This Week, A Book Was Yanked While A Teenager's Johnson Was Not
Sex, Lies, and A Porn-Scanning App
Coming Monday: A new essay, titled, “AFRICA: A Brief History of Being Scrambled After.” As many of you know, I have written a number of essays illuminating incredibly important topics, such as which dictator has the best hair and why Iran thinks we’re great. These essays are part of my effort to make geopolitics accessible to people who are too intimidated to read The Economist but want to sound smart at dinner parties. While you’re waiting for the new essay, catch up on my past ones, linked below:
HIGH HEELS, WIGS, AND FLAMBOYANT ROBES
THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY: SMART PEOPLE LOOKING AT COMPUTERS
IRAN: THEY THINK WE'RE GREAT!
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ALEX’S WEEKLY RANT
A Republican Book Ban
This is probably not what Republicans meant when they called for banning books.
Former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows got sued this week by his own publisher. As I wrote a few weeks ago, Meadows had sworn to the publisher that his memoir, “The Chief’s Chief,” was true and factual, including his belief that there had been election fraud and Trump should have won. But then, under oath and that pesky risk of perjury, Meadows told federal prosecutors that, well, maybe his book was more a work of fiction. As a result, the publisher is suing Meadows for $2.95 million and has yanked Meadows’s book from the shelves.
So. Much. Yanking.
Speaking of things being yanked, let’s talk some more about House Speaker Mike and his Johnson, and more specifically, his teenage son, whose johnson is apparently not being yanked.
Last week, I took you all onboard Noah’s Ark and explained how Mike Johnson believes that the Bible conveys actual historical events. I also remarked that, for someone who is in a covenant marriage and promotes “traditional family values,” Speaker Mike sure spends a lot of time thinking about other people’s johnsons.
This week, we learned that one of those johnsons Speaker Mike thinks a lot about belongs to his teenage son.
In a resurfaced clip from 2022, Mike Johnson explains how he and his then 17-year-old son, Jack, use an app called Covenant Eyes to monitor each other’s porn habits. You can watch the video clip here, and here is (part of) the text:
[Covenant Eyes] scans…all the activity on your phone or your devices, your laptop, tablet, what have you, we do all of it, and then it sends a report to your accountability partner. So my accountability partner right now is Jack, my son…he is 17. So he and I get a report of all the things that are on…our devices once a week. If anything objectionable comes up, your accountability partner gets an immediate notice….It’s really sensitive, it’ll pick up almost anything, it looks for keywords, search terms, and also images, and it will send your accountability partner a blurred picture of the image.
It looks like Jack Johnson has to jack his johnson the old fashioned way, without internet porn, otherwise his dad will find out. I hope he knows to buy his lotion and tissues with cash, so his dad can’t monitor his analog habits, as well.
What’s worse, in my opinion, is that Speaker Mike also said this, while discussing how he and his son monitor each other’s porn habits: “I’m proud to tell you my son has got a clean slate.” He announced to the entire internet that his son doesn’t jack off to porn! Listen, being 17 is hard enough without your dad discussing your masturbation habits, or lack thereof, with a huge audience.
The Second Coming
As Speaker Mike explained, the Covenant Eyes app scans your devices and blocks explicit content, including, as we see from a video from the company’s web site, the site fuzzybottoms.com. (Go ahead, Google it; I’ll wait.)
The web site for Covenant Eyes specifically markets the app as a tool to “experience victory over porn,” which, according to the company, is “rewiring your brain,” and helps to bring you closer to God. That way, you can stop watching strangers on a screen experiencing rapture and focus instead on Jesus coming.
After scanning your devices, the app sends a full report of what you looked at to your accountability partner. This requires both partners to give consent, of course. Despite reports that some church leaders have tried to force this app on congregants, I think we can all agree, even if the congregants protest, they’re just being coy and they actually really want it, otherwise why are they in church in the first place?
As Speaker Mike noted, he is the accountability partner for his son, and vice versa, proof that the app helps families heal. After all, a family that comes together, stays together.
Customers of Covenant Eyes are left satisfied. They gush about how great the app is. “Covenant Eyes has done more for my faith than I ever imagined,” said one customer who found complete release from porn. Now that’s a happy ending!
Speaker Mike Caught With His Pants Down?
But given how the app is marketed, we have to ask: Does Speaker Mike have a porn addiction? Does he like fuzzy bottoms?
And what about his teenage son? Republicans keep warning the American people about the dangers posed by Hunter Biden’s porn use and dick pics. I trust we must apply this same standard to the son of the speaker of the house.
We also might have a bigger problem here. I know what you’re thinking: what could be a bigger problem than fuzzy bottoms? How about the fact that the speaker of the house has his phone regularly scanned by a third-party app?
According to Wired [emphasis mine]:
Covenant Eyes is part of a multimillion-dollar ecosystem of so-called accountability apps. These apps are marketed to both churches and parents as tools to police online activity, and they charge a monthly fee to do so. Some of these apps monitor everything their users see and do on their devices, even taking screenshots (at least one per minute, in the case of Covenant Eyes) and eavesdropping on web traffic, WIRED found. The apps then report a feed of all of the users’ online activity directly to a chaperone—an “accountability partner,” in the apps’ parlance. When WIRED presented its findings to Google, however, the company determined that two of the top accountability apps—Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You—violate its policies.
I’ve discussed how foreign intelligence services can (and do!) use coercion to get people to do their bidding, by finding compromising information about a person and using it as leverage against them. Probably I’m overreacting on this point. After all, it’s not like we’ve ever discovered religious politicians who preach about chastity and the sins of homosexuality that were secretly hoarding child porn or attending Eyes Wide Shut orgies. I’m sure it’s fine.
The Porn Hypocrisy
It’s fun to remember that Speaker Mike and his definitely-never-yanked-Johnson holds this top office because of inter party fighting in the name of Donald Trump, who doesn’t exactly embody the “traditional family values” that Speaker Mike promotes. While Speaker Mike and his son were bonding over not watching porn, Trump was fucking one of the industry’s stars.
Why does Speaker Mike give a fuck about everyone else’s fucking but not about the fucking of his party’s frontrunner?
And listen, if God didn’t want us to watch porn, he wouldn’t have made us innovative creatures who have always found ways to make porn, regardless of the technology around us. Go look at Etruscan pottery sometime and you’ll see what I mean.
THE WEEK’S LINKS
A roundup of stories you should be reading
UNITED STATES
Feds charge 3 with running high-end brothels allegedly frequented by politicians (Politico)
FRANCE
France investigates suspected Russian role in Star of David graffiti in Paris (Al-Monitor)
Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where she served in West Africa and Europe. She writes and teaches about terrorism, disinformation / covert influence, and oligarch yachts. Her writing has appeared in Slate, Reductress, Funny or Die, POLITICO, The Center for Public Integrity, and other publications. She has spoken to the BBC, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, France24, and numerous other media outlets. She was also invited once to speak at Harvard, which she now tells everyone within the first ten seconds of meeting them. She is the author of the Victor Caro series, satirical novels about the CIA. Before joining the CIA, Alex was a journalist, covering Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy. She reported on issues related to national security, intelligence, and homeland security. Did she mention she was invited to speak at Harvard?
