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Item one: How do the Republicans do it?

In one way, you have to be impressed by the Republicans. They keep going further and further right, completely undeterred. They keep somehow finding these people. And they keep elevating them. And now, MAGA Mike Johnson—a hard-core theocrat who is, in terms of his obviously deeply held philosophical beliefs, to Jim Jordan’s right, and indeed perhaps well to Jim Jordan’s right—is two heartbeats away from the presidency, after having been elected House speaker.

No one except Capitol Hill reporters and people who are such serious politics junkies that they need help had heard of Johnson until this week. I sure hadn’t. There are 221 Republicans in the House of Representatives right now. I’m guessing I could name 80 of them. That leaves around 140 of them who are totally unknown to me, and it’s my job to follow this stuff. Clearly, a larger number than that is completely unknown to America beyond their own districts.

In fact, I’m not sure even Hill reporters knew much about Johnson before this week. Consider how Punchbowl News—a Beltway insider operation if ever there was one—described Johnson to its subscription-only readers Wednesday morning:

In case you haven’t Googled him yet, Johnson is a 51-year-old, fourth-term member of the House. He’s the House Republican Conference vice chair. He’s got a pair of degrees from Louisiana State University and has seats on the Judiciary and Armed Services committees. His district, which hugs the western part of the state, is as red as they come. It’s also home to some big military facilities, including Barksdale Air Force Base and Fort Johnson.

Johnson could be the first former chair of the Republican Study Committee to become speaker.

The Louisiana Republican is the son of a Shreveport firefighter badly injured and disabled on the job. The now congressman worked as a college professor, conservative talk radio host and columnist. But it was his roles on behalf of several religious groups—as an attorney and spokesperson—that launched his political career. Johnson is married with four children. If he’s elected, Johnson will enter the speakership as a man with exceedingly modest means. Johnson has at least $280,000 in debt and no disclosed assets.

All of that could have been lifted from the guy’s Wikipedia page.

And it tells us nothing useful about who he actually is, politically. It makes him sound pretty bland and anodyne. Someone like Johnson benefits from this lack of knowledge and curiosity about the backbenchers. If you’re not out there saying outrageous things on a weekly basis like Lauren Boebert or Matt Gaetz, there’s some kind of assumption that you must be a normie.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Almost none of them are normies. Here’s a thought experiment. I’m just going to choose three GOP backbenchers at random by going to House.gov and clicking around. And we’ll learn together about them.

I expect I could go on and on. The point I’m making here is that this is who the anonymous members of the House GOP conference are. They may toil in relative anonymity, but that doesn’t mean they’re very different from Marjorie Taylor Greene. They’re mostly like her, just with less of a talent for getting attention.

This circles us back to Johnson. Over these last two days, we have been learning things, and they paint an unnerving picture. Just watch the short clip in this tweet and follow the logic of these words: “You remember in the late ’60s we invented things, like no-fault divorce laws. We invented the sexual revolution. We invented radical feminism. We invented legalized abortion in 1973, where the state, the government, sanctions the killing of the unborn. I mean, we know that we’re living in a completely amoral society. And so people say, ‘How can a young person go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates?’ Because we’ve taught a whole generation, a couple generations now of Americans, that there is no right and wrong.”

He also blamed abortion for the shortfall in the Social Security Trust Fund. Again, follow the logic: “Roe v. Wade gave constitutional cover to the elective killing of unborn children in America. You think about the implications of that on the economy; we’re all struggling here to cover the bases of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and all the rest. If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy, we wouldn’t be going upside down and toppling over like this.”

Johnson is, interestingly, one of just three American politicians to sit on the advisory board of a British organization called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, or ARC, which claims to be striking blows in support of “our moral, cultural, economic and spiritual foundations to imagine a future where empowered citizens take responsibility and work together to bring flourishing and prosperity to their homes, communities, and beyond.” The other U.S. pols on the board are far-right Utah Senator Mike Lee and Texas Representative Dan Crenshaw. As luck would have it, ARC is hosting a huge event next week at the O2 arena, sort of London’s equivalent of Madison Square Garden, starring, wait for it, Jordan Peterson. ARC was co-founded by Baroness Philippa Stroud, the former CEO of the Legatum Institute, which was the leading pro-Brexit think tank in Britain.

It tells me something about Johnson that, of all the hard-right politicians in the United States from which ARC had to choose, it selected Johnson (along with Lee and Crenshaw) as one who best represents its values. What it suggests is that Johnson, though unknown to you and me, has developed a profile over the years in right-wing circles worldwide that share his view that we inhabit “a completely amoral society.”

And this is what gave birth to the headline on this column. Jim Jordan is a hard-right warrior, a front-line infantryman eager to storm the Omaha Beach of the culture wars. Nothing about him screams theocrat. Johnson, however, is exactly that. He may not be speaker long enough to try to impose his eighteenth-century views on America in any meaningful way, but let’s make no mistake about who he is and how he—and so many other rank-and-file Republican members of the House—can carry around hard-right and anti-democratic views and never, ever be scrutinized for them.

Item two: Guns, guns, guns

Here we go again. Johnson was among the Republicans who chimed in this week to offer their prayers for the people of Lewiston, Maine.

I suppose they are being sincere. These people genuinely believe in the power of prayer. That’s their right. But the mass shootings continue, so only two conclusions are possible here. One, that Republicans aren’t really sincere in their statements, and they do not in fact pray regularly for victims of mass shootings. Two, that prayer doesn’t seem to be working.

I suspect number one is probably true in most cases, but I know that number two is true. Prayer will not stop or decrease mass shootings. Reasonable gun laws will decrease (probably not stop, but at least decrease) mass shootings. That’s it. And there’s one big impediment to reasonable gun laws. As TNR’s Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling pointed out this week, the National Rifle Association has spent $37 million in the last decade on lobbying. That’s what’s going on here, nothing more.

This week’s quiz: Yabba dabba doo! Let’s stay with cartoons and delve into another childhood favorite of mine, The Flintstones. You may roll your eyes if you wish, but I always thought the premise—in that era of unstoppable faith in progress and the future, to go back in time and turn middle-class America into a Stone Age milieu where evolution had decided that people only needed three fingers and you had to brake your car with your feet—was kind of ingenious. In fact, I still think that.

And by the way, who played Thalia Menninger on Dobie Gillis? She was also name-checked as a visiting celeb in a Flintstones episode, but she didn’t make the cut above. Answers next week. Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com.

—Michael Tomasky, editor

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