Ron Johnson Charges 9/11 Was Inside Job

Ron Johnson. Photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America / Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Wisconsin’s Republican U.S. Senator Ron Johnson is pushing his newest and perhaps most incredible conspiracy theory, that 9/11 was an inside job that is being covered up. He has also called for new congressional hearings on the tragic event.

“What actually happened on 9/11? What do we know? What is being covered up? My guess is there’s an awful lot being covered up in terms of what the government knows about 9/11,” he charged, in an appearance on the online show of conservative commentator Benny Johnson, who has been pushing this conspiracy theory.

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9/11 Commission), released a full report on the attack in 2004. Congress held hearings in 2021 — two decades after Sept. 11 — where intelligence and security officials gave insight into the attacks and intelligence failures before 9/11. But Johnson seems to think this was all a coverup of what really happened.

Johnson chairs the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, part of the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs in the Senate and suggested he will use his position to hold hearings on 9/11. He cited Benny Johnson’s claims of a conspiracy and said he’s talked to former U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon, who recently appeared on former Fox News host Tucker Carlson‘s show alleging a cover-up.

“There are a host of questions that I will be asking now that my eyes have been opened up,” Johnson declared.

Johnson questioned the official finding for how a third building, World Trade Center Building 7, could have collapsed. After the collapse of the Twin Towers from terrorist-controlled planes flying into the buildings, fires ignited in Building 7 and the building eventually collapsed. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) conducted an extensive investigation into the collapse and concluded that fires were the primary cause. But Johnson called the NIST “corrupt,” meaning it, too, was part of a coverup.

“I don’t know if you can find structural engineers other than the ones that had the corrupt investigations inside NIST that would say that the thing didn’t come down any other way than a controlled demolition,” he charged. “Who ordered the removal and the destruction of all that evidence?… Where’s all the documentation from the NIST investigation?”

Experts have repeatedly debunked efforts to link Building 7’s fall to a controlled demolition.

In response to Johnson’s comments, Larry Glickman, a historian at Cornell University, noted on Blue Sky that it’s “incredible” that a sitting senator “can say something like this with every expectation that such comments will not be grounds for bipartisan calls for his immediate resignation or removal from office.”

“We were friends,” said Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who worked with Johnson in Congress in 2010, in a post on X. “He was just a normal Tea Party senator back then. I don’t recognize him now.”

Sen. Johnson has in the past pushed false theories on the COVID-19 virus, the vaccine and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The New York Times has described him in 2021 as “the Republican Party’s foremost amplifier of conspiracy theories and disinformation,” though that was during a period when Donald Trump had gone rather quiet. The competition has gotten much tougher these days.

But Johnson seems intent on continuing to maintain his lead. He also claimed that the Great Depression of the 1930s was “pretty well planned,” in his discussion with Benny Johnson.

And repeated his claims that the Covid vaccines were far harmful than we’ve been lead to believe by medical experts. “We’ve been completely covering up the vaccine inspection injuries. The vaccine injections… injured a lot of people, destroyed their lives, killed people.”

Where is the evidence for this? It is being covered up by the staff of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he charged. “Unfortunately you can expect that a lot of documents were destroyed…”

Whether it’s about 9/11 or vaccines, he suggested, government officials will try to hide the evidence of what really happened. “Within these agencies, a lot of them are going to cover their tracks and cover things up and destroy a lot of evidence,” he charged.

The New Republic may have had the best headline on Johnson’s remarkable theories: “Ron Johnson Goes Full 9/11 Truther in Deranged Rant.”