Kate Cohen today in the Washington Post, with a fact- based op/ed about new MAGAt House Speaker Mike Johnson:
... In “The Flag and the Cross,” Perry’s book with Philip S. Gorski, the authors show that the higher White people rate on the Christian-nationalist scale, the more likely they are to agree with the notion of “righteous violence” — specifically that “the best way to stop bad guys with guns is to have good guys with guns.”
Those with a casual knowledge of Christian theology might have trouble squaring this pro-violence stance with Jesus’ reported instruction to “turn to them the other cheek.”
Johnson has an answer for that. “This is not someone’s personally affronting you or saying something horrible about you to turn your other cheek and forgive them,” he told that Shreveport congregation. “We’re talking about the very survival of the truth in our nation.”
He went on: “We serve the Lion of Judah, not some sort of namby-pamby little king. … ‘Our weapons are for pulling down strongholds’ — this doesn’t sound like a namby-pamby gospel.”
No. It doesn’t sound namby-pamby. It sounds like exactly the sort of ideology that might encourage rioters, who were told Christianity was under threat, to charge the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, carrying twin symbols of Jesus and guns.
“We can charge the very gates of hell and we must,” Johnson has preached...
But the Post can't bear to let this demonstration of Johnson's radicalism go without trying to normalize him at the same time with an article whose scurrilous, tendentious headline is "Democrats quickly seek to make Speaker Johnson a boogeyman". Ooooh! Bad Democrats must be exaggerating mild- mannered Mike's politics in order to make him a boogeyman!! This f*cking paper (which continues to use "Democracy Dies in Darkness" as its increasingly ironic motto) refuses to see the plain, objective truth, even as our democracy dies, not in darkness, but in shallow, clickbait journalism. Its compulsion to normalize the abnormal says as much about it as it does about those it's sanitizing.
BONUS: Thomas Zimmer does a deeper dive into another WaPo article normalizing MAGA Mike! Good read.
(Photo: Win McNamee/ Getty Images)
