Without a doubt, this week’s biggest political story that doesn’t involve Donald Trump, the Alabama special Senate election, or the Republican tax scam centers around a racist state representative in Kentucky who committed suicide on Wednesday night after a long history of deceit finally caught up with him.
Last fall, Dan Johnson, a Louisville-based pastor running for the Kentucky state house, turned heads when he shared some outrageously racist memes about the Obamas, in which he likened them to apes. Despite almost universal condemnation, he not only stayed in the race, but won it after riding the massive Republican wave that swept through the Bluegrass State.
However, in a long-overdue dose of karma, he found himself isolated by his own party in the face of a staggering report from the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting. One of his former parishoners, Maranda Richmond, claims that a drunken Johnson groped and sodomized her on New Year’s Eve 2012. An investigation by the Louisville police went nowhere, but was reopened after KyCIR did some digging.
Within hours of this story coming to light, both major parties, as well as the leaders of his own state house caucus, called for Johnson to resign. Johnson initially vowed to fight on, but shot himself while standing on a bridge in his hometown of Mount Washington, south of Louisville.
Richmond’s story rightly received the most coverage nationally. But that isn’t the only reason why KyCIR’s report on Johnson makes for horrifying reading. Over seven months, KyCIR–a subsidiary of Louisville Public Media, the NPR member in Louisville–uncovered evidence that proves beyond any doubt that Johnson was manifestly unqualified to clean the Kentucky State Capitol, let alone serve in it.
Johnson made his way to Louisville from Bastrop, Louisiana in 1985. Soon after he arrived, according to police reports, he tried to set his 1982 Cadillac on fire for the insurance money. He owed $10,000 on the car, and it needed thousands’ more dollars worth of repairs. He was also drowning in money problems that followed him from Louisiana.
Johnson asked two people to douse the Cadillac with gasoline, but police arrived before they could finish the job. Johnson initially claimed the car was stolen, but admitted the scheme under further questioning. He was indicted that December for conspiracy to commit arson and false reporting, but the charges were dismissed in 1987 after he completed a pretrial diversion program.
Despite this, Johnson soldiered on, and founded Heart of Fire in 1995. Since then, it became well known in Louisville for its rather unconventional approach to church. For instance, in 2016, Guns.com highlighted Johnson’s “Gun Choir.” Watch here.
But a lot of things practiced by Johnson–or “the Pope,” as he calls himself–went way beyond unconventional. Former member Jennifer Stepp recalled seeing people smoking during services. She was also taken aback by the racist and Islamophobic commentary that was all too common in Johnson’s sermons.
What really stunned her, though, was the first time she went to one of the church’s weekend parties. According to several other members, beer was regularly available for sale, and flowed copiously. One of those former members, Danielle Ellmore, recalled that underage drinking was very common there. State and local alcohol control officers cited Johnson three times between 2008 and 2015 for selling alcohol without a license. However, they hadn’t paid him a call since 2015.
Johnson also played fast and loose with the truth in a way that would make Trump proud. In the past, he claimed to have served as White House chaplain, been on the front lines for the 1992 riots in Los Angeles, and been endorsed by Ted Nugent. These stories, and others, have all been proven to be lies.
The obvious question–why are we only learning this now? Indeed, KyCIR specifically faults the media for not exposing Johnson’s “web of lies and deception” sooner. It’s tempting to give the media a pass. After all, who would have thought that a guy could share racist memes and still win?
But further analysis reveals that Johnson should have never been in the race long enough for those memes to even become an issue. He was actually the second Republican standard-bearer for his house district in Bullitt County, south of Louisville. Stepp won the Republican primary, but was bounced from the ballot in July when it was discovered that one of the people who signed her nomination papers didn’t live in the district. Kentucky election law requires a candidate’s nomination papers to be signed by two registered voters in the district where a candidate seeks to run. The Bullitt County GOP then selected Johnson as Stepp’s replacement.
Frankly, it’s incredible that no one at The (Louisville) Courier-Journal, Louisville’s television and radio stations, or Bullitt County’s daily news paper, The (Shepherdsville) Pioneer-News, thought to delve more into Johnson’s past. Based on the vehement reaction from the state GOP–a marked contrast to how their Alabama counterparts handled Roy Moore–there’s little doubt that had this been uncovered sooner, Johnson would have been long gone before election day.
To my knowledge, the only more egregious instance of the media failing to adequately vet a candidate came in 2010, when the South Carolina press failed to look more into the background of Alvin Greene, the ultimate winner of the Democratic primary for Jim DeMint’s Senate seat. A year earlier, he had been arrested for showing lewd pictures to a student at the University of South Carolina.
Had this been uncovered, there is no scenario under which Greene would have stayed in the race long enough to pull off his upset over the Democrats’ favored candidate, Charleston County councilman Vic Rawl. As it was, Greene’s primary victory effectively gifted DeMint another term–one that is now being finished out by Tim Scott.
It’s no different here. If the media had done its job, the people of Bullitt County would have known that Johnson was manifestly unfit and unqualified, and he would have been gone long before those memes even surfaced.
(featured image courtesy Kentucky Legislative Research Commission via Lexington Herald-Leader)
