I had a feeling we would see this, but boy, did it happen fast.
The Left absolutely CAN’T EVEN with Mike Johnson as the new speaker of the House. This is a level of unhinged that it took Donald Trump a little while to build up to, and we’re not even 48 hours into Johnson’s speakership as of this writing. (READ MORE: The Speaker We Need)
What am I talking about? Things like this:
Or this:
Late this evening House Republicans chose Rep. Mike Johnson as their fifth would-be speaker of the month.
Johnson is one of the biggest anti-choice extremists in Congress, he wants to ban all abortions without exception — to the point of criminalization with prison sentences. pic.twitter.com/vRFaMqpT82
— Rep. Don Beyer (@RepDonBeyer) October 25, 2023
It’s hilarious to see Beyer act like he’s never heard the pro-life position articulated. Yes, Don, making the killing of a pre-born human being illegal means that if you do it anyway you will face jail time.
What should be understood is that a year ago Louisiana had a bill percolating in the state legislature that would have criminalized abortion on the part of the woman procuring one — and Johnson actively opposed it as going too far. He’s actually a very conventional pro-life leader who would certainly see the law enforced against abortionists but views those having abortions as women in extreme circumstances who need counseling and options rather than cops.
Not that Beyer would know, or care to share, that context.
There’s more. For example:
Mike Johnson built a legal career in Louisiana opposing the basic civil rights and civil liberties of the LGBTQ+ community. Last fall, he introduced a national Don’t Say Gay Law. Voting for him as Speaker is despicable. https://t.co/HmUQ1AqlTl
— Mondaire Jones (@MondaireJones) October 25, 2023
That chair is not a pulpit. That chamber isn't a church. That man isn't a preacher.
This is Christian Nationalism in action from the new Speaker of the House. https://t.co/GfAKaFrGD8
— American Atheists (@AmericanAtheist) October 25, 2023
I could belabor this, but you get the gist of it.
For me, the most entertaining of these came back home in Louisiana, where Katie Bernhardt, the AWFL (affluent white female leftist) who runs the state Democrat Party, put this out…
Louisiana Democratic Party Chair’s Statement on the election of Mike Johnson as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives ⬇️ #LaGov #LaLege #SpeakerOfTheHouseVote pic.twitter.com/uimsAMvjOj
— Louisiana Democrats (@LaDemos) October 25, 2023
…and was immediately ratioed — not by the conservatives, but by her own party.
Because Mike Johnson was unopposed last year. The Democrats didn’t even run anybody against him. And their voters are furious at Bernhardt for failing even to make the race before then declaring him a “Threat to Democracy.”
He’s going to drive these people absolutely nuts. But the thing is, nothing they’re going to say about Johnson — election denier, anti-abortion terrorist, radical homophobe, “Christian nationalist” — is much different from what they said about Kevin McCarthy. The difference is that Mike Johnson doesn’t care what the Left says about him, and the Republican Party is going to learn a very good lesson from him if they’re smart enough to absorb it.
Namely, that you don’t have to accept their premises and their insults.
There is evidence that has begun to sink in. Here’s something else from Johnson’s first day as speaker the Left can’t handle:
Looks like my colleague @rachelvscott hit a nerve. Well done.
The surest sign that you have asked the right question is when the powerful congressman you asked it of—and his buddies—try to shut you down and shut you up.
It’s a perfectly legitimate question. Why won’t he answer? https://t.co/nu6sMFxhV6
— Terry Moran ???????? (@TerryMoran) October 25, 2023
The unhinged harpy Rachel Scott didn’t hit a nerve, she asked a stupid, insulting question and was immediately told to shut up.
What happens when Joe Biden is asked a question he doesn’t like? Exactly.
And besides, these people deserve every iota of what’s coming, because…
1. They Brought This on Themselves
I’m lumping Democrat activists, legacy corporate media drones, and the servile members of the House Democratic Caucus together here, and perhaps that’s only about 92.1 percent fair. Of course, we know that the media drones and the keyboard warriors on Xwitter would march in exactly the same formation the House Democrats did when the vote to dump Kevin McCarthy came not quite four weeks ago.
And what did they do? They ALL voted to get rid of McCarthy. Every last one of them voted to vacate the chair after Matt Gaetz made that motion.
Snipe all you want at the eight Republicans who wanted to get rid of McCarthy. By themselves they had no power whatsoever to do that. It took Democrats to remove McCarthy and plunge the House into abject chaos for more than three weeks; let’s not forget that.
And here’s the thing about chaos — nobody really knows what the outcome of chaos will be. That’s why it’s chaos. Uncertainty rules the day.
So if you get rid of Kevin McCarthy, who lets himself get maneuvered into shutdown politics and can’t act because he doesn’t have the faith of his caucus, and as such is a weak leader, the chances aren’t so bad that you really might not be so happy about who ultimately succeeds him.
That could have been Steve Scalise, who I contend would have been a much stronger speaker than McCarthy. But Scalise has been around for a while in the GOP leadership and has a good bit of Washington uniparty rust on him, or at least that was the most prominent criticism of him on the right. Or it could have been Jim Jordan, who would have been a real nightmare for the Democrats. Or it could have been Tom Emmer, who’s awfully close to being a Democrat compared even to McCarthy.
Instead they got as full spectrum a conservative as there is, and a man less than eight years into the job. Mike Johnson isn’t a Washington man at all — he’s the very essence of flyover-territory Middle America and somebody who actually cares what the Left has done to the culture, politics, and economics of the country.
Attacking Mike Johnson is going to come off a whole lot like attacking regular folks — and by the way, the regular folks hate the Left with a white-hot passion. They just haven’t had very good receptacles for that political ardor, especially when it was Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell they had to vote for in order to express it.
We’ll see how this turns out, but the bet here is you’ll be getting a lot different presentation and a lot more of relatable, soulful Republican Party in advance of 2024. And if you do, and that results in big wins, then a lot of Democrats are going to find themselves as castaways along the inhospitable shores of FAFO Island.
2. The Rehabilitation of Matt Gaetz
I won’t belabor this too much, but there are people out in the world who are going to have to give Gaetz a little more of his due than they’ve parted with to date.
Because if Matt Gaetz doesn’t strike at the king and kill him, as the old saying goes, you don’t get an opportunity to start fresh with new House leadership.
It’s gratuitous to trash McCarthy at this point, though if Gaetz is correct it was McCarthy’s behind-the-scenes machinations that scuttled the bids of Scalise and Jordan to be speaker and caused all of the havoc over the past three weeks, and if that’s true then Kevin McCarthy’s problems are exactly nobody else’s now.
But what’s true is that Kevin McCarthy, for all the work he put into the cause of the House GOP over the years, was and is a total political mediocrity. He occupied space far more than he won for the cause. I’ve likened him to the mediocre coach of your favorite team who wins no more than he loses, and the fans tear each other apart over whether he ought to be fired, and honestly that has been the lot of the Republican Party off and on since 1988, with the slight exception of Newt Gingrich’s few years in the Speaker’s chair in the 1990s. McCarthy himself has been high up in the GOP leadership for more than a decade, and never in that time was he able to consistently, effectively articulate conservatism or act on its mandates.
That’s a brand of Republicanism that is dead and gone at the grassroots level, and it’s even gone at the state level in most of the red states. It really only exists in Washington, and that’s the reason the GOP underperforms so badly. The Democrat base loves uniparty politics — it showers them with swag from federal helicopters. What do Republican voters get? DEI in the military, SWAT raids on pro-life activists, political indictments, $34 trillion in debt, corporate oligopoly, the end of starter homes, and electric vehicles you spend three times as long to charge as you do to drive them.
Whether Matt Gaetz knew he was opening the door for his party to move past that by ultimately electing a conservative Speaker from Middle America isn’t even really the question. What matters is Gaetz did open that door. And even if Johnson doesn’t fulfill the expectations this column is creating, McCarthy — and that mediocre GOP brand he represented — is out.
So thanks, Matt. And if you parlay this into the Florida governorship in three years like you clearly want to do, good for you.
3. The Ghouls Are Back
Too much is going on in the world, so now it’s time to politically monetize a mass shooting:
BREAKING: White House says guns are to blame, urges new Republican Speaker (@SpeakerJohnson) to work with the Democrats to ban assault weapons following Maine mass shooting that left many people dead and many injured. pic.twitter.com/6rVM6l1S6k
— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) October 26, 2023
What’s so objectionable about this is the complete cynicism.
Everybody knows that neither Karine Jean-Pierre, Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom, or the other ghouls busily feasting on the dead bodies that maniac harvested give a red hot damn about the people of Lewiston, Maine. They didn’t give a damn about them last week, and they sure won’t give a damn about them next week.
All they want to do is take your guns away and make you helpless against them — whether it’s their clients in the criminal class, or their weaponized goons in the federal law enforcement agencies they deploy ever more aggressively against the regular Americans Mike Johnson typifies.
And none of it is a secret anymore. It isn’t a secret because they took the guns away in those big blue cities they own, and the murders multiplied. What happened in Lewiston would simply be another weekend in Chicago or Philadelphia, and that never makes Karine Jean-Pierre wax melancholy.
What they told Rachel Scott is perfectly appropriate here: shut up.
4. Reserving Judgement on Mark Meadows, But…
…this would seem to be a setback for Team Trump.
I’ve received confirmation from multiple members of Congress and Confidential Informants that this is true.
— Ryan Fournier (@RyanAFournier) October 26, 2023
Not only have I received calls from current members of Congress, I received calls from media, who know that I know about this information. I’ve received calls from former members of Congress, who have also explained the same thing to me.
This is worse than Watergate. This is…
— Ryan Fournier (@RyanAFournier) October 26, 2023
This obviously alters the perception of Meadows among lots of people who saw him as a hero, but he’s obviously going to have his own side of the story.
But the idea that the FBI had Meadows wearing a wire while he was a presidential chief of staff and that he was essentially spying on the president is so mind-blowing and so absolutely…
I’ll stop. We’re going to want to let this shake out a little before we form opinions on it. There has to be context and we’re going to need details before we can process it.
Because this could be End Of The Republic type stuff. You can’t get much hotter than this.
And what a segue into our final topic…
5. The Blacklist Is one Heck of a Binge
I haven’t watched network TV with any regularity since the last century, so while I’d heard that the Blacklist was a quality show, it never occurred to me to pick it up for scheduled viewing.
But it’s on Netflix now, and seeing as though Netflix has become more or less an HBO–style sewer of gay struggle, black struggle, and black gay struggle, I decided to give the show a shot.
After powering through the first two seasons, I feel almost like I’m watching the news.
Not exactly. Most of the stories these episodes tell are wildly implausible, but there is a bit of truth imparted in that show — namely, that we’re plagued by an elite criminal class not just in this country but worldwide, that criminal class imposes an awful lot of suffering on normal people, and our government, when it isn’t in league with the criminals, seems wholly incapable of effectively vanquishing them.
That’s perhaps a bit strong. Perhaps. But those first two seasons, which originally aired in 2013 and 2014, are even more timely now.
If you don’t know anything about this show, it’s really a vehicle for James Spader to act out his perfectly reptilian persona. He’s an uber-villain who’s in a position to be the hero of the show, though Megan Boone, a young FBI agent tasked to work with Spader, is the show’s protagonist. There is a bit of a father-daughter relationship which forms between the two, though Boone’s character steadfastly attempts to reject it as her life is destroyed by the impossibly dangerous missions that Spader’s leads on master criminals generates for her.
It’s a little formulaic and the episodes run together more than they should, but at least in the first couple of seasons there isn’t a surfeit of woke, and there are some real values and moral lessons woven into the story.
Of course, those more current on the Blacklist can offer better judgement than can I as to how things progress. But so far I’ll recommend it if for no other reason than Spader is brilliant in his portrayal of the unflappably evil Raymond Reddington.
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