Mike Johnson tells it like it is – ignore his warning at America’s peril.
I have extremely low expectations for humanity. I presume more times than not to be disappointed by us. Over the past four to five years, what has sunk my pathetically low bar even lower is the Republican Party. I am not sure how much deeper they can sink to spike my abhorrence, but the great thing about penning this column each week is it brings new opportunities to mine the depths of depravity. This week we had a doozy from the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, a heretofore little-known religious loon from Louisiana who helped facilitate the attempted coup de tat on America in 2020/21. Upon the proposed release of extended January 6 footage, he said this week – in public! – as a matter of decorum and philosophical pride, “We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ and to have other concerns and problems.”
The Speaker of the House of Representatives, a man two heartbeats from the White House, who has sworn on his precious Holy Bible to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States, and currently guides the nation’s law body, called the press together and said, once again I state, out loud, that he means to protect criminals who sought to violently overthrow a free and fair election, beat and eventually kill capitol police, and destroy the people’s property.
Is this not completely and utterly insane behavior? Or is this the new norm?
I believe the latter now more than ever, even though I have written so for years, and especially after January 6, but the cat is out of the bag: the Republican Party is a proudly devised and systemically bolstered domestic terrorist organization. What adversary conclusion can one glean from this? Its titular head is shouting from the rooftops that he will aid the obstruction of justice for enemies of the state. In essence, what Johnson is saying is the Republican Party is aligned with domestic terrorists – not some nut like Tucker Carlson or those dweebs on OAN or the Proud Boys or the tin-foil hat brigade on the Internet waiting for JFK Jr. to join Donald Trump, the new Christ, as VP, but the Speaker of the House!
Initially, in the waning hours and days after the horrors of January 6, the entire gory episode was on Donald Trump and his cronies (many of whom are in jail or have plea-bargained to take him down). The whole “Come to the Capitol Mall, it’s going to be wild” tweets, the rally, the violent rhetoric, and the armed insurrections were his and his alone. But then, slowly but surely, those who initially decried Trump and underlined his crimes on the floor of Congress, like former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, seemed to take a left turn and kowtowed to the criminal underground. Now the voters, nearly 90%of Republicans, join them. They are about to send the architect of this mayhem, still screaming about our elections being fraudulent back into the fray as their 2024 nominee for president.
To be fair to Johnson, the man didn’t even want to be Speaker. This was the idea of the fascist wing of the party who couldn’t abide McCarthy getting the people’s business done by working across party lines. They ousted him and ended up with a man who clearly disdains the American experiment and its people. His design is a theocracy, a Christian Sharia Law doctrine that jails pregnant women and queers as he stated before the Supreme Court in a 2003 amicus brief about how “deviant same-sex intercourse should be a crime.” Johnson, who calls our Bill of Rights’ separation of church and state a “misnomer,” is on the record framing America as a “Biblical Republic,” boldy hanging a Christian Nationalists’ “Appeal to Heaven” flag outside his office that he wishes will replace the stars and stripes as if imagining a Handmaid’s Tale dystopia. The aim of this theocracy is laid out in one simple edict: “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society”.
Believe Johnson when he says this stuff. He doesn’t see the January 6 rioters and insurrectionists as criminals, but rather as persecuted Christian Warriors sent to overthrow this secular nation for a one-religion government like Iran or Saudi Arabia. Stripping women of their reproductive rights was just the start for this sect, and it is being fronted and supported by the Republican Party. Not maybe or tomorrow, or even if things go badly, right now, and not just Trump and some crazies from the hinterlands, but the federal government. Not phony conspiracy theorists, either, but a ruling party – one of only two that we got, folks!
The other day, after Ohio rightfully codified women’s rights into their state constitution, which Republicans there are trying to override as I write this, former Republican presidential contender and talking head from some half-baked Right Wing internet media conglomerate, Rick Santorum, once again said out loud, that “pure democracies are not the way to run a country.” People guffawed. “What a dipshit,” they laughed. Yeah, he is a dipshit, but you know who also espouses this nonsense? Mike fucking Johnson. He has has said on more than one occasion that “America is not a democracy.” He believes it, and now he is in a position of immense power. Now if Trump wins and Republicans gain full power again, make no mistake, he’s coming for your freedom and replacing it with Christian falderal as law.
They’re banning books and threatening our kids’ curriculum to strike history and revisit it with God-fearing jingoism. It is happening – not as a science fiction harbinger like War of the Worlds, it’s the Republican Party today. So, when Mike Johnson says, “We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ and to have other concerns and problems,” we need to hear loud and clear his defense of those who want to transform America into a theocracy. Because he means it.
Listen and heed him.
Or else.
