The ascension of the heretofore little-known Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) to speaker of the House after a tumultuous period of Republican infighting that saw former speaker Kevin McCarthy ousted and then a slew of candidates quickly shot down has prompted outrage in the mainstream media.
Establishment outlets have been quick to label Johnson a right-wing extremist. (Whether the epithet is merited is up for debate. Johnson has a 72-percent Freedom Index score from The John Birch Society, meaning he votes in line with the Constitution 72 percent of the time. That’s barely a C average — by no means exceptional, though better than Kevin McCarthy’s 60 percent or Tom Emmer’s 67.)
The main gripe the mainstream media has with Johnson is that he, in their words, sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. According to the Establishment, that makes Johnson an “election denier” and a promulgator of “Trump’s Big Lie.”
Politico detailed Johnson’s involvement in efforts to prevent the certification of the election for Joe Biden amid evidence of widespread voter fraud:
One day before a mob bludgeoned its way into the Capitol, Rep. Mike Johnson huddled with colleagues in a closed-door meeting about Congress’ task on Jan. 6, 2021.
A relatively junior House Republican at the time, Johnson was nevertheless the leading voice in support of a fateful position: that the GOP should rally around Donald Trump and object to counting electoral votes submitted by at least a handful of states won by Joe Biden.
… As Trump’s legal challenges faltered, Johnson consistently spread a singular message: It’s not over yet. And when Texas filed a last-ditch lawsuit against four states on Dec. 8, 2020, seeking to invalidate their presidential election results and throw out millions of ballots, Johnson quickly revealed he would be helming an effort to support it with a brief signed by members of Congress.
In a separate Politico piece, one authored by Adam Wren, the outlet argues that Johnson’s election to speaker is a victory for the “election deniers.” Wren makes the case that it is imperative that the GOP acknowledge, once and for all, that the 2020 election was not stolen. He writes:
Whether the Republican Party can ever reconcile its divergent response to Jan. 6 is not the next question. It’s the question defining this turbulent political moment in Washington and beyond — roiling and coursing just below the surface. These days, all roads lead back to the original lie that Donald Trump won.
In another demonstration of the mainstream’s fixation with Jan. 6, at the press conference immediately following Johnson’s election as speaker, a reporter was quick to ask Johnson and the group of Republicans at the podium with him about his role in trying to stop the certification. Johnson and his fellow Republican lawmakers just as quickly shut the reporter down and moved on to the next question.
What all this hysteria truly shows, above anything else, is the absolute importance for the Establishment that the “insurrection” narrative regarding Jan. 6 should remain front and center in the public mind.
Curiously, the Left has continually accused those concerned with election integrity of living in the past and being unable to “move on” from the 2020 election. Yet it is these mainstream voices that have refused to “move on” from Jan. 6. And the reason they are unable to is because so much of their contemporary agenda rests on preserving the “insurrection” narrative.
This can be clearly seen with the multi-front legal ordeal faced by Donald Trump. The cases against him and the effort to derail his candidacy are all predicated on the the narrative that Trump lied about there being election fraud, used this to justify his attempt to “overturn” Biden’s “win,” and then led a “violent” “insurrection” at the Capitol to get his way.
Without that narrative, the cases against Trump fall apart. Moreover, if the narrative falls apart, then Democrats’ crusade against Trump is no longer the righteous effort to protect American “democracy” from a would-be authoritarian, but becomes the corruption of our legal institutions in order to persecute a political rival.
Thus, Democrats are in a bind. Now that they have committed themselves to this course of action, they can’t turn back. If they were to admit that the “insurrection” narrative surrounding 2020 and Jan. 6 is bogus, then they would simultaneously be admitting to weaponizing the government and to a host of law-breaking of their own.
The same applies to the media. If they admit to anything other than the narrative that has been so carefully propagated over the last three years, they then acknowledge that they have been complicit in misdeeds worthy of Communist China and the Soviet Union, such as electoral fraud and locking up political prisoners on trumped-up charges.
This is why the freedom movement cannot afford to take the Establishment’s advice on Jan. 6 — to “move on” and “finally admit” the election was not stolen.
Concerned citizens must do the opposite: Continue to seek and diffuse the truth in order to defeat the tyrannical lies of the Deep State.
