Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson is a hardcore Christian nationalist who has a history of spouting extreme right-wing views — including on mass shootings.

The Louisiana Republican’s record on guns has come under scrutiny in the wake of a shooter killing at least 18 people in Maine on Wednesday, and in addition to opposing gun control legislation, the man who is now second in line for the presidency has blamed mass shootings on both teaching evolution and abortion.

When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters.”

He’s advocated for the return of prayer in public schools, derided the “so-called separation of church and state” on the House floor, and argued that the nation’s founders did not establish the separation to prevent religion from influencing government, but rather to impede the government from restricting the influence and free exercise of religion.

The new House Speaker is also a diehard Trump supporter who worked to overturn the 2020 election, and so it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that he doesn’t view the United States as a democracy.

It’s not just majority rule, it’s a constitutional republic, and the founders set that up because they followed the biblical definition of what a civil society is supposed to look like.”

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