Mike Johnson’s meteoric elevation from an under-the-radar congressman from Louisiana to second-in-line to the U.S. presidency sent journalists, Democrats and Republicans alike to uncover information about the personal and professional history of the most right-wing and least experienced House Speaker in history, who took the top job on Wednesday.
On the day Johnson was voted in, several major right-wing social media accounts on X, formerly known as Twitter, began circulating clips of an interview Johnson gave to PBS in 2020, in which he told journalist Walter Isaacson that the police killing of George Floyd was “an act of murder” and called for “systemic change.” Notably, Johnson said in the interview that he had learned about racism in America through the experience of raising a Black son, Michael.
I can’t speak to what happened during his upbringing, but if the man I saw as my father, who took me in as a teenager, decided to enter into politics, conservative politics no less, I’d tell him to visit for Christmas but leave me out of the politics. I’d want to go to the grocery and raise my family without being harassed by reporters and crazy random idiots, especially if he was a minor local politician in the community where I lived, but even moreso if national office were always the goal. The best way to achieve that would be to not let the general public even know about him, but he can still be in the family text chat and bring the grandkids by to see the rest of the family in person and in private.
The guy just wants Internet detectives like you to leave him and his family alone. Doing a good job of that doesn’t mean anything should smell off.