The Lathe of Hell
Abby Johnson: the first subject to require extensive addenda because she won't stop saying racist stuff
It’s been a big couple of days for this site, as the Abby Johnson piece got retweeted to the exact people that I write this stuff for (fellow left-leaning Catholics with diagnosed mood disorders), Abby Johnson also happened to be in the news a lot for reasons we’ll discuss in a minute, and now the Johnson piece is actually the one thing I've written in my life that the most people have read, ever. Some new people subscribed and said very nice things about the piece, which is very humbling.
If that ends up being the high-water mark for G.O.T.H.S., I think that's great. I’m really happy with how my piece on Johnson turned out, and when I published it, I thought it was a really comprehensive examination of everything shitty that Johnson had done in her career, centered around the severe and obvious shift in her personal politics that came between her 2011 memoir and the 2019 film adaptation of her memoir. And for most pieces I write here, eight to nine thousand words is reliably long enough to cover every single shitty thing that an individual has said or done.
With that said, here's a list of the additional shitty things Abby Johnson has done in her career that I've only learned about in the past nine days. Many of these come from a very helpful Twitter thread from Mary Pezzulo and entries from her very good blog “Steel Magnificat” (also good blog name, arguably better name than mine but my acronym is better), and then the rest of them are things that have just literally happened or become national news this week:
She stuck up for a self-described alt-right anti-abortion activist who was posting horrible racist shit and then awkwardly had to walk it back, writing on Facebook “My eyes have been opened to current views in our society that I had honestly hoped no longer existed. I have come to believe that the Alt-Right position generally equals racism. I have come to learn that ethnonationalism, when discussed in regards to American society, is code for racism. There is no room for it here in our movement.” This is not impressive when you realize she wrote it in 2018, at least three years after everyone else figured out what “alt-right” meant.
She, unprovoked, got into a Twitter fight with a Black Episcopal bishop and called him a thug:
She then got into a different unprovoked fight on Twitter with a different clergyman of a different minority group and suggested that people like him needed to be “purged” from the church
Two months ago - which, remember, was the height of the Black Lives Matter protests and brutal police violence against demonstrators - she posted a psychopathic racist rant about her own adopted Black son, explaining how it was okay for police to profile him because, well, statistically, he was more likely to commit crimes than Johnson’s white biological children. Ms. Pezzulo at Steel Magnificat blogged about it when it happened, and Vice just ran the story on August 25th.
Very recently, she posited that racism may not have had anything to do with George Floyd’s murder, which is probably not where your thinking should be in late August.
In May, she appeared to advocate for “household voting”, and in case that seemed ambiguous, she clarified that it meant having husbands override their wives’ voting rights:
And the reason why she was trending on Twitter yesterday is because she scored a primetime speaking slot at the full-on fascist RNC.
A lot of Johnson’s RNC speech was a retelling of stuff you could already read in Unplanned, and the New York Times described it as “graphic and at times misleading”. She also claimed that “almost 80 percent of Planned Parenthood abortion facilities are strategically located in minority neighborhoods”, not-so-subtly suggesting - as the film adaptation of Unplanned does - that Planned Parenthood is actually a vehicle for the extermination of minority communities. Planned Parenthood disputes this, they’re probably the ones that are correct based Abby Johnson’s track record with claiming things that are easily disprovable. Plus, given everything else Johnson has said and done, I’m surprised she feels uneasy about the extermination of minority communities, which are full of people that she considers thugs, criminals, not deserving of voting rights, and in need of purging.
Ms. Pezzulo did a great job rounding up the earlier stuff over the past few years, and while I like where my piece ended up, I’m honestly embarrassed I wasn’t able to find all of the early racist rants. Part of that, though, is because I can only look at Johnson’s Twitter feed for so long before my stomach turns.
Overall, what I said about Johnson originally still stands: it doesn’t really matter whether her life story is made up or not, because her career choice matters more. You can choose to be a human being who acts with compassion and brings something new to the anti-abortion movement - which Johnson seems to want to be in her 2011 memoir! - or you can choose to be a conservative firebrand with a steady job getting media hits, but you can’t be both. I look at her and I see a person who found a job that paid well and chose to do that, and as that job changed over the past decade into something more explicitly authoritarian and racist and awful, she went right along with it, because she still wants the job. What I don't see is anyone who cares one way or another whether abortion ends, or at least anyone who cares about it more than finding her next speaking gig and the next group of angry frightened old people who will sign her check. She's not driven by mission. She's just grifting. It’s called Grift Of The Holy Spirit, not Mission. Plus the acronym is better.