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To hear the Democrats and the mainstream media say it, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) is a clear and present danger, a threat of imminent harm that must be at the very least stripped of her committee assignments, or expelled from Congress altogether.
The Democrats had hoped House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy would purge the congresswoman for them, but when he apparently refused, Pelosi released a vitriolic statement on Wednesday, calling him a representative from "Q-California," and accusing him of "failure to lead his party" and "handing the keys over" to the "anti-Semite, QAnon adherent and 9/11 Truther" Greene.
The Republicans' response has been typical. A handful of House and Senate members openly sided with the Democrats - including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who called Greene a "cancer" on the party - while others have proposed a tit-for-tat ouster of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) from committees, on account of her own statements deemed anti-Semitic, conspiratorial and hateful.
Neither GOP faction seems to understand that they're being played, because the issue here isn't what anyone may have said or done, but who they are. Greene is a supporter of former President Donald Trump, while Omar is a member of the progressive 'Squad' and therefore beyond reproach by definition. These are the new rules of "Our Democracy," the new regime that has replaced the American Republic over the past month, following a successfully waged media, intelligence, political and narrative civil war.
Several keen-eyed people have observed that the brigading of Greene - who was elected in November with something like 75 percent of the vote in her district - is a tactic straight out of Saul Alinsky's 'Rules for Radicals,' specifically #13 about isolating and polarizing a single target. There's absolutely no reason to think the Democrats will stop at Greene, as their talk of "people with guns" being a danger has already targeted Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado), for example.
Note, also, that the Democrats are currently trying to convict former President Donald Trump of "inciting insurrection" in relation to the January 6 unrest at the Capitol. They have already used the riot as a pretext to deploy 25,000 troops in Washington - and leave more than 5,000 through the end of March - and erect a "permanent" fence around Congress. There is even talk of invoking the 14th Amendment - passed after the Civil War in 1865 to outlaw the defeated Confederate leaders - to keep him and his supporters from ever holding any office again.
Meanwhile, there is a massive push by mainstream and social media alike to censor "disinformation," defined by conveniently retained "experts" as anything that disagrees with their narrative. The New York Times has even floated the idea of a government "reality czar" - what Orwell's readers might recognize under a different name, the Ministry of Truth.
Note that the Biden administration's foreign policy, supposedly based on promoting "democracy" and US "values" worldwide, now literally involves cheering for censorship of Ukrainian TV stations who criticize their president, as "efforts... to counter Russia's malign influence."
In other words, totally normal everyday politics of peace, unity, healing and respecting the Constitution and long-established norms and traditions - not.
It's easy to laugh at the fact that members of Congress sound like bickering high-school cliques, but it ought to be a nervous laugh at best. This is not normal. In normal circumstances, there would be pushback against people who spent years on "Russiagate" and "Resistance" accusing anyone of conspiracies, for one thing. Instead, it's their critics who get brigaded, canceled, censored, deplatformed, etc.
There is open talk of employing the catastrophic US "war on terror" against domestic political opponents, and essentially overriding the First Amendment in the name of fighting "hate speech" and "manufactured facts." There will still be lip service to free speech, of course, but remember, this is the party that gets to define the meaning of words.
All of this may not add up to "pre-genocide" practices, as some have warned, but it comes uncomfortably close. Maybe not to 1980s Lebanon or 1990s Bosnia just yet, but Our Democracy bears ever more resemblance to Panem of the Hunger Games by the day, and less and less to the American Republic it has effectively replaced.
About the Author:
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Telegram @TheNebulator and on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
Reader Comments
The double think is maddening.
Why are AOC, Waters, and Pelosi allowed anywhere near the Congress building? Every day they show up it is like a treasonous riot invading.