Professionally Insulting Speaker Mike Johnson Is A Career Move Now
As a writer, it’s hard not to look at certain articles composed quite clearly by someone of my opposite ideological ilk and pause angrily snorting “They PAID someone to write this?!?” But we really need to have a quick word about the pile-up of articles, columns, and Op-Eds that are just open-faced excrement sandwiches aimed at Louisiana’s First Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Shreveport’s own: Mike Johnson.
Celia Rivenbark penned an Op-Ed for NC Newsline, reprinted by The Louisiana Illuminator this week entitled: “New House Speaker Mike Johnson is quietly frightening,” by way of a subtitle she added, “Like the scariest villain in the horror movie, his biggest skill so far is saying terrible things in a comforting voice.”
She opens with a round of blatant insults targeting five prominent Republicans, writing “Where’s the noisy bombast of jacketless jackal Jim Jordan? The slick good looks of Kevin McCarthy, always impeccably dressed and looking like he was late for the vote because his caviar facial ran long? Where’s the old guard intensity of a seasoned member of Congress with an undeniable “Handmaids” Commander vibe like Steve Scalise? Or, failing those, perhaps the flaky flamboyance of Liars Club poster boy George Santos? The dead-eyed dreadfully dumb Marjorie Taylor Greene, maybe?”
Taking three paragraphs to get to her actual target, she paints Johnson as “more like former Vice President Mike Pence without all the annoying frat boy personality.” She likens his sensibilities to ‘the 19th century,’ as many have citing his own remarks.
Rivenbark is hardly alone either. Thomas B. Edsall writing for The New York Times said Johnson can “be fairly described as a Christian nationalist.” Philip Gorski, a sociologist at Yale interviewed by Edsall said of Johnson:
He says out loud what most others just feel: that America was founded as a Christian nation, that the founders were “evangelical” Christians, that the founding documents were based on “biblical principles,” that God has entrusted America with a divine mission, that he has blessed America with unique power and prosperity and that those blessings will be withdrawn if America strays off the straight and narrow path of Christian morality. And that it is every good Christian’s duty to make America Christian again.
Gorski adds that Johnson, “likes to say that the United States is a “republic” and not a “democracy.” By this, he means that the majority does not and should not get its way. That would be democracy. A republic means rule by the virtuous, not the majority. And the virtuous are of course conservative Christians like him.”
This isn’t just historically inaccurate, it’s a smear against both Johnson and America’s Judeo-Christian-influenced founding. At least Rivenbark was trying to obviously insult the GOP, the Times is clearly trying to couch the digs in a more academic veneer.
Four days later, David French writing for the Times opined that Johnson’s reference to the Bible as the source of his worldview during an interview with Sean Hannity was “less illuminating than many people think.”
He accused Johnson of “promot{ing] the same theories as some of the most corrupt and incompetent lawyers in American legal life,” referring to former President Donald Trump’s legal challenges to the 2020 Election. He cited, of all sources, disgraced former Rep. Liz Cheney who said Johnson “was acting in ways that he knew to be wrong.”
French compares Johnson unfavorably against former Vice President Mike Pence claiming, “This is precisely indicative of the political ruthlessness that’s overtaken evangelical Republicans. They are inflexible about policy positions even when the Bible is silent or vague. They are flexible about morality even when the Bible is clear. One Christian man tells the truth, and it kills his career. Another Christian man helps lead one of the most comprehensively dishonest and dangerous political and legal efforts in American history, and he gets the speaker’s gavel.”
It’s been rather clear for quite some time that the path toward media success from 2016 to the present has been dumping on former President Trump. But now it seems that has been extended to encompass Speaker Johnson as well and trashing Mr. Johnson from Shreveport has become a profitable venture.