Tag: trump election lies
Mike Johnson

Does Johnson Really Believe All That 'Biblical' Shuck And Jive? Nah

Everybody in the South has known somebody like House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA): an amiable, polite, well-dressed religious crackpot who’s either completely out of his mind or pretends to be for career purposes. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

If you’re an ambitious politician someplace like his hometown of Shreveport, there’s no penalty for professing belief in all manner of absurdities calculated to reassure God-intoxicated true believers in backwoods churches that you’re one of them. Everybody understands, especially the people who put up the money.

There’s nothing in the Bible, for example, that compels Johnson to profess disbelief in climate change—although he could probably manufacture something, if challenged. There are, however, plenty of oil and gas wells around the Ark-La-Tex, as the area around Shreveport and Texarkana is called, and the people who own them mean to extract every cubic centimeter from the ground and turn it into cash. The bulk of Johnson’s campaign funds come from the petrochemical industry.

Never mind that finding oil requires hiring geologists that understand the actual age of the earth, some 13.8 billion years, rather than the 6600 decreed by Answers in Genesis, the Kentucky theme-park Johnson once represented, with its life-sized Noah’s Ark exhibit and sea-faring brontosauruses. The congressman has insisted that the Bible story represents historical truth.

It’s the same with evolution. As a creationist, does he take his children to physicians who reject biological science as a Satanic lie? Even in Shreveport, those can be hard to find. So, it’s all a shuck and a jive. Almost everybody who’s been to college—Johnson has two degrees from Lousiana State University—understands the rules of the game, and everybody plays along.

In media interviews, Johnson is anything but shy about advertising his piety, recently describing himself to Fox News propagandist Sean Hannity as “a Bible-believing Christian.” To understand his views, he said “pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.”

A skeptic might observe that Scripture has been interpreted in rather a lot of different ways over the centuries. To Johnson, however, it’s only in Southern Baptist churches in North Louisiana that perfect fealty to God’s word has been achieved. All others are heretics or worse.

Also during his interview with Hannity, however, Johnson displayed a newfound willingness to accept political reality. He told his host that gay marriage is a settled issue and that there’s no national consensus on abortion. In the past, he has blamed legal abortion for mass shootings: also, feminism, no-fault divorce laws, and the “sexual revolution.”

"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,” he told a New York magazine interviewer in 2015, “then you do wind up with school shooters.”

Because to the fundamentalist mind, only two possibilities exist. Either you agree with them on every issue, or you’re “of the devil” and an enemy of God. Indeed, Johnson has compared same-sex marriage to the right of "a person to marry his pet."

Which come to think of it…

Who starts purring madly when I climb into the marital bad at night? My wife or Martin the cat? Who gets up early to read the newspaper, and who stays wedged by my side? Have I chosen the wrong gender and species?

But I digress. Rep. Johnson claims firmer views. See, when the U.S. Constitution says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” it really means that Protestant fundamentalism rules.

Similarly, when Thomas Jefferson wrote that “It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are 20 gods or no God,” he really meant to establish a Biblical republic based upon a literalist reading of scripture. That this is absurdly ahistorical matters hardly at all. It’s called “Christian Nationalism,” and millions in the so-called Red States have chosen to believe it.

Theirs is an embattled faith. According to Johnson, “it is only and always the Christian viewpoint that is getting censored. The fact is the left is always trying to shut down the voices of the Christians.”

And yet God has elevated a champion. “I believe God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment,” he said during his first speech upon being elected Speaker.

And that champion’s main purpose, he has made clear, will be elevating, Donald J. Trump, that thrice-married, career adulterer, pussy-grabber and adjudicated rapist to the presidency. Johnson was one of the prime movers among GOP congressmen trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election, crafting absurd legal arguments even the Republican-majority Supreme Court rejected out of hand.

Think about it: Trump re-installed in the White House.

Wouldn’t that be a glorious day for the Lord?

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

Mike Johnson

Mike Johnson Seems Nice -- Until You Take A Closer Look

Mike Johnson, the four-term Louisiana representative just elected as House speaker, makes a pleasant first impression. That may be why his fellow Republicans chose such an untested politician, with no obvious qualifications, to fill that demanding post. Or they may have simply succumbed to exhaustion and embarrassment after the procedural fiasco that left Congress in limbo for weeks.

Whatever their motivations, it is now clear that Johnson's sudden elevation was a wildly irresponsible act. Behind his thin biography and bland smile is a fanatical mindset that will threaten constitutional order and the democratic process. Throughout his public career, the new speaker has espoused the ideology of Christian nationalism, which marks him as hostile to religious pluralism, rational inquiry and personal dignity.

His perspective sets him far outside the mainstream of American life. Which is not too surprising, because he appears to exist in a far-right dimension of fantasy.

Consider the most obvious stain on Johnson's record, which alone ought to have disqualified him from such high office, namely the starring role he played in former President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election results. Billing himself as a constitutional lawyer, he crafted a legal brief, signed by congressional Republicans, that aimed to disqualify millions of votes in four key states because of fake "fraud" claims.

Those claims had already failed and the Supreme Court swiftly rejected Johnson's arguments. Then he voted against certifying Joe Biden's victory on the House floor.

Presumably that was why Trump, the chief saboteur of democracy, endorsed him for speaker. But Johnson went all the way, voicing the discredited conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems equipment that eventually cost Fox News Channel nearly $800 million in libel damages. "The allegation about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with the software by Dominion — look, there's a lot of merit to that," he said on a Louisiana radio show, describing Dominion's product as "a software system that is used all around the country that is suspect because it came from Hugo Chavez's Venezuela."

Those accusations were unequivocally false, as Johnson could easily have discovered for himself. Either he didn't care whether what he was saying about a free and fair election was true — or he was eager to repeat lies because they had been uttered by Trump's lawyers.


Underneath his mild-mannered persona, Johnson is afflicted with a dogmatic temperament that prizes partisan and sectarian belief over factual evidence. He has proclaimed his confidence in the "creationist" superstition that proclaims Earth is only six thousand years old, because the Bible appears to say so, and not 4.6 billion years old as determined by astronomers and geologists. Indeed Scripture, or at least his interpretation of it, provides his all-purpose intellectual guide.

To anyone who asks, "What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?" he offers a simple reply. "Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it — that's my worldview. That's what I believe and so I make no apologies for it."

Where this strict adherence to Biblical law and lore will lead him on economic or foreign policy questions remains to be revealed, although the precedents are ominous. Christian "charity" is not characteristic of Christian nationalists, who have shown an inclination to torment the poor and working class that Jesus would not approve. And owing to their obsession with other people's sex lives, we already know what he thinks about gays and lesbians and anyone else who doesn't conform to his notions of morality.


Yes, Mike Johnson is one of those people who feels obliged to denigrate people defined as "deviant" by his religious sect. He would outlaw their sexual lifestyles and punish them severely, much like the Iranian regime or the Taliban. In his worldview, too, deviance is a sin that extends beyond homosexuals and transsexuals to anyone who has sex outside the bounds of marriage or who asserts the right to reproductive freedom. He has declared that the state has a compelling interest in suppressing such "damaging" conduct, including contraception.

What were Republicans thinking when they installed this bigot as speaker of the House? Did they expect Americans to welcome his rigid ignorance and aggressive prejudice? They've made Trump happy, but before long they will answer to voters for this mad insult.

Joe Conason is editor-in-chief of The National Memo and editor-at-large of Type Investigations. He is the author of several books, including two New York Times bestsellers. His latest book, The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers And Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism, will be published by St. Martin's Press in 2024.

GOP 'Moderates' Kneel As House Picks Election-Denying Extremist Speaker

GOP 'Moderates' Kneel As House Picks Election-Denying Extremist Speaker

By Wednesday morning, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, who initiated the House Republicans' speaker debacle, was already celebrating the impending elevation of a MAGA election denier as the next speaker of the House.

"If you don't think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement and where the power in the Republican Party truly lies, then you're not paying attention," Gaetz gushed on Steve Bannon's podcast "War Room."

Gaetz isn't wrong. Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana ha been a quintessential pro-Trump, pro-insurrectionist flamethrower from the word “go.”

As CBS News' Robert Costa tweeted:

Important to know: Johnson was deeply involved in efforts to keep Trump in power starting immediately after 2020 election. Early Nov. 2020. I know because I spent months reporting on that period and he was part of letters and behind-scenes efforts with key outside groups. I’ve talked with key sources from that time about how Johnson — then all but unknown — worked with allied Trump groups and conservative leaders in a coordinated way to make sure that whole orbit was working together to help Trump.

Now, with Johnson officially in control of the gavel, the MAGA wing of the Republican Party will have forced their will on the majority of House Republicans who would have preferred someone more moderate, such as Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, a member of leadership who voted to certify the 2020 election.

That's why a cohesive group of House GOP members with at least a toehold in reality coordinated their votes to doom the speaker bid of Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. Jordan built his career on trying to destroy the institution he worked in, engineering the exit of at least semi-reasonable Republican speakers-past, such as Rep. John Boehner of Ohio and Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

So why did Republicans coalesce around Johnson, a democracy subverter in the mold of Jordan? Here are two potential reasons: Johnson, who began his first term in 2017, has had a decade less time to amass the number of enemies that Jordan has since joining the House in 2007.

Second, and equally as important, the relatively saner members of the House Republican caucus probably came to a simple conclusion: They would have to settle for an election denier as their leader because Trump and his MAGA allies would never let anyone else through. Trump runs the party, and the speakership runs through him. Trump single-handedly doomed Emmer's speaker bid precisely because he voted to certify the 2020 election.

So the choice for the Republican realists was either elect a MAGA election denier or work with Democrats to elect someone who hasn’t been an outright subverter of American democracy. And to do that, it would have meant placing the country over their own electoral ambitions because any Republican realist in a red district surely would have drawn a primary opponent.

The takeaways of a Johnson speakership are simple: The MAGA wing of the Republican Party, having beaten down the so-called GOP moderates, is running the joint, leaving the Sen. Mitch McConnell wing of the party on an island taking incoming fire from all sides.

Moderate House Republicans can never again be counted on to tone down their MAGA allies, because those MAGA allies would sooner burn down the House, so to speak, than let saner forces run it. In other words, moderates in pursuit of governance will never outmaneuver MAGA nihilists.

But the worst is yet to come. Under the leadership of Johnson, anti-democracy Republicans will surely provide a mesmerizing display of pyrotechnics aimed at destroying functional democracy both at home and abroad.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Flashback: What Mike Johnson Said As Mob Stormed Capitol On January 6 (VIDEO)

Flashback: What Mike Johnson Said As Mob Stormed Capitol On January 6 (VIDEO)

Fox News interviewed a shaken but unapologetic Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) live from an undisclosed secure location in the House complex as a violent mob of Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, delaying the certification of the 2020 presidential election. During the interview, Johnson, whom the House Republican caucus elected its speaker-designate on Tuesday night, defended his effort to toss the results in multiple states as “presenting our thoughtful arguments and thoughts about this whole process.”

Johnson, who made 50 appearances on weekday Fox programs (14 in prime time) between August 2017 and his run for speaker, came to prominence for his key role in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. He “led the amicus brief signed by more than 100 House Republicans in support of a Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate the 2020 election results in four swing states won by Biden: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.” Johnson drummed up signatures for that brief in part by telling his colleagues that Trump had personally asked him to request members sign it. The lawsuit, which was heavily touted by pro-Trump media outlets like Fox, was ultimately rejected unanimously by the U.S. Supreme Court.

After Trump’s efforts to reverse the 2020 election through legal action failed, he and his associates sought to have Congress and Vice President Mike Pence throw out the electoral votes of key states on January 6, 2021. He also summoned thousands of supporters to Washington, D.C.

Johnson expressed solidarity with the protestors that morning and promised to take their efforts to Congress later in the day. “We MUST fight for election integrity, the Constitution, and the preservation of our republic! It will be my honor to help lead that fight in the Congress today,” he posted on social media.

Then in a speech outside the White House, Trump urged the crowd to march on the U.S. Capitol, where the joint session had assembled to certify the results. They did, assaulting scores of law enforcement officers, breaching the building, and sending members of Congress into hiding.

Fox’s Bill Hemmer spoke with Johnson by phone as the mob occupied the Capitol, shortly after 3 p.m. ET. Johnson would not identify his location, saying only that he was “with a number of members, House members” in a “secure location.”



“Well, I was in the middle of the proceedings in the House chamber down at the table. We were presenting our thoughtful arguments and thoughts about this whole process, the Electoral College, as you mentioned,” Johnson explained. “It’s a very important process for our nation. Happens every four years. And we’re going through the methodical steps. This is nothing unusual what was happening today. There have been many objections over the years. You know, we’re going through the process, and then they begin the lockdown. There’s chaos on the floor, and members get a bit alarmed. And we get multiple orders by the Capitol Police and ultimately they evacuate the chamber. It’s just a really, really sad thing.”

Hemmer then asked Johnson, “Our nation’s capitol gets massive rallies every year, all the time. How did this happen?”

“You know, it’s a great question,” he said. “The whole nation is a tinderbox right now of emotion, you know, of vitriol.”

Johnson did not blame Trump or Republican members like himself for causing that vitriol with false claims of election fraud. Instead, he said, “I’m here as one of the advocates on the Republican side, stating our concerns about this election, the allegations of fraud and the irregularity and all that.”

He continued, “But I don’t see my colleagues on the other side of the aisle making the other argument as an enemy.” He argued that the public needs to remember “the things that unite us” and that “we’re all one family in this country. And if we forget that, we lose that value, our republic is in peril.”

Johnson went on to explain that the members with him were feeling “a lot of sadness.”

“We feel like we’ve crossed a Rubicon in some way,” he said. “It’s bigger than our politics; it’s the culture itself. And we got to get back, again, to those things that unite us. If we don’t, we’re in trouble.”

Hemmer then mentioned that after a long silence while the crowd stormed the building, Trump had posted on social media that the crowd should “stay peaceful.” He asked Johnson, “Does he need to say more?”

“That’s a good start,” Johnson replied. “But I do believe, you know, I’m a supporter of the president. But this is a time for the commander-in-chief, the leader of the country — he still is that — to step up and call for calm.”

“We have to get back to basics,” Johnson concluded. “And I hope in the days and weeks, months to come — no matter the outcome of this presidential election, or any political outcome — that we can get back to these foundational ideals. Because if we don’t, again, you know, we’re going to see a lot more of this in the days ahead.”

At a news conference Tuesday night after Johnson became the fourth speaker-designate selected by his peers since a handful of Republicans ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy earlier this month, a reporter tried to ask him about his role in seeking to overturn the 2020 election. Other members of the caucus shouted her down as Johnson smirked, shook his head, and said, “Next question.”