DALLAS — “The Glenn Beck Program” aired a segment Friday promoting faith-based anti-porn surveillance software Covenant Eyes, editorializing on recent news that the current Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is a user and subscriber.
The 15-minute segment featured a conversation between guest host Justin Barclay and Covenant Eyes CEO Ron DeHaas.
DeHaas is also a board member of NCOSE, the powerful, religiously-inspired lobby formerly known as Morality in Media, which has as its mission the eradication of all pornography. According to NCOSE’s definition, pornography encompasses anything from Cosmopolitan and Sports Illustrated magazines to all adult content online.
Barclay prefaced the interview with editorializing comments from mainstream outlets — including Rolling Stone magazine — which characterized Johnson’s admission that he and his teenage son use Covenant Eyes to monitor each other’s internet usage to avoid pornography as unusual.
“I don’t mind being called crazy when ‘normal’ is so evil, when it’s so wrong” Barclay commented. “I don’t mind being called a little nutty. I don’t want to be normal. And neither does ‘MAGA Mike’ Johnson, apparently.”
DeHaas — who promotes what he calls his “accountability software” from an office park in Owosso, Michigan, located in the economically ravaged expanse between Flint and Lansing — told the “Glenn Beck Program” audience that the media has been misreporting “the true story.”
“The true story is: Mike Johnson is a good father,” he told Barclay. “And you’re right — people have taken that and turned it around to evil, like that’s an evil thing, being a good father is a bad thing.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson ‘Did an Advertisement’ for Covenant Eyes
According to De Haas, Johnson’s recently resurfaced endorsement of his for-profit anti-porn service at a panel at a Baptist Church gathering a year ago is “like, honestly, the Speaker of the House doing an advertisement for a Covenant Eyes, because he talked about Covenant Eyes’ accountability and how well it works, and how he used Covenant Eyes successfully to help teach his son to stay away from pornography.”
The actual story, De Haas’ stressed, is that “Mike Johnson, a good father, had a desire to discourage his son from getting trapped by pornography. And not only that, he sets an example for his son by holding himself accountable with his son — mutual accountability. So the real story is ‘Mike Johnson is a good father.’ We could use more good fathers who are active and engaged in parenting, and we ought to salute him.”
DeHaas used the segment to share his views about adult content in general, without providing sources for his panic-mongering, sweeping claims.
“You know,” he told Barclay, “we have to face the fact that virtually everybody now — there are a few exceptions that I’ve come across — but virtually everybody has been tempted by porn on the internet. The statistics show that upwards of 70% of men, and upwards of 50% of women actually have an ongoing struggle with it.”
DeHaas claimed that he has “corresponded with hundreds of teens and young adults who have struggled with porn since they were younger than 13. And these are kids that come from good homes. Their parents really are shocked to find this out.”
Although religious conservatives like DeHaas have consistently opposed attempts to implement science-based sex education in U.S. schools, the faith-based entrepreneur complained that porn has effectively become “the sex education of our young people.”
“It is training the boys, ‘This is how you treat girls’ and it’s teaching the girls, ‘This is how you get treated.’ Is it really is becoming the sex education of our of our of our youth,” he stated, completely ignoring — as NCOSE and other anti-porn activists routinely do, the existence of LGBTQ+ people and content.
Further Outlandish Claims about ‘Communists’ and ‘the Devil’
The rest of the segment included a bizarre, innuendo filled aside trying to link the very existence of online porn to “the growth of the erectile dysfunction industry.”
“Two decades ago, the ads for the drugs were old men talking to old men in the ad,” the 74-year-old DeHaas shared. “Now you listen to the ads, it’s young men talking to young men. And so that’s the results.”
Barclay replied, tonally fudging the line between joke and actual statement, “I can see the headline here: ‘Porn is a communist plot!’ And I want to say that that is a version of evil. And it’s a very seductive version that may start out in a very sort of, relatable, or just introductory way. And it gets worse and worse and worse over time, that people have talked about this. But it really does seem to me that we are under attack these days, not just obviously with the physical, that we’re facing on the battlefields, you know, across the world, but also in our hands.
“We’ve got these devices,” he went on, now fully conspiratorially. “There’s an information battle happening, there’s a battle for the soul of the nation in a lot of ways, through information, propaganda, but if you can get — it seems to me — into the relationships of men and women, and even stop them from having them at all in America, and you can put a lovely husband… husbands and wives and… just affect people in that way, you can do tremendous damage.”
Barclay then added that this seemed to fulfill a fable or prophecy popular among religious conservatives about “what the devil would do,” to which DeHaas replied: “You know, you’re absolutely right. Pornography is damaging every relationship that you can think of. It’s your family, your friends, it impedes your work. It impedes whatever ministry you have. And 93% of our members say that the reason they are one of the reasons that they’re using Covenant Eyes, is to improve their relationship with God, and they recognize that it has been damaged.”
The segment ended with a full promotional plug for Covenant Eyes, without disclosing whether “The Glenn Beck Program” had been compensated for this infomercial-like news segment.
