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Okay. You’re seeing a lot of takes on Mike Johnson, the new guy the Republicans have finally chosen as Speaker. He’s an election denier with monetary ties to Russian oligarchs who was a primary architect of attempts to overturn the last election in the House, a climate-change denier, an opponent of my marriage being legal (in the era were “defence of marriage” meant “keeping marriage only for cishets”), and, for that matter, same-sex relationships being legal at all.
He opposed Lawrence v. Texas (2003) – the case that overturned laws making LGBTQ people illegal – and wanted me to have to keep my list of states where I was illegal. Axios has the roundup.
He’s quickly burying chunks of his past, for example deleting his podcast’s website (though it’s still on Apple Podcasts for the moment) and saying how much he suddenly doesn’t remember.
That’s all out there and as far as I can tell it’s all real. They all line up as the beliefs of someone I expected the fundamentalist right to pick as their anointed Great Leader – well, except the Russian connection, I wasn’t picking that out in the early 2000s – and he’s the kind of guy I’d’ve expected them to coalesce around if he had more charisma than a desk chair.
(Those who have actual charisma all went into megachurch preaching and are all rolling in too much money to bother trying to be president. They do recruit footsoldiers, though.)
It all fits. Culturally, politically, probabilistically, all the many elements tie together into a reasonably neat bundle. He may not be racist enough – but he probably is. I’ll assume it’s true.
But it’s that last article I want to talk about today, the one talking about how much he “doesn’t remember.”
In particular, I want to talk about a couple of short phrases from it, because they’re important, and need translation from fundamentalist language to be understood.
First, let’s talk about “I genuinely love all people.”
You might have faint memories of a moment from 2016, Trump talking into a hot mic about how he loves everybody. Ring a bell? It’s not the same thing, not quite; Trump’s “love” is based upon the idea that your supporting and sacrificing yourself to him is taken as read; it’s a made-up “reality” upon which the “love” depends.
But I mention it because the two statements are equally true, which means not true at all, and I also mention it also because there are certain similarities between these statements, which I will explain.
Finally, I mention it because it’s not new language. Trump was carrying it forward a bit in 2016, but the version Johnson is using here.. it’s very old language from the fundamentalist movement.
Back during the 1990s and early 2000s fundamentalist anti-queer campaigns, where they were going from state to state passing laws to make us more illegal than we already were? When they were passing or trying to pass laws and public initiatives barring us from employment, increasing penalities against us for existing, declaring our existence obscene, requiring schools to teach we were “illegal, immoral, unnatural, and wrong” and other variants of legal abuse like that?
They also said they loved us all, and that this love is why they were doing all this work to hurt us.
You may’ve heard the phrase, “hate the sin, love the sinner.” It was always a lie, but this was one manifestation of it. Obviously, they didn’t love us at all. You don’t love someone when you’re spreading blood libel about them like “homosexuals can’t reproduce, so they rape your children to turn them gay and give them AIDS.”
That is not love. That is hate, with great purity and fury.
But that was hard for them to justify to themselves, back then, when they still had some tenuous connection to an idea of “Jesus” and “God” being “of love,” and hadn’t yet been given permission to be their worst selves by Donald Trump.
So to square this circle, they decided that we weren’t really lesbians, gays, or whatevers. We were normal people, heterosexual cisgendered people, engaging in a sinful lifestyle from which we had to be made to repent. So everything they could do to hurt us was for our own good, to “turn us away from sin” and “towards salvation in Jesus.”
And they’d just say that outright, so don’t think I’m reading any of these in. That was text, not subtext.
So they say they love everyone, what they really mean is they love these fictional alternate-reality stand-ins they make up, and not the evil child raping faggots channelling literal minions of Satan in arrogant defiance of God’s Law that they feel free to destroy without mercy or regret.
That’s also how they could tell their followers to make their gay and lesbian children homeless and destitute until they “repent of their sin.” When they really turned that up, that’s when we started seeing the fleet of LGBT homeless kids in Seattle. Those were the ones who survived long enough to get here, at least.
So just as they continually make up horrible things about other people to get enraged about so they can blame those other people for the things they made up to get enraged about…
(with me on that? It’s complicated, read it carefully, it’s how they work)
…they similarly would make up alternate-reality people that they could love, so that they could hurt the actual people involved as much as possible without guilt, all while calling it “love” and “redemption.”
Neat, isn’t it?
Now, let’s get to the second phrase I want to talk about here: “regardless of their lifestyle choices.”
This is the same signifier as above. It’s also exactly the same phrase they used in the 90s, because they don’t make anything new.
They decided long ago that LGBT people aren’t real, we’re cishets making perverted, illegal, unnatural, ungodly, and wrong decisions about our lives. We make wrong “lifestyle choices.”
They’re not just denying our right to exist; they’re denying that we exist at all.
You may note a similarity between this and their more focused attacks on trans people separately now. It’s not just similar, it’s exactly the same. Being who they are, they don’t create new ideas. At most, they repackage old ones. They just pick new targets.
And that’s what they mean by “loving everyone” regardless of their “lifestyle choices.” They “love everyone” who sacrifices themselves to the fake version of those selves that the fundamentalists made up, similarly to how Donald Trump “loves everybody” who sacrifices themselves to… well… Donald Trump.
Like I said up top, it’s not the same. But it’s related.
They’ve both been living in their own made-up realities for a really long time.if you don’t go along, well. I think you know how that goes.
So let’s go to the third and final phrase of today’s discussion. This one’s longer, but fortunately, requires less explanation. To wit:
“I am a Bible-believing Christian,” [Johnson] continued, saying that if anyone wants to know his views on any given subject, “Go pick a Bible off the shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.“
On one level, this is fairly self-explanatory, as long as you understand that it only works in the context of American evangelical fundamentalism’s ideas about what “the Bible” means at any given point. It helps to understand that many – arguably, most – of these beliefs are literally in direct opposition to the text of that same book, one example being that the Bible is very clear that life begins with breath, not at conception. Their “religious belief” is horseshit.
But that’s not the important part.
The important part here is… another case of dissociation! Just as they project their hate at the ideas they make up onto the people they make up these ideas about, and just as they dissociate the identities of the people they choose to hate from the real people who actually exist so they can declare that they “love” everyone, they are further here dissociating themselves from their own political beliefs.
Because what that phrase really means is, “These aren’t my beliefs, they’re God’s beliefs – God’s laws – and as such both above you, me, and the world, and as such are utterly and completely inarguable. And I obey them, as I must, and it is my duty to make you obey them as well.”
That’s what that phrase actually means. Not by coincidence, and again, not by implication: this is how they’d talk about it to themselves, internally, back in the day. I got this from them.
So that’s what they mean when they say all that, that’s what they hear when someone else says it, and if you know their language, that’s what you hear too.
Johnson’s no different. That’s what he means when he says it, too.
Time Magazine calls him a Christian Nationalist. They are correct, though while they describe the authoritarian nature of this movement, I think they underplay it – it should be first and foremost. They don’t believe in democracy; they believe in God’s Law, by which they mean, what they think should be real.
Time also provides a lot of commentary and evidence from their pair of experts who have spent a decade studying this movement. As someone who has spent decades plural studying this movement – from the opposite side of their active war against me and mine – I can tell you that you don’t need all that to know who he is. If you know them, the three phases I quoted above really are all you need.
He’s their guy, and he will play his part gladly and enthusiastically, with the “love” of “God” – both as defined above – in his heart.
2024 is shaping up to be a really rough year. Be ready.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
