The Theocrat in the Closet: Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House

Trump's pipsqueak congressional butler hides behind fake faith to protect pedophilia

Mike Johnson, the current possessor of the House Speaker’s gavel and wielder of sanctimonious bromides, stands before the Congress and the American people not as a leader, but a sermon in a suit—a damp Sunday homily given human form.

The Louisiana Republican is less a politician than a walking evangelical comic book.

Spontaneously muttering scripture with all the warmth of a malfunctioning televangelist. And the political dexterity of a man trying to juggle live snakes in a lavatory.

Two years ago, the Republicans hoisted this pious mannequin into a position of legislative power. A move akin to putting a Boy Scout in charge of an illicit marijuana dispensary.

Johnson’s greatest qualifications appear to be his flair for selectively quoting Leviticus on cable news and his skills in kissing Trump’s gelatinous ass while the nation’s constitution, economy, and sanity crumble.

Speaker Johnson is a man who governs not with reason, nor with the dull but necessary calculus of statecraft.

But the fervor of a tent revivalist who’s convinced a federal budget that further enriches billionaires is the Book of Revelation and that every compromise and move away from doctrinaire conservatism is a pact with Beelzebub.

This would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic and catastrophic.

But every now and then, from the deep pews of American life, a voice rises—not from the think tanks, nor from the ivory towers, but from the commons. Including the open phone lines on C-SPAN.

Johnson recently appeared on the channel’s Washington Journal program and proclaimed “everyone is smiling” in cities where Trump has deployed troops. Enter a caller named “Sam from Colorado.”

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Sam eviscerated Johnson’s piety with more precision than a hundred op-eds and a thousand Sunday public-affairs-show panels.

Sam declared that Johnson’s comments “feel dystopian and insane.”

Then, Sam pivoted from Johnson’s bizarre description of federal troop deployments to the government shutdown.

Johnson keeps accusing democrats of demanding illegal immigrants get health care. Sam declared to Johnson, “as you sit here and lie about this… will you bring a one-year extension of the Obamacare tax subsidies to the floor?” Johnson would not answer the question.

Still, Sam from Colorado had made Johnson squirm. And he had exposed an uncomfortable truth.

On policy, economics, and governance, Johnson is nothing more than an absolute farce.

But there is an even juicier chapter to the fraud that is Mike Johnson. The personal stuff.

There has long been a suggestion whispered in Capitol Hill hallways, typed furiously on internet blogs, and passed around on social media like a bong in the backroom of a frat party, that Mr. Johnson has been spotted not merely wandering from his hetero-holy dogma.

But (allegedly) cruising on Grindr.

Grindr is a gay hook-up app. A den of digital sin (per the likes of Johnson), a marketplace not for loaves and fish but for torsos and suggestive emojis.

If the Grindr allegations are true, it is not the sexuality or the acts that damn Johnson, but the hypocrisy—a sin so common among the GOP in Washington, D.C. that it should be engraved above every Republican office door.

Let me be clear: there is no shame in being gay, closeted or otherwise. The shame lies in wielding moral cudgels against the very people whose lives one privately mimics.

This is the eternal sickness of the conservative moralists.

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Whether the claims about Johnson are true or false, the mere existence of the allegations and the degree to which they keep circulating speak volumes about the Speaker.

Johnson has publicly championed anti‑LGBTQ policies, defended “family values,” supported conversion‑therapy‑adjacent rhetoric, and otherwise positioned himself as a bulwark against what he calls “gender ideology” or “homosexual normalization.”

In public, he decries what he calls the decay of morals. In private, the whispers suggest he may be straying from his own script or at least did before he became Speaker. “Hypocrisy on steroids,” as one critic told the Hill.

Johnson, like so many self-appointed apostles before him, may turn out to be the latest in a long line of preachers caught by a trap that they set. Another pious rooster found roosting in the wrong henhouse.

But again, the real tragedy is not the personal contradictions of Mike Johnson.

It is that a nation so proud of its institutions, so allegedly allergic to tyranny and ignorance, continues to allow such corrupt, jelly-spined, conservative fanatics to dress up their repression and lies as leadership.

Johnson is a pulpit parasite who mistakes bigotry for conviction, cowardice for faith, and political demonization for democracy.

In the end, our republic will survive, not because of its so-called leaders like Johnson and Trump, but in spite of them.

Our American experiment will survive because of the countless Sams—the irreverent, un-bought, un-bossed, cantankerous citizens who call a fraud a fraud on C-SPAN and a Grindr profile a Grindr profile.

So here’s to C-SPAN’s “Sam from Colorado.”

And here’s to every American who refuses to be governed by men of such ill-intent, who quote the Bible in public. And swipe right in private.