Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) doesn’t seem particularly concerned about reality. During a weekend appearance on the Fox program Sunday Morning Futures with host Maria Bartiromo, he claimed that “social media” conducted “interference” in the 2020 presidential election on behalf of Joe Biden, as if he’s still desperate to find some excuse for the fact that tens of millions of Americans voted against Donald Trump, who lost by millions of votes across the nation as a whole. The reality is — Trump lost! There was no secretive conspiracy among media or social media companies to stop him. He lost.
Yet, Senator Victim Complex seemed entirely unfazed by these facts. As he belligerently put it:
‘I think we’ve known for a long time that the mainstream media, social media, is just part and parcel of the Democrat Party. Everybody complains about Russian interference in the 2016 election, now in the 2020 election — it pales in comparison to the interference, the censorship of the mainstream media and the social media. They selected their candidate, Joe Biden; they did everything they could… to make sure that he won. Their interference in the election is something they simply will not own up to… I support a free press, but it has to be an unbiased press, and we are at a very dangerous moment in American history where we don’t have a unbiased press.’
So, he supports a “free press” — as long as that press says what he finds appropriately “unbiased,” apparently! Did Johnson even notice that he immediately seemed to contradict himself? In Johnson’s imaginary conservative utopia, “bias” isn’t to be allowed, apparently. Thoughts that could go against the party line seem like more than Johnson is willing to handle.
Troublingly, Johnson subsequently insisted that Democrats are “trying to destroy conservatives and the Republican Party completely.” Besides the glaring untruth of his remarks — no, Democrats are not trying to “destroy” Republicans — this kind of existential fearmongering is dangerous. The delusional victim complex that Johnson seems interested in cultivating among his followers directly connects to real-world expressions of violence like the January rioting at the Capitol, because GOP leaders convince their voters that political disagreements amount to an existential struggle for existence itself, basically.
While on Fox, Johnson also offered familiar complaints about various points of the Democratic agenda, like tax increases that have been floated for high earners. Johnson claimed that Democrats are going to “start taxing success” and thereby “kill the recovery,” although he didn’t note that Trump himself dramatically slashed corporate tax rates in the first place. Thus, at least in that context, a “tax hike” would be more like a return to a recent equilibrium.
Check out Johnson’s comments below:
