Mike Johnson Totally Deflects When Asked About His State’s Crime Rate

House Speaker Mike Johnson flailed Friday when reporters called attention to his state’s distressing murder rate.

While appearing on Fox News, Johnson was confronted with a clip of California Governor Gavin Newsom name-dropping the Louisiana Republican, while mocking President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of Democratic-led cities.

“If he is to invest in crime suppression, I hope the president of the United States will look at the facts. Just consider Speaker Johnson’s state, and district,” Newsom said during a press conference on Thursday. “Just look at the murder rate, which is nearly four times higher than California, in Louisiana.”

Louisiana’s homicide rate in 2023 was 19.3 per 100,000 people, approximately 300 percent higher than California’s homicide rate of 5.1 per 100,000 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control.*

Johnson didn’t even try to account for the dismal crime stats.

“Again, Gavin Newsom will do anything for attention, he can name drop me all that he wants, he needs to go and govern his state and not be engaging in all of this,” Johnson said.

“Look, we have crime in cities all across America and we’re against that everywhere and we need to bring policies to bear,” Johnson said. “My hometown of Shreveport has done a great job of reducing crime gradually, but we’ve got to address it everywhere it rears its ugly head.”

While Johnson isn’t stupid enough to get on board with Trump’s tactic of simply pretending Republican-led cities don’t have bad crime rates, he seems content to completely ignore the situation in his own district.

In fact, Shreveport, which is part of Johnson’s district, landed at 25 on Newsweek’s recent list of the 30 U.S. cities (with at least 100,000 residents) that had the highest number of violent crimes against people. Newsom has claimed that Shreveport’s murder rate is six times higher than the rate in San Fransisco, a city regularly criticized by Trump and other Republicans.

No city in California made the list.

The rest of Louisiana isn’t in the clear, either. In 2024, Baton Rouge had a murder rate of 36 people per 100,000, and New Orleans had a murder rate of 31 per 100,000. Baton Rouge’s murder rate is twice the rate in Washington, D.C., where the president has deployed thousands of National Guard troops, some of which were sent by Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry.

Newsom responded to Johnson’s Fox News appearance Friday by copying Trump’s social media cadence. “Mike ‘Little Man’ Johnson can’t even answer a basic question: why is Louisiana’s homicide rate nearly 4X HIGHER than California’s????? LOUISIANA IS A FAILED STATE!” he wrote in a post on X.

* This post originally misidentified how much higher the Louisiana homicide rate was compared to California.

Donald Trump has tapped Deputy Health Secretary Jim O’Neill, a market fundamentalist Silicon Valley investor and long-time associate of billionaire Peter Thiel, as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control.

Taking the place of Susan Monarez, whose firing has raised alarm over the dangerous incompetence of the health department under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., O’Neill will bring to the role no medical or scientific background.

But he does have a history of feverish advocacy of deregulation and libertarianism, as the progressive group Public Citizen highlighted when he was nominated for his current role at Trump’s health department.

In a 2014 speech, for instance, O’Neill—then managing director of Thiel’s Mithril Capital—proposed allowing drugs onto the market without first determining whether they even work. “Let people start using them, at their own risk,” he said. “Let’s prove efficacy after they’ve been legalized.”

He revealed in the same speech that, while working for George W. Bush’s health department, he opposed the Food and Drug Administration regulating firms that use algorithms in lab tests, such as biotech company 23andMe.

He’s also a proponent of legalizing the organ trade. “There are plenty of healthy spare kidneys walking around, unused,” as he put it during a 2009 talk—where he also argued in favor of generally leaving health care to the whims of the market. “Because there’s not a free market in health care, people are suffering very significant health consequences that in a free market they would not suffer,” he claimed.

The 2009 remarks were delivered at a seasteading conference. For those who don’t keep up with plutocrats’ vanity projects, seasteading is the idea of establishing autonomous, floating communities at sea. Until last year, O’Neill served on the board of a Thiel-backed seasteading venture, which was founded by anarcho-capitalist Patri Friedman—of whom O’Neill is a self-described disciple—who outlined his goal as follows, according to SFGate:

“I envision tens of millions of people in an Apple or a Google country,” where the high-tech giants would govern and residents would have no vote. “If people are allowed to opt in or out, you can have a successful dictatorship.”

O’Neill also appears to share, with many of his Silicon Valley peers, a fixation on anti-aging.

President Donald Trump is once again stomping all over Congress’s power of the purse.

The president invoked a rare “pocket rescission” to claw back roughly $5 billion from the U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the New York Post.

Trump wrote to Congress Thursday night requesting $4.9 billion in funding toward international aid efforts, including $3.2 billion in development assistance from USAID, the essential aid organization Trump bypassed Congress to dismantle.

Congress has 45 days to decide whether or not to approve Trump’s request, but the White House Office of Management and Budget says it can just freeze the funds until the fiscal year ends on September 30, ensuring the funds’ cancellation.

All of this comes as Congress stares down the barrel of an October 1 deadline to avert a total government shutdown.

“Congress can choose to vote to rescind or continue the funds—it doesn’t matter,” an official from the White House budget office said in a statement, per Politico. “This approach is rare but not unprecedented.”

While OMB, run by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, is all for a pocket rescission, the Government Accountability Office holds that such a move is illegal.

General Counsel Mark Paoletta said that when Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter made similar requests, “GAO noted the lapse without objection.” He claimed that GAO had only recently changed its tune because of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Trump also wants to scrap funding allocated to the State Department, including $521 million in contributions to international organizations and $393 million for peacekeeping activities. The president would take back another $445 million separately allocated for peacekeeping, and $322 million from a joint USAID-State Department Democracy Fund.

For the second time in just a few weeks, the Justice Department has done Attorney General Pam Bondi’s brother, Brad, a solid.

On Wednesday, the DOJ dropped felony wire fraud charges against a client of Brad Bondi named Sid Chakraverty, a property developer who was accused of defrauding programs meant to support women- and minority-owned businesses.

According to the motion to dismiss, filed by a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, the move was in keeping with the administration’s stance that programs “that use race- and sex-based presumptions”—as did the one Chakraverty was said to have scammed—are unconstitutional. It was an abrupt reversal from a motion the Trump appointee had signed 24 days earlier, Bloomberg reports, “defending the merits of the prosecution.”

Brad Bondi celebrated the outcome on LinkedIn, writing, “I am proud of our excellent work in winning this victory.”

This was his second victory within a month’s time thanks to his sister’s Justice Department. In July, federal prosecutors scrapped Covid-19 relief fraud charges against a Florida politician he was representing.

In both cases, the Justice Department issued identical statements to the media: “This decision was made through proper channels, and the Attorney General had no role in it.”

Back in March, yet another of Brad Bondi’s clients—former electric vehicle CEO and Trump campaign megadonor Trevor Milton—saw fraud charges against him disappear, this time due to a pardon from the president.

President Trump has terminated former Vice President Kamala Harris’s Secret Service Protection—just before she embarks on her book tour.

“You are hereby authorized to discontinue any security-related procedures previously authorized by Executive Memorandum, beyond those required by law, for the following individual, effective September 1, 2025: Former Vice President Kamala D. Harris,” the memorandum reads.

Former President Joe Biden had extended Harris’s Security Service protection from six to 18 months as he was leaving office—and Trump’s memo axes that directive.

Harris had heightened security concerns as the first Black woman ever nominated to be the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate. Trump’s move also comes as she prepares to set off on her 107 Days book tour, which will have her back in the public eye for the first time since the election. Harris will lose the 24/7 in-person and online threat prevention her detail provided, and they’ll leave her Los Angeles home too.

“The Vice President is grateful to the United States Secret Service for their professionalism, dedication, and unwavering commitment to safety,” a Harris adviser told NBC.

When Trump’s first term ended, Biden politely extended Secret Service for all of Trump’s adult children to 18 months as well. Instead of matching the basic kindness that Biden offered, Trump terminated protection for Hunter and Ashley Biden. He also revoked Secret Service protections for Dr. Anthony Fauci, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, and now Harris.

These moves are purely spiteful, especially since Biden gave Trump’s own family equal treatment while Trump decided that anyone he doesn’t like should have their protection ended.

“This is another act of revenge following a long list of political retaliation in the form of firings, the revoking of security clearances and more,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told CNN. This puts the former Vice President in danger and I look forward to working with the Governor to make sure Vice President Harris is safe in Los Angeles.”