We’re learning more and more about House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), and while the revelation about the 51-year-old sharing an online porn-accountability app with his teenage son might be perversely mockable, John Oliver said Sunday the news is too disturbing considering how close the House Speaker is to the current and future presidency.
“If there was any hope Johnson might moderate his views now that he’s speaker, that is gone,” Oliver said on this week’s episode of Last Week Tonight, adding later: “And because there was so little vetting of Johnson before he became speaker, we kept discovering new unsettling facts about him.”
Johnson received an award last week from the National Association of Christian Lawmakers “for Christian honor and courage” at a gala where a TV evangelist proclaimed “homosexuality is three times worse than smoking.” To which Oliver quipped that the only thing the LGBTQ+ community and smokers might share in common is an attraction to the cartoon mascot, Joe Camel. “If Mike Johnson’s son is watching this, I’m really sorry. Your dad seems like a lot. And if he is watching this online, then I guess Mike probably is, too. Hi Mike! You must’ve gotten that alert after we showed the picture of the camel.”
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Oliver continued: “While this is very fun, a few things. First, it’s probably not ideal for national security if a guy second in line to the presidency has that app on his phone. But also, the stuff that people are now unearthing about Mike Johnson extends beyond the personal.”
Just last week we learned Johnson had promoted and written the foreword for the book The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era, authored “by a right-wing blogger that among other things gives credence to unfounded conspiracy theories including the Pizzagate hoax, and disparages poor voters as unsophisticated and susceptible to government dependency who are easy to manipulate with Black Lives Matter ‘Defund the police’ pandering,” Oliver said. “A pretty clear dog whistle.”
Although Johnson’s staff claimed the House Speaker hadn’t read the book and wrote the foreword as a favor, Johnson himself has previously said otherwise. “I obviously believe in the product, or I wouldn’t have written the foreword, so I endorse the work,” he said on the Aug. 5, 2022, episode of Truth Be Told With Mike & Kelly Johnson. “Look. I love it. I love the book. Everybody can go and get the book. I highly recommend it.”
“Yeah, it turns out his endorsement was pretty full-throated,” Oliver said. “Which incidentally is a Google image search strictly off limits to Mike and his son.”
More revelations will come out about Johnson, Oliver predicted. “But it’s too late,” he said. “ He’s already speaker. For all the fear of a second Trump term, it is worth remembering our current Speaker of the House is an anti-LGBT bigot who believes in more accountability for his son’s search history than he does for the people who tried to overthrow the government. But thankfully this isn’t insurrection footage. He can’t blur his views and hope no one notices because much like his son, we’re unfortunately now all watching him.”
