Following Donald Trump’s departure from the White House and his removal from Twitter, he lost the ability to instantly inject misinformation into the news cycle. In light of this, one high-profile Republican has thoughtfully taken up the mantle. In recent weeks Senator Ron Johnson has waded into increasingly conspiratorial waters, going so far as to push crackpot theories that Trump himself no longer mentions—such as the claim that hydroxychloroquine is a viable treatment for COVID-19, as well as a theory of climate change so asinine that it rivals Trump’s position that the phenomenon is a Chinese hoax.

More recently Johnson has invoked race to justify downplaying the Capitol attack. “Even though those thousands of people that were marching to the Capitol were trying to pressure people like me to vote the way they wanted me to vote, I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn’t concerned,” he said on a right-wing talk radio program. “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.” 

Johnson has since doubled down on this argument, claiming that race has nothing to do with it. “One of the reasons I’m being attacked is because I very honestly said I didn’t feel threatened on January 6. I didn’t,” Johnson said at a conservative event in Wisconsin over the weekend, per CNN. “There was much more violence on the House side. There was no violence on the Senate side, in terms of the chamber.” (Videos recorded on January 6 show Trump supporters smashing windows on the Senate side and storming the halls just outside the chamber.) Johnson went on to say that “had the people that rioted in 570 different riots that burned I don’t know how many dozens of buildings in Kenosha, Wisconsin…if those people had shown up in Washington, D.C., I said I might have been a little concerned. That has now been twisted, contorted into calling me a racist.” 

He has also theorized that it was not, in fact, Trump supporters who were to blame for the riot that ensued at the Capitol; that “the mood among the demonstrators on January 6 was largely ‘positive,’ but there were ‘agents provocateurs’ and ‘fake Trump protesters’ in the crowd” who sparked the disruption. That particular trial balloon has been met with condemnation, including from some Republicans. Senator Roy Blunt, a member of GOP leadership, asserted on Meet the Press on Sunday that Americans “don’t need to try and explain away or come up with alternative versions. We all saw what happened.” Describing the January 6 riot as “a terrible day for America,” Blunt said, “I think it was absolutely unacceptable, and we can’t let that kind of thing be repeated again in our country.”

Others are likening Johnson to another Wisconsin scaremonger: Joseph McCarthy. Former congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, who represented Wisconsin’s 5th Congressional District for decades, described Johnson as part of a long line of Wisconsin “mavericks” going “way back to Joe McCarthy” in an interview with The New York Times. “[Wisconsin voters] do love people who rattle the cage an awful lot and bring up topics that maybe people don’t want to talk about,” he said. Former conservative radio host Charlie Sykes, whom the Times credited as a key figure in lifting Johnson to his first Senate victory, also referenced McCarthy in the same breath. “I don’t know how he went from being a chamber of commerce guy to somebody who sounds like he reads the Gateway Pundit every day. He’s turned into Joe McCarthy,” Sykes said.

Last week the Times asked Johnson, who hasn’t announced whether he will run for reelection, about some of his more untethered remarks, including comments he made during a 2010 interview dismissing the risk of climate change. “You know, there’s a reason Greenland was called Greenland. It was actually green at one point in time. It’s a whole lot whiter now, so we’ve experienced climate change throughout geologic time,” he said at the time, concluding in a separate interview that “the science of man-caused climate change is [not] proven, not by any stretch of the imagination.” Speaking with the Times, Johnson acknowledged that he had “no idea” how Greenland got its name. “I could be wrong there,” he said, “but that’s always been my assumption that, at some point in time, those early explorers saw green.”

— Andrew Cuomo’s Biographer on the Governor’s Brutish History
— How Officials in Trump’s White House Scrambled to Score COVID-19 Vaccinations
— A Private Jet of Rich Trumpers Wanted to “Stop the Steal”
— Donald Trump Is Drowning in Criminal Investigations and Legally Screwed
— The Wave of Anti-Asian Hate Could Last Beyond the Pandemic
— Could Brett Kavanaugh Be Booted From the Supreme Court?
— Leak of Bombshell CBS Investigation Led to Multimillion-Dollar Settlement
— From the Archive: The Day Before Tragedy

— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.