Sen. Ron Johnson is a tool. He’s a millionaire narcissist who has made a career of doing the bidding of Ron Johnson. The one thing Ron Johnson wants is more power. That’s it. That is the entirety of his psyche.
Since Donald Trump lost the last election by millions of votes, Johnson has cynically promoted the false narrative that the election was stolen. He knows it wasn’t. He then moved on to the fascist-majority of the Republican Party position that the insurrection and attempted coup d’etat at our nation’s capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021, was not a big deal. In fact, Johnson defended MAGA rioters as being ethnically unable to break the law. To do this, of course, he has had to promote outright lies and disinformation about the events of that day.
One problem that has continued to dog the conservative movement over the last couple of years is their bungling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The “19” stands for the year of the pandemic’s discovery and you don’t need to be a math whiz to see how the plan of doing nothing until it raged out of hand and then fighting against good public policies has worked out for our country. As of the writing of this story, no less than 826,000 Americans have lost their lives to COVID-19.
But Ron Johnson knows what the solution is: natural immunity. You see, now that more Americans have died (predominantly unvaccinated Americans) than in both World Wars, Vietnam, Korea, the American Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the “War on Terror, the Spanish-American War, and the Gulf War combined, we can rest easy. How come? Something-something God.
On the Vicki McKenna radio show, Johnson gave a truly twisted bit of logic explaining his position.
Johnson begins by bragging about his immune system, “By the way I now tested positive but I also tested for antibodies at a whopping level.” Ron’s got the bigliest antibodies. He then goes on to ask the a truly unintelligent straw man argument question: “So I tested positive, but I didn’t have any symptoms. How do you explain that?” You weren’t exposed to a large viral load? You may or may not have been given early treatments not available to most Americans? You got lucky? Sort of a meaningless question, right? 826,000 Americans weren’t as lucky.
But here’s Ronnie’s point: “Why would we automatically assume that our natural immunity is going to be awful? It’s going to be non-existent. Why do we assume the worst? Why assume the body’s natural immune system isn’t the marvel that it really is?” Umm, I don’t know, fucking cancer? AIDS? Measles? Smallpox? Rubella? Polio? Mumps? Whooping cough, tetanus, diphtheria, Hepatitis A and B? What are you talking about? God?
"Why do we think that we can create something better than God in terms of combatting disease? There are certain things we have to do, but we have just made so many assumptions, and it's all pointed toward everybody getting a vaccine." Oh, God. So God gave you no symptoms and killed all those other people because he made Ron Johnson’s immune system more marvelous than everybody else’s?
Johnson would like to remain a Senator, and possibly wiggle his way higher up at some point, he has found purchase in pushing anti-vaccine and anti-mask propaganda and he has aligned himself with anti-vaxx conmen. He has promoted gargling mouthwash as some kind of therapeutic for fighting off COVID-19. The logic for the GOP—or what they are passing off as “logic” to their constituency—is that our economy remains one that hasn’t worked for most Americans for over four decades because … liberals are trying to “flatten the curve.”
The cynicism here is that Johnson is being lightly mealy-mouthed on purpose. He’s not saying you shouldn’t be vaccinated, just wondering why everyone is so quick to tell everyone to get vaccinated. But his logic is that God would be offended if you got vaccinated since, with the exception of hundreds of thousands of Americans and many conservative christians, God has created a marvelous immune system. Ron Johnson is trying to come across like he’s a Christian Scientist but he doesn’t have the God-given courage to really have a true conviction above promoting Ron Johnson.
Studies have predicted that without a vaccination program, the number of dead Americans at this point would be closer to two million. That’s the problem with Ronnie’s made-up God theory of protection. The only way it works is if God wants all of those people to die. It only works if God was hoping that more than one in every 500 children in our country to lose a caregiver. Maybe Ron just worships a crap God who wants that. Maybe Johnson has misinterpreted what God does and does not do in regards to infectious diseases?
Help get rid of senators like Ron Johnson by supporting his Democratic opposition in the upcoming elections.