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Mike Johnson’s “commitment is not to democracy” “If Republicans vote for a medieval insurrectionist, and nobody knows, does it count?” Brian Beutler recommended on Friday at Off Message, meaning the new Republican speaker from Louisiana. Make Mike Johnson famous: 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.  Nancy Mace wants to wear a Scarlet Letter? How about two? MJ. Republicans hung “Nancy Pelosi liberal” around Democratic candidates’ necks for decades. Two parties can play that game. The press is obliging. Politico’s Katelyn Fossett spoke with Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian of evangelical Christianity and politics.

Another admission of conservative impotence Put us in charge, say Republicans. We pledge to do nothing. “The end of the day, it’s, the problem is the human heart. It’s not guns. It’s not the weapons. At the end of the day, we have to protect the right of the citizens to protect themselves, and that’s the Second Amendment.” — House Speaker Mike Johnson, asked by Fox News’s Sean Hannity about demands for more gun laws or more legislation in the wake of mass shootings Alexandra Petri translates: The problem is the human heart. Gun violence is an unchangeable, immutable fact of the human condition. That is why it is localized so strongly to this country and this time period. This is not a problem with a solution. It is the price you pay for being human. This is not unique to the United States, although you see it only here. Maybe it’s something to do with the water. Not laws, though; as we know from our efforts to impose vicious lawsuits and increasingly draconian restrictions against anyone who seeks an abortion, it is pointless to legislate about a problem.

Update: Also this: I wonder why they would think the economy is so terrible? Whatever would make them think that?

Mike Johnson is a delusional zealot He’s an educated man but his knowledge of history is nil. Someone should tell him about the centuries of religious wars in Europe that shaped the founders beliefs about religion and the state: Mr. Johnson, a mild-mannered conservative Republican from Louisiana whose elevation to the speakership on Wednesday followed weeks of chaos, is known for placing his evangelical Christianity at the center of his political life and policy positions. Now, as the most powerful Republican in Washington, he is in a position to inject it squarely into the national political discourse, where he has argued for years that it belongs. Mr. Johnson, 51, the son of a firefighter and the first in his family to attend college, has deep roots in the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. For years, Mr. Johnson and his wife, Kelly, a licensed pastoral counselor, belonged to First Bossier, whose pastor, Brad Jurkovich, is the spokesman for the Conservative Baptist Network, an organization working to move the denomination to the right. Mr.

Lately, it seems like all the very richest, most successful people (men, mostly) are batshit crazy. Here’s a primary example: The Adidas team was huddled with Kanye West, pitching ideas for the first shoe they would create together. It was 2013, and the rapper and the sportswear brand had just agreed to become partners. The Adidas employees, thrilled to get started, had arrayed sneakers and fabric swatches on a long table near a mood board pinned with images. But nothing they showed that day at the company’s German headquarters captured the vision Mr. West had shared. To convey how offensive he considered the designs, he grabbed a sketch of a shoe and took a marker to the toe, according to two participants. Then he drew a swastika. It was shocking, especially to the Germans in the group. Most displays of the symbol are banned in their country. The image was acutely sensitive for a company whose founder belonged to the Nazi Party. And they were meeting just miles from Nuremberg, where leaders of the Third Reich were tried for crimes against humanity.

You can’t win if you don’t show up to play David Rothkopf described new House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana as representing “a movement that is actively seeking to institutionalize the religious beliefs of evangelical Christians into law.” Rothkopf was just getting warmed up (Daily Beast): The term Christofascism may seem inflammatory. It is not. It is intended to provide the most accurate possible definition of what Johnson and those in his movement wish to achieve. Like other fascists they seek to impose by whatever means necessary their views on the whole of society even if that means undoing established laws and eliminating accepted freedoms. Christofascists do so in the name of advancing their Christian ideology, asserting that all in society must be guided by their views and values whether they adhere to them or not. Johnson has ties, Rothkopf claims, to the Christianist New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and Seven Mountains Dominionism. Read more at Daily Beast. David Corn has another chilling account of Johnson’s beliefs at Mother Jones. Men in Afghanistan who don’t think the same things as Mike Johnson think the same way.

Upcoming “Corporate Bullsh*t” David Dayen reviews an upcoming book by Nick Hanauer, Joan Walsh, Donald Cohen and Zachary Roth. “Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in America” examines the boilerplate arguments corporate shills have used to object “to virtually every government and social program, from the abolition of slavery to the increase in the minimum wage.” Dayen writes: These timeworn tactics have been successful, the authors write, because “they offer a civic-minded, reasonable-sounding justification for positions that in fact are motivated entirely by self-interest.” It’s an attempt to set the terms of debate and to make those terms unchanging and unmovable. The endless repetition of these talking points is a source of their strength. But identifying their history and application to virtually everything can be a source of their weakness. The six categories of corporate bullshit begins with pure denial.

Or they pretend not to anyway It may seem obvious that everyone in the country knows that Donald Trump tried to overturn the election results in 2020 because we all watched him do it live as it was happening. His campaign filed more than 60 lawsuits in various states, as was his right, none of which were found to be meritorious. His minions and accomplices in the Republicans party both in Washington and around the country actively tried to help him do that by pressuring election officials, persuading local officials to sign on as “alternate electors” etc. And I think you’d have to have been in a coma not to know that he aggressively tried to bully Vice President Mike Pence into refusing to count the electoral votes on January 6th. Trump’s famous January 2nd phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger was all over the news the very next day in which he very pointedly said:  “What I want to do is this.

He’s an anti-immigrant zealot too Greg Sargent writes about the new Speaker’s extreme views on immigration: Rep. Mike Johnson, the newly elected House speaker, has repeatedly flirted with what’s known as the “great replacement theory,” the idea that Democrats are scheming to supplant American voters with immigrants. The Louisiana Republican’s views show how fringe conspiracy theories have gone mainstream in the Republican Party at the highest levels of power. “This is the plan of our friends on this side — to turn all the illegals into voters,” Johnson said at a congressional hearing in May 2022, gesturing at Democrats. “That’s why the border’s open.” The “open borders” trope is a lie, and while a few municipalities allow voting for noncitizens in local elections, in no sense do national Democrats have any such “plan” for “all the illegals.” As far as I can determine, no House speaker in recent memory has been quite as reckless and incendiary with this kind of language. Johnson employs it regularly.