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Why Did Mike Johnson Scrub 69 Podcasts From His Website?
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA), who House Republicans unanimously voted for last week, has scrubbed his personal website, apparently deleting all 69 weekly podcasts he and his wife Kelly began recording last year.
Kelly Johnson’s business website, Onward Christian Counseling, has also been scrubbed. HuffPost reports she “runs a counseling business that advocates the belief that homosexuality is comparable to bestiality and incest, according to its operating documents.” Attempts to access both websites now result in an “Error” message, although those web addresses have been archived.
Speaker Johnson has been described as a far-right Christian nationalist and Christian dominionist.
Last week, after Johnson was elected the third-most powerful official in America, Politico published a profile on “the Christian nationalist ideas that shaped House Speaker Mike Johnson.” The New York Times wrote, “The new House speaker has put his faith at the center of his political career, and aligned himself with a newer cohort of conservative Christianity that some describe as Christian nationalism.”
An MSNBC columnist last week wrote, “Mike Johnson’s Christian nationalist track record isn’t a mystery — it’s a tragedy,” and added, “The new speaker cut his teeth trying to erode the separation of church and state and abortion and LGBTQ rights as a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund.”
On Thursday, in a Daily Beast opinion piece, David Rothkopf wrote, “Here’s Why Mike Johnson Is More Dangerous Than Donald Trump.”
“In interviews he has spoken of the fact that ‘We don’t live in a democracy’ we live in a ‘Biblical republic,'” Rothkop said. “He asserts this was because the founders sought to follow a ‘biblical admonition’—which must be a reference to a different group of people than those I cited at the outset. In the same set of remarks he described democracy derisively as ‘two wolves and a lamb deciding what is for dinner.'”
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A Louisiana-based weekly, reporting on Johnson’s podcasts says the episodes are “focused primarily on politely and genially supporting the anti-civil rights and anti-human rights agenda at the heart of evangelical-infused Republican politics.”
Speaker Johnson and his wife published the 69 podcasts, “Truth Be Told with Mike and Kelly Johnson,” with individual titles including, “Who We Are and How We Should Lead (in Washington and Around the World).” Or, “How to Stand for Religious Freedom & Address the ‘Separation of Church and State,'” which he calls, “one of the most important–and most misunderstood–principles in American society today.”
Another, “Responding Biblically to ‘Pride Month’ and the Culture Wars,” reads: “As truth is now openly challenged and a deluge of huge cultural issues are hitting close to home for every American, it’s becoming more important than ever for all people of good conscience, and certainly Christians, to be able to think through the issues and respond appropriately. In this episode, Mike and Kelly discuss the impact of the explosive documentary, ‘What is a Woman?,’ how conservatives and traditionalists are finally awakening from their slumber and fighting back, and what the Bible says about our specific approach to the culture wars. They also discuss the new initiative to recognize June as ‘Fidelity Month,’ to help restore Americans’ belief in the importance of values like patriotism, religion, family, and community.”
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Huffpost’s report on Kelly Johnson’s business point to an operating agreement and adds, “Onward Christian Counseling Services is grounded in the belief that sex is offensive to God if it is not between a man and a woman married to each other. It puts being gay, bisexual or transgender in the same category as someone who has sex with animals or family members, calling all of these examples of ‘sexual immorality.'”
Meanwhile, notes for the couple’s podcast last year titled, “Biblical Responses to a Divided Nation (A Conversation with Ken Ham, CEO of Answers in Genesis),” read: “In this episode, Mike and Kelly have an important discussion with Ken Ham, the CEO and founder of the Answers in Genesis ministry, the highly-acclaimed Creation Museum, and the world-renowned Ark Encounter theme park in Kentucky. His books have sold more than 3 million copies, and his latest publication, Divided Nation: Cultures in Chaos & A Conflicted Church, explains what is happening in our society, why persecution is increasing and more and more people are rejecting the truth of Scripture, and what Christians ought to DO about it. As he reminds us, ‘it only takes one generation to lose a culture’–and we must act now before it’s too late.”
Johnson may have scrubbed his personal website, but the podcasts have not been removed from other sources including Apple Podcasts.
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A MAGA “civil war” is playing out across the right-wing ecosystem, sapping attention from the ideas that once powered the base and held GOP leaders to power. Now, the movement appears more consumed by infighting than achieving political goals.
MAGA is being drained of “its political muscle, leaving it defenseless as the Trump administration revisits policies previously opposed by the base,” according to Axios. The strength of MAGA “lies in its ability to rally influencers, politicians and activists behind a hard-charging conservative agenda.” But that “superpower is faltering amid a cascade of bitter personal feuds.”
The National Pulse’s editor-in-chief Raheem J. Kassam told Axios, “There’s no focus on anything philosophical or even ideological right now.”
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“It’s all just a cacophony of grifters tussling over audience and ego,” Kassam said. “So, corporate America gets to wield power with the admin virtually unencumbered by scrutiny from the base.”
Serving up a series of examples, Axios reported that on issues such as artificial intelligence, marijuana, Venezuela, and redistricting — all of which “would have triggered significant MAGA backlash” earlier — there has been “mostly crickets.”
Trump reportedly will loosen federal regulations on marijuana soon — an act that once would have attracted MAGA influencers to scream about “pothead culture,” Axios noted. This time, however, the news “barely made a ripple on right-wing social media.”
The “America First” president seizing a tanker loaded with Venezuelan oil and refusing to rule out boots on the ground to overthrow the Maduro regime “barely pinged on MAGA’s radar.”
MAGA influencer CJ Pearson told Axios that “the movement is wholly consumed right now on personality clashes. That is a recipe for electoral doom, and it’s unfortunate to see the unity that we saw after Charlie [Kirk]’s death dissipate so quickly.”
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Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Fulton County, Georgia, demanding records related to the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden.
Trump “has increasingly pressured his administration to find widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, despite those claims having been debunked and dismissed in dozens of cases by the courts,” The Washington Post reported.
The lawsuit calls for Fulton County to hand over to DOJ “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County.”
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Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, according to the Post. “indirectly and without evidence accused Georgia officials of ‘vote dilution'” in a statement.
“States have the statutory duty to preserve and protect their constituents from vote dilution,” Dhillon said.
“At this Department of Justice,” Dhillon added, “we will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections laws. If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will.”
Trump in a recorded telephone call told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021, “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
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Two years later, a Georgia grand jury indicted Trump on racketeering charges. The case ultimately was recently dismissed after setbacks and that Trump, having since become a sitting president, could not be indicted.
Democracy Docket, which covers voting rights, elections, and the courts, called the move “a major escalation in the Trump administration’s dangerous effort to revive President Donald Trump’s fraudulent claims that the election was stolen.”
The news site also reported that Kristin Nabers, the state director for All Voting is Local, said in a statement: “This administration’s unending obsession with the 2020 election results in Georgia uses outright lies to compensate for the fact that they lost.”
“With this terrible overstep of power, the DOJ is now weaponizing laws meant to protect voters for their political vendetta,” Nabers added.
Larry Sabato, Director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics called it “More insane nonsense.”
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Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump’s “signature” weave — where he goes off-script and off-topic — is not working for Americans when it comes to affordability.
That’s according to CBS News correspondent John Dickerson, writing at The Atlantic.
His weave was “on display” this week during a speech that the White House promoted as focused remarks on the economy, but his comments included, Dickerson noted, “the topics of tariffs, U.S. Steel, fracking, wind turbines, electric-vehicle mandates, immigration, crime, gender policies, Obamacare, the Fed, his election victories, rare-earth negotiations, a D.C. terror attack, and ‘the lips that don’t stop’ of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.”
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The problem, he noted is, “now that the engine of the U.S. economy is smoking, the American people are looking for a technician, not an improv comic.”
Trump is hitting “a wall of resentment,” according to Dickerson, who pointed to a Politico poll which, he noted, found that “nearly half of voters—including 37 percent of Trump’s own 2024 coalition—said that the cost of living is the ‘worst they can ever remember.'”
There’s more.
“Only 31 percent of U.S. adults now approve of how Trump is handling the economy, a new AP/NORC poll found, down from 40 percent in March,” he reported. “It’s the lowest economic approval that AP/NORC has registered in either of Trump’s two terms. In a recent CBS News/YouGov survey, a majority of respondents said that his policies are driving up food and grocery prices.”
During times of crisis other presidents have worked to get results:
“Franklin D. Roosevelt passed 15 major bills in 100 days. Ronald Reagan, in the teeth of double-digit unemployment, pushed for sweeping tax cuts week after week. Bill Clinton built an economic ‘war room’ before he even took office, and his team introduced what has now become a political cliché: focusing ‘like a laser beam’ on the economy. Barack Obama instituted a morning economic briefing that put the issue on par with national security. Each practiced the same principle: If you can’t solve the problem fast, at least get caught trying.”
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He say that now, Trump is trying. “Kind of.”
Despite talking about “affordability” during his Pennsylvania speech, he also knocked it.
“The president’s most focused message on affordability is that affordability concerns are a hoax. He used that word, or an equivalent, several times on Tuesday, as he has in Oval Office remarks, in a Cabinet meeting, and on social media.”
The “unavoidable truth, no matter how hard you weave,” Dickerson wrote, is that “his argument is weak because he has to overcome people’s lived experience.”
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Image via Reuters
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