MADISON, Wis. — In a surreal interview with Tucker Carlson, Wisconsin US Senator Ron Johnson, who has spent the past month spouting off debunked conspiracy theories about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is now saying that it’s “cool to watch” video of buildings, like Building #7, be destroyed. Building #7 was a 47-story skyscraper that collapsed in the hours after the Twin Towers were hit by airplanes carrying hundreds of passengers. 2,753 people died, in New York alone, from the 9/11 attacks.
Read the full report below detailing Johnson’s comments.
Wisconsin State Journal: Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson doubles down on 9/11 conspiracy theories
Mitchell Schmidt // 5/30/2025
- U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson has again waded into long-debunked conspiracy theories, suggesting without evidence that someone, presumably with the government, imploded one of the buildings destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks hours after the Twin Towers collapsed.
- Speaking with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, Johnson, R-Oshkosh, said his interest in the attack on New York City, particularly regarding Building 7, a 47-story office building that fell several hours after planes were flown into the nearby Twin Towers, is “because the 9/11 families want to know the answer.”
- “I’m just as prone as everyone else to go, ‘Well, that’s wacko. That’s a conspiracy,'” Johnson said. “But then you start getting the information and you start going, ‘Wow, is that weird.'”
- “Building number 7 — you see it come down — and we’ve all watched, because it’s cool to watch these buildings being demolished, boom, just freefall,” Johnson said. “The only way that happens is if you remove all of their supports at the same time. You blow them all out so a building can really free-fall. If it’s collapsing from something else, it’s like, you know, you build like a fire, and it collapses off to the side or something, right?”
- The National Institute of Standards and Testing concluded that uncontrolled fires caused by debris from one of the center’s Twin Towers caused steel beams and girders to expand, “leading to a chain of events that caused a key structural column to fail.
- “The failure of this structural column then initiated a fire-induced progressive collapse of the entire building,” the group stated in the final report on its investigation.
- Speaking with conservative radio host Meg Ellefson a day later, Johnson again cited the 2020 film “Calling out Bravo 7,” a production he’s referenced in the past that questions the official story behind the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 in New York.
- “And as we find out, in so many different instances, you really can’t trust the government what they told you,” Johnson said. “I mean, the government has just repeatedly lied to the American public for decades on so many different issues. It’s sad. It shouldn’t happen, but it does.”
- In a statement, Democratic Party of Wisconsin spokesperson Phil Shulman criticized Johnson’s remarks.
- “Almost 3,000 Americans died in the 9/11 attacks — and Ron Johnson thinks it’s ‘cool’ to watch buildings collapse as a result of the worst terrorist attack on American soil,” Shulman said. “It seems Ron Johnson could not care less about the devastation these attacks caused on our country.”
- Johnson’s latest comments come about a month after the the Oshkosh Republican told conservative podcaster Benny Johnson he believes there are “an awful lot of questions” surrounding one of the deadliest attacks on the United States.
- Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, has called for more congressional hearings on the attacks while also criticizing as “corrupt” the investigation carried out by the standards and technology institute.
- The institute’s final report was the work of more than 200 experts, including scientists and engineers, and found that Building 7 collapsed due to the hours-long fire that consumed much of the building and inadequate water pressure to combat the fire.
- “Had a water supply for the automatic sprinkler system been available and had the sprinkler system operated as designed, it is likely that fires in (Building 7) would have been controlled and the collapse prevented,” the report states.
