Auf dem Jahrestreffen der Alliance Defending Freedom in San Diego wurde der Redner mit einem Satz vorgestellt, der alles Weitere überflüssig machte. Bevor er für den Kongress kandidierte, sei Sprecher Johnson einer von uns gewesen. Mike Johnson, zweiter in der Nachfolge des Präsidenten der Vereinigten Staaten, gab die Zuneigung umgehend zurück. Die ADF sei für sie wie ein Zuhause, sagte er, man sei wie Familie. Der Mann, der bestimmt, welche Gesetze im Repräsentantenhaus überhaupt zur Abstimmung kommen, nennt eine extrem rechte christlich-nationalistische Organisation sein Zuhause, deren Geschäft darin besteht, Gesetze in ihrem Sinne umzuformen.
„Von Nero bis Newsom herrscht Jesus. Und die Pforten der Hölle werden seine Kirche nicht überwältigen.“
In ihrer rund 25-minütigen Rede auf dem ADF Summit 2026 rief Allie Beth Stuckey, die unter der Marke Conservative Millenial als konservative Podcasterin, Autorin und politische Kommentatorin auftritt, Christen dazu auf, mutig für die Wahrheit einzustehen – ganz gleich, welchen Preis sie dafür zahlen müssen.
The family has known him for more than 20 years. The organization hired him in 2002, and shortly afterward he opened its office in northern Louisiana. So much of what they do, Johnson said about himself and his wife, was learned on the front lines of the culture war, keeping the door open for spreading the Gospel, and that still shapes the way he does his job today. Pay close attention to what he's describing here. He is not saying his convictions shaped him. He is saying a Christian nationalist legal lobby did - and what he learned there is now being applied to the lawmaking process of a country with 340 million people.
At one point, he left something out, and that omission says more than anything else. Their motto once read in full that they wanted to keep the door open for spreading the Gospel by reshaping the legal system. That second half disappeared sometime during Johnson's years there. A movement does not remove its objective from paper because it has abandoned it. It removes it because saying it out loud is no longer necessary once the transformation is already underway. A burglar doesn't hang a sign on the door.
How far that transformation has progressed can be measured by the case law. The Supreme Court's decisions over the past two decades read like a greatest-hits list for this Christian nationalist legal lobby. Hobby Lobby undermined access to contraception. Masterpiece Cakeshop weakened protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation. Dobbs allowed states to ban abortion. Skrmetti allowed them to prohibit gender-affirming care for minors. A group that once occupied the farthest edge of the American right and was founded as a counterweight to the ACLU has effectively dictated its agenda to the highest court in the country. What is especially striking is what some of these cases were built on. Time and again, the Court was presented with lawsuits over harms that had never actually occurred - imagined grievances brought by people to whom no one had done anything. The highest court in the United States heard cases that would never have existed without this organization.
What happened this week shows that they no longer need to rely on the courts alone. On July 15, Senator Ted Cruz asked Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche during his confirmation hearing whether he intended to overturn a legal opinion issued in 2022. That opinion concluded that federal law does not prohibit the mailing of certain medications used for abortion when the sender has no knowledge that they will be used unlawfully. The law in question is the Comstock Act, passed in 1873 and signed by President Ulysses S. Grant - back when Bavaria was still a kingdom.
Its namesake deserves a closer look, because without him the absurdity of this story is impossible to understand. Anthony Comstock was a Christian crusader who saw human sexuality as a mortal threat to the United States and concluded that the postal service had to save the nation from it. He turned the mail into an instrument of moral policing, banning anything he considered obscene - writings about sexuality, as well as anything related to contraception or abortion. One man believed a republic could be saved from collapse by reading its citizens' mail. For more than a century, his work was treated as a museum piece, something legal historians could shake their heads at with amusement. The ADF brought it back to life, and so far it alone has managed to persuade two Supreme Court justices to openly consider applying it in modern America.
This is where the most disturbing thought of the entire story emerges. A law book is not a graveyard - it is a warehouse. A law that is no longer enforced is not dead. It is asleep, and anyone who knows where to find it can wake it up. The comforting belief that societies move forward and leave outdated laws behind assumes that someone actually leaves them behind. As long as those laws remain on the books, all it takes is a single attorney general to turn the clock back more than 150 years without a single word from Congress. Seen this way, progress is not a permanent condition. It is an agreement, and agreements can be canceled. During his hearing, Blanche already announced that he intends to review the existing legal opinion.
Mike Johnson, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, vows for the digital virginity of the West
How deeply this mindset runs does not have to be inferred from congressional hearings. Johnson has described it himself. He and his son monitor each other through a program called Covenant Eyes, which sends an alert whenever either of them spends too much time looking at something considered sexually inappropriate. The father reviews the son's browsing history, the son reviews the father's, and in the language of evangelical tech culture, this is called an accountability partnership. The Inquisition has simply moved into your pocket - Calvinism with Wi-Fi, surveillance as a family subscription plan.
This is where the circle closes with Comstock, because both are built on the same assumption. Human beings cannot be trusted to resist temptation, so someone else has to keep watch. Comstock opened people's mail. Johnson lets the browser report back. Between them lie 150 years of technological progress and not a single new idea. Someone who does not trust his own child to be alone with a screen is unlikely to trust 340 million adults to be alone with their own conscience. The organization supplies the legal cases, the Speaker controls the legislative agenda, and for everyday use there is an app.
No one should dismiss what this means in practice as merely an abstract legal debate among experts. In the states that banned abortion after Dobbs, medication now reaches women almost exclusively through the mail. Anyone who lives far from a clinic, has no car, or cannot afford to travel depends on that option. If the Justice Department declares mailing those medications illegal, what disappears is not simply a product, but the last remaining option for people who already have the least. The people standing before a judge would be those whose only offense was placing an envelope in the mail. That the organization is marching in lockstep with the government is no coincidence. Both are working toward the same goal - turning control over one's own body into a decision made by someone else.
"I started asking myself, why would a doctor be willing to make me sick, but not willing to make me well again?" (Alliance Defending Freedom Summit, San Diego)
Five days after Cruz, Senator Josh Hawley entered the picture. In a letter to the same Todd Blanche, published on July 20, he demanded an investigation into an organization called Plan C, accusing it of a whole list of alleged crimes that, on closer inspection, amount to little more than informing people how a medication abortion works and where the drugs can be obtained. The alleged crime, in other words, is providing information. His arguments are weak and far from new. They simply continue legal theories developed by the ADF, including one presented before the Supreme Court by his own wife, Erin Hawley. That case sought to force the FDA to revoke its approval of mifepristone. It failed, and now the same effort is being revived. Hawley also argues that the Justice Department could simply settle the litigation because the agency itself could now voluntarily do what the lawsuit had sought to compel. A case that was lost in court suddenly becomes a victory - all you have to do is replace the other side.
The timing of Hawley's letter is no accident. Blanche needs Hawley's vote on the Senate Judiciary Committee to secure confirmation. A senator is therefore demanding an investigation from a man whose appointment depends on that very senator. In the language of the law these people claim to defend, that kind of conduct has a name - coercion. If Blanche is confirmed and adopts the legal position that mailing abortion pills has always been illegal, the legal lobby will have achieved a nationwide abortion ban without Congress ever casting a single vote. It would be a law without lawmakers, enacted through nothing more than an internal legal memorandum.
How such influence is built over decades was something Johnson himself described in San Diego, presenting it as a heartwarming story. His daughter, he said, had gone through the organization's Blackstone Legal Fellowship. She is now one of the attorneys serving on the House Oversight Committee, and he asked the audience to pray for her. The room prayed for a young woman who was not in danger, but had already arrived exactly where the program intended her to be. Nor is her path unusual. The fellowship appears to have been created for precisely that purpose - placing its graduates in strategically important positions throughout the state. It is a job placement program with a prayer service attached. Where that path leads can be seen in the career of a former participant named Amy Coney Barrett, who now sits on the Supreme Court and helps decide the very cases her former mentors bring before it.
At the end stands the episode that captures the full arrogance of the project. For years, an American civil rights organization investigated the ADF and designated it as a hate group. Now the Justice Department is reportedly investigating that very civil rights organization - apparently at the urging of the same legal lobby. The investigator becomes the target, while the group under investigation sits beside the prosecutor. It is the simplest way imaginable to erase an inconvenient conclusion. You do not refute it. You investigate the person who reached it.
"We are facing a thousand years of darkness if we don't stop this." At the ADF Summit 2026, Mike Benz stressed what he believes is at stake if politically and economically institutionalized censorship is not stopped.
Mike Benz serves as executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online and previously worked in the U.S. State Department in the field of cybersecurity. Our investigations repeatedly show what he has been promoting ever since - a narrative about a vast global censorship network made up of government agencies, NATO-linked institutions, and European governments that supposedly exists to strangle free speech. None of it has been substantiated. Yet the story is effective because it gives every supporter an explanation for why they should feel persecuted. Separate investigations into his past have also alleged that he was active in the Alt-Right under a pseudonym. He denies that characterization, or rather, reframes it in a different light, which amounts to much the same thing, only expressed more politely.
For Germany, another aspect of his work carries even greater weight. Benz has repeatedly spoken in support of the AfD and defended the party against accusations of extremism. According to his narrative, American agencies, NATO-linked organizations, and European governments all tried to stop the AfD's rise through censorship. In doing so, he turns a party that is under observation by Germany's domestic intelligence service into the victim, and turns the act of monitoring it into a conspiracy. It is the most convenient form of revisionism imaginable, because it spares him from engaging with what the party actually says.
In Idaho, where the organization represented the state in litigation over abortion and the rights of transgender people, one commentator summed it up this way: the ADF does not represent the citizens, but Christian nationalism itself. What is happening in Washington goes even further. In Idaho, the organization worked for the state. In the nation's capital, the state no longer needs to hire it because it already behaves as though the ADF were one of its own agencies. The Speaker of the House calls it his home. One senator lends it the power of coercion. Another carries its legal arguments into confirmation hearings. One of its graduates sits on the Supreme Court, while another now works on the House Oversight Committee. At least a government agency would be subject to legal oversight.
The conference was held under the banner of the nation's 250th anniversary. What was being celebrated was the founding of a republic whose Constitution explicitly forbids the government from favoring any religion - by people who have spent decades trying to impose one. Freedom is part of the organization's name, but what it means by freedom is the freedom to tell everyone else how they should live. The Speaker calls it his home. He is right, it is a home - except that 340 million people live there, and none of them were ever asked whether they wanted to move in.
After research like this, one question inevitably remains: how far has the collective sanity of our time deteriorated? Fanaticism no longer carries a torch. It wears a suit, sits in confirmation hearings, and is quoted by senators. No one is burned at the stake anymore. Instead, they are investigated, their mail is monitored, and access to information is taken away from them. The stake has become more comfortable. It no longer produces smoke, and that is precisely why no one sees it. And now a cappuccino - extra strong.
To be continued ...
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