Ron Johnson Hits The War Machine
Wisconsin's GOP senator is already on Big Pharma's bad side. This past week, he hit Big War hard too.
I’m originally from Wisconsin, and there are a number of subscribers from the Badger State on this list. The good people of my old home state elected Ron Johnson to a third term in the U.S. Senate in 2022, and Johnson is one of those mentioned as a possible running mate for President Trump this year (it doesn’t seem likely, but Johnson’s name is at least floated). To that end, his recent interview with Glenn Greenwald on System Update was highly interesting, as Johnson came out swinging against the Military-Industrial Complex.
To put this in proper context, we have to understand where Johnson is coming from. Running mate speculation aside, Johnson is not a hard-core Trumper. Johnson operates in a political space that I would call “parallel” to Trump and the broader America First movement. A lot of us—myself included—respect Johnson a great deal. He was an independent businessman who got into politics (sound familiar?). He was basically a mainline conservative, with all of the strengths and weaknesses that came with that.
From the perspective of public opinion, his outsider status gave him the ability to connect with the swing voters in Wisconsin—a bloc that has gone for everyone from Barack Obama and Tammy Baldwin on the Democratic side, to Trump and Scott Walker on the Republican side. Ideology doesn’t drive these voters. The ability to connect as an outsider does. Johnson did, and it’s why he’s won three straight Senate elections.
It was in the aftermath of COVID-19 that Johnson started to delve into what we’ll call the more populist issues. He began challenging Big Pharma’s narratives on the vaccines, holding hearings that gave platforms to good doctors like Robert Malone and Peter McCullough, who were ostracized by their profession and the media, but are currently being proven right on a daily basis. Like many, Johnson was less concerned about the vaccine itself, but about why alternative treatments (Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, etc.) were being suppressed.
But there was one area where Johnson was still disturbing conventional, and that was on foreign policy. He voted for the original Ukraine aid package in the spring of 2022 and generally accepted a lot of the assumptions of Washington D.C.’s ruling class—which always lead to intervention and more spending.
Over the last two years, that has changed. Johnson began voting “No” on more money for Ukraine. He’s started to express skepticism about the treaty commitments the United States keeps handing out to nations all over the world.
Now, in the interview with Greenwald, Johnson went right to the heart of the problem—the uber-rich military industry that has made the D.C. suburbs of northern Virginia and Maryland so prosperous. He challenged why the black-ops part of the CIA has overthrown so many governments around the world over the past half-century. He probed whether or not the government of the United States murdered its own president in 1963 for the purposes of keeping a foreign war alive.
Johnson referenced two books. The first was Unspeakable, an exceptionally well-documented book by James Douglass that points toward why JFK was assassinated over his plans to withdraw from Vietnam. It’s a great book, although I would add the disclaimer that Douglas does indulge in a certain level of Camelot-style romanticism about the Kennedys. One can accept his basic thesis, while not pretending the Kennedys didn’t have mafia ties or that they didn’t steal the presidential election of 1960 in Illinois and Texas. But that said, this book is still a must-read for anyone wanting to understand what’s going on today with the “Deep State”, its assault on our freedoms and our right to elect a president who doesn’t start foreign wars.
The second book was The Devil’s Chessboard, which is background on the CIA, with a particular focus on Allan Dulles and his obsession with running black ops around the world. Today, those operations—which involve manipulation of the media and the legal system—are being leveraged right here in the United States.
In reading this book, I found myself thinking of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent commentary that the CIA has to be understood from two different angles. There is the standard intelligence-gathering role, which is what the vast majority of agents do, and it’s perfectly legitimate. They get information so elected officials can make policy decisions. Then there’s the black-ops side, which has overthrown governments around the world, all the while becoming a quasi-independent government unto itself. It’s the latter that is assaulting our right to pick our own leaders.
The fact Ron Johnson is reading these two books and favorably citing them in interviews tells you he’s on his own journey. It’s a path that’s taking him from being a good senator to being a great one. But a warning Ron—if you’re going to challenge both Big Pharma and Big War, I hope you have some really good security, and some really good defense lawyers. In the meantime, the interview is definitely worth a listen:
Speaking of Big Pharma
I’m definitely a Johnny-come-lately to the vaccine debate. I became aware of the abuses of the pharmaceutical industry when doing some legal ghostwriting about the opioids scandal a few years ago. Then the COVID-19 vax issues brought it front and center. But a lot of people have a much deeper history with the games Big Pharma and its compliant government agencies have been playing with other vaccines for a long time. RFK Jr. is certainly the most prominent. But here locally in Massachusetts, another voice is our friend Leila Lawler. Just yesterday, Leila wrote a great article on the chicken pox vaccine over at her Substack Happy Despite Them.
Here are a couple of segments that really caught my eye:
Recently in our town, the board of health responded to “an outbreak” (one student) of chicken pox by requiring any child without proof of immunity be quarantined — removed from the school for three weeks.
I find this chilling. I have read the regulations and I don’t find where they say to do this — to isolate the healthy person. Even if they do say it, it makes no sense and goes against the vast amount of collected knowledge regarding public health that flew out the window during Lockdown.
This follows an introduction where Leila talks about how COVID-19 began the unprecedented idea of quarantining the healthy. The trend unfortunately continues. And for me, it underscores how important these Board of Health roles are. We have an election coming up in our town, which is right next to Leila’s, in less than a month and are fortunate to have a good candidate running. I’m more motivated than ever to do a mailing to get the word out.
Then there’s this, regarding the very existence of the chicken pox vaccine:
the truth is that the chicken pox is three weeks of uncomfortableness — contagious to be sure. Of course, there must be someone to care for a child for that period of time; hence the push for a vaccine: a working mother can’t be spared for something so routine, trivial, and yet so lengthy (as ordinary illnesses go).
When I was a kid, I used to read The Great Brain book series, about a family growing up in rural Utah. One of the things that happened was that the kids would get these contagious diseases—I recall both chicken pox and mumps coming up—and the mother would deliberately make all the kids get exposed once one of them got sick, so they could get natural immunity. At no point did anyone suggest that these diseases were fatal. Yes, there were isolated cases, as there are with everything, but generally speaking, it was just a few weeks of misery.
Why then, are kids mandated to get no fewer than 50 shots by the time they graduate high school? I think we found the answer—corporations aren’t ready to lose the work and let moms stay home. It reminds me of when, in the immediate aftermath of Roe vs. Wade being overturned, Dick’s Sporting Goods announced that they would pay the costs—including travel—of any female employee who wanted an abortion. But they said nothing about paying the costs of child-care if the employee wanted to give birth. Kind of a tip-off about what the real motives are.
From foreign policy to vaccine policy, I don’t know if it’s all about the money—but it’s mostly about the money. Ron Johnson’s interview and Leila’s article are both the latest evidence of that.