How Do You Solve a Problem like Marjorie?
A flibbertijibbet, a will-o'-the wisp, a clown
She Will Not Be Ignored
Yesterday, Georgia representative — and congressional representation of a large swath of my family — Marjorie Taylor Greene doubled and tripled down on comparing mask-wearing and vaccination policies to anti-Jewish discrimination during the Holocaust.
It all started last week when she appeared on a podcast that apparently doubles as a cable news show and said:
“This woman [Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi] is mentally ill. You know, we can look back in a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second-class citizens — so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany and this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.”
Just to fill in the gaps here, Greene is talking about Nancy Pelosi’s continuing requirement that members wear masks on the House floor; and Pelosi’s stated reason for this is the presumably low rate of vaccination among Republican House members.
Now, is mandating that unvaccinated members wear masks on the House floor medically necessary? Probably not, as unvaccinated members pose little threat to their vaccinated colleagues (of whom there are many more anyway). If anything, the unvaccinated members are almost entirely only a threat to each other. So, is Nancy Pelosi using this mask policy to needle her Republican colleagues? Almost certainly. The woman never misses an opportunity to score partisan points. But you know what it’s not? [Expletive]ing Nazi Germany.
As you would expect, the condemnation of Greene was swift and utterly ineffective; as condemnation and shame have no effect on sociopaths. Yesterday morning, Greene doubled down with this:
And when none other than Ben Shapiro condemned her for it, she said this:
Get that? She never compared it to the Holocaust, only the discrimination against Jews “in early Nazi years.” So, I guess, the pre-Holocaust? That is a distinction without a difference if there ever was one.
Needless to say, Greene is psychotic. But she is not altogether unrepresentative of a line of rightwing thought these days. Even last year, when so-called lockdowns and mask mandates were being implemented, the comparisons to Nazi Germany started almost immediately. (Quick note: I say “so-called lockdowns and mask mandates” because we didn’t have actual lockdowns or mask mandates. There were not police patrolling the streets ensuring people stayed in their homes. There was no criminal penalty for leaving your home or refusing to wear a mask; and even the civil penalties for refusing to wear a mask were largely theoretical and unenforced. The worst that was going to happen was being told you couldn’t enter a store and had to stop online.) Even people I know personally — people who should know better — started playing footsie with these Nazi analogies. And it’s just so tedious. It’s also, I’m sorry to say, very, well, white. If your reaction to being told to wear a mask or get a vaccine during a pandemic is “wow this must be like what Jews experienced in Nazi Germany,” you have never experienced anything approaching oppression in your life. Anyone who has experienced actual oppression — or anyone whose empathy mechanism is properly functioning — would never say something so ridiculous. But it’s exactly something you’d expect to hear from a 46 year old polyamorous heiress to a construction company who’s never had a real job.
All of that is prelude to the actual point I wanted to make. There is a burgeoning school of thought among some political types that the best response to people like Marjorie Taylor Greene (and more importantly, Donald Trump) is to ignore them.
I just don’t think that’s a good plan.
Ignoring obviously psychotic people is a good idea, say, in public. Or on public transportation. If there’s a hobo muttering to himself on the subway and urinating in the corner, sure, avoid eye contact and switch trains as quickly as possible. And while I will readily compare Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump to a muttering hobo publicly urinating on the subway, it’s not enough to merely ignore them — because millions of people want them conducting the train.
Greene raised more than three million dollars in the first quarter of this year, which is an almost unfathomable haul for a first-term back-benching representative that isn’t even on any committees (on account of being insane). Donald Trump is far and away the leading GOP presidential candidate for 2024 (even though I’m still bearish on his actual chances of being the nominee, there’s no denying he’s the current frontrunner).
So while it’s true that people like Greene and Trump feed off of the negative reactions they create, and it would be preferable to deprive them of the attention they so desperately crave, we cannot ignore the fact that they have constituencies. Simply ignoring them does not deprive them of these constituencies.
If we learned anything from 2016, it’s that we can’t count on obviously crazy candidates to flame out on their own. These people aren’t boogiemen. They don’t go away if we close our eyes. They are real people who seek to control the levers of federal power. They must be actively opposed, and the people inclined to support them must also be actively opposed.
The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations
Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill on Monday that seeks to fine social media companies that ban political candidates in Florida. This is, obviously, in response to Twitter and Facebook banning Donald Trump from their platforms. It is also, obviously, incredibly stupid.
This is so blatantly unconstitutional that it barely warrants mentioning, but at the same time it is so unconstitutional that it’s remarkable. The government cannot force private entities to present political speech with which the companies do not agree. (At least not in America, and at least not for now.) Moreover, the state of Florida has no jurisdiction over Twitter and Facebook. The Florida legislature has no more authority to demand Twitter and Facebook present certain politicians’ speech on their platforms than they do to set the Yankees’ starting lineup.
What’s most galling about this is that Ron DeSantis almost certainly knows better. But he’s pretending not to as a sop to Florida Trump supporters (of which there are many) who are quite useful for his future political ambitions. (This isn’t the first time DeSantis has pandered to Trump supporters, either. During his gubernatorial primary, he put his head so far up Trump’s ass that he was carrying Trump around on his shoulders like Sean Astin at the end of Rudy.)
I can’t fathom what it’s like to have such a low opinion of your own voters. I mean, I can — I largely agree with DeSantis that his voters are easy to trick as long as you pretend to fight the people they hate — it just strikes me as utterly contemptible to use that information for achieving political power.
It’s also just another piece of evidence in a long line that shows how much of a sham the Tea Party movement was. My entire political life I’d been waiting for a movement to come along that focused on returning government to its proper role and scope; and in 2010 I thought we finally had it. But then by 2015 it turned out that reducing the scope of government had nothing to do with it; and now these same people are celebrating the use of government force to punish private entities for their business decisions — when we all know that if this were 2014 and a policy of Barack Obama, the same people praising DeSantis would be scaling the White House fence with bowie knives between their teeth.
I’m still bitter about it, if you hadn’t noticed.
Trient-Weekly Trivia
Category: Composers
Clue: His brother Ira provided the lyrics for many of his songs.
George Gershwin
Today’s clue:
Category: American Rivers
Clue: This southern state’s entire northern border is formed by the Ohio River.
Dispatches from the Homefront
My daughter is learning a bunch of new syllables lately, and she’s started putting them together in babbling phrases. So she’ll walk around the house saying things like a baba doo ba deeba dooba daba, like a tiny blonde Al Jarreau.