‘Mike Johnson’s Bad Bones’
An excerpt from my Byline Supplement investigation into the creepy world of Mike Johnson, originally published March 25, 2024
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Author’s note: I originally published this excerpt from my Byline Supplement report on March 25, 2024. I felt the need to bump it back up today for new and veteran subscribers as Johnson’s mostly forgotten backstory offers valuable context to this increasingly dangerous man.—hsc
On March 25, 2024, reporting in Bette Dangerous, I wrote:
There have been a few times in recent years when the work I do — often in the dead of night — causes a chill in my bones.
The first time was when I was threading the parallel operations between Robert Mercer and Vladimir Putin.
The second time was when I was writing up my first interview with Dave Troy — ‘The Network’ — for Byline Times. I could see the direct lines between the religious extremists/fossil fuel fascists dominating the GOP and the Kremlin.
The third time was my first interview with Anne Nelson — End Game — which did a deep dive on the shadowy dark money group, the Council for National Policy, which revealed not only a threat to democracy but also earth itself.
“There was never a day when the majority of Germans woke up and voted for Hitler,” said Nelson, in that interview. “It didn’t happen. The fault lines in their system were manipulated and exploited by bad actors. And then they ended up with a dictatorship. And I don’t want to see that happen here.”
I recall calling my daughter to brace her for what was coming — an all out war on gay rights.
I have written dozens of reports on the cynical fake culture wars to push people away from humanity and into fear and loathing.
But it was in the wee hours Friday morning, as I was writing my investigation into the dark and twisted world of Mike Johnson, that the coldest chill came over me.
Johnson is a cynical CNP production, with funding from Koch and Mercer and the Russians — the network — likely their greatest achievement to date.
For very little money, they got a weapon of mass democratic destruction in one man.
I have been looking beyond the mild-mannered exterior of the US Speaker of the House to find connections to election denialism, the extremist of religious extremism — including depriving women of health care rights and depriving all gay rights — Russian and US oligarchs, violent rhetoric, and myriad sexual assaulters.
Below is an excerpt from my report on Johnson, which ran this morning in Byline Supplement.
As always I ask if you can support Byline with a subscription, it helps a small global team of investigative reporters. If you are unable to do so at this time and wish to read the report, I am authorized by Byline editors to send the report on request. Please send a request to bettedangerous/gmail.
Mike Johnson’s Bad Bones
Heidi Siegmund Cuda looks beyond the mild-mannered exterior of US Speaker of the House to find connections to religious extremism, Russian oligarchs, violent rhetoric, and sexual assaulters
March 25, 2024
“The kingdom of God allows for aggression, and there’s a time to every purpose under heaven. From the time of John the Baptist until today, the kingdom of God has been advancing by forceful men and forceful men take hold of it, that’s what the New Testament says.”—Mike Johnson
In watching archival videos of Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican second in line for the presidency, I notice some curious tics. Although a seasoned lawyer with a polished delivery, he sits tightly hunched in his chair, toes repeatedly pointing skyward, heels remaining on the ground. He tilts his head coyly, side to side, while smoothly creating a house of mirrors — homophobes as victims, Christians as the persecuted. His mannerisms give the appearance of a child who really doesn’t want to be there, like a boy in church when the sermon drags on. He seems forced to perform, but for whom?
The video is from 3 February 2015, before the collective cash from billionaire Trump backer and democratic wrecking ball Robert Mercer and a trio of connected Russian oligarchs aimed to secure him a seat on Congress. By then, he’d cut his teeth as the go-to lawyer for defending religious extremism, and aiming to criminalize being gay. He was closely tied to two Council for National Policy presidents — Tony Perkins, an avid homophobe, and Paul Pressler, trailed by four decades of child sexual assault allegations and a $450,000 settlement in 2023.
Watching and listening to Johnson, pre-Speaker, I am reminded of Jeff Sharlet’s The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. He goes to the places we rarely see, to try to document and record the Trumpocene, to understand the coordinated attacks on human rights and the simmering violence. And wherever he goes , there are traces of Mike Johnson’s handiwork.
Despite Johnson’s coy boy head tilts, he is a deepening threat to America and our allies. Currently, he is withholding aid to Ukraine in fealty to Trump, while attacking Biden on X/Twitter each day by shitposting of immigrant boogeymen. He attempted Constitutional sleight-of-hand to prevent the certification of the 2020 election — and when that failed, he voted against certification, thus attempting to deny Americans their rightful vote.
‘The Warrior Christ Tradition’
While watching a video of him from a decade ago, I feel like I have entered an alternate reality. The subject matter of the 2015 video is a lawsuit against the state of Kentucky over a creationist theme park, initially denied a tax rebate due to discriminatory hiring practices. The museum boasts a giant Noah’s ark and promotes biblical mythology as real history, while ensuring guests are reminded that a vengeful God will damn all sinners to eternal hell.
“God will judge this wicked world once again, but this time it will be by fire … God always keeps His promises – judgment will come,” notes the Ark Encounter website. Unrepentant sinners will be treated to “everlasting, conscious punishment in the lake of fire.”
Employees must abide by a 46-point faith statement, ensuring anti-gay propaganda is adhered to.
Bad Bones
At the Ark Encounter, as part of creationist beliefs, small dinosaurs comprised of fake bones were added to the ark — imagining that people and dinosaurs lived together at the same time. According to Answers in Genesis, the fundamentalist organization that created Ark Encounter, the museum’s aim is to “expose the bankruptcy of evolutionary ideas.”
And just when I feel I’m descending into flat earther hell, I’m rescued by a comment from a sane person on X/ Twitter:
“The Ark Encounter in Kentucky is absolutely incredible because it’s hard to believe someone would make something so stupid,” wrote an unenchanted visitor.
This, in a nutshell, is Mike Johnson’s very creepy world.
In an interview on 9 September 2015, as the chief counsel for Freedom Guard — a legal firm that offered pro bono services to homophobes — Johnson breezily defended a county clerk from Kentucky who was jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay nuptials. Again, he deftly creates an upside-down world where the clerk is the victim — not those whose rights she is denying.
In the interview, he says “the kingdom of God allows for aggression… the kingdom of God has been advancing by forceful men and forceful men take hold of it.”
Again, I hear echoes of Sharlet’s Undertow. He calls it the “warrior Christ tradition.”
“On January 6, 2021, we enter the age of martyrs with the death of Ashli Babbitt, and that centrality of martyrdom, what the Nazis called ‘blood witnesses.’ And that unleashes a whole new level of violence,” Sharlet said. “And we're seeing it in Trump's rhetoric, which has grown actually more violent. And I don't want to diminish how violent it was all along.”
As Trump now talks of ‘bloodbaths’ and mild-mannered Johnson has gone on record saying the Bible applauds violence, I think about the Church of Glad Tidings in Yuba City, California, where there are no crosses, where former Trump national security advisor Mike Flynn was gifted an AR-15 and said, “Maybe I’ll find someone in Washington, DC.”
“They've decided that the cross is weak tea,” said Sharlet in an interview. “It's too wimpy. Instead, you have a pulpit made of swords, this is war time theology, right? What's dropping out in these churches is Jesus. They don't talk about Jesus too much. There is a warrior Christ tradition that they can tap into and right now, we see the surge also in a very poisonous masculinity.”
So is mild-mannered Mike a wolf in sheep’s clothing, delivering us to evil in the form of a poisonous toxic masculinity?
“The kingdom of God allows for aggression… the kingdom of God has been advancing by forceful men and forceful men take hold.”
And if so, how did he become the anointed wolf?
Who could forget how he spoke of himself in third person on Fox News, after being named Speaker:
“What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun, and I said, ‘Go pick a Bible off your shelf, and read it. That’s my worldview.’”
In the old videos I watch of him, he has called himself a Constitutional lawyer so what about this:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”—First Amendment, US Constitution
Putting a religious zealot in such a powerful position is an authoritarian shock event, said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of Strongmen — Mussolini to the Present.
“What a triumph for fanatics everywhere to have this person as House Speaker”, she tweeted when the news first broke.
“The enemies of the United States couldn’t have wanted anything more than Mike Johnson and Donald Trump,” said Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works, in our recent Q & A.
“It’s astounding. Ukraine is fighting against a clearly fascist empire that Mike Johnson is just completely needlessly kowtowing to and threatening to hand them the country of Ukraine. Ukrainian soldiers are willing to fight and die en masse to fight Russia, they just need weapons. They’re not asking for anyone to fight for them.
“They’ve been fighting for two years. But Mike Johnson single-handedly might be responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people — for the complete destruction of Ukrainian culture and language — torture camps, mass rape — we know what Russia does when it invades a city, when it attacks a city. You want to see that happen to Kyiv?”
In a recent profile in the New Yorker, we learn Johnson was a theater kid, and on Thursday it served him well, as he did performative politics, saying he’s going to invite Israel’s ‘Trump’ — Benjamin Netanyahu — to Congress.
Much has been written about the 52-year-old’s childhood — born in Shreveport, Louisiana, the oldest of four kids to young parents who later divorced after his firefighter father was injured on the job.
Much has been written about his seemingly picture perfect family life, but little has been written about what really matters to the current state of America, his funders, his controversial mentors, his extreme extremism, and his curious unadopted ‘son’.
Like Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, who had a hidden ‘son’ named Nestor, Johnson said he met a teenage boy while volunteering at Young Life ministries in Louisiana and although the age and dates have fluctuated in the storytelling, the child — now 40 — came to live with Johnson and his wife, who have four children.
Young Life is the 11th largest ministry in the US, catering to middle school and high school aged kids. At least ten former members of the teen mega ministry said they were subjected to sexual offenses, with at least one out-of-court settlement. Young Life also bans gay people from serving as volunteers or staff members, except in select cases if they claim to be “celibate.”
Johnson’s unadopted ‘son’ has been in and out of trouble with the law, but he told the Daily Mail he is grateful for the Johnsons.
Johnson’s wife Kelly reportedly runs a counseling service that “compares being gay to bestiality and incest”.
According to a report in the Huffington Post:
”The wife of newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) runs a counseling business that advocates the belief that homosexuality is comparable to bestiality and incest, according to its operating documents.
“Johnson and his wife, Kelly, have long intertwined their political and business lives: They became a known entity in the late 1990s when they went on national television as the face of Louisiana’s new marriage covenant law.”
Johnson also gave an interview where he shared the news that he and his 17-year-old son monitor each other’s porn intake using a software called Covenant Eyes that scans their devices and gives a weekly report to the “accountability partner”.
The Sex Abusers
Along with him reportedly not having a bank account, another curiously buried fact about Johnson is that he was dean of a law school that never opened which was named after a Texas judge who just paid out $450,000 in a settlement over sexual assault charges.
Recruited by former Council for National Policy mentor, Tony Perkins, Johnson was dean of the Judge Paul Pressler School of Law — a school that never opened. Pressler, an influential conservative activist and former Texas judge, settled a high-profile lawsuit three months ago that accused him of sexual abuse.
According to the Texas Tribune:
“The Southern Baptist Convention and others have reached a confidential settlement in a high-profile lawsuit that accused a former leader of sexual assault, ending a six-year legal drama that helped prompt a broader reckoning over child sexual abuse in evangelical churches, expanded victims’ rights in Texas and showed that a prominent conservative activist and Texas House candidate repeatedly downplayed abuse allegations.
“In 2017, Duane Rollins filed the lawsuit accusing Paul Pressler, a longtime Southern Baptist figure and former Texas judge, of decades of rape beginning when Rollins was a 14-year-old member of Pressler’s church youth group in Houston.”
In court documents, Rollins documented years of drug and alcohol addiction that he said stemmed from the childhood sexual assaults he said he suffered from Pressler, who was fired from his own youth ministry in 1978 for sex abuse claims.
Seven more men have come forward accusing Pressler, now 93, of sex offenses.
A lawyer of the Southern Baptist Convention said Pressler is a “monster” and a “dangerous predator” who used his “power and false piety” to sexually abuse young boys. He called it the “actions of the devil”.
Although the case occurred after the law school failed, there are decades of eyewitness accounts of Pressler’s public impropriety with young men — in hot tubs, country clubs, with law clerks.
Another sex offender is in Johnson’s orbit — Donald Trump …
The Russians
In 2018, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) found a Russian-owned firm gave $66,000 in improper contributions to US Senators and US Reps — among them, Mike Johnson.
The FEC found that American Ethane was majority owned by three Russian nationals, among them Konstantin Nikolaev. Nikolaev also owns a munitions factory making ammunition being used in Russia’s genocidal war in Ukraine. He also funded Russian spy Maria Butina, who infiltrated the National Rifle Association (NRA) and had affairs with Republican operatives. Nikolaev’s son volunteered for Trump’s 2016 campaign. The two other partners operated Russian media outlets.
After Johnson was named Speaker, the NRA posted an ad Johnson did for the gun lobbying group.
American Ethane also had a secret investment by a former Putin advisor, Alexander Voloshin and an original investor was Roman Abramovich, among the richest oligarchs.
Oddly, the American CEO of the company, who is married to a Russian woman, was represented by lawyer Alex van der Zwann, the first criminal convicted in the Mueller investigation, when he did the deal with Abramovich.
So what does it matter if Johnson was among the politicians who took and returned money from the Russians? It’s about Russia’s malign influence on US elections, according to the FEC. This is just one example where the FEC caught the activity.
It’s worth noting that Johnson’s original funding benefactor through the Warrior PAC in 2016 was Robert Mercer, who also funded such weapons of democratic destruction as Trump, Cambridge Analytica, Breitbart, and Parlor.
So when I asked early on who was Johnson performing for?
It could be any or all of the above. Certainly, his facial responses during President Biden’s recent State of the Union address was performative theater.
I reached out to Johnson for comment on all of this and have not gotten a response.
I think we should demand answers to all of it — for example, has he denounced Russia’s malign influence; Youth Life ministries alleged sex offense culture; Paul Pressler’s documented history of child sex abuse charges; the 2020 election lie; discrimination of LGBTQ+ people in America? And vitally important, is he still a climate science denier?
I believe we need a Congressional hearing into Speaker Johnson’s past. He is second in line to run America and the extremism I just laid out does not represent the American majority.
Again, I am haunted by the Undertow, the extremism in the shadows.
As Jeff Sharlet told me: “The extremists are capturing courts and state legislatures. The other side is still catching up to the danger it’s in.”
The slow civil war is quickening.
For those who believe in biblical signs, the Ark Encounter was besieged by heavy rains. The Kentucky ark demanded a million dollar bailout from its insurance companies after the rains damaged their property. They asked for punitive damages, because theirs is a wrathful God.
Or maybe it’s climate change, another subject Speaker Johnson is in denial about.—Heidi Siegmund Cuda in Byline Supplement, March 25, 2024
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This is not a man who represents the American people. He is a dangerous extremist, roll playing a mild-mannered politician.
Every alarm bell is ringing. I just hope we hear it in time.
I will leave you with some sound advice from Dean Obeidallah, who wrote this morning about MAGA Taylor Greene’s latest maneuver to oust Johnson:
“Don’t catch a falling knife… My advice to Democrats is: Don’t catch a falling Republican. Instead, hope the GOP keeps plummeting in value to the point of bankruptcy. (After all, the GOP Is already morally bankrupt.)”—Dean Obeidallah
These are not Christians. These are un-Christians. They are dangerous, and an un-Christian man such as Mike Johnson should not be this close to the presidency.—Heidi Siegmund Cuda for Bette Dangerous, March 25, 2024
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