Over the weekend, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the MAGA representative for Georgia and the first QAnon advocate to make it into the House of Representatives in the US, accused Minority Leader of the US Senate Mitch McConnell of being a “Democrat”, to which one of her supporters yelled, “He’s a communist!”
It wasn’t a stretch in that room. Greene has previously said: “Democrats are actually communist.”
Rough on McConnell? Let’s look back on how it became possible that the long-time senior Republican is being accused by his high-profile colleagues of communist leanings.
May 2016: McConnell endorsed Donald Trump for president of the United States. He would go on to criticise Trump several times in the following months. He pushed back against Trump’s accusation that a federal judge was biased because of his Mexican heritage, and against Trump’s attack on the parents of a Muslim-American soldier who was killed in Iraq. “As the father of three daughters”, McConnell said, Trump should apologise for the “locker-room talk” of the Access Hollywood video. But he never withdrew his support.
2017-20: McConnell used the filibuster to block pretty much everything the Obama administration attempted to achieve in its final years. He found Trump a more trustworthy negotiating partner, helping him reshape the American judiciary in the Republican image. They ultimately got more than 200 judges appointed.
November 2020: After Joe Biden won the 2020 election, for a month McConnell refused to acknowledge Biden’s victory or actively oppose the Trump campaign’s baseless claims of electoral fraud. On December 15, he congratulated Biden on his victory.
February 2021: In Trump’s second impeachment, after the riot on Capitol Hill on January 6 2021, McConnell voted to acquit. Minutes later, he gave a speech in which he said: “Trump’s actions that preceded the riot were a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty. Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”
(If McConnell in his leadership role had got enough votes from his own side to vote in favour of impeachment, Trump would have been disqualified from “any office of honour, trust or profit”.)
Taylor Greene was kicked off her committee assignments for supporting violence against Democrats. Later that same month, McConnell said he would “absolutely” support Trump if he became the GOP presidential nominee in 2024.
December 2022: Taylor Greene’s only criticism of the January 6 riots: “If Steve Bannon and I had organised that, we would have won. Not to mention, we would’ve been armed.”
January 2023: McConnell is “pulling” for House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy to become speaker.
Greene has long claimed that McCarthy would return her to better committees than she had previously been on. McCarthy, once he assumed the role, promptly put her on the powerful oversight committee.
I think that MTG is a terrorist by those statements. McConnell is a crook and a weathervane, but communist????? They wouldn’t know one if it bit them.
The self serving sleaze of US politics is even worse than our own rancid circus.
Victor Klemperer’s Lingua Tertii Imperii tracked the ways that the Nazis used and abused language to the point of any meaningful public discourse becoming essentially impossible.
“Fanatical” became a term of praise, for example, and following the leader “blindly” an admirable trait. In his own words, Klemperer noted:
…. Never has the tension between human power and powerlessness, human knowledge and human stupidity been so overwhelmingly great as now … the basic principle of the whole language of the Third Reich became apparent to me: a bad conscience; its triad: defending oneself, praising oneself, accusing – never a moment of calm testimony.
But then again, he never met MTG.
The point to this apparent idiocy is to make the words devoid of any useful meaning and thus disrupt thought and discussion about the underlying concepts they represent.
It’s a strategy, and even if MTG doesn’t understand it, the people feeding her lines most definitely do.
https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/conservatism.html
See the sections on “Destruction of Language” and “Destruction of Reason”.
See also Orwell’s novel 1984 and its appendix on Newspeak. Less erudite, but more recent, there’s Steve Bannon’s tactic for removing facts and reason from public discourse which he described as ‘flooding the zone with siht’.
An interesting link. Thanks doctor!
How about this effort from that arch nepo-baby, Sarah Huckabee Sanders:
Every day we are told that we must partake in the left’s rituals, salute their flags, and worship their false idols.
That’s not normal. It’s crazy, and it’s wrong.
Conservative accusations are pretty much always admissions of guilt or intent.
Ironic really when what arch neocons like her want is:
The irony would be lost on her and her followers though.
If a Democrat is actually a communist, then does this make Xi Ching Ping a… Democrat?
If you take a look at the constitution of the PRC you’ll find it looks rather more democratic as Australia’s, never mind how it all works in practice. According to article 1 of the constition, “The People’s Republic of China is a socialist state under the people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.”
Even more obviously democratic, there’s Kim Jong-un. Must be, because he’s in charge of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The other Korean Republic, to the south of that one, is of course not a bit democratic by this measure.