"This is a Dark Time in America"

The Rise of Christian Fascist "MAGA Mike" Johnson is More Proof

Congratulations, “land of liberty,” you just put a noxious Christian Fascist two heartbeats away from the most dangerous office on Earth – the United States imperial presidency.

So who is Mike Johnson, the new Speaker of the US House of Representatives? He is an evangelical Republi-Nazi from Louisiana who opposes abortion and homosexuality, which he has called a perversion and likened to bestiality. He supports a national abortion ban. He and his pastor wife have recorded podcasts in which they attack the alleged globalist and, you know, liberal-secular-humanist-Marxist-Communist plot to destroy white western civilization.

In his Speakership acceptance speech, this cold blooded messianic Amerikaner cited  “scripture and the Bible,” declaring that “God has allowed us to be brought here to this specific moment and time.” Johnson praised the US House of Representatives’ 1962 decision to stamp the words “In God We Trust” above its chamber. “This motto,” Johnson said, “was placed here as a rebuke of the Cold War-era philosophy of the Soviet Union. That was Marxism and Communism, which begins with the premise there is no God.”

This uber-Caucasian neo-Redeemer played a significant neofascist role in the US House during the period leading up to the January 6 putsch attempt.  The long rolling right-wing coup campaign that culminated in the infamous Capitol Riot was based on the Big Hitlerian Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from the fascist leader Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump. Johnson was a leading proponent of this Leviathan Lie. Herr Johnson led a ridiculous lawsuit against the six “battleground” states won by Joe Biden, seeking Supreme Court approval for a scheme to let those states’ overturn their popular presidential votes. Just hours after Trump’s frothing mob trashed the US Capitol, the Deep South MAGA representative Johnson drafted a measure to justify Republi-fascist House members’ voting not to certify Biden’s win. Two thirds of the House Republican caucus backed this sickening resolution.

Having removed the insufficiently fascistic Kevin McCarthy (Rf-CA) from the House Speakership three weeks ago, the leading Florida Republi-Nazi Matt Gaetz (Rf-FL) boasted about Johnson’s ascendancy on the podcast of Trump’s former fascist advisor Steve Bannon. “If you don’t think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this [fascist] movement and where the power in the Republican Party truly lies, then you’re not paying attention.” Gaetz said.

During “MAGA Mike’s” media introduction three nights ago, ABC reporter Rachel Scott observed that Johnson had “helped lead the effort to overturn the 2020 election results.” As Ms. Scott tried to ask Johnson if he stood by his past coup campaigning, fellow Republi-fascist representatives surrounding him booed the reporter. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (Rf-LA) laughed out loud and Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (Rf-NC) yelled, “Shut up! Shut up!” Johnson blew the query off, saying “next question.”

Johnson takes up the House gavel with the full support of Gaetz et al.’s cult leader Trump, who is far and away their party’s leading 2024 presidential candidate, notwithstanding his 91 felony indictments.

Johnson had a predictably pathetic response to a large-scale mass shooting that killed 18 people in Maine two nights ago.  He offered prayer. He told reporters that the massacre was a “horrific tragedy” but did not take questions. “This is a dark time in America. We have a lot of problems,”  “MAGA Mike” Johnson said. “and we are hopeful and prayerful,” Johnson said. “Prayer is appropriate at a time like this, that this senseless violence can stop.”

Like the rest of his Republi-fascist crew, Johnson is a steadfast opponent of elementary gun control measures, even of basic background check and “red flag” laws of the kind that might have kept a lethal assault weapon out of the hands of the maniac who just went on a killing spree in Lewiston, Maine. It was the 565^th mass shooting to take place in the US so far this year, for f*#ks’ sake.  That is of course sheer insanity resulting precisely and obviously from the fact that the country is crawling with guns: 120-plus for 100 Americans (the next highest ratio in the world is 56 for every 100 in Yemen).

The Republi-fascist Party is heavily invested in the senseless weaponization of (not-so) civil society. The endless carnage feeds their lust for a massive domestic militarized police state and fuels their narrative about the “radical Lef Democrats” having let crime run rampant.  The disproportionate possession of guns by their fascist base is aligned with their embrace of political violence and with the not-so hidden political eliminationism and genocidal sentiments. The normalization of mass death that the gun violence helps generate is nicely matched to their genocidal fantasies and ambitions. They are very much down with the nation being saturated by guns and especially by military-stye weapons of war like the AR-15, which Trump wanted the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Three Percenters to be allowed to bring with them to January 6.

Hence MAGA Mike’s standard far-right, National (fascist) Rifle Association-approved response to the Amerikan Armed Madhouse’s 565^th mass shooting in 2023: prayers against evil, with no reference to the fact that evil exists all over the world but is uniquely equipped with millions of assault rifles in the hands of everyday citizens (including no small number of murderous sociopaths) only in the fascisizing outdoor asylum that is the US today.

“This is a dark time in America.” No shit!  The fascists have the US Supreme Court. They have the US House. They control more than 20 absurdly empowered US states (“states’ rights” are a leading weapon of the nation’s most reactionary forces going back to the nation’s founding). They have a near lock on the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, which has a good chance of success under the archaic and ridiculous right-tilted Electoral College system. They have turned one of the nation’s two viable political parties into an abject authoritarian instrument of fascistic governance, now with an ambitious and detailed plan for the full Christian white nationalist makeover of the US political superstructure.

Don’t take it just from a revolutionary Marxist like me. Listen to Republicans like Stuart Stevens, a former senior Republican campaign operative who did media work for George W Bush’s White House bids and helped run Mitt Romney’s Republican nomination in 2012. Stevens’ new book The Conspiracy to End America argues that “Trump understood the true nature of the Republican party better than those who were the party’s leaders” in 2015 and 2016: “Hate was creating a surge of appeal.” By Stevens’ account, the late Weimar Republic that birthed the Nazi Third Reich and the contemporary USA share numerous parallels. As in Germany nine decades ago, “democracy” can easily become dispensable, especially if enough big capitalists (the “donor class” in US political parlance these days) decide to hop aboard the authoritarian train.

Speaking of Weimar, what do the capitalist-imperialist Democrats, the Republi-fascists’ enablers and collaborators, have to say about MAGA Mike Johnson’s ascendency? They are making the usual noises of discomfort and looking forward to using his terrible record to “take back the House” at the box in 2024-25, but they are not exactly going hard with outrage.  That’s because Johnson has been making some conciliatory gestures towards the bipartisan neoliberal and imperialist agenda they share the Republicans. As the World Socialist Website reports:

“[Johnson]  offered to establish a bipartisan commission on the federal debt, calling it ‘the greatest threat to our national security,’ now passing $33.6 trillion…The commission was initially proposed by the Democrats during the debt ceiling crisis earlier this year…Most importantly, from the standpoint of the Biden White House, he did not repeat his prior position of opposing further US military and economic aid to Ukraine, the central part of Biden’s request for a supplemental military appropriation of $105 billion for the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and the preparations for war against China. (House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries made Ukraine a major focus of his speech after the election of Johnson. While hailing the bipartisan consensus on further aid to Israel to enable its mass slaughter in Gaza, he added, ‘We must also support Ukraine and its courageous effort to defeat Russian aggression.’)…The Democrats [have] accommodated themselves to the new speaker, voting near-unanimously for the first bill he put on the floor of the House, a resolution of support for Israel in its war in Gaza, which passed 412–10, with nine Democrats and one Republican voting against it. Six Democrats voted ‘present.’”

Last Monday or thereabouts I  heard the former heralded US House Speaker and multi-millionaire San Francisco Democrat Nancy “We’re Capitalist and That’s the Way it Is” Pelosi go on MSNBC to foolishly look forward to the coming day when the Republicans would get back in touch with their supposed real democratic hearts and join the Democrats in the “responsible” governance of “our great country.”  You betchya, Nancy: Hitler and Goebbels will calm down and act like decent partners in respectful bourgeois, bipartisan, and parliamentary politics and policymaking.

Basically the Dems are saying: “it’s terrible about those nasty MAGA folks, but maybe we’ll beat them at the polls by gosh and in the meantime let’s work with the women-hating-white supremacist-nativist-climate-denialist-putschist Republi-Nazis in the shared capitalist-imperialist projects of crucifying Gaza, sacrificing every last Ukrainian to inter-imperialist war with nuclear Russia, provoking nuclear China, and rolling back yet further what’s left of the poor, Pentagon-starved US welfare state. That’s the dismal, dollar-drenched Weimar Dems in a nutshell.

As Refuse Fascism says, “The Democratic Party will not stop this nightmare. Trump, fascist Fox News, and the Republi-fascist Party have branded them as enemies and ‘traitors.’ Yet, the Democratic Party will consistently pull to try to work with, conciliate with and collaborate with them.”

Bulls-eye!

Get ready for more dark shit. We ain’t seen nothing yet.