Photo credit: Gage Skidmore
Starting his eleventh year as an obscure Midwestern senator with no accomplishments of any kind in Washington for his state, Ron Johnson has finally achieved his political dream. He’s the talk of the nation.
With their nationally disastrous Republican president gone, the party’s demagogue ranks have thinned. All Johnson had to do was what he’s done from the moment he entered politics. Some people forget Johnson was created by Wisconsin’s racist Tea Party backlash to President Barack Obama’s election. Johnson, a rightwing businessman from Oshkosh, first came to public attention at those early 2009 Tea Party hate rallies.
Until mainstream Republicans pressured them to clean up their act, the Tea Party didn’t even try to hide its racist roots. White supremacists showed up waving pictures of Obama as an African witch doctor with a bone through his nose and shouting for the president to go back to Kenya. Rightwing radio was happy to promote a respectable looking, white-haired corporate executive as a front for all the bigots.
In 2021 Johnson’s still spewing dumb, racist remarks on rightwing radio shows, but now he’s emerged from the outer fringes of his party to his own twisted version of national prominence. Even after Donald Trump’s massive defeat led to a violent insurrection by his supporters, Republicans are still desperate to hold onto to all the new white supremacists and armed militants President Trump attracted to their party. It’s still their most reliable voting bloc.
A Good Mob?
That’s why Johnson was eager to explain how much he respected that violent, white mob that rampaged through the Capitol looking for Senators and House members to murder. “I knew those are people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement and would never do anything to break the law,” Johnson said. He said he would have been far more concerned if “those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters.”
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Has there ever been a clearer statement of the alternative version of reality Republicans have to pretend to believe in order to remain in what’s left of their party today? Seriously, that mob shouting to hang Mike Pence and hoping to rip Nancy Pelosi limb from limb would never do anything to break the law? They so respected law enforcement they killed one police officer and injured 140 others, stomping some unconscious and causing serious brain injuries to others by beating them with flagpoles with American flags on the other end. Such patriotic love of country.
The final tally by Washington Post fact checkers of the biggest liar in American political history was 30,573 lies by Trump. Johnson can’t approach that record, but he has one of the same “tells” as the champ. Johnson introduced his comments about how dangerous Black Lives Matter was by saying: “This could get me in trouble.” That’s a familiar catch phrase from all Trump’s hate rallies. Loosely translated, it means: “Listen up. I’m going to say something juicy and racist. You’ll love it!”
More Lies
Johnson tried to deny racism was behind his fear of Black Lives Matter in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal claiming hundreds of Black Lives Matter protests had turned into violent riots killing 25 people. The independent service whose data Johnson cited said he misrepresented their statistics. It said 94% of 10,300 demonstrations associated with Black Lives Matters involved no violence or destruction of any kind. Besides, when violence did occur at the protests it was often the result of attacks on the protesters from white supremacists or the kind of overly aggressive police intervention that took place in Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C. The 25 deaths Johnson cited included the two protesters shot and killed by Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha and other Black Lives Matter victims of counter protests and the police.
Rather than being pleased by all the national media attention he’s received, Johnson now claims he’s become the latest victim of “the censorship of conservative perspectives in today’s cancel culture.” Actually, Johnson has received just the opposite of censorship. He’s been widely quoted all over the country for saying something the media accurately identifies as racist and stupid.
It’s insulting to political conservatism for Johnson to claim his public racism is a conservative perspective. Wisconsin is the real victim of Johnson’s absurd media campaign to rewrite the most violent, white supremacist attack to overthrow American democracy since the Civil War as a fun day picnicking on the Capitol grounds and touring the House and Senate. Every half century or so, Wisconsin suffers the national embarrassment of being represented in the United States Senate by a lying, hateful Republican demagogue like Joe McCarthy or Ron Johnson.
Johnson is far past his expiration date. 2022 is the second crucial election for Wisconsin voters this decade. The contests for senator, governor and every single congressional and legislative seat have never been more important.
