Ron Johnson faces jeers at Milwaukee Juneteenth celebration after his opposition to the new holiday
It takes a lot of unmitigated gall to show up at a Juneteenth celebration in your state after you’ve spent so much time and energy opposing the establishment of the day as a federal holiday, but Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) apparently has little in the way of a sense of shame judging from his appearance at just such a celebration in Milwaukee.
If Senator Johnson thought that the assembled celebrants would forget the fact that he had until this week singlehandedly prevented the passage of a bill designating the day that Union Army soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas to announce and enforce the emancipation of enslaved Americans as a national holiday by placing a “hold” on the bill in a Senate parliamentary procedure, he was sorely mistaken.
Rather than receiving acclaim for belatedly dropping his opposition to the legislation earlier this week — after which the bill was passed and signed into law in seemingly record time — Johnson was instead greeted by a chorus of resounding heckles and boos from the assembled Milwaukee celebrants.
While the hypocrisy of Senator Johnson’s attendance at an event that he worked so hard for so long to prevent from becoming a reality may have been the primary motivation for his dismal reception, the Wisconsin Republican has given his constituents many additional reasons to jeer at him in public.
In addition to regularly spreading disinformation about the results of the 2020 presidential election, the January 16th insurrection, and the COVID-19 pandemic — in which his promotion of ineffective hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus cure got him suspended from YouTube — Johnson has exhibited his bigoted worldview beyond his opposition to the Juneteenth holiday with his promotion of the white nationalist “Great Replacement” theory of immigration trends.
He also laughably suggested after President Biden’s recent summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin that the US president was somehow “compromised” by Putin, a ludicrous accusation given the fawning deference that Donald Trump showed to the Russian leader during his term, including Trump stating that he believed Putin regarding his claims not to have interfered in the 2016 presidential election over America’s own in intelligence agencies.
Thus, it seems like the unfriendly reception that the Wisconsin Senator received from his own state’s residents yesterday was more than justified.
You can watch the crowd at the Milwaukee Juneteenth celebration give Senator Ron Johnson the reaction he surely deserves from two separate camera angles in the videos below.
Other reporters and I were interviewing @RonJohnsonWI at Milwaukee’s #Juneteenth celebration when a crowd booed Johnson. As the media availability ended, people continued expressing disapproval when he left. This continued as he made his way through the event. pic.twitter.com/NNhs3BJ33s
— Victor Jacobo (@victorjacobo_) June 19, 2021
@SenRonJohnson This is the response you get when you put a hold on #Juneteenth from becoming a holiday and then have the audacity to show up at a #Juneteenth festival. pic.twitter.com/AvjOQ1MWkz
— Chris Walton (@ChrisWaltonMKE) June 19, 2021
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Original reporting by Bob Brigham at RawStory.
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