During this past weekend’s Wisconsin Badgers football game, TV spectators saw a brand new ad out of Ron Johnson’s re-election campaign: one claiming Mandela Barnes plans to personally stab every Wisconsinite 17 times in the chest.
“Do you want to die? Well, Mandela Hussein Barnes wants you to die,” claims the advertisement. “The first item on his radical liberal agenda is personally stabbing every Wisconsin resident 17 times in the chest. Protect your family from being stabbed by Mandela Hussein Barnes by voting for Ron Johnson — he won’t stab you 17 times in the chest.”
The commercial concludes with Johnson adding, “I’m Ron Johnson and I approve this message.”
After much buzz stirred demanding the Johnson campaign revoke the ad, they released the statement, “We will not be silenced by the fake news radical liberal media trying to steal the election and cancel us for wanting to secure the safety of our beautiful, Christian Wisconsin children from being stabbed 17 times in the chest by Hussein Barnes who was born in Mozambique and wants antifa to George Floyd 9/11 every small town in Wisconsin.”
The Barnes campaign’s official statement on the matter reads, “We want this race to be one built on discussion of policies that will help the citizens of Wisconsin and are disappointed to see such negativity from Senator Ron Johnson. As such, we politely request they take down the ad stating Mandela Barnes will stab every resident of this beautiful state 17 times in the chest. Despite Ron Johnson’s role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election and his use of classified government information to increase his personal wealth, we have run zero negative ads against him because when election day comes, we know the great people of Wisconsin will vote with kindness.”
FiveThirtyEight’s compilation of the latest polls as of Oct. 1 shows Johnson leading Barnes by almost two points.
Jeffrey Brown is a former Arts Editor for the Daily Cardinal. He writes for The Beet occasionally and does some drawing and photography too. He is a senior majoring in Sociology. Do not feed him after midnight.