Evil is still Evil by any other name...unless its name is "Mike Johnson"
Then Evil's name is "Mike Johnson"
Inhumanity is the keynote of stupidity in power.
Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist
Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.
Charles Bukowski
I’ve written at some considerable length previously about how new House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is a religious zealot, a Commander right out of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. And if- more likely when- America becomes a modern-day version of Gilead, Johnson will be front and center, ready to step into his pre-ordained Commander role without missing a beat.
Johnson radiates the warmth and humanity of an SS Übergruppenführer about to order his men to machine-gun a row of innocent victims standing above a pit they dug for themselves. He’ll call it God’s will, give the order, and turn on his heels. Then he’ll smile as the bullets fly, the smell of cordite fills the air, and the bodies thump into the pit.
It’s what Jesus would do, don’tchaknow?
[N]ew House Speaker Mike Johnson is a dangerously kooky rightwing fundamentalist young earth creationist who thinks that “what we read in the Bible are actual historical events,” and who also thinks that abortion causes school shootings because “when you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters.”
I don’t know about you, but I never imagined that after all these years, I’d hear a new and different explanation for school shootings. And yet, here we are, something that leaves me dumbfounded. That’s so unimaginably ridiculous and just plain indefensible that I don’t know what to do with it. Where do you start with something so patently and unbelievably stupid?
Never mind that no scientific evidence backs his theory, nor is there a consensus to validate it.
Of course, this is but one example of Johnson’s “I’ll-take-Jesus-over-science-any-day-and-twice-on-Sunday” belief system. Who needs edumication when all you need is faith in God and a Bible?
When it comes to climate change, f’rinstance, what would you expect but this:
The climate is changing, but the question is, is it being caused by natural cycles over the span of the Earth’s history? Or is it changing because we drive S.U.V.s? I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver.
Or is it caused by Jesus firing up his Harley? No one knows.
There are so many ways Mike Johnson is out of step with ordinary, everyday Americans…those who aren’t looking for ways to hasten the Apocalypse. But there are many things about Johnson’s beliefs that are legitimate cause for concern, like
Johnson’s long admiration for fake history charlatan David Barton, who makes up just-so stories about history to claim that America has always been a Christian nation, right down to claiming that the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are directly based on the Bible and that the South only practiced slavery because plantation owners weren’t familiar with the actual contents of the Bible.
Barton also thinks climate change is caused by God’s anger over abortion, so we’re sure he and Johnson can come up with a dandy bill to fix global warming and school shootings at the same time, because it will be a national abortion ban. One that also changes the outcome of the 2020 election and makes Donald Trump president for life and bans gay marriage, another Johnson hobbyhorse.
So, if God’s angry over something, does he punish us for it? And does he single out specific segments of the population? That would explain why I’m still waiting for the Minnesota Vikings to win a Super Bowl. I can’t imagine what we’ve done wrong, but long-term suffering appears to be our lot in life.
And if you think that’s cause for concern, get a load of this:
If you think that tweet is a bit over the top, keep in mind that there are many Republicans on Capitol Hill who greatly admire Viktor Orban and the benevolent dictatorship he’s created in Hungary. And they’d love nothing more than to create a similar system here in the U.S. with The Former Guy at the top of the political food chain.
Whether one finds it an overreaction or close to the truth, Mike Johnson has been drawing “The Handmaid’s Tale” comparisons from the Left side of the political spectrum…and not without good reason. Most of what he’s said and advocated for has until now been lost in the prop wash; no one had paid much attention to him prior to his name being mentioned as a Speaker candidate.
Once that happened, it became clear that Johnson was someone Democrats needed to be concerned about. Mike Johnson could take Republicans and, with them, the federal government in a very sinister direction.
There may be even worse aspects to Johnson’s tenure as House Speaker:
Mary Trump, the estranged niece of Donald Trump and an outspoken critic of the Republican Party, warned about Johnson in an interview with historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted to her Substack newsletter, The Good in Us by Mary L. Trump.
"We now have, as speaker of the House, somebody who's a religious fanatic— homophobic, anti-woman, actually worse than Jim Jordan," Mary Trump said….
Mary Trump has issued a warning about the new speaker of the House, Mike Johnson….
Mary Trump described him as a "Christo-fascist" in a post to X (formerly Twitter) about her interview with Ben-Ghiat. In a clip from the interview, Ben-Ghiat warned about the "separation of the removal of church and state," which is "not good for democracy."
In a different post, Ms. Trump goes on to say:
I am so tired of the Republican Party shoving religion down our throats. Zealots like Johnson push policies that ruin the lives of their fellow human beings because they’re convinced that their “beliefs” trump the humanity of the people whose existence they disdain. Johnson, who is in favor of a total, nationwide abortion ban, is a viciously homophobic, misogynistic bigot.
As recently as 2016, Johnson said: "What's happened over the last 60, 70 years is that our generation has been convinced that there's a separation of church and state. We hear that term all the time, and most people think that that's part of the constitution, but it's not." He also claimed that we live in a “biblical republic” which is not a thing, while completely ignoring the Bill of Rights—and Johnson claims to be a constitutional lawyer.
If Johnson were a constitutional lawyer, he’d understand the separation of Church and State. He’d also understand that America isn’t a “biblical republic,” whatever that might mean. Truthfully, it’s not even a thing and has no relation to the Constitution.
On the secular front, Johnson:
wants to cut Medicare and claims Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme.”
described January 6th as a “legitimate protest.”
claims catastrophic climate change is a hoax.
Medicare and Social Security are not “Ponzi schemes.” If Congress would stop raiding the SSI trust fund, it would have had a chance to be self-sufficient. That can’t be the case when Congress keeps robbing the piggy bank.
January 6th was in no way a “legitimate protest.” I’d ask only one question of Speaker Johnson: What would you say if Democrats had carried out the January 6th insurrection? I dare say that you’d be far less sanguine about the “legitimacy” of that protest.
The coastline of Speaker Johnson’s home state- Louisiana- is disappearing because of global climate change. That’s real; there’s no denying that.
As for the 2020 election, Johnson didn’t simply refuse to vote to certify the results, he was responsible for giving the big lie the patina of legal legitimacy. In doing so, he relied on the “independent state legislature” theory, which essentially claims state legislatures have the authority to overrule state courts in matters relating to the Elections Clause. (Earlier this year, in its decision in Moore v. Harper, the Supreme Court ruled that the opposite is the case.)
So it wasn’t Italian satellites or Chinese ballots containing chards of bamboo that were to blame for the “stolen election,” it was, according to Johnson, the unconstitutionality of the expansion of mail-in voting during COVID which, while equally false, sounds much more reasonable….
Which puts the second worst thing we can say about Mike Johnson in an even more disturbing light—he considers Jim Jordan to be his mentor. I can’t think of any one statement that so tidily sums up Johnson’s unfitness and total lack of judgment. The worst thing we can say about Mike Johnson is that he is now Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.
For a “constitutional lawyer,” Mike Johnson seems to know little of the Constitution. And even if he did, it wouldn’t matter because Johnson, like most Republicans, appears to be making up the rules as he goes.
He is not a benign, harmless Christian sent to help America through dark days. No, Mike Johnson is a hyper-Christian zealot looking to hasten America’s conversion to Gilead in whatever way he’s able to.
The House went without a Speaker for 22 days, which some might think was a blessing. During this time, at least Republicans couldn’t do any damage. However, they also couldn’t pass aid to Israel or Ukraine, nor could they do anything about the looming government shutdown.
Even if Republicans can’t remove their anteriors from their posteriors, the People’s business still needs to be done. The country can’t simply grind to a halt…and yet that’s precisely what was happening.
There’s some exemplary leadership, eh? I’d expect immaturity like that from a pack of Cub Scouts, not one of our two major political parties.
This is why the GOP should never be allowed to govern again…or at least until they have some adults mature enough to do the heavy lifting of governing. Currently, there’s no one in Congress with an “R” behind their name capable of doing that.
Not even close.
It’s demoralizing, of course, that a Johnson Speakership is a win for Matt Gaetz, the man who single-handedly destroyed Kevin McCarthy’s political career. And it’s a win for Jim Jordan and Donald Trump, too. Much more importantly, it’s a loss for us, for democracy, and a blow to the Democrats’ chances of retaining the White House in 2024. What are the odds that a House of Representatives run by Speaker Mike Johnson will abide by the results of a presidential election Joe Biden wins?
There is literally nothing the Republicans will find disqualifying about Donald. Everything will have been rigged in advance. They learned a lot from their failures in 2020 and they won’t make the same mistakes again.
There’s no rational world where “Matt Gaetz” and “win” should appear in the same sentence. That it does is a symptom of the sickness that has infected the GOP from top to bottom. It’s become a party of egotistical, incompetent, inept, ass-kissing, ladder-climbing, mean-spirited assholes who care about one thing and one thing only- political power. It matters not how many bodies they must step over to achieve it, nor how many lives and/or careers they destroy.
Seizing that brass ring is all that matters.
Winning isn’t everything; it’s the ONLY thing. The bruised and battered egos and the ruined careers in one’s rear-view mirror are merely the cost of doing business in a zero-sum game.
Remember…in Gilead, those who lose often hang on the wall.
(All of my posts are now public. Any reader financial support will be considered pledges- support that’s greatly appreciated but not required to get to all of my work. I’ll trust my readers to determine if my work is worthy of their financial support and at what level. To those who do offer their support, thank you. It means more than you know.)
