OSHKOSH – Uncovered tweets from Mandela Barnes by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel show just how dangerously liberal Mandela Barnes is. Barnes’ tweets include a reference he made to AOC as “my president” and insulting remarks, such as when he said Rep. Steve Scalise was “taking one for the team” after the congressional baseball shooting. 

Does Mandela Barnes stand by these extreme tweets today? 

Read the full story from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel here, or read excerpts below:

Bice: On Twitter, free-wheeling Mandela Barnes called Trump a ‘Russian spy’ and rejected George Washington as a top president
Daniel Bice
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
September 29, 2022

Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, a classic millennial, loves social media.

Indeed, Barnes — a Democrat challenging Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron  Johnson — has tweeted more than 18,400 times since joining Twitter a decade ago, an average of nearly five tweets a day.

“I would probably say I spend too much time online,” Barnes, 35, said in a February 2021 interview. “I can be reading too, but I spend a little too much time online.”

But what’s he saying on Twitter? 

A lot. What we get here is an unvarnished and free-wheeling political candidate touching on a number of interesting and controversial topics over the past decade.

Early on, he demonstrated his liberal leanings by suggesting that progressives who move to the center are “compromising all integrity.” He once jokingly referred to lefty U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, known by her initials AOC, as “my president.” He imagined using the COVID-19 pandemic to revamp society.  

“We should drastically reimagine society, our communities, and what quality of life actually means in a moment like this,” Barnes tweeted in March 2020, just as coronavirus was starting to spread. 

Barnes asked in November 2016 if the presidential election had been “rigged.” Months later, the first-term Democrat declared Donald Trump, then president, a “Russian spy.” More recently, he dismissed the notion that George Washington was one of the country’s top presidents.

Barnes once said he “really could not care less about a 2nd Amendment ‘right’” to bear arms. He also criticized House GOP Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana for not changing his position on gun control after being shot in the hip during practice for the Congressional Baseball Game in 2017.

“Taking one for the team,” Barnes wrote even as Scalise was using crutches and a scooter to get around the Capitol. “I question how people vote against self interest but this is next level. He literally almost died on this hill.”

In recent years, Barnes has ripped two moderate Democratic senators with whom he would have to serve if elected, even suggesting Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia was a missing vertebrae” in the Senate Democrats’ spine. 

In addition, Barnes, who is vying to be the state’s first Black senator, has opined on police and community unrest, two subjects for which he has been criticized during the election. 

During the 2014 Ferguson protests, which erupted after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, Barnes acknowledged his struggle to call for peace there. As for police, he tweeted that not all police” are corrupt or racist.

“BUT, if I gave you a bowl of skittles and told you three were poison…” he tweeted in response in 2016 to a post about the number of people killed by police in the U.S. A day earlier, Trump made the exact same Skittles analogy regarding Syrian refugees. 



Alec Zimmerman, a spokesman for Johnson, said the tweets give the public an insight into the actual views of the Democratic politician. 

“Mandela Barnes’ tweets speak for themselves,” Zimmerman said.

“He excuses violent rioters, but compares devoted Christians to terrorists. He bashes the Constitution, police and the Founding Fathers,” Zimmerman added, “No amount of ducking the media and cutesy television ads can change the truth that at his core, Mandela Barnes is a dangerous extremist.”

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