Our new Speaker of the House rolled out a series of lies on November 17, 2020, lies that would cost Fox News nearly a billion dollars and mar the pristine criminal records of several lawyers close to Trump. Those same lies sparked the January 6th insurrection and subsequent, ongoing election denialism.

The allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion, look, there's a lot of merit to that.

And when the president says the election is rigged, that's what he's talking about, that it was, the fix was in."

You know, I could give you example after example in all these states.

I don't know how much time you all have this morning, but there's some, some of these lawsuits have a lot of merit and we need to exhaust all the legal remedies.

In every election in American history, there's some small element of fraud, irregularity, error.

We just know that you just accept that that's the case.

But when you have it on a broad scale, when you have, you know, a software system that is used all around the country that is suspect because it came from Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.

That is what the new Speaker of the House said. And then he advanced the very anti-constitutional "independent legislature" theory to further undermine our elections.

Nicolle Wallace rightly noted that even Bill Barr called BS on that before also noting that Fox News had to pay out almost $800 million to Dominion Voting Systems for the very same lie.

Charlie Sykes had some thoughts too, but I have to say that it is wildly ironic to me that Charlie Sykes, who laid the foundation for what we have now, is concerned about "squishes" in the GOP.

"Look, the bottom line here is, and Adam Kinzinger, by the way, texted me this morning that, that Mike Johnson is Jim Jordan in drag," Sykes joked. "But this, this is a huge victory for Matt Gaetz because the center did not hold."

He continued, "I mean, there was a moment where it looked like there might be a, a rump of normies or so-called moderates in the party that were going to say no to Jim Jordan. But the squishes ultimately did what squishes do. They, they caved in."

Well, yeah. You have to wonder if all of the previous votes were just performance art in anticipation of this outcome.

Sykes was shocked that the vote was unanimous for Johnson.

"Not one Republican voted against him, despite the role that he played in the, in the coup attempt," he lamented. "I mean, the reason why Tom Emmer is not the speaker and Mike Johnson is, is because Tom Emmer voted to certify Joe Biden's win." Well, that and the fact that Emmer voted to codify same sex marriage, which white Christian nationalist Johnson did not.

"But you know, just keep in mind though, that this dysfunction in the Republican party is going to continue," Sykes warned. "It was to, to quote Joe Biden, very much an inflection point and no joke because every single Republican voted for one of their most extreme members and somebody who played a rather extraordinarily deplorable role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election."

No lie, Charlie.