Energy commission stacked with Trump appointees is shielding a big political donor

A century-old newspaper in Wisconsin has issued a damning takedown of the Badger State's senior Senator, Ron Johnson, who announced this week he is running for re-election despite having promised to serve only two terms. It is urging Republicans to primary him.

"Ron Johnson is a virus that infects the Wisconsin GOP," The Capital Times writes of the "political careerist who has become known nationally as the U.S. Capitol’s primary purveyor of conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic." Johnson, they add, is a "charlatan" and "a delusional huckster who recommends fighting COVID-19 with Listerine."

Senator Johnson, the paper continues, is a "political grifter" who "serves as little more than a placeholder for his chief benefactor, defeated former President Donald Trump."

Indeed, it begins its well-informed attack by noting that "Ron Johnson is not a Wisconsin Republican. He’s a Trump Republican, and he could care less about what Wisconsin Republicans think, or about the future of their party. That was obvious in the scandal-plagued senator’s decision of where to announce his reelection run: on the opinion pages of New York City-based Wall Street Journal."

On Friday, writing for The Bulwark, retired physician William Steiner described the ongoing fanatical devotion to former President Donald Trump in The Villages, a sprawling Florida retirement community that backed the former president over Joe Biden 68 to 32 — and the bizarre, authoritarian political structure that holds this community together.

"Here, within the confines of a quiet, retirement neighborhood, residents have nothing to gain by promoting the lie that Trump won. They truly believe it. And they are not afraid to show it, sometimes in angry and disturbingly uncivil ways," wrote Steiner. "There is a retiree who has turned the family garage into a showcase of pro-Trump/anti-Biden banners and paraphernalia. The Villages has an ordinance that prohibits political signage displays in residential yards. So, in order to comply to the letter with that ordinance, the shrine to Donald sits in the garage and the garage door is left up so that all who pass by can marvel at the level of Trumpian devotion."

The Villages was famous for contentious political golf cart parades in the runup to the 2020 election, and in the aftermath, multiple residents have been charged with election fraud for trying to cast more than one ballot.

One of the curious and less-discussed facts about the Villages, wrote Steiner, is that it is not a self-governing community.

READ MORE: MAGA rioter who told CNN he'd storm Capitol again melts down in court after being sent back to jail

"The Villages is not a city. There is no mayor, no city council, no local police department, no central government agency. Virtually all aspects of The Villages are controlled, directly or indirectly, by a single family worth billions, now in its third generation," wrote Steiner. "The Villages is spread over three different counties, so no one county commission or other government agency has oversight for the entire complex ... The law enforcement comes from the county sheriffs. Taxes are controlled by the county commissioners who, heretofore, have all been more or less in lockstep with the family of H. Gary Morse, the late architect of The Villages."

"I am not arguing that The Villages system is wrong, or evil," wrote Steiner. "But this kind of textbook benign dictatorship really is un-American, in the sense that this is not how matters in a large community are traditionally managed in the United States. In contrast, democracy is messy. No matter who wins an election, there is always a significant proportion of the population that is unhappy and wants to change things. Democracy could never produce or successfully maintain The Villages. The rules on yard signs would be changing every two years!"

You can read more here.

The estranged wife of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes said he is a "complete sociopath" during a Friday interview on CNN.

CNN's John Berman interviewed Tasha Adams one day after her husband was arrested on charges of seditious conspiracy for his alleged role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Adams described fearing for her family and that she was happy he was arrested.

"So much relief," Adams said.

"I knew I lived in fear he might show up here. But the -- just setting that weight down and knowing we were safe and my kids were safe and my kids' school doesn't have to worry, that was a relief I didn't know existed," she explained.

READ MORE: MAGA rioter who told CNN he'd storm Capitol again melts down in court after being sent back to jail

"So I understand you're telling us you feel personally at risk from Stewart, but I wonder what danger you feel, what threat you feel he poses to the country," Berman said.

"He's a dangerous man," Adams replied.

"He is very dangerous. He lives very much in his own head," she explained. "He sees himself as a great leader, he almost has his own mythology of himself and I think he almost made it come true as seeing himself as some sort of figure in history and it sort of happened. He's a complete sociopath, he does not feel empathy for anyone around him at all."

Watch:

Tasha Adams www.youtube.com