cases, ongoing—public scandals. For Johnson, like so many others, not running from their past is a feature, not a bug.

“One of the great virtues to have is that you got caught doing bad things and not giving a fuck,” says John Stanton, a former DC bureau chief at BuzzFeed News, who was involved in the outlet’s 2014 decision to fire Johnson. “That’s the definition of Donald Trump’s career. He’s been caught over and over again. I think they value that greatly.” 

Another thing Trump values is intense toadying, and Johnson today has no qualms about being in open alignment with power. He depicts himself as part of a battle for the future of America, one with Trump fearlessly at the helm and his fellow pro-Trump media members manning the guns. Their targets are Democrats, the mainstream media, LGBTQ visibility, political correctness, immigration, and any other object of hate the president might identify on any given week.

“True freedom is a functional, peaceful, orderly society where you can get a piece of the American Dream,” Johnson tweeted recently. “We must protect and fight for it at all costs. This is our generational battle. This is our Normandy and Iwo Jima. The enemy is already inside the gates.”

The results are making themselves felt. Johnson has cast himself as an heir to the throne of his former boss, slain Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk. Johnson’s wife, Katelyn Rieley Johnson, has bragged that he got Jimmy Kimmel pulled off the air after the late-night host discussed Kirk’s death. In a podcast within a week of the shooting, Johnson, who has said he was a close friend of Kirk’s, seemed to get FCC Chair Brendan Carr to endorse a claim that Kimmel’s monologue had been a “clear cut violation” of policy against “news distortion.” 

“Look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr told Johnson. “These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action on Kimmel or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” ABC’s suspension soon followed.

Johnson is pushing the boundaries of even what the Trump wing of the Republican Party is willing to say. He’s launched an attack on H-1B visas, those granted to skilled workers in specialty occupations, and called for a halt to legal immigration too. He’s also one of the far-right voices amplifying unproven claims that welfare fraud among Somali immigrants in Minnesota has funded the terrorist group al-Shabaab. 

“Your tax dollars are being stolen and shipped over to people who hate us and want us dead,” Johnson tweeted. “You should be furious. This is a direct result of careless immigration policies. We must ramp up mass deportations and halt all legal immigration.” 

More and more overtly, Johnson is depicting nonwhite immigrants as an existential cultural threat, an increasingly stark and baldly racist us-or-them approach. And he’s using the tips and tricks of virality and traffic-mongering he learned at places like BuzzFeed to do it.

Johnson, 38, is trim and nondescript, with sandy brown hair, black-rimmed glasses, and an absolutely immobile forehead. His speaking style is usually bland, a mildly incredulous cadence and lowered volume that can be reminiscent of Tucker Carlson under light sedation. In what seems like an effort to sound younger, he sometimes greets his viewers with “yo,” or proclaims things to be “wild.” 

Johnson’s company, Benny Media, produces an extraordinary amount of content: His YouTube channel churns out one to four videos a day. His five-day-a-week podcast, The Benny Show, interviews members of Congress, Cabinet members, various Trumps, and conspiracy peddlers back to back, an unbroken stream of boosterism and suspicion. Johnson tweets relentlessly (4 million followers) and posts versions of his YouTube content to Instagram (2 million followers) and TikTok (just over 325,000). The effect is a wall of content, a one-man Fox News. 

Johnson’s value to the administration is rooted in his sycophancy; he reliably depicts them in the heroic, tough, battle-ready light they want to be seen. This has led to unintended consequences: In November, a 233-page opinion from Sara Ellis, a Chicago-based federal judge, cited Johnson’s videos eight times while demonstrating that Noem and Greg Bovino, the senior US Border Patrol official who’s become the face of Trump’s anti-migrant crackdown, illegally encouraged force against demonstrators. 

“For example,” Ellis wrote, Johnson’s footage captured Noem as she “admonished agents at Broadview to go hard against people for ‘the way that they’re talking, speaking, who they’re affiliated with, who they’re funded with, and what they’re talking about…,’ statements that Bovino then echoed.” Ellis dryly noted that Noem stood for an interview with Johnson with a group of “arrestees as a backdrop,” people who were later released without charges. In a tweet, Johnson dubbed these people, falsely, “Democrat domestic terrorists.”

Johnson also puts out videos that would appeal to both racist and more overtly conspiratorial viewers: a video mocking Black EBT recipients upset about losing SNAP benefits during the government shutdown, for instance, or one that expressed support for the baseless theory promoted by Candace Owens that France’s first lady, Brigitte Macron, was born male. (The Macrons have sued Owens and others who spread the claim.) Johnson has amplified a similar false story about Michelle Obama, and also is not above making his own pure, grotesque outrage bait: After his visit to Chicago, he posted an AI-generated video of himself in a Batman suit, punching people in sombreros and an Asian woman. (Johnson later deleted the tweet.)  

“He’s always on,” says Keith Edwards, a left-leaning YouTuber who has tracked Johnson’s rise. “It’s a superpower. It’s probably a bit of dysfunction as well.” 

“He’s able to say and do things that I think are just kind of beyond the pale,” Edwards adds. “Going on ICE raids, saying things that are clearly not true…It’s a level of relationship with the truth that I just think is abysmal. He doesn’t really have one.”

The Trump administration and its allies have backed and promoted Johnson to new heights, and his enemies are also now the enemies of the state. In October, Attorney General Pam Bondi stood aside Johnson and helped announce charges against a 69-year-old San Diego man who allegedly sent him a letter expressing a wish that someone would murder him like Kirk. Bondi cast Johnson as an heir to Kirk’s legacy: “Benny is a well-known media personality carrying a message very similar to Charlie’s, grounded largely in faith and love of country.”

Ever on-message, he explicitly blamed the threat against him on the Democratic Party. “This is what happens when a party abandons faith and morality,” Johnson tweeted that day. “It is the same Godless hatred that threatened my family, murdered Charlie, attacked churches and ICE agents, and tried to assassinate President Trump.” 

The White House gave Johnson a place of honor at an August press conference—the briefing room’s daily “new media” seat—from which he falsely claimed his onetime home in Washington, DC, had been set on fire in 2020, seeming to suggest it was a targeted attack. According to the New York Times, Johnson also claimed in a subsequent YouTube video that his house “was burned to the ground.” While there was an “intentionally set” fire on his block, according to DC’s fire department, firefighters contained the “blaze to [the] home of origin,” which was actually his neighbor’s. Johnson sold the supposedly destroyed house in 2021. At the press conference, Johnson also falsely claimed his security camera had captured murders on his block, when none had been recently reported. (There had been a nearby shooting the day before the fire, which left three people with non-life-threatening injuries. A suspect with a long history of drug-related crimes was later arrested for the shooting; his lawyer declined to comment.) Today, Johnson, his wife, and their four young children are based in Tampa. In a Newsmax appearance, he described moving to Florida as a personal escape from the “communist” leadership and lawlessness of East Coast cities.

Johnson fired back at the Times story on Twitter/X, sharing security footage of smoke emanating from a window of his old house and his wife fleeing, their baby in her arms. Johnson called the paper’s reporting “dehumanizing propaganda” and proof of the “Left’s goal…to never grant sympathy to regular Americans, even if they’re innocent children. Evil bastards.” 

Alas, Johnson has complained that trouble followed him to Tampa. This month, he tweeted that a man showed up at his door “ranting about me” before going to the house of another Florida-based conservative figure, Phillip Buchanan, who goes by Catturd online. According to federal court records, the man, identified as Andrew Aiyar, has been charged with posting a threatening tweet saying he intended to kill the wife of another conservative podcaster, Matt Walsh, “with a meat cleaver.” 

“I don’t like to speak publicly about this kind of stuff because it involves my family and their security. I’m sick over it,” Johnson wrote. “But I have an obligation to amplify this case as it is one of multiple ongoing criminal prosecutions for threats against my family. Over the past year I’ve watched my President get shot in the head and my friend get assassinated. Things are spiraling wildly out of control. There are real-world consequences for psychotic rhetoric and lies amplified online. Enough.” Aiyar’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Johnson was throwing back shots with the same mainstream media he now denounces as evil. Unlike many figures in Trump’s media ecosystem, Johnson’s early career included work at news outlets with track records of real reporting. After beginning as a blogger for The Federalist, in 2012 Johnson, then writing for The Blaze, started courting Ben Smith, BuzzFeed News’ founding editor-in-chief. As a form of flattery, Johnson told Smith during a conversation on the floor of that year’s Republican National Convention that he was, according to Smith’s 2024 memoir Traffic, “religiously copying our work” for The Blaze. 

As Smith writes, he was looking to hire a right-leaning writer who would allow fellow conservatives to “see themselves in BuzzFeed.” 

“Benny represented, to me, an untapped new well of traffic,” Smith wrote, “a new identity to plumb.” Smith, now the editor-in-chief of Semafor, writes that he allowed his eyes to “skate over” what he describes as Johnson’s “race-baiting” posts on the New Black Panther Party, an obscure group that Johnson implied had influence over President Obama. “I certainly didn’t run his work through,” Smith admits, “plagiarism-detection software.”

At first, Johnson’s presence at BuzzFeed was a hit. “He was one of the reporters who consistently drove a lot of traffic at a time when that really mattered,” a former DC friend says. “He’d do these buzzy stories,” they added, that didn’t necessarily push any ideology. A particularly popular one from 2013 focused on the “running of the interns,” a Supreme Court coverage ritual where young broadcast news workers sprint freshly issued opinions to on-camera reporters waiting outside the building, vying to be first. The listicle was heavy on photos, light on text, and undeniably charming. 

At the time, Johnson was omnipresent on the DC circuit, knocking down drinks with an ideologically diverse group of journalists and political operatives, united in their mission of trying to get into the most exclusive parties. (When only a few people showed up to his 2013 birthday, he was devastated, one person remembers.) The scene was hard partying and sexually libertine, another person from those circles recalls, even among the more politically conservative figures. “There was a lot of sex happening,” they said, including right-leaning people who were somewhat openly bisexual. “A psychoanalyst would have a field day.” 

Even then, though, Johnson didn’t let his guard down much, even with people he spent a lot of time drinking with. “He wasn’t a person that it felt possible to get close to,” one journalist who knew him then says. 

Johnson was productive, racking up more than 500 stories in a year and a half at BuzzFeed News, earning the title of Viral Politics editor. There was, however, trouble in paradise: “Benny was always the target of progressives on Twitter,” Smith wrote in his book, “who saw him as a dangerous protofascist.” In July 2014, after Johnson accused the Independent Journal Review, a recently formed conservative site, of plagiarizing his work on former President George H.W. Bush’s socks, two pseudonymous Twitter users built a case that Johnson had himself been recycling text from Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers. After their findings were picked up by Gawker’s J.K. Trotter, Smith initially defended him as “one of the web’s deeply original writers.” But BuzzFeed began investigating Johnson’s work and realized that at least 15 stories had been plagiarized, including some that relied on content published by other news outlets. As Stanton recalls, “that’s when it was like, ‘We’re gonna fire him.’” The number of plagiarized stories BuzzFeed uncovered ultimately reached 41. 

BuzzFeed suspended Johnson while the investigation took place. “Unbeknownst to us he went to the beach with his girlfriend,” Stanton says, “and turned off his phone.” To deliver the news of his firing, Stanton resorted to calling his girlfriend. When she handed the phone to Johnson, Stanton recalls, he said his detractors were “jealous, and after him, and people didn’t like him because he was conservative.” Then Johnson said “YOLO” and hung up.  

“Put aside the moral implications or reasoning that he has for being who he is, he was clearly attempting to make a name for himself and become famous, and he took a bunch of shortcuts to do that knowing that could have bad blowback on his colleagues—and it did. People questioned their reporting,” Stanton, now editor of New Orleans’ altweekly Gambit, says. “He never apologized to his co-workers for putting them in this tough spot.” 

“He’s quite talented. He could’ve done good stuff,” says another one of his BuzzFeed editors. “But he was too lazy to do the work.”

Johnson was silent on social media for about a month before announcing that he’d taken a social media editor job at the National Review—one of the places he’d plagiarized from. The ironies compounded, when, within a year, he joined the Independent Journal Review as “content director.” In 2015, Ben Terris described the move in a Washington Post profile as a triumphant comeback, noting that Johnson had escaped what’s usually a journalism career death sentence. “Benny rebounded unusually quickly” after BuzzFeed, Terris wrote, “fielding offers within weeks of his dismissal from media organizations eager to get a piece of the addictive new breed of storytelling perfected by this 29-year-old.”

But by the following year, Johnson had precipitated what media reporter Oliver Darcy, then writing for Business Insider, called “a crisis” at IJR after being accused of plagiarism, again, by his colleagues; he also faced charges that he was mercurial, dictatorial, and verbally abusive to people working under him. 

“Johnson—who once compared himself to Walt Disney, two people said—frequently berated the video team over what was characterized as minuscule details,” Darcy wrote. “Multiple sources said Johnson loudly hurled profanity at team members for small mistakes, fostering a distressing work environment. The behavior eventually led to Johnson receiving a formal verbal reprimand from the company’s human-resources department.” 

Johnson was demoted after the Business Insider story, and, by 2017, had left IJR too, following his role in a story that baselessly claimed former President Obama was somehow behind a court ruling blocking Trump’s first-term anti-Muslim travel ban. By 2019, he made a clean break from news outlets by signing as chief creative officer at Kirk’s Turning Point USA, and, around 2020, co-founded Arsenal Media, a PR firm to help conservative politicians and media figures go viral. That job also produced bad press, when an investigation from The Verge again depicted him as “bullying and humiliating” staffers. 

Johnson could be “very abusive, very toxic, screaming at people, like using profanity, vulgarity, making women cry, like pushing them to the edge,” one anonymous worker told The Verge, elaborating that they “hadn’t been screamed at like that since I was probably seven years old on the playground.” 

While Arsenal Media still exists, Johnson is no longer part of it or Turning Point USA, relying instead on his own eponymous media company to make money. At least one major source of Johnson’s funding, however, has dried up. In September 2024, two Russian nationals were indicted for allegedly bankrolling Tenet Media, a Tennessee-based company that, as part of a plot to stoke domestic division, funneled nearly $10 million to conservative influencers, including Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern.

The Justice Department said the content creators who had ended up as part of the foreign influence operation hadn’t been told of the company’s Russian funding, and Tenet Media’s talent said they were unaware of the true source of their hefty paychecks. In a statement at the time, Johnson said he and the “other influencers were victims in this alleged scheme. My lawyers will handle anyone who states or suggests otherwise.” 

These days, Johnson has fashioned an identity as a conservative dad and devoted husband, a model of traditional values. (“Benny is a man of simple tastes,” his website bio reads, one who “enjoys sitting down with a glass of whiskey and a pipe, preferably after a meal featuring as much meat as he can fit on the grill.”) For the last few years, his wife has made her own efforts to become a social media personality, using her previous career as a registered nurse to rebrand as “Nurse Kate,” “a health and wellness advocate” who also promotes vaccine suspicion and what she’s called a “trad wife” lifestyle; she recently appeared on Fox News to call for an end to infighting in the MAGA movement. 

Johnson has become more overtly anti-LGBTQ over time, complaining in a June YouTube video about Pride Month “shoving rainbow-colored vomit down your throat,” as he put it. This has raised eyebrows, given that a former BuzzFeed colleague of Johnson’s, the author Saeed Jones, has posted online that the two men once “made out” at a booze-soaked 2013 company Christmas party. (Jones did not respond to requests for comment.) “I’m not naming names,” Jones added, but “I wasn’t even the only guy Benny made out with THAT night.” 

At least two gay men in progressive media have commented on this apparent hypocrisy. In September, Keith Edwards made a video, which has amassed more than 600,000 views, rounding up evidence of Johnson’s bisexuality or homosexuality. In addition to Jones’ tweets, it includes allegations from far-right influencer Milo Yiannopoulos and a 2017 incident where Johnson complained about an ad on Military Times’ site promoting a gay cruise, seeming not to realize it was likely targeted based on his own web browsing history. 

“I’m allergic to hypocrisy,” Edwards says. “I personally believe Benny Johnson should get as much conservative dick as he wants, and I’m happy for him. But you have to be truthful about who you are. Otherwise you’re damaging people like you who don’t have the ability to hide.” Progressive talk radio host Michelangelo Signorile, who’s written a book arguing for outing closeted political figures, responded to Edwards’ video on his blog, writing that “if this is true, it’s certainly relevant for the media to confirm it and report on it, as Johnson is part of a movement doing enormous damage to the LGBTQ community and is a powerful player who helped elect a president who is promoting vile hatred against queer people.” 

Rumors about Johnson’s sexuality have also become ammunition in a fractious battle, as the MAGA movement has been convulsed by a power struggle kicked off by Kirk’s death, the lack of a clear successor to Trump, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s emerging apostasy. In December, Johnson and his wife appeared to threaten to sue Yiannopoulos—a self-proclaimed “ex-gay” man—for repeatedly tweeting that Johnson is closeted. In return, Yiannopoulos tweeted that “I have receipts, and the truth is a total defense against any claim of defamation or libel.” 

For anyone who might wonder about the gap between the stories they’ve heard about Johnson and the image he now presents, Johnson has credited Charlie Kirk with helping personally set him on the straight and narrow. 

“I was unmarried,” Johnson said during an October speech at a Moms for Liberty summit that he posted to TikTok. “I was a degenerate. I was every bit addicted to alcohol and some very bad things. And through Charlie’s example in my life, he Christ-centered me.”

As Johnson continues his Trump-and-Kirk-and-Christ-aided comeback, some observers have questioned the authenticity of his social media followings. Progressive YouTuber David Pakman, for instance, accused him in August of using “artificial inflation strategies” to boost his subscriber count far beyond what his videos’ viewership would suggest. (A YouTube spokesperson told the Times it “did not find any evidence of inauthentic traffic, including inauthentic channel subscriptions.”) 

But what can be discerned about Johnson’s audience from the comments they leave on his videos is that they skew older—baby boomers who found their way online and eventually into the deeper end of the conspiracy pool. His content is still packaged, more or less, as news, and it is accessible on platforms that they can find; he focuses heavily on issues those viewers care about, like alleged voter fraud and the perceived unfairness of previous prosecutions against Donald Trump.

One of the few times Johnson ever showed signs of going off-message was during the first round of controversy over the Trump administration’s failure to release the Epstein files in full, even as he repeatedly insisted that Trump was not in the files himself. But at the same time he suggested he was unsatisfied by the administration’s lacking disclosure, Johnson was running cover, assuring his audience on July 14, for instance, that FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino—who’d threatened to quit over a feud with Bondi over releasing the files—was working hard on something “very important.” 

“Trump Team is ‘back together and locking in,’” Johnson wrote, putting his words in quotes without making it clear whose words he was quoting. 

But Johnson has mostly worked to echo the administration’s evolving line on the files. When Trump, under growing public pressure, ginned up a new Epstein investigation targeting prominent Democrats and said the House GOP should back a bill demanding their release, Johnson was on-message, writing that “every shred of evidence points directly at Democrats.” 

He’s been rewarded for that loyalty, again, by both the Trump administration and the larger MAGA sphere. Johnson, whose podcast is sponsored by an online home mortgage lender, recently announced that he’ll be partnering with a conservative property developer as a spokesperson for “Make Housing Great Again.” (The Trump-linked America First Policy Institute, sponsor of the initiative, did not respond to a request for comment on whether he will be paid. Johnson also did not respond to a detailed request for comment for this story.) In Johnson’s words, the “fight for homeownership” is a “fight for the survival of our culture and civilization.” 

“The average first-time homebuyer in America is now 40-years-old. That is far beyond the optimal age to get married and start a family,” Johnson told Fox News. “This is a generational betrayal, and we must reverse it for our children and for their future. This was the final policy priority of Charlie Kirk. We will deliver and save the American Dream.”  

Many people who know Johnson ponder his longevity should the Republican party ever move on from Trump. 

“Some of these influencers in DC are getting so close to the administration it’s backfiring on their brands,” a person familiar with conservative media told me while discussing Johnson. 

“He has a ten or 15 year career to make a lot of money and then you’ll watch him get crazy,” someone who knew him in conservative media predicts. “At a certain point that becomes useless to people in serious political circles. Assuming that the Trump thing is a blip in history, I don’t see the classic Marco Rubio type using Benny for distribution. The candle burns bright and then it burns out.” 

“I don’t know that anybody will have any kind of good reason to be nice to Benny if and when the worm turns and all the authoritarians are out of favor,” agrees Stanton, the former BuzzFeed editor. “I don’t think he’s got that kind of shelf life. But I’m not sure that matters anymore.”