Bice: On Twitter, free-wheeling Mandela Barnes called Trump a 'Russian spy' and rejected George Washington as a top president


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. 


The two campaigns had different takes on the tweets. Maddy McDaniel, spokeswoman for Barnes, suggested that the public should not make too much of the tweets but should instead see them for what they are — a bunch of old social media posts with little or no context. 
“Twitter is not the place to have nuanced policy discussions, and unlike Ron Johnson, Lt. Gov. Barnes has always been clear with Wisconsinites that he will fight to lower costs for working families and ensure everyone has an equal shot at the American Dream," McDaniel said.

McDaniel accused Johnson's team of "cherry-picking" tweets to distract from his record. The Johnson campaign and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, incidentally, were unaware of the tweets by Barnes until asked to comment by the Journal Sentinel last week.