The corporate media can’t stand Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).  

In March 2021, The New York Times published an article about the Wisconsin senator titled “Assaulting the Truth, Ron Johnson Helps Erode Confidence in Government.” In May 2021, The Washington Post published a piece titled “Ron Johnson’s unscientific use of vaccine and death data.” And the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Wisconsin’s most widely circulated newspaper, titled their October 2022 hit piece, “Election deceiver, science fabulist, billionaire benefactor. After 12 years, it’s time to term-limit Sen. Ron Johnson.” And this is a very small sampling of what is said about him. 

The last headline was published just before the 2022 midterm election, in which Johnson defeated Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes with 51 percent of the vote. Maybe voters chose Johnson because Barnes’ team recorded their campaign commercials while their candidate was putting up groceries, prompting questions of Barnes’ ability to manage his time wisely. Or maybe Johnson won because more voters trusted him to represent their interests.  

Whatever the reasons, at least one force working against Johnson was the mainstream media. But in this day and age, a legislator who’s not attacked by the Deep State-controlled media is suspect. Major media is more a gauge of the elite’s interests than of true public opinion. And someone who’s been vilified and attacked as intensely as Johnson has is likely doing something right.   

Johnson has now been elected three times. He’s driven by a sense of duty to better his country. He is an accountant by trade, and the nation’s fiscal state has always been one of his largest concerns. He’s also been one of the most vocal defenders of people injured by Covid injections. His pro-gun and pro-life stances have been consistent, and he’s never backed down on his belief that the 2020 presidential election was flawed.   

For the last Congress (2021-2022), Johnson earned a 90-percent rating in The New American’s Freedom Index, his highest so far. His scores for prior Congresses fluctuated between 40 and 85 percent. For the current Congress, his score stands at 80 percent. 

On July 7, we interviewed Senator Johnson in our studios. We talked to him about his views — the ones earning him intense criticism from the mainstream media and enough votes to put him in Congress three times. 

The following is a condensed version of our discussion with him. The full interview is available at TheNewAmerican.com as a video with the accompanying transcript. 

The New American: In a stump speech you gave before you were ever elected to the Senate, you discuss the difference between liberals and conservatives. And the contrast you made was that the Left [liberals] does it for power, whereas the Right [conservatives] does it out of a sense of duty. What is it that concerns you most about what is happening in our nation, and drives your sense of duty?

Senator Ron Johnson: Liberals — the Democrats — are the party of Big Government. They want government. They want experts to rule. They want the power to rule. We conservatives value freedom. And as conservatives, we recognize that humans are not perfect. And if we don’t want to live in anarchy and chaos, we need some form of government. But our Founders were geniuses, and they realized government needed to be limited, because they came from tyrannical regimes. And they realized that as government grew, our freedoms necessarily receded. So the call to duty that I felt is that government had grown to a point where our freedoms were noticeably receding, 

Take a look at tax rates. There’s a direct proportion: The higher percentage tax you pay, the less freedom you have. The government is extracting your hard-earned labor. Now, government needs some money to operate. So we’re happy to be taxed at a certain level, but not at confiscatory rates.

Take a look at what happened during the pandemic. How many of our fellow citizens willingly gave up their freedoms for a very false sense of security? 

But that’s been happening over the decades. Starting, I would say, with the New Deal, more and more Americans are signing up for the benefits they receive from government, not necessarily recognizing how much freedom they’re giving up in that bargain.

TNA: How could we change that? 

Johnson: I’ve got one amendment stenciled on my Senate office wall. It’s the 10th Amendment. What it basically says is that the federal government will do only those things that are enumerated in the Constitution. All other governing authority resides in the States. And of course, the ultimate power is with the people. That’s the foundation of our constitutional republic. That government ought to be close to the governed — local government first, then state, and the last resort is the federal government doing only things like national defense, security of our border, the basic rules of engagement for interstate commerce. 

TNA: A limited government.

Johnson: Very limited. But what’s happened was, back over 100 years ago, the federal government was two percent of our economy, and state and local governments were five percent. So the total take of government was seven percent of our economy. That was pretty much within the Founders’ vision. But last year, the federal government consumed about 25 percent of our economy, and state and local governments, maybe another 15 percent. So the total government take is now somewhere around 40 percent. There’s been such a massive increase in spending, it’s kind of hard to keep track exactly of those percentages. But we’ve gone from seven percent a little more than a century ago to about 40 percent today. 

TNA:Are there those in Congress who see the Constitution more as a barrier, or are there many who respect the Constitution?

Johnson: Let me start by saying I don’t like being partisan. I wish you didn’t have to be partisan. But the fact of the matter is, you have one side of the political spectrum, the Left, and one party, the Democrats, who don’t have much respect for the Constitution. The judges that they nominate and confirm for all the courts, including the Supreme Court, are activist jurists. They believe that there’s a living Constitution, that we ought to look outside of the United States in terms of what international law is saying about certain issues and apply that to the U.S., and they just ignore the Constitution. So there are a lot more Republicans — conservatives — that adhere to the Constitution and revere it. 

Paul Dragu with Senator Ron Johnson

TNA: What do you make of the foreign-influence and bribery scandal surrounding the Bidens?

Johnson: Starting in 2019, Senator [Chuck] Grassley and I really delved into it. We got the suspicious activity reports from the Treasury. We showed the vast web of foreign financial entanglements. And not just Burisma out of Ukraine, but with the wife of the former mayor of Moscow. We showed all the foreign transactions in China and other countries. We laid out more than enough evidence in September of 2020 to convince me that Americans should not take a chance on Joe Biden as president because he was highly compromised. I’ve been investigating this for many years. I’ve seen the grotesque level of corruption inside the FBI, inside the Department of Justice, inside our intelligence agencies. And it’s not a fair system. It’s not a level playing field. We have a multi-tiered system of justice. We’ve got a system that protects the powerful and primarily the Left, particularly in D.C. It’s pretty easy to get a conviction on a Republican. But to get a conviction on a Democrat or somebody connected to a powerful Democrat, almost impossible.

“We’ve got a system that protects the powerful and primarily the Left, particularly in D.C. It’s pretty easy to get a conviction on a Republican. But to get a conviction on a Democrat or somebody connected to a powerful Democrat, almost impossible.”

— Senator Ron Johnson

TNA: Is reform possible? 

Johnson: Well, it starts with exposure of the truth. But those individuals who are corrupt also have a great deal of control. For example, how do you investigate the top law-enforcement department? They are the law. When I subpoenaed Christopher Wray to get the information on the corrupt Russian collusion investigation, we just got blown off saying, well, we can’t give you those documents because we have an active investigation. They think Congress, which means the American people, doesn’t have the right to know.

They know what they’ve done. They know where to hide the ball and they know how to hide it very effectively.

Congress is going to have to do a better job of using every enforcement tool it has, as weak as they are. We ought to hold them in contempt, and if they don’t comply after the contempt charge has been made and voted on, send the Sergeant at Arms [to detain them]. I mean, we need to start getting serious about this, because the Executive Branch realizes we have weak enforcement capabilities, and they just hide the ball.

TNA: How seriously should we take China as a threat? 

Johnson: China’s a real problem. You go back a couple of decades and I think the world was hoping that if we opened up our economies to Chinese manufacturing, that would help lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Globally, we’re pretty compassionate people. So we did open up. The problem is, China cheats, and their cheating has some very detrimental impacts. When they decide to get in the steel business, they create great overcapacity in the steel business and they start putting steel companies out of business throughout the world.

On the other hand, China hasn’t been particularly warlike in the last 50 years. 

So China is complicated. And I would much rather try and develop better relationships with our adversaries, turn them back into friendly rivals. Try and understand their perspective of things. 

Shifting over to Russia and Ukraine, I was chairman of the European Subcommittee on Foreign Relations. I’ve been to Ukraine a number of times. I have a lot of respect for the Ukrainian people who want what we have. They want freedom. They want prosperity. They want opportunity. They wanted to lean toward the West and Putin didn’t want to let them go.

But at the same time, I don’t know to what extent we helped foment the [Ukrainian] revolution. 

We are all for people fighting for freedom. But the result of that was Putin was concerned about the loss of his naval base. So he invaded Crimea. And a lot of folks in Crimea are more Russian-leaning. Russia invaded eastern Ukraine, which is also more Russian-leaning. And finally, he invaded all of Ukraine.

And the result has been massive destruction of Ukraine and the loss of tens of thousands of both Ukrainian and Russian lives. 

We need to stop saber rattling, stop beating the drums of war, do everything we can. I think it’s interesting listening to RFK, Jr., right now talking about how his uncle said the top priority of any president was to keep America out of war.

I think that’s a pretty good priority for any president: Keep us out of war. 

TNA: Do you believe this administration is trying to suck us into war? 

Johnson: It’s looking more and more like they almost goaded Ukraine into a proxy war. And now you hear members of the administration talking about the war goal in Ukraine being to degrade the Russian military. But they’ve got 7,000 nuclear weapons. As much as I sympathize with the Ukrainians and their courage and their bravery, we need to recognize that it’s not a fair fight. And losing in Ukraine is an existential threat to Russia. Putin will not lose that war. If he’s got to bring out nukes, I fear he’ll bring them out. I don’t think we ought to be pursuing the goal of degrading the Russian military. That just brings us to the brink of some kind of nuclear Armageddon.

“Losing in Ukraine is an existential threat to Russia. If Putin has to bring out nukes, I fear he’ll bring them out. I don’t think we ought to be pursuing the goal of degrading the Russian military. That just brings us to the brink of some kind of nuclear Armageddon.”

TNA: You voted at least once to send aid to Ukraine. I think there were three other appropriations bills that you voted against. Where do you stand on that? How long should we keep sending aid to them?

Johnson: You’re right. I voted for the first aid package for Ukraine for a couple of reasons. First of all, I think we could have done something to prevent Putin from invading, by visibly giving them all kinds of lethal defensive weaponry. The other thing would have been to publicly declare we will never offer NATO membership to Ukraine. The other reason I voted yes was that we have no control over what the commander in chief does when it comes to these types of initial wars. He was depleting our stockpile of weapons. That $40 million was to replenish our own stockpile. But I haven’t voted for Ukrainian aid since.

TNA: So let’s discuss the debt-ceiling bill. Why did you vote against it?

Johnson: Well, first of all, it wasn’t an increase in the debt ceiling. It was a suspension of it. I laid out in an article in The Wall Street Journal, the day after I got reelected, what I would do in exchange for increasing the debt ceiling. I laid out four pieces of fiscal control that we could attach to an increased debt ceiling.

One would be a Preventing Government Shutdown Act to take government shutdowns off the table forever, because it’s very economically inefficient. [Two would be] a full faith and credit guarantee that we would never default on our debt. And by the way, we never will. It’s kind of a phony crisis. [Three] would be the [Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny] Act. You’ll put some constraint over the growing regulatory state. The final [piece of fiscal control] would be to reduce the size of the federal government through an Attrition Act. You don’t want to fire anybody, but you can really reduce the size of federal government very quickly by not hiring more people. Those would be the four things I would have attached to the debt ceiling. 

So now the debt ceiling has probably been raised, because of that suspension, by about $4 trillion. I personally could not support that. 

TNA: How can the federal debt be brought under control? What do a fiscally responsible House and Senate look like?

Johnson: Well, first of all, you start going through a process where you put everything on budget. We’re the largest financial entity in the world and nobody knows how much we spend. The answer is $6.3 trillion. And let me put it in perspective. In 2002, we passed the $2 trillion spending Rubicon. Seventeen years later, we’d more than doubled that, to $4.4 trillion. This is a bipartisan problem. There are far more fiscal conservatives that worry about this on the Republican side. There’s virtually no one on the Democrat side that really worries about spending.

TNA: Where do you see this going if it continues at this rate?

Johnson: A debt crisis. The real danger for the U.S. is if we cease to be the world’s reserve currency. If that happens, we can’t print these dollars. Printing dollars does cause inflation, but we can at least avoid unbelievably high interest rates because we can kind of control that process.

If we’re no longer the world’s reserve currency, we’re going to be paying global interest rates. And to put that in perspective, the last three decades of the last century, our average borrowing costs for government was 5.3 percent. It’s a pretty reasonable interest rate, right? Well, because of all this massive printing of dollars, we’ve been keeping interest rates artificially low, under two percent. If we were to return to that three-decade average, that would add $1.2 trillion per year just in interest expenses. That’s what we spent last year on Social Security.

Now it’s going up because inflation is going up. A debt crisis would be devastating for us.

TNA: Is an Argentina- or Venezuela-style collapse possible for us? What about the efforts of BRICS countries to promote de-dollarization?

Johnson: It is. But we’re probably going to continue to avoid that day of reckoning because we’re still the most financially stable country in the world. I’ve talked to global experts. They kind of downplay the fact that somebody’s going to replace us as the world’s reserve currency. But I keep pointing out to people that Venezuelans voted themselves into poverty, that there’s nothing guaranteed about our liberty, our freedom, or our prosperity. We can fritter it all away. And I would argue that right now, we basically are.

“Venezuelans voted themselves into poverty. There’s nothing guaranteed about our liberty, our freedom, or our prosperity. We can fritter it all away. And I would argue that right now, we basically are.”

— Senator Ron Johnson

TNA: In past interviews — and I actually saw an interview you did with The Epoch Times — you said the world is run by elite globalists. Here at The New American, we’ve been telling people this is the case for quite some time. How and when did you come to this conclusion? 

Johnson: I’m not saying they definitely run the world, but they’ve got an enormous amount of influence. When I do investigations, I see the power of these federal agencies and you see the video montages of everybody that’s gone to the World Economic Forum coming back and saying, we’re going to build back better.

I’ve gotten to know Bobby Kennedy [Jr.] pretty well. He’s recommended a couple of books to me. The first one is JFK and the Unspeakable, and I’ll just tell your listeners to read it. The next one would be The Devil’s Chessboard. When you finish with those, go ahead and read The Creature from Jekyll Island. 

TNA: How much do others in Congress know that this is the case? And are these people working against the interest of the United States government and United States citizens?

Johnson: I don’t know. But I think my colleagues look at me and they see the way the press has savaged me. So they don’t want any part of that. But then again, you take a look at The Creature from Jekyll Island. You had six men in 1910 who boarded a train down to Jekyll Island in Georgia. They represented 25 percent of the wealth of the world. [Today] we see BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard, these mutual funds now control the vast majority of all corporate stock. And they’re pushing things like ESG now. They do it very quietly behind the scenes. 

I think one of the interesting examples of how they can operate is in getting the Federal Reserve Act passed when, from 1910 to 1913, Taft, the president, didn’t want to give the central bank that much control. He wanted more government control over it. They didn’t like that, so they didn’t support Taft. [Woodrow] Wilson was more than happy to give the central bank that level of control. So this cabal, this group who controlled the banks but also controlled the media, made sure that Teddy Roosevelt ran his third party so that Wilson would get elected.

TNA: You know, we published The Creature from Jekyll Island.

Johnson: Oh, God bless you.

TNA: You’re skewered in the media for giving a voice to those who incurred vaccine injuries. What are people going through?

Johnson: Well, first of all, I think the evidence is overwhelming that these vaccines have caused deaths. But there are over 35,000 deaths worldwide. Twenty-five percent of those are occurring on the day of the vaccine or within two days. It doesn’t prove causation, but wow, that’s a correlation. And one thing we found during Covid: Doctors have been very strongly disincentivized from reporting. They’ve been vilified, they’ve been attacked, they’ve been fired, they’ve been sued, and they’ve been made examples of. So other people don’t come forward. 

And what’s even to add to the travesty is the fact that because our CDC, our FDA, aren’t acknowledging it, the medical establishment’s not acknowledging it. They’re just blowing it off and these people can’t get treatment.

These vaccine injuries, they’re real. They’re severe. They include death. When do you ever hear the word SADS, Sudden Adult Death Syndrome? And we’ve never heard of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome until 2021. And I just ask your listeners, think of all the famous people that are dropping like flies in the prime of their life. 

But what’s overwhelming evidence is the fact that the body count is so high that all these people who have been pushing this can’t afford to admit they’re wrong. They all were pushing the vaccines. They were all censoring the early treatment of things like ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, the multi-drug protocol. 

TNA: Are there any plans, if, for instance, Republicans were to take back the Senate and keep the House and somehow maybe win the presidency, to investigate this?

Johnson: I would be chairman of the subcommittee investigations. I’d have stronger subpoena power than I had as chairman of the floor committee. I’ve written more than 50 oversight letters that have laid the foundation for these investigations. But right now, under the current chairman, we’re going to be holding hearings on the PGA-LIV merger on [July 11]. I love the game of golf, but it’s not what we ought to be focusing on. We ought to be focusing on our miserably failed response to Covid. 

TNA: So let’s go to immigration. We’ve got chaos at the border. 

Johnson: We’d pretty well stopped unaccompanied children and family units, and we did that partly because of an Operation Safe Return that I worked on with [Senator] Kyrsten Sinema, that actually morphed into Return to Mexico. We stopped the flow of unaccompanied children and family units, and we actually reduced the number of single adults crossing the border because we’re serious about securing the border.

We were getting close to completing the fence. And then Biden took office. Even during the presidential campaign, you had all the Democrat candidates saying they were going to offer free healthcare. So single adult illegal immigration was up even during the campaign. 

This is a massive problem that, once again, the complicit and corrupt media are not covering. And so you don’t have the public outrage that we should have in terms of the sex trafficking, the human trafficking, the drug trafficking with fentanyl. We’ve got a wide-open border.

TNA: Is this administration intentionally creating chaos? 

Johnson: Yes. Well, what other goal do they have? They want to create millions of people that are going to reliably vote for Democrats, which is why they want mail-in voting.

And they want everybody registered and they want to relax all controls on elections. Democrats are serious about acquiring absolute power.

TNA: You’re a known Donald Trump supporter. What do you make of this latest indictment? 

Johnson: I’ve got a great deal of sympathy with what he’s gone through. Within two weeks in office, he had two phone calls with world leaders leaked to the media. Who could he trust as president? His administration? We obviously know the disloyalty of Colonel Vindman, which led to his impeachment.

The Hillary Clinton campaign made up the whole Russian collusion hoax. So, I’ve got a great deal of sympathy for the position he must face in the media. They dropped all pretense of trying to be unbiased. Because this guy is such a danger to democracy, they said, we’ve got to do everything we can to destroy his presidency. And they had help from the James Comeys of the world and other actors inside the agencies, the FBI, and I would say the Department of Justice. We found that out with the 51 intelligence officials who signed the letter saying that the Hunter Biden laptop had all the earmarks of a Russian information operation. That was an information operation that we know was generated by Antony Blinken of the Biden campaign, who lied to my investigators, saying he never emailed Hunter Biden. We’ve got the emails now. 

A Republican president has got many, many barriers, because they’ve got the Deep State working against them, whereas a Democrat pretty well has the Deep State working for them.

TNA: What do you think of Trump’s claim that the election was stolen?

Johnson: I have always said there were definite irregularities that we never got to the bottom of.

But I don’t make any claims because I just don’t have the hard evidence. I held the only hearing examining the irregularities of the 2020 election. I think the main problem is during Covid, you had the Baker-Carter Commission warning us that absentee balloting is the area of greatest concern. And of course, the Democrats push relaxing all the controls and we doubled absentee balloting. Gee, what could go wrong? And they’ve done nothing to restore confidence in the system. 

Now, in Wisconsin, we have more than 1,800 election clerks. The vast majority are people of great integrity. They take election integrity very seriously. I don’t really question their integrity, but we’ve got a couple jurisdictions where we’ve got to watch them like hawks. And so, during the 2022 election, what Republicans did is make sure we had election workers filling all the shifts.

TNA: What does a secure election look like? 

Johnson: Voter ID is on the table. And by the way, 80 percent of Americans agree with that. They don’t want their legitimate vote canceled out by an illegitimate vote. We should all go back to paper ballots. We shouldn’t have any electronic voting. We want to make it easy to vote, but very difficult or impossible to cheat.

TNA: Do you support Trump, or would you prefer DeSantis?

Johnson: I want somebody that can unify this country and heal it. We need somebody unlike Biden, who in his inaugural speech said eight times that his number one goal is unifying. He has done the exact opposite. 

He is filling these agencies with radical leftists. And the problem is then they burrow in, they get appointed as political appointees. So we need complete civil service reform. We need to shrink the size of government so that we can shrink its influence in our lives. And we’ve got to reform our system so that we can weed out the bad actors, the partisans.

TNA: What about gun rights? You have a good record on guns. Should we ban AR-15s?

Johnson: No. The reason I’m a big Second Amendment supporter is that I realize the Second Amendment isn’t about hunting. It’s about preventing tyranny. And we need to be concerned about tyranny right now. It’s also about personal protection. Who am I to tell a young woman who lives in a dangerous part of town that, no, you’re going to be limited to three bullets in a clip? It’s not guns that kill people. It’s people that kill people. 

A much bigger problem that we’re also not addressing is that, through our welfare state, we’ve done great harm to the nuclear family.

Since the War on Poverty, poverty rates have pretty well flatlined at 15 percent. We’ve spent about 20-plus trillion dollars on the War on Poverty, and haven’t made a dent. I can’t get into the mind of a liberal. I don’t know why they want to control everybody else’s lives. I don’t know why they want to grow government. The War on Poverty has utterly failed.

TNA: The answer is always more money.

Johnson: Across the board in Washington, D.C., I’ve never seen a problem where the answer wasn’t more spending. In the end, Americans bear the responsibility. They keep electing people that promise them benefits. And everybody likes the benefits. Everybody loves the free money now. And very few people are actually looking at the true cost. For example, inflation. A dollar you held at the start of the Biden administration is worth 86 cents today. That hurts everybody. Inflation is a tax on everybody.

TNA: Why should Americans be hopeful? 

Johnson: America’s a great country, because Americans are good people. We share the same goal. We want to save a prosperous, secure America. Unfortunately, we’ve got elements, primarily from the Left, that are purposely dividing us. That’s why the number one goals for the next president should be to heal and unify this nation and keep us out of wars. Let’s get elected officials and leaders pointing out what we agree on, acknowledging that Americans are good and that we’re unified behind those goals. And then let’s try and achieve those goals.

TNA: Are people getting wiser about what’s going on?

Johnson: I think more people’s eyes are opened up. I think the pandemic has certainly done that. But corporate media, Big Tech, and social-media giants, they’re of the Left and they control the narrative. And we’re fighting powerful forces here as conservatives. 

TNA: Do you see a rising alternative media that perhaps can balance out the influence of mainstream media?

Johnson: I think so many Americans have lost faith in these institutions, whether it’s the FBI, or the Department of Justice, or the media. And they’re seeking out alternate sources. I think that’s a good thing, as long as it’s not censored. I really appreciate what Elon Musk has done in terms of Twitter, opening up the files, showing the corruption and the government complicity in violating free speech.

TNA: Senator Johnson, thank you so much for joining us. Good luck, and keep up the good work.

Johnson: Thank you for having me.