By CLINTON FEIN
July 22, 2025

Mike Johnson, the spineless jellyfish currently occupying the Speaker’s chair, just performed the most pathetic political abdication of decency since Representative Jim Jordan abandoned the wrestlers he knew were being abused and raped, did nothing to stop it, and then tried to cover it up.

Last week, Johnson puffed his chest on “The Benny Show,” making bold proclamations about transparency regarding the Justice Department files on Jeffrey Epstein. “We should put everything out there and let the people decide,” he declared with the conviction of Charlie Kirk’s mistrust of the Deep State. The Rules Committee even approved a measure to bring the resolution to the floor.

By Monday, Johnson’s flaccid spine had completely liquefied. “We need the administration to have the space to do what it is doing,” he acquiesced, presumably after a scolding from the White House, before sending Congress on a convenient six-week summer vacation. No vote. No files. No fucking backbone.

This was a return to form. Johnson briefly forgot his place in the ecosystem: curled up in the fetal position beneath Donald Trump’s desk, awaiting instructions. The moment someone reminded him that Epstein’s “client list” might easily be confused with a Mar-a-Lago guest list, Johnson’s momentary courage evaporated faster than ethics on a jet flying to an underage sex party on a billionaire’s private island.

What’s particularly fascinating about Johnson’s selective moral outrage is where he actually does choose to take a stand. Not against sexual predation or the exploitation of minors by the wealthy and powerful, that would require actual principles. Instead, Johnson’s “family values” oriented moral crusade centers on porn filters.

In a 2022 interview that feels like it was scripted by a particularly heavy-handed evangelical dystopian novelist, Johnson proudly explained how he and his then-17-year-old son installed an app called Covenant Eyes to monitor each other’s internet activity. “He’s got a clean slate so far,” Johnson boasted, in what must rank among the most uncomfortable father-son arrangements since Abraham and Isaac went mountain hiking.

The stark irony is that Johnson is fixated on restricting his son’s access to consensual adult content while simultaneously preventing the American public from accessing information that could mitigate actual child exploitation. He’s more concerned about his teenage son, God forbid, seeing boobs than he is about exposing the powerful men who allegedly participated in or enabled the systematic abuse of underage girls before they had even grown any.

Johnson isn’t even pretending to protect national security or ongoing investigations. He’s shilling for the White House. He’s protecting power. He’s protecting wealth. He’s protecting the same circle of untouchable elites that has always been protected in this country. And most undeniably, he’s protecting the man who controls his puppet strings as Speaker and who has a sordid, well-documented, uncomfortable history with Epstein.

When someone is so terrified of what might be revealed. Johnson’s retreat extends beyond mere cowardice — it’s complicity. It’s an admission that whatever the fuck is in those files is too damaging to the people he obsequiously serves to the detriment of those he was elected to serve.

As Johnson tries to impose his Covenant Eyes on the nation –filtering out the truth about powerful predators — his political “daddy” should be triggering the app’s alert system; he should be breaking the fucking algorithm. This is a pig who bragged about sexual assault on tape, who has been credibly accused of rape, who commented on his own daughter’s fuckability, and who partied, ogled and leered with Epstein. If Johnson’s disposable moral filter were applied consistently and Covenant Eyes actually worked, Trump wouldn’t just be red-flagged—he’d be a Pornhub category. Jack Johnson’s phone battery would be perpetually depleted under the strain of endless notifications.

What Johnson understands perfectly well but chooses to ignore is that transparency isn’t optional in a functioning democracy. The public has a right to know who was in Epstein’s orbit, who enabled him, who participated in his crimes. That information doesn’t belong to Mike Johnson or Donald Trump or Pam Bondi or Kash Patel, or anyone else to suppress just because it will, at the very least, be politically inconvenient.

Johnson’s reliance on the Covenant Eyes app is a perfect metaphor for his approach to governance: a performative show of moral concern that actually serves to protect the powerful and complicit, allowing real predators to continue operating with impunity, while duping the rest of us with parental controls. 

Everyone already knows the gist of what’s in those Epstein files. And that anyone fighting this hard to keep them hidden isn’t doing it to protect the victims. They’re doing it to protect themselves and their friends. And in Johnson’s case, they’re doing it because they understand that their position, their power, and their future depend entirely on maintaining the system of impunity that allowed Epstein to operate for decades.

So while MAGA Mike Johnson creepily monitors his son’s internet for nipples (or Sharpie-drawn pubic hair disguised as signatures), the rest of us are left guessing and imagining what horrors and secrets lurk in those sealed documents. When a man positions himself as a Family Values Christian but his compulsive, patriarchic monitoring of porn is prioritized over exposing predators, the real obscenity isn’t what’s on the screen.