Is being encouraged to step aside. Perhaps, it's just political malice. Eric
GOP Sen. Ron Johnson complained about the failed drug hydroxychloroquine not
getting FDA approval, and refused to say the COVID-19 vaccine is safe
(msn.com)<https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gop-sen-ron-johnson-complained-about-the-failed-drug-hydroxychloroquine-not-getting-fda-approval-and-refused-to-say-the-covid-19-vaccine-is-safe/ar-BB1eQkax?ocid=msedgntp>
Here's the NYT article the TV story refers to.
Assaulting the Truth, Ron Johnson Helps Erode Confidence in Government
Pushing false theories on the virus, the vaccine and the Jan. 6 attack on the
Capitol, Mr. Johnson, the Republican senator from Wisconsin, has absorbed his
party’s transformation under Donald Trump.
*
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*
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* 203
[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/03/19/us/politics/00RonJohnson1/00RonJohnson1-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale]
[Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, has become the party’s foremost
amplifier of conspiracy theories and disinformation.]
Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, has become the party’s foremost
amplifier of conspiracy theories and disinformation.Credit...Anna Moneymaker
for The New York Times
[Trip Gabriel]<https://www.nytimes.com/by/trip-gabriel>[Reid J.
Epstein]<https://www.nytimes.com/by/reid-j-epstein>
By Trip Gabriel<https://www.nytimes.com/by/trip-gabriel> and Reid J.
Epstein<https://www.nytimes.com/by/reid-j-epstein>
* March 21, 2021
BROOKFIELD, Wis. — Senator Ron Johnson incited widespread outrage when he said
recently that he would have been more afraid of the rioters who rampaged the
Capitol on Jan. 6 had they been members of Black Lives Matter and antifa.
But his revealing and incendiary comment, which quickly prompted accusations of
racism, came as no surprise to those who have followed Mr. Johnson’s career in
Washington or back home in Wisconsin. He has become the Republican Party’s
foremost amplifier of conspiracy theories and disinformation now that Donald
Trump himself is banned from social
media<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/technology/trump-social-media.html>
and largely avoiding appearances on cable television.
Mr. Johnson is an all-access purveyor of misinformation on serious issues such
as the pandemic and the legitimacy of American democracy, as well as invoking
the etymology of Greenland as a way to downplay the effects of climate change.
In recent months, Mr. Johnson has sown doubts about President Biden’s victory,
argued that the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was not an armed insurrection,
promoted discredited Covid-19 treatments, said he saw no need to get the
coronavirus vaccine
himself<https://twitter.com/Emilee_Fannon/status/1369760015419072513?s=20> and
claimed that the United States could have ended the
pandemic<https://www.iheart.com/podcast/139-vicki-mckenna-27246267/episode/the-vicki-mckenna-show-this-79766949/>
a year ago with the development of a generic drug if the government had wanted
that to happen.
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Last year, he spent months as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security
Committee seeking evidence that Mr. Biden had tried to pressure Ukrainian
officials to aid his son Hunter, which an Intelligence Community report
released on
Monday<https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/2021-intelligence-community-election-interference-assessment/abd0346ebdd93e1e/full.pdf>
said was misinformation that was spread by Russia to help Mr. Trump’s
re-election.
[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/03/19/us/politics/00RonJohnson2/merlin_185128749_c16d145b-0860-4d23-b50f-b43a6d5cb454-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale]
Image[Mr. Johnson has sown doubts about President Biden’s victory, argued that
the attack on the Capitol was not an armed insurrection and promoted
discredited Covid-19 treatments.]
Mr. Johnson has sown doubts about President Biden’s victory, argued that the
attack on the Capitol was not an armed insurrection and promoted discredited
Covid-19 treatments.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times
Mr. Johnson has also become the leading Republican proponent of a revisionist
effort<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/us/politics/antifa-conspiracy-capitol-riot.html>
to deny the motives and violence of the mob that breached the Capitol. At a
Senate hearing to examine the events of that day, Mr. Johnson read into the
record an account from a far-right
website<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/us/politics/ron-johnson-capitol-riot.html>
attributing the violence to “agents-provocateurs” and “fake Trump protesters.”
On Saturday, he told a conference of conservative political
organizers<https://twitter.com/RicoReporting/status/1373370003181961224?s=20>
in Wisconsin that “there was no violence on the Senate side, in terms of the
chamber.” In fact, Trump supporters stormed the
chamber<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/photos-capitol-building-protesters.html>
shortly after senators were evacuated.
His continuing assault on the truth, often under the guise of simply “asking
questions” about established facts, is helping to diminish confidence in
American institutions at a perilous moment, when the health and economic
well-being of the nation relies heavily on mass vaccinations, and when faith in
democracy is shaken by right-wing falsehoods about voting.
Republicans are 27 percentage points less likely than Democrats to say they
plan to get, or have already received, a vaccine, a Pew Research Center study
released this
month<https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2021/03/05/growing-share-of-americans-say-they-plan-to-get-a-covid-19-vaccine-or-already-have/>
found. In an interview, Mr. Johnson repeatedly refused to say that vaccines
were safe or to encourage people to get them, resorting instead to insinuations
— “there’s still so much we don’t know about all of this” — that undermine
efforts to defeat the pandemic.
Editors’ Picks
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For Kim Ng, Getting the Job Wasn’t the Point. ‘I’ve Got to Do It Well.’
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Lighting Up Later in Life
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The drumbeat of distortions, false theories and lies reminds some Wisconsin
Republicans of a figure from the state’s past who also rarely let facts get in
the way of his agenda: Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose witch hunt for
communists<https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1957/05/03/317458642.html?pageNumber=1>
in and out of government in the 1950s ruined lives and bitterly divided the
country.
“Wisconsin voters love mavericks, they really love mavericks — you go way back
to Joe McCarthy,” said Jim Sensenbrenner, a long-serving Republican congressman
from the Milwaukee suburbs who retired in
January<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/us/politics/jim-sensenbrenner-wisconsin.html>.
“They do love people who rattle the cage an awful lot and bring up topics that
maybe people don’t want to talk about.”
For Democrats, who have never forgotten Mr. Johnson’s defeat of the liberal
darling Russ Feingold in
2010<https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/us/politics/05feingold.html>, and again
in a 2016
rematch<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/us/politics/wisconsin-senate-ron-johnson.html>,
regaining the Senate seat in 2022 is a top priority. Though he has yet to
announce whether he would be seeking a third
term<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/30/us/politics/wisconsin-presidential-election.html>,
Mr. Johnson recently said that the fury that Democrats had directed his way
had made him want to stay in the fight. Still, he has raised just $590,000 in
the past two
years<https://www.fec.gov/data/candidate/S0WI00197/?cycle=2020&election_full=false>
— a paltry sum for an incumbent senator.
Mr. Johnson’s most recent provocation came on March 12, when he contrasted
Black Lives Matter protesters to the Trump supporters “who love this country”
and stormed the Capitol, the carnage resulting in 140 injured police
officers<https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/27/us/biden-trump-impeachment/the-capitol-police-union-says-nearly-140-officers-were-injured-during-the-riot>
and more than 300 arrests
<https://www.npr.org/2021/02/09/965472049/the-capitol-siege-the-arrested-and-their-stories>
by federal authorities. During an interview with a right-wing radio host, Joe
Pagliarulo<https://www.iheart.com/podcast/the-joe-pags-show-22959056/episode/first-step-to-impeach-dem-governor-79539565/?embed=true%22>,
Mr. Johnson said: “Joe, this will get me in trouble. Had the tables been
turned and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of
Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.”
Research on the protests against racial injustice over the summer showed that
they were largely
nonviolent<https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-violence-in-america-new-data-for-summer-2020/>.
In the interview with The Times, Mr. Johnson rejected comparisons to McCarthy.
And he insisted he had no racist intent in making his argument.
[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/03/19/us/politics/00RonJohnson3/merlin_154090806_033878fb-15b2-4ed9-a3eb-8fbc1d91f794-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale]
Image
[Like former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Johnson proved himself remarkably
adept at adopting the misinformation that increasingly animated right-wing
media. ]
Like former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Johnson proved himself remarkably
adept at adopting the misinformation that increasingly animated right-wing
media. Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
“I didn’t feel threatened,” he said. “So it’s a true statement. And then people
said, ‘Well, why?’ Well, because I’ve been to a lot of Trump rallies. I spend
three hours with thousands of Trump supporters. And I think I know them pretty
well. I don’t know any Trump supporter who would have done what the rioters
did.”
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On Sunday, Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, denounced Mr. Johnson’s
distortion of the events of Jan.
6.<https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007655234/weve-lost-the-line-radio-traffic-reveals-police-under-siege-at-capitol.html?playlistId=video/2020-Elections>
“We don’t need to try and explain away or come up with alternative versions,”
he said on the NBC program “Meet the Press.” “We all saw what happened.”
Mr. Johnson, in the Times interview, also faulted the federal government for
what he called its “tunnel vision” pursuit of a Covid-19 vaccine while not more
deeply studying treatments such as hydroxychloroquine — the anti-malarial drug
promoted by Mr. Trump that the Food and Drug Administration says is not
effective<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/health/fda-hydroxychloroquine-malaria.html>
against the virus. That strategy, he said, cost “tens of thousands of lives.”
Conspiracy theories and a defiant disregard of facts were a fringe but growing
element of the Republican Party when Mr. Johnson entered politics in 2010 —
notably in the vice-presidential candidacy of Sarah Palin two years earlier.
But under Mr. Trump, the fringe became the mainstream. Fact-free assertions by
the president, from the size of his inaugural
crowd<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/us/politics/trump-white-house-briefing-inauguration-crowd-size.html>
in 2017 to the “big lie” of a stolen election in
2020<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/31/us/trump-election-lie.html>, required
Republican officials to fall in line with his gaslighting or lose the support
of the party’s base voters.
Mr. Johnson proved himself remarkably adept at adopting the misinformation that
increasingly animated Fox News commentators and right-wing talk radio.
“Through the years, as the party has morphed into a muscular ignorance, Q-Anon
sect, he’s followed along with them,” said Christian Schneider, a former
Republican political operative in Wisconsin who embedded with the Johnson
campaign in 2010 to write a glowing account for a local conservative
magazine<https://www.badgerinstitute.org/WI-Magazine/Volume19No3/How-Johnson-Won.htm>.
“Now, he’s a perfect example of that type of politics.”
[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/03/19/us/politics/00RonJohnson4/merlin_39745369_b0c04e6e-2644-49c0-a259-74789778c02d-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale]
Image
[Mr. Johnson entered politics as a businessman concerned about federal spending
and debt in 2010, defeating the Democratic senator Russ Feingold.]
Mr. Johnson entered politics as a businessman concerned about federal spending
and debt in 2010, defeating the Democratic senator Russ
Feingold.Credit...Narayan Mahon for The New York Times
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Mr. Johnson was the chief executive of a plastics company started by his wife’s
family<https://web.archive.org/web/20101020011954/http://www.thenorthwestern.com/article/20101003/OSH0101/101005107/Johnson-s-Pacur-LLC-began-as-Curler-family-enterprise>
when he first ran for the Senate in 2010. He campaigned as a new-to-politics
businessman<https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/us/politics/01wisconsin.html>
concerned about federal spending and debt, and he spent $9 million of his own
money on the
race<https://www.fec.gov/data/candidate/S0WI00197/?cycle=2010&election_full=true>.
But there were signs in that first campaign of Mr. Johnson’s predilection for
anti-intellectualism. On several occasions, he declared that climate change was
not man-made but instead caused by “sun
spots<https://archive.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/100814454.html/>” and
said excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “helps the trees grow.” He also
offered a false history of Greenland to dismiss the effects of global warming.
“You know, there’s a reason Greenland was called Greenland,” Mr. Johnson told
WKOW-TV<https://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/goper-ron-johnson-greenland-used-to-be-green-not-exactly>
in Madison back then. “It was actually green at one point in time. And it’s
been, you know, since, it’s a whole lot whiter now so we’ve experienced climate
change throughout geologic time.”
In the interview on Thursday, Mr. Johnson was still misinformed about the
etymology of Greenland, which got its name from the explorer Erik the Red’s
attempt to lure settlers to the ice-covered
island<https://visitgreenland.com/articles/10-facts-nellie-huang/#:~:text=It%20actually%20got%20its%20name,the%20name%20would%20attract%20settlers.>.
“I could be wrong there, but that’s always been my assumption that, at some
point in time, those early explorers saw green,” Mr. Johnson said. “I have no
idea.”
Just as Mr. Trump would later use Fox News to build a national political
persona, Mr. Johnson did so on Wisconsin’s wide network of conservative
talk-radio shows. His political rise would not have been possible without
support<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/us/politics/wisconsin-race-supreme-court-nominee-merrick-garland.html>
from Charlie Sykes, then an influential radio
host<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/opinion/sunday/charlie-sykes-on-where-the-right-went-wrong.html>
in Milwaukee who once read an entire 20-minute speech by Mr. Johnson on the
air.
Mr. Sykes, who since 2016 has been a harsh critic of Trump-era Republicans,
said last week of Mr. Johnson: “I don’t know how he went from being a chamber
of commerce guy to somebody who sounds like he reads the Gateway
Pundit<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/15/us/politics/trump-media.html> every
day. He’s turned into Joe McCarthy.”
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This month alone, Mr. Johnson has made at least 15 appearances on 11 different
radio shows.
[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/03/19/us/politics/00RonJohnson5/merlin_185255190_eb04a473-23e9-4b44-8cd6-c58f723af5f8-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale]
Image
[Conspiracy theories and a defiant disregard of facts were a fringe but growing
element of the Republican Party when Mr. Johnson entered politics in 2010.]
Conspiracy theories and a defiant disregard of facts were a fringe but growing
element of the Republican Party when Mr. Johnson entered politics in
2010.Credit...Morry Gash/Associated Press
On Tuesday he appeared with Vicki
McKenna<https://www.iheart.com/podcast/139-vicki-mckenna-27246267/episode/the-vicki-mckenna-show-this-79766949/>,
whose right-wing show is popular with Wisconsin conservatives. She began by
attacking public-health guidance on wearing a mask and maintaining social
distance, arguing it is a Democratic plot to control Americans. Mr. Johnson
agreed with Ms. McKenna and her assessment that public-health experts in the
federal government are misleading the country when they promote the coronavirus
vaccine.
“We’ve closed our minds to all of these other potentially useful and cheap
therapies all on the holy grail of a vaccine,” he said. Dr. Fauci, he added, is
“not a god.”
In the interview, the senator said it was not his responsibility to to use his
public prominence to encourage Americans to get vaccinated.
“I don’t have all the information to say, ‘Do this,’” Mr. Johnson said.
His false theories about the virus and the vaccine are reminiscent of other
misinformation that Mr. Johnson has amplified. During a 2014 appearance on
Newsmax TV, he warned of Islamic State militants infecting themselves with the
Ebola
virus<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/andrewkaczynski/gop-senator-isis-using-ebola-is-a-clear-and-present-danger#.mf70abwrYq>
and then traveling to the United States. In 2015, he introduced legislation
directing the federal
government<https://www.ronjohnson.senate.gov/2015/7/johnson-introduces-bill-to-require-federal-strategy-to-protect-electric-grid>
to protect itself against the threat of an electromagnetic pulse, a conspiracy
theory<https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/us/politics/gingrichs-electromagnetic-pulse-warning-has-skeptics.html>
that has long lived on the far right of American politics.
Last year’s monthslong investigation by Mr. Johnson’s Homeland Security
committee into the Bidens and Ukraine concluded with the G.O.P. majority
report<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/us/politics/biden-inquiry-republicans-johnson.html>
finding no wrongdoing by the former vice president. An Intelligence Community
assessment<https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/2021-intelligence-community-election-interference-assessment/abd0346ebdd93e1e/full.pdf>
declassified and released on Monday concluded that Russia had spread
misinformation about Hunter Biden to damage his father’s campaign and to help
Mr. Trump win re-election.
Mr. Johnson, who was not named in the assessment, was adamant that his work was
not directly, or unwittingly, influenced by Russians.
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“Read the report — show me where there’s any Russian disinformation,” he said.
“Anybody who thinks I spread disinformation is uninformed because I haven’t.”
For weeks after the November election, Mr. Johnson refused to acknowledge Mr.
Biden as the winner while echoing Mr. Trump’s false statements about rampant
fraud. He convened his committee in December to air baseless claims of fraud
and mishandling of ballots, even as dozens of claims of fraud made by the Trump
campaign were being tossed out of courts across the country.
[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/03/19/us/politics/00RonJohnson6/merlin_181325025_7d5993a7-1d77-4c35-95aa-3507281d045a-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale]
Image
[Mr. Johnson has refused to say that coronavirus vaccines are safe or to
encourage people to get them.]
Mr. Johnson has refused to say that coronavirus vaccines are safe or to
encourage people to get them.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times
In a cascade of interviews with friendly conservative outlets, Mr. Johnson has
lately portrayed himself as a victim of “the radical left” that is waging a
scorched-earth campaign to flip his Senate seat.
“The best way to maintain power is to destroy your political opposition, and
they’re targeting me,” he told the Oshkosh radio host Bob
Burnell<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a0ya9a2Sz8> on Tuesday. “This is
obviously a vulnerable Senate seat in a swing state so they think I’d probably
be the target No. 1. And I am target No. 1.”
Mr. Johnson’s defenders say he is fighting the liberal media’s attempts to
silence him.
“I see the same thing happening with Senator Johnson that the media did with
Donald Trump,” said Gerard
Randall<https://thompsoncenter.wisc.edu/staff/randall-gerard/>, the chairman of
the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s African-American Advisory Council. “I know
Senator Johnson personally, and I know that he is not a racist.”
If Mr. Johnson seeks a third term, the race is likely to be decided in the
Milwaukee suburbs, which used to deliver Republican landslides but have moved
away from the party since the Trump era.
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The city of Brookfield, for example, backed Mr. Trump by a margin of just nine
percentage points in November, after voting for him by 20 points in 2016 and
President George W. Bush by 39 points in 2004.
“There was a lot of eye-rolling” about Mr. Johnson’s recent comments about the
Capitol siege, said Scott Berg, a conservative who has served as a Brookfield
city alderman for 20 years. “If I were in the leadership of the Wisconsin
Republican Party, I’d be out shopping for candidates” for the Senate in 2022,
he added.
Still, in 2016, Mr. Johnson ran 10 percentage points ahead of Mr. Trump in
Brookfield. Voters there suggested the suburb might not be drifting from
Republicans as fast as some Democrats had hoped.
“I’m a Johnson supporter — I voted for him twice — but I think he’s going down
a rabbit hole I don’t want any part of,” said John Raschig, a retiree who was
leaving a Pick ‘n Save supermarket. “It’s sort of like Trump: I’d vote for him
because the other side’s awful, but I’d prefer somebody else.”
Trip Gabriel reported from Wisconsin, and Reid J. Epstein from Washington, D.C.
Giovanni Russonello contributed reporting.
