Bulwark Takes - Ron Johnson Has Gone Full 9/11 Conspiracy Nut

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

Senator Ron Johnson just floated a shocking 9/11 conspiracy theory, claiming the government might have been involved. Sam Stein, Sarah Longwell, and Will Sommer dive into this alarming trend of politicians promoting dangerous conspiracies, why these ideas keep spreading, and how they're impacting American politics.

Hey guys, it's me, Sam Stein, Managing Editor at The Bulwark. I am joined by our fearless publisher, Sarah Longwell, and our less than fearless newsletter writer, Will Sommer. We are going to be talking about Ron John, 9-11 conspiracies, maybe a little bit of Mike Lee, if we can get into it, and conspiracies around Trump's attempted assassination in Butler. Before we do that, subscribe to the feed. We appreciate the subscriptions.

All right, let me set the stage and then I'm going to kick it around. Ron John, our senator from Wisconsin, was on Benny Johnson's show yesterday, I believe. And I don't know how the topic turned to 9-11, but eventually it did. And whether or not 9-11 was an inside job or a government plan. And here's what Ronjan had to say. you you All right, so there you have it. Senior Senator from Wisconsin. I guess we can say, you know, he's one of 100 respected members of the upper chamber just dabbling in 9-11 conspiracy theories. I guess what stuck out to me, Sarah, was that how little

reaction there was to it. Like in normal times, I think people would have been freaking out that this guy is embracing the this was a controlled demolition idea. But this is a senator. I couldn't believe it. Not only is he a senator, but he has the unique distinction of being a pre-Trump senator. It is one thing, right? Post-Trump, you get Marjorie Taylor Greene

with the Jewish space lasers and like conspiracy theories are now, because Donald Trump is- So it's the PT versus the post-Trump? Okay. That's right. No, I think this is important because what it shows us is something important,

which is that this strain, it like lived inside of them. And they now they just get to let their freak flag fly because it's cool now, right? Like based Mike Lee. It's so funny about Mike Lee. I used to be Mike Lee, like for the Supreme Court, Mike Lee was a super interesting, thoughtful conservative who has now shaved his head and his game for every conspiracy theory in town. And it makes sense, right? Like Donald Trump is a conspiracy theorist interesting, thoughtful conservative who has now shaped his head and his game for every conspiracy theory in town. And it makes sense, right? Like Donald Trump is a conspiracy theorist in chief who launched his political career with the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was a

Kenyan Muslim socialist and not born in the United States of America. And so post-Trump, the fact that he has attracted tons of conspiracy theorists makes some sense. It's funny, though, that actually the conspiracies, like it's the conspiracies we friends we made along the way. To me, it's like a lot of that's true. But so much of it is just that everything we now consume is gravitated to algorithmic websites. And like people just get, I guess what distinguishes this from me is that I used to assume that people who got sucked into these internet rabbit holes were not serious lawmakers or elected members of the Senate. But in fact, it's true that a lot of them are, or at least a good sizable portion of them are.

So yeah, Mike Lee seems to be perpetually online. And I guess the reference here is that his most recent tweet suggests that there is some maybe planning that happened behind the Butler assassination attempt. Will, give us the epidemiology here of these conspiracies. Like what is the, how did these things form? Where do they fester online? Yeah. I mean, in the case of 9-11, as you said, Sam, this used to be a, this was like a red line that people in public life couldn't cross. I mean, I think there have been CNN commenters. It was liberal. It was liberals who espoused it. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, it was sort of like, you know, Ron Paul types on the right and then sort of like extreme liberals on the left. And now, you know, I mean, it started with someone like Alex Jones. The Loose Change documentary was really big. But that was like, you know, stuff you'd hear. What was that? The documentary Loose Change. That was kind of like the. Does Sarah know this one? Do you know this one'd hear that the documentary loose change that was kind

of like the does sarah know this one do you know this one is this where the frogs are gay well that's are we turning the frogs gay that's not that one i mean is this the gay frog one well well maybe you guys shouldn't check it out because you might get red-pilled on this because if you're not but but this is the yeah this is the um anyway this is the big loose chair or the big uh what is the loose change document? Is it stuff that falls out of your pockets or are we changing things loosely? Like the gender of frogs? What are you talking about?

So, yeah, so it's an Alex Jones documentary about 9-11 being an inside job. And so that is sort of broadly, that was kind of like one of the main. And let me guess, let me guess. He thinks it's an inside job. He does. He does. Yes. Shocked.

Not Alex Jones. Not. Oh, my heart. How did it gain foothold in the white? Just because Alex Jones? Well, you know, I think we see with Trump and, you know, with Trump getting into birtherism, you know, long ago and all this stuff. I mean, just a lot more of this stuff under the Obama presidency, I think, became increasingly

respectable. And then particularly once Republicans kind of ditched George W. Bush, then you could say, you know, well, yeah, 9-11 was an inside job. I mean, you have Ron Johnson here just dropping like, you know, how was Building 7 demolished? Or like, you know, planes can't make that big of an explosion. I mean, he's apparently pretty deep into it. Hold on a second. So you just said something really important that makes a ton of sense, which is the abandonment of George W. Bush. Now, because on one hand, you could talk about the political realignment of all the cranks, now anti-vaxxers, whatever, they've all moved into the Republican Party. But this idea of the subsequent nature of what happened post 9-11,

which was Iraq and Afghanistan, which have just been so widely discredited on the right as a political move. And the way that George W. Bush is now, he is not simply like not revered. He is loathed on the right. He's a pariah. And so actually it does make sense that blaming George W. Bush is part of this natural evolution slash devolution for the Republican Party away from that era's politics. So I just want to make sure I'm unpacking this right. Under this conspiracy, George Bush, either- And also, let's keep in mind, Israel, you know, looms large here as well. Obviously, naturally. Did they do 9-11? The Jews are responsible for everything, Sarah. My people are very talented.

But under this idea, they wanted, allowed, or facilitated the destruction of the World Trade Center towers because they needed some sort of rationalization or justification for launching a massive war in the Middle East that would enrich the military industrial complex of which they were major members. That's the basic conspiracy, right? That's right. Okay. Does it run into any problems with Trump's closeness to the Saudis? Well, you know, that's an interesting one. I don't think it does because they don't really exist in the world of reality.

And so you have a lot of these things where it's like, well, how is Donald Trump the big anti-human trafficking crusader if he was pals with Jeffrey Epstein? And they say, well, he was going undercover. And in the same way, I think it may be that Trump is going undercover in the Saudi royal family. Sarah, you do all these focus groups. So I'm kind of curious, do you see a lot of this stuff among people? Has it like grown over time where you see this type of thing? Yeah. I mean, this is, it is a big, long conversation about how authoritarians succeed. And part of it is by creating an environment in which truth simply cannot be known, which is an interesting thing when you, when I think about what it meant to be a

young conservative, because a big animating factor of being a conservative in the early 2000s was actually specifically that truth could be known and that right and wrong were real concepts, and that it was the left who said that everything was morally relativistic. And that was something that conservatives rebelled against. And so today, though, the rise of social media, conspiracies, everything else, I hear this all the time in the focus groups where people just say, I don't know what to believe, which is why more and more, what you get are people believe sort of the smartest person about politics in their orbit. And oftentimes those people can be down rabbit holes or like, and conspiracy theories can stand in for intelligence in a lot of ways. It's like,

look how tapped in I am to this. Now I see the real thing happening here, but everything from the deep state to, I don't know, like, I mean, do they think that Pearl Harbor was an inside job? Cause like, it's the same rationale. Like, Are we retconning everything now into this framework? It doesn't come up a lot, but I do think it's pretty much assumed that FDR knew that Pearl Harbor was going to happen among these conspiracy theorists and just let it happen. Because increasingly we're seeing Hitler become

kind of rehabilitated or Churchill was such a bully to Hitler, this kind of stuff. So that's kind of part of the larger new take on World War II. Churchill, that Hitler bully. Yeah. This might be too big a question to tackle in this type of form, but how do you get people out of the rabbit hole? And I know that there's been some documentaries about family members who have confronted their conspiracy adult relatives and tried to pull them back from the abyss. And is there a method for getting people out of this rabbit hole? And are we just too far gone when you have U.S. senators who now become, you know, the leading purveyors of this stuff? Yeah. So, I mean, this might be a useful segment for Ron Johnson's family.

Yeah. I mean, the answer is that there's really no like one method. The best thing I've seen, especially from talking to families with people, members in QAnon, is just trying to get them obsessed with something else. And so maybe it's sports, getting them outside, maybe even a video game. There's this intensity that comes with a devotion to a conspiracy theory. And if you could just get them offline, which is often easier said than done. Well, yeah. And that's what stands out for me is like how much Mike Lee is online. Like his Twitter habits are really almost scary. I was just reminded again today that his screen name is Based Mike Lee. Based Mike Lee.

So stupid. You know, I saw a tweet one time or a quotation of some kind that said like, I think I may have said this to Will recently on a podcast that, you know, the internet did to our parents what they said video games were going to do to us. Like the way that they were so worried about our generation. And we talked about like, you need to label things with explicit things like rap music. Like we were all going to lose our minds, but actually it is our, and like Ron Johnson is like peak boomer in this regard. Like, and you could totally see how Mike Lee as a pre-Trump politician was like predisposed to some of this. But then the internet gave him the algorithmic hole that he needed to go down to say, well, I hadn't thought about building seven. Because how, if you knocked down two other buildings that are massive with planes, and a third one collapsed three days later, that seems very suspicious. And actually,

it seems like two big buildings had planes rammed into them, which, by the way, you can see, but not just by people who were there, who were in the building. It is observable in every video you watch from the day. But, like, they are not going back and trying to, like, reconstitute reality. And it's tough to, like, but this is now, it is very endemic. I mean, Sam, when you were like, do you see this more in voters? I don't know. You may have heard about that little theory that the 2020 election was stolen. That the ghost of Hugo Chavez was changing votes in the voting machines.

I mean. Well, that's the thing. It's like, and then we have Trump who like comes up with these insane theories about the Italians and like, you know, and Hugo Chavez. And it's like, oh yeah, but he's the president. And like, of course, this is what I'm getting is like, it's hard to pull people back from the abyss when it's the president and senators who are the ones who are spreading this stuff because they are in reality, trusted authoritative figures. And if, you know, they're the ones who are telling

you to believe this, or at least to question the world around you, then why wouldn't you? Right. I mean, it's just that it's hard to, it's hard to see how we break out of this either way. We'll keep monitoring it. Sarah, Will, appreciate it. Thank you so much for your expertise on this. Will, uh, you watch Alex Jones, so we don't have to. Not my expertise. I'm just here to pontificate. You're here to give us the good stuff. Will's here to educate us. All right. Subscribe to the feed. Thanks for watching. Take care.