Mike Johnson Just Loves Redemption! (For White Christian Nationalists Only)

Putting Johnson's swift absolution of Rep. Clay Higgins in its proper context.

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OK, let’s talk about Speaker Mike Johnson, AKA one of my top five least favorite people in America right now.

I like to call him the Father Of Lies

By now, you’ve probably heard what happened in the House of Representatives this week, just before Congress adjourned until after the election.

GOP Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana — a truly disturbed, stupid and bigoted individual with clear anger issues, a rent-a-cop with severe Little Man Syndrome who once voted for former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke — sent a violently racist tweet directed at innocent Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.

Lol. These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters... but damned if they don't feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP.

All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th.

Higgins’s tweet was disgusting, racist and delusional in every way it possibly could be. Demonizing Haitian immigrants as eating pets; threatening that they’d better leave the country by January 20, or else; hallucinating that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are the current president and vice president. Everything.

Higgins is facing censure for the tweet, which he’s since deleted but says he does not regret. I wrote yesterday at Wonkette about how that all went down — with some more background on what a dangerous sicko Higgins really is — so if you have extra time after this, go check it out.

In that post, I focused on what Speaker Mike Johnson had to say about Higgins’s tweet, how vile and dismissive he was of the truly evil words that had emerged from the gutter trash brain of Higgins, and how eager Johnson was to absolve Higgins of his sins. I want to expand on that here, because A) fuck that guy, and B) what he said gets right to the heart of what The Moral High Ground is all about.

Here is video, below that the transcript:

“Clay Higgins is a dear friend of mine and a colleague from Louisiana, and a very frank and outspoken person. He’s also a very principled man.

“I think he tweeted, I didn’t even see it, but he tweeted something today about Haitians. He was approached on the floor by colleagues who said that was offensive.

“He went to the back, I just talked to him, he said he went to the back and he prayed about it, and he regretted it, and he pulled the post down. That’s what you want a gentleman to do.

“I’m sure he probably regrets the language he used. But you know, we move forward. We believe in redemption around here.”

Christ, what an asshole.

At Wonkette I responded to Johnson saying Higgins is “a very principled man” thus: “When one character from Birth of a Nation calls another character from Birth of a Nation a ‘very principled man’ …”

In the video, you’ll hear a reporter explaining exactly what Higgins tweeted, and you’ll then hear how dismissively Johnson said “OK.” He didn’t care. I asked at Wonkette if there’s even one Republican congressman who doesn’t secretly or not-secretly agree with what Higgins said.

But the sickest part of Johnson’s response was when he assured everyone that Clay Higgins said he had prayed about it. All better! Redemption UNLOCKED! Jesus washed him clean, prest-o change-o, now let’s go to Cracker Barrel and eat fried shit!

That’s all it takes for a white Christian nationalist to be totally absolved, didn’t you know? You don’t have to take personal responsibility for anything.

Especially if you are a very principled man.

“We believe in redemption around here,” said Johnson, an off-putting fascist white Christian extremist about Higgins, another off-putting fascist white Christian extremist.

They only believe in it for themselves, of course. It’s only for their very specific type of (usually white) Republican Christian.

But as long as stories end with redemption, conservative Christians are fine with any kind of unseemliness — or things they view as unseemly. (Example: the way right-wing Christians love to parade around alleged “ex-gays,” people who claim to have changed their sexuality and become conservative heterosexual holy warriors for Jesus. Redeemed!)

The redemption stories can be really short too. Why, Clay Higgins got redeemed for his naughty tweet in like a day, even as he was still explaining out loud how much to CNN that he didn’t regret it.

As long as you say “Jesus says I’m redeemed!” you can commit any kind of atrocities, that warm the cockles of your dark, depraved hearts. Isn’t that right, Christian nationalists? (Substacker Zack Hunt wrote about this yesterday, quoting the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who called this extremely “cheap grace.” Bonhoeffer was executed by the Make Germany Great Again crowd in 1945.)

Before Moving On, Did I Mention That Fuuuuuuuuck Mike Johnson?

Snake

To be clear, Mike Johnson is one of the creepiest, smarmiest, most dangerous Christian nationalists in American public life. He is garbage.

On top of all his anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry — he’s very appalled by gay sex, and he’s really into the “ex-gay” torture shit — he believes God ordained him to become speaker of the House. He doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state, and leans on his “expertise” as a constitutional lawyer to argue against it. (Ask Liz Cheney if he’s a smart lawyer, though, or more of a complete fucking airhead.)

He’s one of those sicko weirdo fundamentalist Christians who once dated his daughter at the purity ball.

Oh, and one time, he admitted — in public! not a hint of shame in his voice! — that he and his teenage son were accountabili-buddies on a weird conservative Christian app called Covenant Eyes, which sends one of them an alert if the other one has engaged in the sinful act of looking at porn on the internet.

Humans of Earth: Don’t you want an app that sends you a text message if your dad either is or recently was masturbating? Or does that strike you as some extremely perverted shit?

I’ve described Johnson as everybody’s least favorite Sunday school teacher, but for those of you who grew up in the evangelical church, I have a more specific image for your brain. Mike Johnson is the guy who ends up chaperoning the youth group trip — the choir tour, the mission trip, the ski trip, the camping trip — who everybody hates, the one literally nobody wants as their camp counselor. He’s not one of the fun youth group leaders. No. He’s a creepy dad they ask to come along because they need one more chaperone, and he is a total fucking buzzkill, and everybody in his cabin is jealous of literally everybody else on the trip who didn’t draw the short straw and have to bunk with Mr. Bible the Porn Cop.

Oh also, lest we forget, Mike Johnson was one of the chief architects of Donald Trump’s plot to overthrow the nation’s government to overturn the election he’s too small a man to admit he lost.

That’s an extremely important detail for putting this in context. (Though again, Liz Cheney was pretty clear that he was a pretty laughably bad architect of it.)

Mike Johnson, Clay Higgins And Donald Trump: God’s Chosen Sidepieces On Earth

By pure chance — or DIVINE PROVIDENCE — I watched an excellent documentary last night called Bad Faith, which traces Christian nationalism in the United States, from its origins all the way through January 6, 2021, to the moment where we now find ourselves, facing down an election in which we will decide — perhaps for once and for all — whether we will defeat white supremacist fascist Christianity at the ballot box, or whether we will allow these charlatans to continue stealing the power they so desperately have been scheming for these last five million decades.

(That’s the trailer above. I recommend that every reader of this newsletter watch it, especially in the last few weeks before the election. It just came out this year, and is free on Amazon Prime right now.)

The film does a wonderful job of documenting the heritage of the movement whose current iteration is MAGA Christianity, with its god-king figurehead of Donald Trump, and all the dominionist Christian levers of power, behind the scenes and out in the open, working together to seize America and destroy our democracy from within.

Mike Johnson, Clay Higgins and all their pals are heirs to and current actors in a Christian nationalist movement that was the movement of slaveowners, not abolitionists. Of the Ku Klux Klan, and Birth Of A Nation. Of Jim Crow. Of hating immigrants early and often, especially dark-skinned people. Of demonizing literally anyone who looks different or believes different or loves different.

It’s the historically protestant evangelical movement that was not founded in opposition to abortion — nah, that’s a myth, they didn’t co-opt that from Catholics until it was politically convenient. (Also once they allowed themselves to join forces with conservative Catholics for Christian supremacist expediency.) It was founded in response to desegregation.

(If you went to a Christian private school in the South, you should check to see when it was founded. If it was in the late 1950s, 1960s or early 1970s, ta-da! You may have gone to a segregation academy — whether it was officially a segregation academy, or one of those that just so happened to achieve the exact goals set out by segregationists.)

It’s the movement of Donald Trump’s “fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville. Remember that one of those sides was Nazis and Confederate statue humpers. (And no, it has not been “debunked” that Trump said that, fuck off.)

It’s the movement of the fascist Christian Supreme Court — which the Christian nationalists have been fighting and organizing around for decades — that enshrines white supremacy in voting and confiscates people’s rights to their very bodily autonomy.

It’s the movement of Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election, and of every Republican action in the country that seeks to prevent all eligible Americans from voting, and to discredit American elections as inherently rigged. (The film highlights the famous quote from dead Christian nationalist founding father Paul Weyrich, who said in 1980, “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. ... As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”)

It’s the movement of the Great Replacement Conspiracy theory, the one that says Democrats (particularly Jewish Democrats) are importing minority voters to replace traditional white Americans. It started on the extreme fringes, but then Tucker Carlson and many others on the right helped mainstream it, and now it’s just as common to see it on Fox News, in a Trump speech or in a tweet from Elon Musk as it is to see it in a white supremacist mass shooter’s manifesto.

It’s a movement that currently has a real hard-on for Holocaust denial. (Tucker helping again!)

This movement is led by truly the most evil members of our society, who are nonetheless 100 percent certain they have the Moral High Ground — just like this newsletter has been saying! — and that God chose them to exercise dominion over the rest of us, whether we consent to it or not. Evil sure does love convincing people it’s good, doesn’t it? (Also that they’re either the heroes or the aggrieved victims of every story, and never the villain.)

In the film, the legendary Dr. William Barber from the Poor People’s Campaign states that “Racism isn’t just about hatred of Black people. It is really fundamentally about hatred of democracy.” So it is now, so has it ever been.

So no, Clay Higgins doesn’t have to show remorse or repentance for being a white supremacist rent-a-cop and directly threatening vulnerable Haitian immigrants on Twitter. He’s in Trump’s and Mike Johnson’s white supremacist Christian nationalist tribe, therefore he’s redeemed by default, in the name of Jesus, with whom not one of these people shares a single thing in common.

By the way, Mike Johnson also said this week that if he’s in power on January 6, 2025, he’ll follow the Constitution to certify the 2024 election if he believes it was conducted freely and fairly.

By now we all should understand what “freely and fairly” means to a man like Johnson. It means that the white supremacist Christian nationalist man wins. That’s it. No other exercise of democracy is legitimate to these foul souls.

We have to beat the shit out of these people at the ballot box on November 5, and after that we have to do it for as many elections after that as it takes, to deny them every glimmer of hope of seizing power in this country ever again.

The survival of our democracy depends on it.

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-Evan