The headline on USA Today’s online homepage over the weekend read, “GOP senator touts book promoting bleach treatment for autism, cancer.” I said to myself, “Five bucks says it’s Ron Johnson.”
Unfortunately, I was right. “At a time when Americans’ trust in public health agencies is waning, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, is under fire for promoting a book peddling an unfounded medical theory that bleaching can treat autism and other diseases,” the newspaper reported.
Oh my.
Shortly after Donald Trump grudgingly left the White House following his 2020 defeat, he was effectively banned from most major social media platforms and made few television appearances. It was around this time when The New York Times described Johnson as Trump’s successor as the GOP’s “foremost amplifier of conspiracy theories and disinformation.”
In the years that followed, Johnson has seemed a little too eager to prove his critics right, peddling bizarre and easily discredited nonsense about Covid-19. And the Jan. 6 attack. And vaccines. And climate change. And the 2020 presidential election. And the 2024 presidential election.
Earlier this year, the Wisconsin Republican went even further, becoming the only senator from either party to embrace fringe ideas from the so-called “9/11 truther” movement.
But as the year nears its end, Johnson is apparently still adding to his greatest hits list. The USA Today report is based on the latest reporting from ProPublica, which told readers last week that the Wisconsin politician “is endorsing a book by a discredited doctor promoting an unproven and dangerous treatment for autism and a host of ailments: chlorine dioxide, a chemical used for disinfecting and bleaching.” From the article:
The book is ‘The War on Chlorine Dioxide: The Medicine that Could End Medicine’ by Dr. Pierre Kory, a critical care specialist who practiced in Wisconsin hospitals before losing his medical certification for statements advocating using an antiparasite medication to treat COVID-19. The action, he’s said, makes him unemployable, even though he still has a license.
Kory has said there’s a globally coordinated campaign by public health agencies, the drug industry and the media to suppress evidence of the medicinal wonders of chlorine dioxide. His book, according to its website, contends that the ‘remarkable molecule’ works ‘to treat everything from cancer and malaria to autism and COVID.’
Common sense might suggest that officials in positions of authority would steer clear of such a claim. And yet, as ProPublica’s report noted, the book jacket features a prominent blurb from Johnson, who described Kory’s book as “a gripping tale of corruption and courage that will open eyes and prompt serious questions.”
He later confirmed that he did, in fact, read the book and approve the blurb.
In case this isn’t obvious, it’s probably worth taking a moment to emphasize that actual experts have been far less impressed with the underlying thesis than the Republican senator. Joe Schwarcz, director of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society in Montreal and an expert on the threat of pseudoscience, told ProPublica: “It is all lunacy. Absolutely, it’s 100% nonsense.” Johnson, whom GOP senators put in charge of the Senate Homeland Security Committee for six years, evidently came to his own conclusion, as he so often does. Ahead of his 2022 reelection campaign, the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel said Johnson was “unfit” for office and called him “the most irresponsible representative of Wisconsin citizens since the infamous Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy in the 1950s.” Four years later, he’s significantly worse. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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