Politics
Harry Fletcher
Nov 06, 2023
Fox News
Mike Johnson, it’s safe to say, isn’t the typical kind of person we’re used to seeing take on the speaker of the United States House of Representatives role.
First of all, he’s a climate change sceptic who once helped force the government to pay for a Noah’s Ark theme park, and now a clip has resurfaced that shows him admitting he monitored his son's devices for any “objectionable material”.
Johnson, a Republican politician, took on the role after a month of political paralysis in the US government and more details about his personal and political beliefs are now emerging.
A resurfaced clip from 2022 shows him talking about his internet habits and he states that he installed Covenant Eyes – which he describes as “accountability software” – on his phone.
He then revealed that his habits are monitored by his son, while he is also able to keep en eye on his son’s habits to make sure he’s abstaining from watching internet porn and any other explicit material.
“It scans all the activity on your phone, or your devices, your laptop, what have you; we do all of it,” Johnson said while speaking at a debate on the “War on Technology” at Benton, Louisiana’s Cypress Baptist Church.
He went on to say: “It sends a report to your accountability partner. My accountability partner right now is Jack, my son. He’s 17. So he and I get a report about all the things that are on our phones, all of our devices, once a week.
“If anything objectionable comes up, your accountability partner gets an immediate notice. I’m proud to tell ya, my son has got a clean slate.”
Would you want your dad monitoring your internet habits, and vice versa? Somehow we think not.
It comes after many people in the news were introduced to Johnson and his views for the first time last month following his appointment.
In 2014, Johnson worked as a lawyer for Ken Ham, an Australian Christian fundamentalist whose company, Answers in Genesis, has been peddling creationist views since 1994.
Among those is that the entire universe is only 6,000 years old, and that things like evolution, geology, archeology, physics, astronomy, among others, were planted by a deceptive God to test our belief and loyalty.
Republican Johnson also previously helped introduce a bill that led to the removal of LGBTQ+-friendly materials from classrooms, which he claimed was exposing children to “sexual imagery and radical gender ideology”.
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