As part of Fox Business’ coverage of the Republican National Convention, Maria Bartiromo sat down with House Speaker Mike Johnson, who claimed that officials believe there are now “terrorist cells set up around the country.” Not surprisingly, the host asked how many.
“I don’t know,” the Louisiana Republican replied. “It’d be conjecture on my part, but intuitively we know that this is a serious problem.”
This made far less sense than Congress’ top Republican official seemed to realize. First, he doesn’t need to speculate: As the House speaker, Johnson receives briefings on sensitive, highly classified security information. If he’s learned about “terrorist cells set up around the country,” he could speak to the problem with authority.
Instead, the GOP leader decided it’d be responsible simply to speculate on national television about a terrorist threat based on what people “intuitively” know.
Second, information about terrorist cells is not something that people can “intuitively” know. It simply falls outside of what “intuition” means: No one has instincts about the existence of terrorists forming groups and/or networks on domestic soil. People in positions of power either have seen evidence or they haven’t. It's not the sort of thing someone can know by way of a gut feeling.
But as relevant as these details are, there’s a larger problem: Johnson's reference to what is “intuitively” known is part of an unfortunate pattern.
After Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat, for example, Johnson insisted that “a lot of us know intuitively” that there were problems with the process.
After the Senate rejected the House’s impeachment effort against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Johnson said “know already intuitively” that Mayorkas “had a fantastical breach of duty.”
When the House speaker unveiled legislation to ban non-citizens from voting — which is already illegal, and which effectively never happens — Johnson declared at a press conference, “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.”
What we’re dealing with is a Republican leader who appears to rely on “intuition” a bit too much. Time and again, Johnson lacks the evidence to support his beliefs, so he references “intuition” as if it were a legitimate substitute for knowledge.
It’s not.