Evidence from late 2023 onward shows a sustained pattern of U.S. outlets resurfacing Mike Johnson’s past writings, sermons, and religious activism and framing them as extreme, matching Sacks’s prediction.

• Shortly after Johnson became Speaker in October 2023, CNN’s KFile ran a widely echoed piece detailing his early‑2000s editorials in the Shreveport Times supporting criminalization of gay sex and calling homosexuality an “inherently unnatural” and “dangerous lifestyle” that could destroy “the entire democratic system.” This was explicitly framed as digging into his past rhetoric now that he was Speaker and was repeatedly cited by other outlets and partisan comms operations.

  Sources: CNN article and re‑use in other political communications. (amp.cnn.com)

• New York Magazine/Intelligencer’s “Mike Johnson’s Old‑Time Religion” and related coverage highlighted an earlier sermon where Johnson rejected evolution and suggested teaching evolution contributes to school shootings, again using an old sermon to illustrate his worldview as Speaker. (en.wikipedia.org)

• Rolling Stone and the New York Times resurfaced Johnson’s comments on a pre‑speakership Christian prayer call in which he described America as “dark and depraved” and questioned whether God would bring judgment; these were packaged as revelations about the new Speaker’s theology and rhetoric from before he was in leadership. (debatepolitics.com)

• NPR and other outlets in November–December 2023 ran profiles scrutinizing Johnson’s ties to far‑right Christian networks (e.g., New Apostolic Reformation, dominion theology) and events like the National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance, explicitly presenting these older relationships and appearances as evidence of a Christian‑nationalist, theocratic bent now relevant because he is Speaker. (wusf.org)

• A wide range of commentators and outlets repeatedly described Johnson with terms such as “hard‑core theocrat,” “extreme Christian fundamentalist,” and “Christian nationalist”; some high‑profile commentators compared his rhetoric to Osama bin Laden’s or likened his Christian nationalism to the Taliban, clearly aiming to portray him as radical or unhinged. (catholicleague.org)

• Coverage did not stop after the initial week: through late 2023 and into 2024, outlets continued to publish pieces revisiting his past legal work for the Ark Encounter/Creation Museum, his earlier statements blaming evolution for moral decay, and his longstanding ties to organizations like Answers in Genesis and the Family Research Council, all framed as indicators of an unusually extreme religious‑political worldview for a modern Speaker. (religionnews.com)

Putting this together, media behavior matches the forecasted “drip, drip, drip” of stories about Johnson’s backbench‑era sermons, writings, and affiliations, with a consistent emphasis on presenting those past remarks as extreme. That is substantively what Sacks predicted, so the prediction is best judged as right.