Politics - News Analysis

Listen to How the New Speaker’s Wife Speaks and How It’s Identical to How Michelle Duggar Speaks — And the Reason is SCARY

If this doesn't make you sick, I don't know what will.

Newly-elected House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana is very open about his religious beliefs. He has already prayed on the House floor, declared that God intended for him to become Speaker, and hit all the major fundamentalist talking points.

That much was easy to predict.

But if you thought it was weird that evangelical Mike Pence calls his wife “mother” and will not be in a room alone with another woman who is not his wife Karen, wait until you meet Kelly Johnson. Kelly is the Speaker’s wife, and she is, impossibly, an even better example of the kind of brainwashing that some fundamentalist Christians go through.

Don’t let that sound like sympathy to you — I don’t have any. She makes her choices. But the executive director of Blue Missouri, a Democratic group in a largely Republican state, Jess Piper, watched a video with Kelly Johnson and saw something very familiar.

As you’ll see in the video, Kelly uses what is colloquially known as a “fundie baby voice.” That’s an odd term, but one that makes perfect sense once you hear it.

And as Piper points out, it’s used for a very specific reason: It shows the wife’s submission to the husband.

There are plenty of fundamentalist groups with strange traditions — the Quiverfull movement, People of Praise, Project Blitz, and the list goes on — but one thing many have in common is the theme of female submission. And Piper says that with the background she’s from, the voice that Kelly Johnson uses is very familiar.

In fact, she compares it to Michelle Duggar, of 19 Kids and Counting fame (and some scandals later on). And if you listen to the two side by side, as Piper helpfully shows you in the video, they sound identical.

Remember, we’re not talking about the sound of Kelly Johnson’s voice. We are talking about the affectation she uses when speaking in front of people.

We may never, in fact, know what Kelly sounds like without the impressions she does of the childlike innocence that her husband wants her to portray.

I don’t know about you, but this video looks like it could be a sequel to “A Handmaid’s Tale.” Watch and see for yourself.

Chilling.

meet the author

Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

Comments

Comments are currently closed.