A review of secret audio obtained by CNN’s KFile by downloading a 2022 episode of the Todd Starnes show featuring Mike Johnson reveals the new Speaker of the House is very hostile to Americans’ rights to same-sex marriage and contraception pills. Agreeing with fellow conservative extremist Clarence Thomas’s view that the Supreme Court’s prior decisions affirming those rights for Americans were “not radical. In fact, it’s the opposite of that,” Johnson told Starnes “There’s been some really bad law made. They’ve made a mess of our jurisprudence in this country for the last several decades. And maybe some of that needs to be cleaned up.”

The explosive revelation that Johnson uttered these unsubtle threats on tape – coming right on the heels of him also just last month warning a prayer group that God was going to destroy America for tolerating bisexuality in teenagers – threatens to not prompt any backlash or consequences whatsoever within the Republican Party or, let’s be honest here, the larger media ecosystem in which such public expressions of policy goals need to be falsely labelled as “secret audio” to merit any attention. Even then it has to compete against “OMG Taylor Swift gave Travis Kelce a handjob on the team bus!” for bandwidth. Johnson can’t do anything to make his dark fantasies a reality now, but people miiiiight just want to start paying attention to this kind of shit going forward.