MTG In Renegade Mode Is Creating Lotsa Problems For Mike Johnson

I would never have thought I would have seen this day of Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, making some kind of sense. But it has arrived. The explanation for it is that she intended to run for the Senate and Donald Trump told her fuggedaboutit, she wouldn’t win. That caused Marge to do a flip like a pancake. One minute she displayed one side and the next minute it was something else altogether. Here she is talking about the two big buzz issues which exist in Washington today.

MTG: I've been in the Capitol, and there are two things I couldn't find this week: I couldn't find anywhere the Epstein files, and I also couldn't find the Republican plan to fix the health insurance industry.
pic.twitter.com/eOqLWlfk4x

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) October 11, 2025

Now Moses Mikey has to be climbing the walls over this. Epstein is his Achilles’ Heel because it is Trump’s and the two of them have a symbiotic relationship. Johnson exists to shield Trump. Johnson keeps stalling on the swearing in of the new Rep from Arizona because she would provide the crucial 218th vote to allow the release of the Epstein files. But he can’t stall forever, that’s the plain reality of the situation.

Plus, Mikey must be tearing his hair out because he goes on TV several times a week and talks about how the Democrats want to give Medicaid to illegal aliens being the sticking point in ending the government shutdown. No. It is the ACA subsidies which expire the end of this year. It has always been the ACA subsidies, not transgender operations or Medicaid for aliens or anything of the sort. And now one of the House’s most vocal Reps, a Republican no less, is out there telling the truth about what the House needs to do.

Let’s see how Johnson deals with this tomorrow. I have no doubt that he will be on one of the Sunday shows, if not more, and it’s a cinch somebody will ask this. Unless, of course, he winds up on CBS, which will probably be the case. CBS is slated to become OAN-lite when Bari Weiss takes over after the Skydance/Paramount merger goes through.

You might want to click into this article from Democracy Now! which describes Weiss as having “a 20-year history of suppressing speech that she finds objectionable, especially when it’s speech championing the rights of Palestinians and criticizing the state of Israel. And The Free Press has been centrally involved in that.”

So, with her becoming not so much the formal head of CBS News as Ellison’s kind of personal enforcer outside the normal chain of command within the organization, it remains to be seen what she’ll actually do. But many people, including me, are concerned that she will enforce a right-leaning ideology on the whole network, and probably particularly on Israel coverage, where CBS has sometimes gone outside the bounds of what someone like Weiss would approve of, or, for that matter, what Shari Redstone, the previous owner, had approved of.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about The Free Press? Most people around the country have never heard of it. Is it worth anywhere near $150 million that Skydance is paying for it?

DAVID KLION: $150 million, I think almost anyone would agree, is a very, very steep valuation. The Free Press was founded as a Substack called Common Sense by Bari Weiss and her wife, Nellie Bowles, and her sister, Suzy Weiss, in, I believe, 2021, the year after Weiss resigned The New York Times — resigned from The New York Times after the forced resignation of opinion editor James Bennet, which media-savvy people may recall was over an op-ed that Bennet published by Senator Tom Cotton calling for military force against Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Weiss left in a public resignation letter saying that the Times was censorious and a hostile work environment.

And she created the Common Sense initially as a place to sort of run letters by, you know, disgruntled private school parents about their kids’ curriculums and stuff like that. But very quickly, it became — it attracted support from venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks in Silicon Valley, who are open Trump supporters. And it was rebranded as The Free Press, and it attracted a staff of, I believe, something like 40 or 50 people now. So, that’s a real publication. Publicly, it’s supposed to have around 170,000 paid subscribers, and nearly 10 times that many total subscribers. So, you know, almost 90% of them are free, which is a pretty typical ratio, I think, for Substack-based media. And there are other Substack-based media companies, like Zeteo or The Bulwark, that are very ideologically different from Weiss’s.

But The Free Press has been, I think, incredibly successful, but a $150 million valuation is something else. People have run the numbers, and it’s highly unlikely that the site’s organic subscriber base could justify that. And given that the Ellisons have, for all intents and purposes, infinite money, and $150 million is pocket change for them, it’s widely understood, I think, or should be widely understood, that this is an ideological power play by them. This is about turning Bari Weiss into — it’s about elevating her political ideology over one the most important and storied news brands in the United States.

You can see from this brief snippet that the political reasons for having Weiss in charge of CBS News eclipse the meritorious reasons. CBS will be something else in a short while. I speculate that Stephen Colbert will be glad he’s no longer there and he’ll probably pop up someplace else. I sure wish he would. I would love to hear him talk about the new CBS from a safe place where he can’t be fired — assuming that a place such as that still even exists.

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