The first round of reactions to Mike Johnson’s rise to the Speakership is in – and unfortunately, the ascension of yet another ideologically extreme figure has been met with the well-established normalizing impulses that define media coverage and the mainstream political discourse. 2/

The Washington Post, for instance, published a sympathetic home story akin to what reality TV delivers if the producers want the audience to embrace a contestant – a tendentious collage full of praise, without a single criticism directed at his political and religious extremism. 3/