Say Her Name

Republicans trot out peppy, younger female MAGA shills - so far to ridiculous effect

As we continue to mark Women’s History Month, I’d like to shine a spotlight on some of our freaky Republican Congresswomen. A new poll finds the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade has created what the New York Times called today “a new generation of abortion voters.” One in five of these new single-issue voters did not vote in 2020. They will this year.

This is bad news for Republicans. Republicans already had a woman problem with their nominee, the proudest p*ssy grabber in the land. They have been losing elections bigly ever since the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022. It’s quite likely that - despite the months of horse-race polling and pearl-clutching ahead - pro-choice voters will stamp out Trumpism and MAGA in November.

Dobbs was payback to the tiny but motivated Republican zygote wing, but it is a disaster electorally. The GOP appears to believe they can defy the numbers by trotting out peppy, younger female MAGA shills - so far to ridiculous effect. In the last week alone, cheerleader-ish Alabama Sen. Katie Britt was caught in a brazen lie about a border trafficking victim, South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, dolled up by the ABC “This Week” team with an extra glop of lip gloss, played the rape victim card to dodge questions about her support for serial, adjudicated sex abuser Trump. To round out the cast, in tinpot dictator/Godfather style, The Don’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, just swanned in to take charge of the RNC, and is expected to turn it into a piggy bank for Trump family legal fees.

These women are mad, bad … dangerous to know. But the true avatar of the GOP female is Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

In a functioning democracy, every lunatic has a right to vote. In that way, we should be proud of Rep. Greene. She has a real, if deranged, constituency. But, like Trump in the White House, Greene’s presence in Congress has normalized the deeply abnormal. The voters of Georgia’s 14th District have sent her to Congress for two terms so far. The title, office, and taxpayer-funded salary legitimize a conspiracy theorist who has personally harassed school shooting survivors because she believes the blood lettings are “false flag” actions designed to separate armed Americans from their precious AR-15s.

National political reporters and television anchors put lipstick on the pig, lazy TV bookers at networks and companies that care more about eyeballs and advertising than the national interest give her airtime.

Her position also means she is one of the few Americans who can heckle the President of the United States up close and in person, even to touch and put something in his hand, without getting tackled by the Secret Service. At last week’s State of the Union, clad in the red hat, she challenged Biden as he walked by, and put a button with the phrase “Say Her Name” into his hand. The name she wanted him to say is the Republican meme of the moment, the cynical use of the murder of a Georgia nursing student, Laken Riley, allegedly by a Venezuelan undocumented immigrant, as a prop for their xenophobic fear-mongering.

As usual, the right stole the slogan from the more creative progressive side. The “Say Her Name” chant is what police violence protesters shouted about Breonna Taylor, killed by Louisville cops who were looking for her boyfriend.

Biden’s response was lauded because he did “say her name” from the House rostrum. In true Biden fashion, he stepped on his own success by calling her alleged killer “an illegal.” But Biden’s real failure with respect to the Laken Riley ploy is one that the entire Democratic messaging apparatus shares. Every time Trump and the MAGAs shriek about migrant crime the response should be, in lockstep: the number of Americans murdered by immigrants is a tiny fraction of the number of Americans killed by other armed Americans enabled by politicians who refuse to regulate access to guns.

Between 2015 and 2022, over 19,000 people were shot and killed or wounded in an American mass shooting. There is no nationwide data on immigrant murderers, but research by the New York Times and the Marshall Project found that between 2007 and 2016, there was no link between undocumented immigrants and a rise in violent or property crime.

That systematic messaging failure is of a piece with the ongoing normalization of Marjorie Taylor Greene and her MAGA ilk. Greene’s name should never be uttered on television or published online or in paper without a link to the video of her harassing David Hogg, a teen survivor of the Valentine’s Day 2018 school shooting that killed 17 people. In the video, Greene, carrying a large beige tote bag and a single-use plastic bottle of water, is stalking Hogg on a sidewalk near Capitol Hill, where he was lobbying for gun reforms in March 2019. Here is the video.

Think about this: A congresswoman got her start in politics harassing a teenager, and not just any teenager, but the traumatized survivor of a school shooting. She accused him of being funded by George Soros. She called him “a coward.” She even warned him that she had her own gun in her purse.

Video of the incident didn’t surface until after she was elected for the first time in 2020. Only then did CNN call Hogg (whom Greene had been calling #hogghitler online) to ask him about the incident. Hogg said he “absolutely” felt threatened when Greene mentioned her gun. But he told himself, “If they shoot me, they prove my point.”

Like Alex Jones, an ogre still fundamentally unpunished for torturing the parents of Sandy Hook children shredded by an AR-15, Greene claimed to believe the Parkland high school shooting was a false flag operation. Media Matters for America published her social media posts - since removed - colloquies with like-minded conspiracy theorists about how the Parkland security guard was paid a pension to keep quiet about a plot. One commenter referred to the pension as a “(k)ick back for going along with the evil plan,” to which Greene responded, “My thoughts exactly!! Paid to do what he did and keep his mouth shut.”

In another 2018 Facebook post, Greene wrote: “I am told that Nancy Pelosi tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that ‘we need another school shooting’ in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control.” 

Only a few years ago, that this person would serve in Congress was unthinkable: She thinks gun reformers plot school massacres. She holds this belief so firmly that she harassed a teenager on a public street. But TV bookers will book her, she votes on national policy, and small and big donors support her campaigns - all of that shellacking her with a layered veneer of normalcy.

Say Her Name: Marjorie Taylor Greene. She is unmoored from reality. And she’s not alone.

As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”