And the picture emerging is VERY Different from what one might expect….
Remember though….
House Republicans might have come together to give him the gavel…
But they come at things from SEVEAL differnt directions….
Someone asked me today in the media, ‘People are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue?’ I said,
‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.”
— Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), on Fox News.
…
“Before arriving in Washington less than a decade ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a deeply religious Christian, was a legal crusader associated with a fringe evangelical movement called ‘young Earth creationism,’ based on a literal reading of the Bible’s Book of Genesis that posits the Earth is only several thousand years old,” the HuffPostreports.
…
Brian Beutler: “I do hope they understand there’s more to typecasting an opposition leader than issuing a few press releases, fanning out some juicy opposition research, and declaring the damage done. Johnson’s record—forget his record, actually; his name, his face, his job title—will not take root in the public imagination on its own. And without a sustained effort to make him famous, he can make himself seem innocuous simply by being a bit more demure than his peers.”
“Instilling an idea about a person in the social consciousness and making it stick is an unending and tedious process. Republicans didn’t define Al Gore as a wooden teller of Big Fish tales in one day, it required relentless scoffing; same with John Kerry as the out-of-touch cheese-eating surrender monkey, Hillary Clinton as Mrs. Emails. Nancy Pelosi as Mrs. San Francisco values, and so on.”
…
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has said he has an adopted Black son, but Josh Marshallcan’t find any photos of him.
“No African-American son shows up in any of the family photographs on Johnson’s House website or on his personal Facebook page. Nor does Michael figure anywhere in any of Johnson’s campaign biographies.”
“As I went further down this rabbit hole tonight I was a bit dumbfounded. Is Michael made up? Is he excluded from family pictures? I was so baffled that I went pretty far down that rabbit hole trying to figure out what was going on.”
…
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) dismissed gun control in a Fox News interview after the mass shooting in Maine.
Said Johnson: “The problem is the human heart. It’s not guns… this is not the time to talk about legislation.”
…
‘He Seems to Be Saying His Commitment Is to Minority Rule’
I’ve noticed also in listening to his speeches that he is explicit about describing this country as a republic and not as a democracy. Inside these conservative Christian nationalist spaces, that is par for the course: that this is a republic, and it is a republic, again, founded in this biblical worldview, and that it’s not a democratic free-for-all. And so again, this is Christian supremacy.
If you align with this value system, then yes, you have the authority to shape our laws. If you do not, you have no business shaping our laws. He once said: “We don’t live in a democracy, because democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what’s for dinner.” Meaning, the country is not just majority rule; it’s a constitutional republic. And the founders set that up because they followed the biblical admonition on what a civil society is supposed to look like.
I think that’s really important here: His commitment is not to democracy. He’s not committed to majority rule; he seems to be saying he’s committed to minority rule, if that’s what it takes to ensure that we stay on the Christian foundation that the founders have set up.
Now, he would say that there’s really no tension here — that, again, if the Constitution represents this kind of biblical worldview that he suggests the founders embraced, then there’s going to really be no conflict….
Roula Khalaf: “That is the most sobering fact about America’s new second in line to be president. But we cannot overlook Johnson’s Christian fundamentalism. He is a sincere biblical literalist. As an active legal ally of the Southern Baptist Convention, and also as a Louisiana and now Washington legislator, Johnson has a 25-year record of Christian extremism.”
“He believes homosexuality is unnatural and should be illegal, he supports a federal outlawing of abortion in any circumstances (as co-author of the ‘life begins at conception’ bill before this Congress), he believes the US is a Christian nation founded on biblical principles, and he is a ‘Christian Zionist’ supporter of the politically philo-Semitic and theologically antisemitic view that the Book of Revelation will be fulfilled in modern-day Israel. Remember, that involves the second coming of Jesus in a prophesied rapture in which the righteous will ascend to heaven and the rest, including the Jews, will be slaughtered.”
image…Speaker Mike Johnson, a Shreveport, Louisiana, native, entered politics after spending more than two decades defending conservative Christian causes as a litigator at the conservative legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom. | Francis Chung/POLITICO
He’s a hardcore radical Right Wing nutjob
Who gives a damn what “direct” his support comes from?
Oh yes you and the Republican “ moderates “
What exactly,if anything, of the above descriptions of the new Speaker do you disagree with?
All of them are true of course.
I have heard some of these biblical kooks using the current events in the Middle East, as well as Johnson’s elevation to the speakership ,as the beginning of the “end times.”
Hey we will all be going to Hell soon!
Weeeeee!!
Johmson looks like one of the suited up religious kooks from The Handmaids Tale for a good reason.
He is one. Oh and his wife is every bit of a Christofascist homophobic nut as he is. She ran a “counseling” service that equated being gay with bestiality and incest.
As to the End of Days shit evangelicals have warned we’ve been in those for decades. Nothing new. Though the heightened strife in the Middle East has their hearts newly fluttered with anticipation of Israel supposedly launching an attack that will lead to the destruction of Earth. Then the Jews will be “thanked” by burning in hell while the “good” Christians who pined for this will be rewarded in heaven.
That’s what these nuts believe.
Disagree with?
Huh?
The guy IS who he IS.….