GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) — Republican US Senator Ron Johnson accused the ‘mainstream media’ of a ‘double standard’ after the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial board called on him to resign.
The largest newspaper in the state had accused Johnson of ‘Sedition’ and racism, it blamed him for inciting the riot at the US Capitol on January 6th through his calls for investigation into alleged irregularities in the 2020 election.
“The attacks on me, the attacks on President Trump, are far broader and not targeted just at me as an individual or at President Trump, they’re directed at you, the 74 million [Trump voters],” Johnson said on WTAQ’s ‘The Regular Joe Show’.
Citing recent remarks from former CIA Director John Brennan, Johnson implied that average Trump supporters were being targeted by Democrats and the media following the riot at the US Capitol.
“John Brennan is out there now saying we need a ‘domestic war on terror’. How does he define domestic terrorists? As libertarians!” said Johnson “It is frightening.”
Brennan made comments blaming “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians” for the early January violence.
“It’s an unsustainable state of affairs. You have tens of millions of Americans not looking at the election results as legitimate, and they have legitimate concerns,” Johnson added.
The Oshkosh-area Senator led investigations into the 2020 election, none of which were effective in changing or removing any votes or disqualifying any ballots.
Calling the ‘mainstream media’ “grotesquely biased”, Johnson claimed that the media has exacerbated the national divide.
“It is well past time for the mainstream media to look in the mirror,” Johnson told host Joe Giganti. “And understand…the role it has played in widening the divide.”
Johnson argued that the calls of ‘sedition’ and incitement being leveled at Republicans are hypocritical, given that similar calls never took place over the summer during protests and riots in the wake of police shootings of black men in Kenosha and Minneapolis.
“Lt. Governor Barnes went down and participated in the protest,” Johnson said. “Governor Tony Evers said ‘We don’t know what happened…but this is another case where a cop murdered somebody. The double standard is profound.”
Johnson published a rebuttal to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s initial call for him to resign, however, the Journal Sentinel took the “unprecedented” step of annotating Johnson’s response with their own footnotes.
Johnson maintains that there were irregularities in the November election that are worthy of investigation. With a new, Democratic-controlled US senate, it’s not likely that such investigations would continue.
