Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson's, Deceptive Pitch to Americans
Such sweet-sounding phrases, such a skillful coverup of contempt for We the People!
Like you, no doubt, I received an email from the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. I’ll let you read it first before I comment on it. Here it is, minus the request for money at its conclusion:
Fellow American,
The most important things in life are faith, family, and freedom. That's not just a slogan, these happen to be the foundations of our great country. That is why I am fighting every day to preserve them.
Faith. Our nation began with the bold declaration that all men are created equal by God, and that our rights derive from Him and not the government. The founders insisted that faith must remain central to our national identity because, as George Washington summarized, "religion and morality are indispensable supports" of our republic. Like so many American households through the generations, in our house we instill faith in the hearts of our children, serve God, and serve people.
Family. Stable, happy families are the basis of any thriving society, and public policy should always acknowledge this obvious truth. Strengthening the nuclear family should be a top priority, and government should get out of the way and respect parental rights. Kelly and I have been very intentional about passing along the values of hard work, honor, and sacrifice to our children, just as our parents passed them along to us. For nearly two and a half centuries, this has been the American way.
Freedom. It is a self-evident truth that God endows all of us with inherent freedoms, such as the natural and unalienable rights to life, liberty, conscience, and the ability to pursue happiness, own property, build wealth and defend ourselves and our families. The purpose of government is to secure these rights, and the ideas we advance should always aim to maintain and increase the liberty of the American people. I've devoted my life and career to fighting for those fundamental freedoms and traditional values, first in the courts as a constitutional law attorney, and now in the Congress.
This is a simple truth: America is the freest, most powerful, most successful nation in the history of world – but we cannot maintain that status if we are led by politicians who hate the very foundations that made us who we are!
SUPPORT MIKE JOHNSON >
Right now in America, children are being taught in many schools to be ashamed of their country and themselves. The pledge is being taken out of school because it mentions God. Free speech is being censored and silenced right before our eyes. Democrats are fighting for the right to elective abortion right up to the moment of birth. Unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats are seeking control of almost every aspect of our lives.
This is simply un-American, and we must stop the madness.
We must elect more leaders who make decisions based on American values with an emphasis on God, family, and country. It's the only way to preserve the blessings we have been given here.
Now it’s my turn
Johnson starts with “Our nation began with the bold declaration that all men are created equal …” If he really believed that, then he would fight to make our society be egalitarian. He would fight to make our society be one in which all people, despite their real differences (as discussed here) would have equal status in society. He would thus fight to ensure that the economy was NOT based on having some rich and some poor but rather on the egalitarian principle (which is WIDELY approved of by most people) of “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need.” He would condemn and fight to abolish the way the haves treat the have-nots like dirt, as is discussed with lots of specific examples here.
But no! Mike “all men are created equal” Johnson does no such thing. He remains absolutely silent about the actual ways that people are wrongly treated like dirt, not as equals of all men. Johnson’s flowery phrases coupled with silence about how our society is in violation of those phrases is designed to make people follow leaders like him who will keep the rich in power and make sure they will be able to keep treating the have-nots like dirt.
Next Johnson says, “Stable, happy families are the basis of any thriving society,…” But he remains silent about the reason why so many American families are NOT stable and happy. A family cannot be stable and happy when the parents cannot find jobs that pay enough to make their family stable and happy. And the reason they cannot find such jobs is because people like Mike “stable, happy families” Johnson work on behalf of the corporate elite to ensure that most jobs pay very little so that the upper class can be billionaires.
Next Johnson says, “It is a self-evident truth that God endows all of us with inherent freedoms…” Mike “inherent freedoms” Johnson doesn’t express an iota of concern for the fact that 1.2 million Americans are in prison. Mike “self-evident truth” Johnson remains silent about the self-evident truth that “While the United States represents about 4.2 percent of the world's population,[5] it houses around 20 percent of the world's prisoners.”
Johnson won’t utter a peep about the fact that it’s poor Americans, disproportionately non-white Americans, who are behind bars. He won’t talk about the fact that their crimes are mostly just being caught with illegal drugs by a racist “war on drugs” that is designed to arrest and imprison poor people but not wealthy people, as shown here. Nor will the new Speaker of the House deign to mention that the crimes of America’s prisoners don’t come even close in horribleness to the mass murder crimes so eagerly and plentifully funded by the likes of Mike “unalienable rights to life, liberty” Johnson and the other members of Mr. Johnson’s House of Representatives, as discussed in “The U.S. Government Is Run By Mass Murderers.”
No surprise, therefore, that the new Speaker announced that his #1 priority legislation will be to provide Israel with all the money and weapons it needs to keep on murdering Palestinians in Gaza to enforce its seven decades of violent ethnic cleansing and apartheid, or as Mike Johnson will so sweetly put it, to defend “unalienable rights to life, liberty, conscience, and the ability to pursue happiness,” you know.
How Do the Mike Johnsons Get Away With It?
First, keep in mind that the vast majority of Americans share the views I expressed above. Take a look at some of them: 500 photos of my zip code neighbors saying they want an egalitarian revolution (click on any photo and zoom in to read the sign the person is proudly displaying.)
Second, there is today no substantial organized movement that champions and expresses the egalitarian views and aims most people hold. As a result, the millions of Americans who, like my neighbors displayed above, have egalitarian views and aims feel as if they were alone in having such views and aims. They feel hopeless about shaping society by their actual values. They may even fear that expressing their real views and aims would lead to being ostracized by their neighbors or getting fired from their job. They figure that the best thing to do is either stay out of politics all together, or support some lesser evil, like Johnson.
The Michael Johnson’s of the world know this; and they skillfully take advantage of it. Their rhetoric is designed to appeal to people on the basis of: “This is the best you can expect; at least I’m not as bad as that other politician.”
Third, the Mike Johnsons of the world will lose their power when a sufficiently large egalitarian revolutionary movement mobilizes the hundreds of millions of Americans who want an egalitarian society. I suggest how to begin building such a movement here.