Believe it or not

 I'm gifting Krugthulu's column today, which tells the amazing truth about our new Speaker of the House. Do read, but just for starters:

Much of the reporting on [Mike] Johnson has, understandably, focused on his role in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Let me say, by the way, that the widely used term “election denial” is a euphemism that softens and blurs what we’re really talking about. Trying to keep your party in power after it lost a free and fair election, without a shred of evidence of significant fraud, isn’t just denial; it’s a betrayal of democracy.

There has also been considerable coverage of Johnson’s right-wing social views, but I’m not sure how many people grasp the depth of his intolerance. Johnson isn’t just someone who wants to legalize discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. Americans and ban gay marriage; he’s on record as defending the criminalization of gay sex.

But Johnson’s extremism, and that of the party that chose him, goes beyond rejecting democracy and trying to turn back the clock on decades of social progress. He has also espoused a startlingly reactionary economic agenda.

 

You probably never heard of Johnson, but he was actually chair of the Republican Study Committee, which made the party's policy proposals in 2020 for the new congress. Bet you didn't know that the Republican party is on record wanting to, among other things:

• Raise the Social Security Retirement age to 69 or 70 - and possibly higher in the future.
• Raise the Medicare eligibility age to 70, and then higher in the future.
• Cut Medicaid, Children's Health Insurance, and Affordable Care Act subsidies by $3 trillion over a decade. 

As Krugthulu concludes, "So Mike Johnson is on record advocating policies on retirement, health care and other areas I don’t have space to get into, like food stamps, that would basically end American society as we know it. We would become a vastly crueler and less secure nation, with far more sheer misery."

 

But here's the thing. Not only do the vast majority of voters not know this, if you tell them, they don't believe it. If they did believe it, obviously, they would not vote for Republicans. But it just doesn't seem possible. Does it?