What We Can Learn from Marjorie Taylor Greene
And what her attempt at rebranding herself tells us about us
In 1992, at an elementary school in Trenton, New Jersey, Dan Quayle’s political carer ended. For those unfamiliar with the name, Quayle was at that time the Vice President of the United States, and his career was ended by, of all things, a spelling bee.
While presiding over the event, Quayle mistakenly corrected the spelling of the word “potato” by adding an “e” at the end, and that one chalky mistake made him a laughingstock. He instantly went from first in line for the presidency to political outcast, just like that.
In January of 2004, Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean had a similar moment when he let out an impassioned scream during a speech just ahead of the New Hampshire primary. The moment was played endlessly on news programs and commentators everywhere called it the “I Have a Scream” speech. Dean’s campaign never recovered, and he dropped out shortly after.
In March of 2019, Marjorie Taylor Greene targeted activist David Hogg on the street as he was in DC advocating for common sense gun control. Hogg was a survivor of the school shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The shooting killed 17 people and injured dozens more, yet Greene agreed with the right-wing narrative that the shooting was a “false flag” and that it never really happened.
She also said that the 2018 California wildfires were intentionally set by “space solar generators” belonging to the Rothschild family. This is how we all got to learn about the “Jewish space lasers” conspiracy theory.
And there are many, many more conspiracy theories she has endorsed over the years, from man-made hurricanes to chemtrails, and just about everything in between. Yet Marjorie Taylor Greene did not suffer the same fate as Dean or Quayle, just as Donald Trump each week does dozens of things that would have ended any other presidency in American history, yet he manages to avoid the consequences again and again. And Greene, in true Trumpian fashion, got to launch her recent rebrand on “The View” and continue a political career that should have never started. But for the moment, forget about what that says about her, or about Trump. The question we should be asking is, “What does this say about us?”
That is a question too large for the small article in which I present it, so I will not attempt to answer it completely, but instead, I’d like to offer a rhetorician’s perspective. And for a rhetorician, the two most powerful tools in the world are time and repetition. Whoever gets their message out the loudest, and for the longest, wins. It’s just that simple.
And on the American right, it’s even simpler than that. Over the last half-century or so, starting on the radio with personalities like Rush Limbaugh and growing into a massive web of right-wing networks and digital media entities, corporate media has successfully captured a significant percentage of the American population and walled them off from information sources that don’t toe the corporate line. So Americans who consume right-wing media today consume only right-wing media and nothing else. And as a man who makes arguments for a living, and teaches others how to do the same, I can say this with absolute confidence:
Under these conditions, I can make anyone, even you, believe just about anything, and under these circumstances, over enough time, you could do the same to me. No one is immune, not even the experts. Time and repetition always wins.
America’s future is more uncertain today than at any time in my life, and I say that as a middle-aged Cold War kid who grew up believing the world could end on just about any day. After all, if the bombs were to drop tomorrow, a few rich men could probably convince about a third of us that the mushroom clouds are being caused by Jewish space lasers and that Hydroxychloroquine can shield us from the radiation. The ads would be perfectly crafted to allow people just enough time to enter their credit card numbers before being vaporized by the blasts.
Remember that when Marjorie Taylor Greene announces that she is running for President.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.