Quote:Johnson exhibited his out-there mindset again Tuesday during a Senate hearing on the Capitol riots, reading, as New York’s Nita Prater reports, from a single eyewitness account published by the Federalist that claims “the mood among the demonstrators on January 6 was largely ‘positive,’ but there were ‘agents provocateurs’ and ‘fake Trump protesters’ in the crowd.” The essay was written by J. Michael Waller of the Center for Security Policy, which Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a “conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece for the growing anti-Muslim movement.”
This was familiar territory for Johnson, whose reaction to the assault on the Capitol has consistently tended toward downplaying its insurrectionary character and blaming it on everybody but the Trump supporters who were sent to the Capitol in a MAGA frenzy by the 45th president himself. Johnson has long been an aficionado of the kind of beliefs found most often in the more sequestered avenues of right-wing social media. He clung, for example, to the hydroxychloroquine “cure” for COVID-19 even after Trump stopped promoting it.

Johnson, who came to the Senate by upsetting the chronically underfunded Russ Feingold in 2010 and then beating him again in a 2016 rematch, used to come across as boring and unoriginal. Not any more, notes veteran Wisconsin journalist Bruce Murphy:

Quote:It’s remarkable to see the transformation of Johnson, who ran as a businessman concerned about the federal deficit and was consumed by the issue in his early years. He has gradually transformed into a collector of crackpot theories and conspiracies and one of the strangest senators serving today.