VIDEO: Bari Weiss’ Mike Johnson Interview

Former New York Times editor Bari Weiss has a new publication called The Free Press, and it’s notable for being something hard to find these days – balanced journalism. Weiss isn’t a Joe Rogan or Dave Rubin; she isn’t a red-pilled former progressive or anything like that. She’s just not a wacko leftist, and if you’ll remember the circumstances surrounding her departure from the Times, she was essentially thrown off the progressive plantation for the sin of agreeing to give a hearing to Sen. Tom Cotton’s opinion, in the form of a Times op-ed, that the Black Lives Matter riots in the summer of 2020 were an insurrection that needed to be dealt with using military assets.

Weiss didn’t necessarily agree with Cotton. She just took the position that his opinion was one shared by a large number of people and it deserved an airing and some discussion. Today’s media Left holds that no aggressive positions counter to their preferences should be allowed in the public square, and therefore she was essentially hounded out of her job as an editor for the Gray Lady.

That hasn’t hurt her career much. Weiss has become a lot more well-known since she went out on her own, and her site is really very good. It’s both balanced and inquisitive, which makes it worthy of perusal in ways that The Nation or Mother Jones or The Atlantic are certainly not.

In any event, Weiss had House Speaker Mike Johnson on her podcast on Friday, and there was a decent amount of news that came out of the interview.

What you’ll likely hear the most about was Johnson’s revelation about Joe Biden’s complete oblivion as president. He tells the story from almost exactly a year ago when he met with Biden, and when Johnson was finally allowed to be alone with him he brought up the topic of Biden’s utterly indefensible moratorium on exports of liquified natural gas, a ban created via an executive order in late 2023.

Johnson asked Biden what he was doing with that moratorium. He explained that it’s a major hindrance to Louisiana’s economic recovery – there are a host of LNG export terminal projects in various stages of construction in the Lake Charles area, one of the nation’s chief pieces of natural gas infrastructure is the Henry Hub, which is located in Erath, Louisiana outside of Lafayette, and one of the richest natural gas fields in North America is the Haynesville Shale, which is centered in northwest Louisiana where Johnson’s district is.

But also, as Johnson was at the White House to be “hotboxed,” as he noted in the interview, by Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and Kamala Harris and others over Ukraine funding, he made the point that by refusing to export LNG to Europe we were effectively ceding that market to Vladimir Putin and essentially funding the Russian war effort against Ukraine while Johnson was then being pressured to fund the Ukrainian war effort.

But as he made that argument, Johnson notes, Biden denied he’d issued the ban.

And they argued over Biden’s executive order. Biden said he signed a request for a study of liquified natural gas exports, not a ban. Johnson had first-hand knowledge that this wasn’t true. And very shortly he recognized that it wasn’t that Biden was lying to him. Biden had absolutely no idea what he was signing.

This wasn’t completely new information. The Wall Street Journal already had a story on it. But Johnson openly confirmed it in the Bari Weiss interview.

There’s a lot of fun stuff in here. Johnson is engaging and funny, and his Donald Trump impression is rock solid. His recollections from conversations with Elon Musk are also fairly interesting, and Johnson also shares interesting insights from his experiences trying to herd all the various species of cats on Capitol Hill.

But mostly, it’s an important interview in that it gives a glimpse into what’s coming starting this week with Trump’s inauguration and the lightning speed this new unified Republican government will attempt to move in as it seeks to secure an American revival.

The whole thing goes an hour and five minutes, and it’s well worth a watch.