Why MTG Can Get Away with Slandering Democrats as Criminals

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, April 04, 2023

 

For the most part, 60 Minutes journalist Leslie Stahl’s sit-down interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene, in which the Republican congresswoman from Georgia appeared earnest when she stood by her accusation that “Democrats are the party of pedophiles,” produced one of two reactions.

 

First, incredulity over Stahl’s stunned silence, which was all she could muster in response to the accusation. There was plenty of that. The second was bitter hostility toward both Stahl and CBS for failing to fact-check the claim either in real time or post-production.

 

The second reaction invalidates the first insofar as there is no valuable way to fact-check a statement that isn’t designed to reflect any facts. “They support grooming children,” Greene averred. “Democrats support — even Joe Biden, the president himself, supports children being sexualized and having transgender surgeries,” she continued. “Sexualizing children is what pedophiles do to children.”

 

There’s a tautology at work here, and you must be steeped in too-online right-wing rhetorical culture to grasp it. Greene is a product of that culture. It’s doubtful that she could elaborate on this contention in a way that would, if not convince her skeptics, at least meet the threshold at which point neutral observers would have to concede that it was, at the very least, an argument.

 

Greene doesn’t often (ever?) have to produce that sort of argument, in part because her audience is already convinced. But why? The pedophile accusation is a serious one, and the burden of proof is on her. Analyzing the congresswoman’s thought process and her intended audience’s response to her remarks would be an interesting exercise if we hadn’t witnessed the mirror image of her behavior from the left for over a decade. If you substitute the criminal degeneracy that Greene is leveraging for her own political gain with another form of potentially criminal anti-social behavior — racial discrimination — her goals and motives become more apparent.

 

For years now, conservatives and Republicans have been privy to a pseudo-intellectual exhibition on the left to charge GOP lawmakers with the most spurious allegations of racial hatred. The primary objective is character assassination.

 

“They keep saying ‘Chicago,’ by the way. Have you noticed?” MSNBC host Chris Matthews asked, leadingly, in coverage of Barack Obama’s 2012 nominating convention. Game Change author John Heilemann picked up what Matthews was putting down: “There’s a lot of black people in Chicago.”

 

“Who lives in urban America?” Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson asked in a 2014 discussion about jobless benefits disproportionately going to city-dwellers. “This is ‘welfare queen’-lite. You don’t even have to say it. All you have to say is ‘urban.’” Add that to the pile of coded “dog whistles” that only the Right could supposedly hear. Among them, fighting words like “golf,” “professor,” and even “Constitution.”

 

“Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.” So declared Nikole Hannah-Jones in her introduction to the symposium of often factually deficient 1619 Project essays, which became a near-religious text for Democrats who sought the 2020 Democratic nomination.

 

“This country was founded on white supremacy,” said Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, “and every single institution and structure that we have in our country still reflects the legacy of slavery and segregation and Jim Crow and suppression, even in our democracy.” He added that, “until this president” — referring to Trump — the nation sought to make amends for this great historical offense. Trump’s voters thwarted that project.

 

“I can talk to those white women in the suburbs that voted for Trump and explain to them what white privilege actually is,” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) said, presuming to lecture Republican voters for failing to properly appreciate the benefits they enjoy as a result of their “whiteness.”

 

“If this country wasn’t racist, Stacey Abrams would be governor,” said Representative Seth Moulton (D., Mass.) in a pander for the ages. Neither he nor the rest of the Democratic field in that year limited their indictment of the GOP’s racial bigotries to Georgia’s political establishment. Most of the party’s presidential candidates that year branded Donald Trump a white supremacist, but that was not an extraordinary charge reserved for an extraordinary man.

 

According to the New York Times’ analysis, even a mild presence like Virginia’s Republican governor Glenn Youngkin “stoked the resentment and fear of some white voters” when he opposed adding subject matter related to critical race theory to elementary-school curricula. Youngkin “did stoke white grievance politics to mobilize the Republican base,” MSNBC host Chris Hayes agreed.

 

And on and on.

 

The audience for this sort of thing is not looking for replicable social science with a falsifiable premise. They want to anathematize their opponents — or, at least, have some license to ignore their critics, whose views don’t deserve a hearing in a civilized society. Greene doesn’t need a sophisticated argument that would withstand peer review. Nor did these partisan Democratic polemicists. Their respective audiences heard what they wanted to hear.