The battle over the Speakership dreams of Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., was a cataclysmic event, in terms of the media's increasingly ineffective efforts to convey to news consumers what is actually going on. Most press coverage portrayed the struggle as one between a more moderate faction supporting McCarthy and a far-right splinter group who opposed him. In reality, however, the fight was merely showboating from a small group of trolls who wanted attention, with no real substance to any of the disagreements. Indeed, pro- and anti-McCarthy groups are in fierce agreement on nearly all major policy issues, including the question of whether democracy is a good thing worth protecting. (Both sides believe it is not!)For proof there's no real daylight between the two factions, look no further than the fact that the biggest Republican troll in the House, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, was on Kev's side from the get-go. Greene has become one of the most famous — and powerful — Republicans in Capitol Hill by sheer dint of her gleefully unapologetic fascism. She's one of the biggest apologists for Donald Trump's Big Lie and the violent insurrectionists who attempted to overthrow democracy on January 6, 2021. She's a grade-A conspiracy theorist who rode into Washington spouting QAnon nonsense. Once in office, she went straight for the third rail in American politics, showy antisemitism, downplaying the Holocaust and raving about how Jews were setting wildfires with space lasers. She hits all the major stations of the conspiracy theory cross, from dismissing mass shootings as "false flags" to vaccine denialism to, naturally, 9/11 trutherism. She, of course, has also gotten that sweet, sweet attention by calling for the execution of her political opponents.But she's all for McCarthy, because he is fine with all this, despite his media image of moderation. Greene, who is a much savvier operator than the liberals constantly dunking on her would like to admit, clearly realizes that being on the always-Kevin side of this fight opened up a golden opportunity: She can now rebrand herself as a mainstream Republican. With her shiny new committee assignments — complete with access to some of the most highly classified information in government — and her role as McCarthy's golden girl, Greene is set to remake herself into a respected figure on Capitol Hill. She'll be just as much a conspiracy theory kook as she ever was, but her new status as an elder statesman in the GOP will put an ennobling gloss on her lies, helping push them through the ever-credulous Beltway press.
That Greene is consciously rebranding herself became undeniable on Sunday, when she distanced herself from QAnon during a Fox News interview.
"Well, like a lot of people today, I had easily gotten sucked into some things I'd seen on the internet," she said when host Howard Kurtz asked her about QAnon. "But that was dealt with quickly early on. I never campaigned on those things. That was not something I believed in."
I strongly agree with these two points:
- There is not much difference between the holdout extremists and the other Republicans in the House. The GOP has undeniably radicalized into a corrupted, mendacious anti-democracy political force.
- The mainstream media is doing a poor job of explaining what is going on. One can reasonably speculate that the main reasons are some combination of (i) pro-corporate bias due to corporate ownership, (ii) incompetence and too many errors of omission and commission, (iii) much more pressure to sensationalize and trivialize news to make money than to inform the public, and/or (iv) loss of public trust after decades of unfounded attacks, lies and slanders.
Also, Greene is a shameless liar. She knew all along that QAnon was lies, slanders and crackpottery. She was never sucked in, despite her claim to the contrary. She just needed the publicity. The mainstream media gave it to her.
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