#658: It's Pretty Easy Being Greene dissects how Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG) weaponize misinformation—Jones falsely claiming he predicted Ukraine’s invasion, MTG pushing HR 6070 to honor Kyle Rittenhouse while conflating trans issues with child safety. MTG’s $1M+ fundraising from defense contractors like Lockheed and Koch belies her "regular people" narrative, while her failed bills (e.g., the Congressional Voting Accountability Act) expose performative grandstanding. Their shared conspiracy-driven rhetoric, from fabricated drag queen threats to Roger Stone’s denied January 6th ties, reveals a pattern of exploiting outrage for political capital, prioritizing spectacle over substance in America’s culture wars. [Automatically generated summary]
So there's something happening around InfoWars, like I said, that's definitely a cause for concern, and it needs to be noted.
To be fair, there's a lot of hard stuff going on.
But there's this trend that we need to pay more attention to it.
It's the relationship that's growing between InfoWars and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
They're becoming a bit more entrenched than you might have expected the case to be.
Could have predicted?
Green appeared on Alex's February 2nd show, and we discussed that appearance, but what we've not yet touched on is how it's been followed up by a ton of further interaction.
The whole Putin invading Ukraine thing definitely seemed like a more relevant topic to cover, but now that Alex has kind of settled into his very transparent status quo of defending Putin while pretending he's just looking at all sides, we have an opportunity to go back and fill in some of the gaps from things that we missed along the way.
On her initial appearance, Alex mentioned that he was excited to meet Marjorie in person, and as it turned out, he didn't have to wait all that long, as she ended up making her first in-studio appearance on February 20th, which is where we're going to begin our episode today.
Green doesn't show up until the second hour of this Sunday episode, but if you take the time to listen to the beginning of it, you'll notice that Alex's top story is not one that looks great in hindsight.
There are a lot of conflicting reports about what's happening in Eastern Europe.
Northeastern Europe.
And what's really about to unfold in Ukraine, where there's been an eight-year proxy war between the globalists and the Russians.
Here's just some of the headlines.
Russia plans biggest war since 1945, says the British globalist prime minister, who I wouldn't believe a damn word comes out of his mouth, but who knows, it might be true.
Russian troops receive orders to proceed with invasion.
He's specifically casting doubt on assessments that Russia was going to invade Ukraine on his February 20th show, mere days before the invasion actually happens.
That on its own probably isn't that bad.
I think a lot of people would have said similar things.
The problem is that as soon as the invasion happened, just a few days after this, he decides to put together a compilation of dumb clips he's pretending to prove that he's dead.
he predicted the invasion back in August 2021.
Right.
This is central to one of Alex's deception games and understanding clips like this is key to getting what's going on.
On February 20th, Alex was probably aware that he'd made a prediction that there would be war by February, or at least he He's aware that he'd been yelling about war being imminent for a while, but he also knew that he'd been saying that it was going to be a war with China.
So if there's news coming out about the possibility of Russia being involved in a war, that's not what Alex is looking for.
Alex loves Putin and hates the United States government, so if an agency within the U.S. government is saying that Putin is going to invade Ukraine, of course that's not true.
And Alex's supposed prediction isn't even a factor.
doesn't it doesn't come into his mind but then once the actual invasion happens there's a change in the calculation the prediction of war with china didn't materialize but this invasion is close enough for him to use so alex pretends that this is a is what he was talking about the whole time.
We heard how in this compilation, he used a clip from last November where he had to edit out the part where he said that he didn't think Russia was going to invade Ukraine.
And here you see that same mentality still in place on February 20th.
What people forgot and what Gautama wasn't even really thinking about, which was his mistake, was that if life is suffering, you should therefore be able to make money off it because there's nothing you can do, baby.
I could care less about anybody but my family and other hard-charging patriots that love liberty.
But I get some butterflies and excited and was pacing up and down before she got here because I am extremely...
Excited to have MTG, Marjorie Taylor Greene, from Georgia's 14th District with us right now, because out of all the great people, there's quite a few good people in Congress, quite a few bad ones.
I've got to say, she's probably my favorite.
There's a few good ones up there, but I tell you, she is just the most genuine, and she's the most popular of anybody that got elected in the last round, but the system's coming after her big time.
This is indicative of the slide that's happened on Alex's show over the years.
There was at least once, at one point, the pretense of being above principle and the issues, whereas now it's all just attempts to hijack people's attention, do some trolling, and then talk about meme shit.
it.
Alex used to at least pretend to discuss documents.
Now, half of the time, he's reporting on tweets or sub stack posts that people write that don't mean anything.
Alex used to have guests who had an air of seriousness around them, whether or not they actually were, but people like Webster Tarpley or G. Edward Griffin.
But it wasn't so long ago that they were replaced by people like Carp.
...and Mike Cernovich.
Alex never really had any true depth to the stuff he was saying and covering, but in his earlier career, there was at least an expectation that he pretend.
At this point, the cultural landscape has changed enough that there's no real point in even pretending, and now it's good enough just to do the troll shit and pretend that that is itself substance.
Anyway, that brings us to Marjorie Taylor Greene popping onto the show.
She is fairly popular, which, combined with her clearly extreme right-wing politics, is the only reason that Alex has any interest in her.
That, and she's actually desperate enough for attention that she's willing to be on Infowars.
There's a pretty good chance that she's going to retake her seat in the 2022 midterm election, but from a lot of what I can tell, that just has to do with the inherent advantage of incumbency.
She's a really fucked up person who's willing to give speeches at Nick Fuentes' political conference and make regular appearances on Enforce, which puts her in the position of being someone with a bit of a constituency ceiling.
While it is true that the GOP has drifted closer to her brand of insanity in the past years, she still is a real vulnerability in terms of a potential GOP primary if she's ever up against a really strong candidate who doesn't pal around.
It is an exciting interview for her, because she can just talk shit and speak freely.
Other interviewers would probably push back on completely insane things, you might say, but Alex would just let that shit slide and then try and outdo her.
Bigotry is on the table, stupid conspiracy theories are treated like serious concerns, It's much more fun than being on CNN for someone who's a bigot and really loves stupid conspiracy theories.
Wow, that's really profound, how the thing that Marjorie learned when she went to Washington is literally the most obvious complaint that everyone has about Washington.
But, you know, if she's so unlike these cloistered Washington bubble beings, then you would think that her legislative history would be full of all kinds of important bills that really help the people who she represents.
But this was back in April 2021, so this is when the right-wing media was all up in arms about Waters saying that people should stay in the street and protest through the Chauvin trial.
Looks like she also introduced a number of bills that were obviously going to die in committee, but had names that were just perfect for folks in the right-wing media to cover.
Stuff like the We Will Not Comply Act, or the Fire Fauci Act.
In November, she introduced a bill, HR 6070, which was known as the Kyle H. Rittenhouse Congressional Gold Medal Act.
She wanted to give Rittenhouse a Congressional Gold Medal.
You know that thing that's been awarded to people like Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, and Jonas Salk?
This seems like something that if I were just a regular person living in Rome or Calhoun or Dalton, Georgia, I'd be pretty interested in my representative taking the time to do that stuff.
It's a fine criticism of Congress to say that Congress members are often too in their own world and in a bubble, but the reality is that Marjorie Taylor Greene is in a bubble too.
It's a way worse bubble.
It's a bubble where the mechanisms of government really only exist in order to create opportunities to bring yourself more media attention and thus strengthen your own brand.
It's essentially all Marjorie has been doing since she's gotten to office, introducing these meaningless bills that are red meat for extreme right-wing media, going on tour with Matt Gaetz, speaking at Nick Fuentes' event, and now showing up on Alex's show more than once.
The normal congressional person's bubble may be an issue because it does keep them a bit detached from the larger world.
But Marjorie Taylor Greene's bubble essentially only has room in it for herself, which is a big, big problem.
I feel like the guy you're talking to is the one who talks about people having horns coming out of their head, being demons and such.
This is just a string of words that are meant to appeal to a far-right base, but ultimately what Green is saying makes no sense.
Like, what's the relationship between any of these thoughts?
You can see that there isn't any, because right-wing media training is essentially just go out there and list off as many grievances as you can, something will stick.
What she means is that fentanyl is the number one cause of death of Americans aged 18 to 45, which is a problem, but ultimately, she doesn't have a solution other than yelling about China or the border or something.
If she wanted to make a concrete difference in this area, she would support safe access to drug sampling and test strips, so people...
This would be ultimately unacceptable to someone like Marjorie, though, because it would be tacitly accepting the reality that some people do drugs.
And you can't have that.
Same thing with, like, safe needle programs and the right-wing opposition to that shit.
What was the journey running for Congress and winning by record numbers and being demonized and attacked and being the woman in the arena that Teddy Roosevelt talked about?
What has that process been like?
Because it seems like in the last three years, it's made you stronger, not weaker.
So Roosevelt's speech was about the man in the arena, and it's very specifically not about the woman in the arena.
When Teddy Roosevelt was president, a woman wouldn't have been allowed into the arena, literally or metaphorically.
Teddy Roosevelt was president from 1901 to 1909, and women didn't have the right to vote until 1920, the ratification of the 19th Amendment.
The first woman was elected to Congress in 1916.
And Rebecca Felton was the first woman in the Senate in 1922, but she was appointed to fill a vacancy and only served for one day because she was installed as a PR move on the part of the governor who was running in the upcoming Senate election and didn't want to appoint somebody to fill the vacancy.
So in fairness, Teddy Roosevelt would come out in favor of women's suffrage in 1912, but the speech that Alex is referring to is from 1910, so it's a little incongruous.
Anyway, you know, there's some deep, deep lessons that you learn when you go into Congress, and Marjorie has the opposite of those.
Is it really something that they're going to present as a conspiracy here, that political parties derive their power from being able to vote as a bloc, and that's essentially how the democracy works?
Honestly, this is painful to listen to, not only because it's stupid, but because it reveals a shocking level of disdain that Alex and Marjorie have for the people who are listening to them.
What Marjorie is describing is not strong-arm tactics or some kind of a weird conspiracy within Washington.
It's caucusing.
Marjorie's actual complaint is that she didn't have the political capital to dictate the direction of the party in her first term in office.
It's really an expression of narcissism and entitlement being disguised as some kind of complaint about party politics.
If she has a problem with the GOP, she's more than welcome to leave the party and become an independent, and then she won't have to get all the shit that she might get if she doesn't want to vote with the party on some important vote.
She can't do that, though, because the GOP has a very powerful fundraising machine, and without that R next to her name, she'd be essentially fucked in any election in her district.
Especially if that fundraising machine were to go behind one of her opponents.
What you hear Marjorie expressing here is essentially impotence because she doesn't understand how to make things work in government and she's not willing to figure it out.
Why would you when doing this kind of bullshit and doing media spectacles is clearly more profitable for you than governing?
Somebody like AOC that's an admitted communist that flies first class and wears $8,000 outfits, but says a hard-working mom or dad, you know, running a business, making $50,000 a year is greedy.
Is she bad because she admits she's evil?
She admits she's out in the open.
Or is somebody like Mitch McConnell more evil?
Because he claims he's with us, but he makes sure that that power structure stays in place.
Second, this is a really interesting thing for Marjorie to be doing because in some ways, this kind of behavior is only really going to drive a further wedge between her and the party she seems so frustrated that she isn't in control of.
That kind of seems counterproductive because as grim as things may seem, the odds of enough completely insane people like her getting voted into the House to make a coalition that she could use to get...
So in 2021, Green tried to start the America First Caucus, but was only able to bring in Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, and Louie Gohmert.
Immediately after announcing the faction, the GOP leadership expressed their strong disapproval of it, and the group disbanded, most likely because people like Louie Gohmert knows where his bread is buttered, and having a group that's just Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, and Marjorie is a little too obvious what they're actually for, and maybe...
Well, speaking of making things too obvious, on their policy platform statement, the America First Caucus had a section about immigration that's a little bit too on the nose.
They kept referring to people as, quote, post-1965 immigrants, which is a dog whistle to white nationalists who believe that the Hart-Seller Act, passed in 1965, was a nefarious plot to diminish the white population in the country by stealthily bringing in non-white immigrants.
People like Marjorie have big ideas, but unfortunately at their core, they're hateful bigots, and so their big ideas only really attract other bigots and cast-offs, and they can't really help but wink to their bigot audience and their statements of beliefs.
And then when the whole thing doesn't work, naturally Marjorie pretends that she had no idea about that policy position paper.
She took her shot and failed, because the accumulation of political power when you want to work within and without the established party hierarchy is complicated.
It takes precision tools, and she's just a jackhammer, so she'll just end up destroying anything she tries to create outside of publicity stunts.
So, as for Elaine Chao, Mitch McConnell's wife, I'm not sure if she and Mitch are on the Chinese payroll, and I don't know how much of that is being said by Marjorie just because Chao is Chinese.
In reality, Chao's family owns a shipping company that does business in China called Foremost Group.
Though she's not formally connected to the company, they stood to gain from foreign policy decisions that Trump could make, and let's not forget that Trump named Chao his Secretary of Transportation.
So this seems like a case of racism intersecting with some good old-fashioned corruption, and it's being depicted as proof that someone is a spy for China.
Let's pretend that Elaine Chao actually is a Chinese spy.
Make Trump look like a real idiot for making her part of his cabinet.
So we'll get to Green's voting record, but I wanted to bring up something that I didn't realize until I was poking around about Marjorie for this episode.
Did you know that between May 2021 and January 2022, Marjorie was fined at least 34 times for not wearing a mask in the House chamber?
I was going over her record, and there are a couple of interesting points that come up.
The first is that she did vote against the GOP's position in her time in Congress so far, 24.2% of the time, making her the third most frequent person in the House going against their party.
Alex introduces this next segment here, just reading off a laundry list of deceptive and misrepresented headlines that he's using for the sake of spreading transphobic narratives, and it gets to this clip, which is pretty bad.
First off, if I was a parent and my fifth grade daughter had to sleep and shower in some kind of cabin at some summer camp that I paid money to send my child to, and there was a man calling himself a woman, sleeping in her cabin, showering with her, that guy, he'd be in jail.
He would be in jail.
Well, first off, my husband would have beat him into the ground, and then he'd be in jail.
But this is exactly how we need to stand up against this stuff.
So one thing that's pretty important to point out here is the story that Marjorie is talking about involved absolutely no wrongdoing by anybody.
No child was hurt or anything.
The entire issue is that one of the counselors at a science camp that fifth graders went to was non-binary and used they-them pronouns.
This has to do with a fifth grade group of students from Los Alamalitos who went to a camp called Camp Pali.
If any of the people who participated in outrage rants like Marjorie here took the time to look into this at all, they could learn a little bit more about this camp and realize that it's more or less a luxury camping setup.
When they say that the kids stayed in a camp end with the counselors, it's meant to evoke the idea that they're staying in this tiny shack, but in reality, they're big buildings that house 10 students and bunk beds and have separate rooms that the counselors stay in.
Also, each cabin has two to three private bathrooms and showers, so there's no communal showering going on here at all.
From everything I can tell, this started as a local news report from KTLA about two parents who were mad that the school district didn't tell them that someone who worked at the camp that their children were sent to was non-binary, and if they had known, they wouldn't have sent their children.
From everything I can tell, no other parents were upset, and I can't find a bunch of other complaints from other parents who had sent their children to this camp.
That's all you need.
The fact that everything was fine at the camp and no child was mistreated leads to folks having to show their cards a little bit too clearly.
on this one.
Nothing happened but to Marjorie the mere existence of a non-binary person in proximity to children is a threat to that child because she believes that trans and non-binary people are inherently dangerous to children in the same way that the right-wing media made that argument about gay people in the 80s or black people decades prior.
Doing the same game over again, and it's disgusting.
Also, Marjorie needs to be way more careful with her language.
I have no idea how intentional what she said was, but at the end of that clip, if you just take her words in the context of how she said them, she's advocating for committing acts of violence against trans and non-binary people.
She's pretending that it's about people sleeping or showering with these students.
But in the case she's talking about, that didn't happen.
The story she's basing her outrage on is just that a non-binary person was employed somewhere.
All I'm saying is if these people act in the way that they never have, never will, and frankly, wouldn't make any sense at all for anyone, then I think we should commit violence against them.
And that they won't, can't, and never will should not stop us from continuing to commit violence against them.
Whoever came in second place, the real girl in the race, she's the winner.
He should be thrown out of swimming completely.
All of the men, I do not care about, it shouldn't matter about what they do in their bedroom, if they want to wear a dress fine, but what they're doing is they are defeating women.
It's about beating women down, and the left stands up for it.
And this is where America needs to say, enough.
Most Americans agree that this is wrong, and it's absolutely ridiculous.
And I don't know why Fox News or anyone We need to call them what they are.
They're men.
That makes them a he, a him, and not play this pronoun game anymore.
Oh, that's a great thing for Alex to just be like, yeah, let's go along.
Let's go even further.
So the trans athletes thing is just a convenient, easy place for people like Alex and Marjorie to hide their hate because it gives the pretense of their bigotry coming from a place other than what it is, which is just hate.
I've never once on his show or any like it heard a conversation about trans man athletes and whether or not they think it's wrong for them to compete in men's sports because that doesn't work for the narrative that they're trying to use this mask to Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Now, I want to put a fine point on this in the way that I mean to be very emphatic about.
What Marjorie Taylor Greene is doing here isn't making a political statement about trans athletes or anything like it.
She's categorically dismissing the validity of trans people's existence.
At very least, she's reducing being trans to being a purely sexual thing by saying things like, whatever you do in your bedroom.
This is an unacceptable level of ignorance for a person who's an elected official to have.
It's just outrageous.
And it's particularly relevant for someone like Marjorie, because she represents a district in Georgia, which happens to be the state with the fourth highest percentage of the population to identify as trans.
It's very relevant to her constituency.
Probably a lot more so than whether or not Kyle Rittenhouse gets a gold star from Congress.
Well, I think a part of it, too, is signaling to the folks...
You know, there's a method of accumulating power, which is engaging in the communal demonization of the chosen victim group, or the vulnerable group that the rest of your...
And I think that she gets something out of that as being part of signaling and making very concrete that she is part of this in-group that is doing the hating of this vulnerable group.
So Alex has some old talking points he wants to weave back in and it's just gross.
And like you said, they're stealing women's spaces, and children are being put to the Black Queen story time that a big, fat man in a clown outfit is a woman.
I'm sorry.
That's not a woman.
That's a big, fat man or a little boy dressed up like a girl.
This is all very, very sexualization of children.
In fact, I can't show this video in Austin, part of what we have.
They had men on stage with little kids giving them money who had no G-strings on.
Saying they were women with glitter on their genitals and hugging little kids.
express how infantile even these these thoughts that she's bringing to the table are this is such perversion but it's also grooming children it's grooming them to believe things that are lies and that are completely wrong no Exactly.
It's like Hollywood stars and all the things they've engaged in.
Why did Alex stop himself when he was clearly saying a status symbol?
That was clearly what he was about to say.
He stopped himself somehow, and then changed it to what Hollywood stars do, which I assume he means Paris Hilton having a dog in her purse or something.
Well, I think that Alex is just lying about how in her last fight before retiring, Fallon Fox did break her opponent's skull in the ring.
And then he's conflating that with a 2019 story about Sida Aleta, who was a woman fighter in the UK who competed in the Fast and Furious fight series.
Later, she suffered a brain injury in her fight, which ended up leading to her death the next day.
Her opponent, Jamie Morgan, is a cis woman.
Alex is combining these things and making up details in order to suit his purposes, because this is a transphobic episode he's got going on here with Marjorie Taylor Greene, and why not pretend that...
I mean, in her defense, though, I will say that when everybody in the GOP kicked her off those committees, they had to have been like, well, yeah, she's not here for this.
And so when I lost my committees, I started sitting on the House floor.
And I don't know if you've ever heard this story, but I started sitting on the House floor, and what I wanted to do is learn the process.
And so I started watching them debate the bills back and forth.
And they would, the person in the chair that was supposed to be Speaker Pelosi, she would, or he, whoever it was with a mask on, I had no idea, but it usually wasn't Nancy, they would ask for the voice votes.
And so after they debated the bill, the Democrats would say, yay!
And then the Republicans on our side would say, nay!
And then the person sitting there in the Speaker's chair with the gavel would say, the bill passed.
And like 10 members of Congress would have voted saying yes or no.
So, you see, the best time to learn about what it means to be a member of the House of Representatives is when you're there and you've been kicked off your committees.
Yeah.
That's the time to get down to brass tacks and figure out what you're supposed to be doing.
Marjorie's a real idiot, but I guess in the long run on this one, who cares?
Traditionally, the House didn't vote on every measure with roll call votes because there's so many members of that body that if they were going to do it that way, it would take forever and essentially nothing would ever get done.
Conversely, with just 100 members, the Senate traditionally does do roll call votes for most orders.
It's only 100 people.
The way things work is that bills or measures or resolutions that are likely to pass or fail or put up to a voice vote, and then it's decided by the Speaker.
People can then call for a roll call vote, so if someone contests the vote, it can be looked at more closely, and the House can't end up getting bogged down in this laborious-ass process.
What Marjorie is discussing doing could have been a problem in earlier days, but at this point, it's more or less just an annoyance, since they have digital voting cards and they don't have to go one by one, vote yay or nay.
Also, you can go to Congress' website and look at the list of roll call votes in previous sessions of Congress, and honestly, it doesn't appear that there are any more or less of them since Marjorie started doing this.
For instance, there were 449 roll call votes in the first session of the present Congress, compared to 705 in the first session of the 114th Congress, which was in 2015.
You can find the voting records for folks in the House back then, and I don't think she's making an impact.
I really don't think Marjorie is having an impact at all, at least especially not in the way she thinks she is.
And part of that has to be due to her clear ignorance of how government works, as evidenced by her bewilderment at the idea of a voice vote and the fact that she's confused by the idea of people voting present.
This indicates that she doesn't understand the bodies of Congress and how they need a quorum to carry out business legally, so if you don't want to take a side, but you also want to make sure that the vote can happen legally, the solution is to vote present.
You know, there's other situations, too, but there's a lot of functions.
It can be done in a case where a Congress member has a conflict of interest, so they can't vote one way or the other, but...
If they were to not vote and it leads to a quorum not being there, that in effect could be them working in some way.
So there's a number of reasons one might vote present.
I really would have hoped that a person would know these kind of basic things before they decide to run for Congress, but when it's all about attention and just yelling, why would you?
Why would you care about how to effectively do the job you're asking people to...
But then, I think back about my civics education in school, and it's like, yeah, I can see somebody who just has my civics education from school, not, like, learning anything outside of that.
Going to Congress and being like, well, this isn't how it's supposed to work.
I find it to be really difficult to think how government can function if people like Marjorie, who have no idea how any of this stuff works, are the people who get elected.
Because she thinks, and these dum-dums think, that if they go in there and they disrupt the process, then that will give them more power and bring more attention to the subject.
When in reality, when you go in there and you obstruct the process, that only makes people who have any actual power...
Avoid you.
Go as far away from this bullshit as they can in order to do things in those secret back rooms that you hate so much.
Anybody else comes into office, the House flips Republican, all of a sudden they try to push an agenda through, she becomes a problem for the Republicans.
It's actually worse than that when you actually consider Marjorie's larger record.
In 2021, she probably broke house rules when she appeared in an ad soliciting donations for a group called the Stop Socialism Now PAC.
The issue is that candidates and elected officials can't solicit donations larger than $5,000, but people can give an unlimited amount to PACs, so this was a super unethical thing for her to do.
Not only that, though, at the end of last year, when Marjorie was going on tour with Matt Gaetz, part of that was at least in part to, it was meant to promote their joint fundraising organization, the Put America First PAC.
But it's also, like, if you understand the funding difference between her and her next closest, I think it's Jennifer Strahan is the other person running who's closest to her.
It's comical, the gap between them.
There's no reason that anybody in Alex's audience should be sending her money, even if they believe in her.
To me, you know, they talk about the Civil War and the GOP.
Well, I fully embrace it because I believe that iron sharpens iron, and we need to be the GOP conference that actually does something for a change instead of talking about it on Fox News.
You see, I think Republicans have a job to do, and that is to become the American Party.
So fun how these do want a party that's the American Party.
It's not left or right.
It's the American Party.
Now, I will say that it It happens to have literally all of the positions that are miles to the right of the current GOP, and they think that anybody who's on the left is a literal demon, but it's not about left or right.
As they say, patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, but there's an addendum to that.
It's also an early refuge for really lazy con artists.
That's what's going on here.
Anyway, that's about as much as there is in the February 20th episode.
I will say that I think that the most relevant element of this is, like, I know that Marjorie was awful, but I didn't know that she was this ill-equipped to be in government.
When I heard her talk about being surprised by the idea of voice votes or not knowing why people vote president...
And then a larger problem, obviously, is the willingness to be so explicitly and disgustingly transphobic in response to what is, at its core, a benign story.
And while we were in the bunks, like, one of the dudes who was, like, our leader, he was a college dude, was running around naked, whipping, like, high schoolers with a towel.
So, while she was in Austin, Alex and Marjorie apparently went to dinner, and they released a little six-minute video of him interviewing her, I guess, about how Nancy Pelosi doesn't wear masks enough.
It's a little dumb, and honestly, it has the feeling of a couple people drinking, and then one of them grabbing the camera and saying, oh, that was gold.
Say that thing you said so I can record it.
It's very clunky.
It's a six minute video, but actually only two minutes are Alex talking to Marjorie.
The other two thirds of the video is a compilation of people like Joe Rogan and Tim Poole talking about how right Alex is about everything.
Also, Marjorie says that she's going to be starting a podcast.
And it's hard to tell, but there are two possible impressions that this video is meant to convey.
One is that her podcast is going to be done through Infowars.
The other is that Alex desperately wants to give that impression, though it's not true.
I have no idea, but I would caution Marjorie against this plan.
She actually doesn't seem to have much to say, and I think if she did a podcast, it would overexpose her.
And honestly, I don't know how much of an actual committed audience she has.
You have to factor in the reality that most of her audience is probably a bit outside the normal podcast audience demographics and younger people who support her You know, like Nick Fuentes' followers, they look at her as just a useful tool to bring their white identity ideology closer to the mainstream.
She's not somebody who they would take the time to listen to.
Also dumb was Marjorie showing up on the War Room to chat with Owen, and we're not going to talk about that.
So some other dumb things happened over the next days, the last bit, in our present day.
The Washington Post story came out that they released a video of Roger Stone offering to give someone a pardon, or try and get someone a pardon for $100,000, and saying that Trump was the worst mistake in American history, and strangely really wanting to get out of town fast after things popped off at the Capitol on January 6th.
This is really dumb, but I guess it's good enough for the Infoars audience.
I don't particularly care about what Roger has to say anymore, if I'm being totally honest.
It seems really clear to me that the walls are closing in around him and that he's going to be increasingly combative until eventually he goes back to jail.
Yeah.
It's really disconcerting how many different groups that were involved in planning to riot on January 6th he was directly involved with.
I think that's something we're going to learn even more about in the future.
In addition to that, Roger was working really closely and even directly with Ali Alexander on Stop the Steal stuff, and Ali got a permit to hold an event on the Capitol grounds under false pretenses, which incidentally was the rally that Alex was trying to lead a mass of people to.
Also, Roger has deep ties to the Proud Boys, the leadership of which just got arrested on conspiracy charges related to January 6th.
And if you read their indictment, it's super clear they plan to storm the Capitol well in advance.
I would say that if Roger isn't super guilty here, he has some real serious explaining and soul-searching to do about how he's mixed up with all these people who are planning to try to overthrow the government, and he had no idea what they were up to.
I'm looking forward to the moment in court where the defense lawyer is like, I would like to remind everybody we have a presumption of innocence in this country.
So Marjorie was in person with Alex on February 20th, and that's because she'd come to town to support Christian Collins in the GOP primary for Texas' 8th District.
Also present were Mike Lindell and Madison Cawthorn.
They were coming in to support this Collins guy in the primary, and on March 1st, Collins lost to Morgan Luttrell, who got 52.2% of the vote to Collins' 22.2%.
So then, on February 25th, Green was off to Orlando, where she spoke at Nick Fuentes'pseudo-Klan rally, and then at CPAC the next day.
People were a bit shocked and disillusioned by the depths of the G. GOP had sunk to where they're totally fine with somebody associating with somebody who started a pro-Putin chant at his rally and spoke positively about Hitler and saying the N-word one day and then they're being welcomed at the biggest GOP event of the year the next.
This helped give a little bit more attention to the profoundly hateful things that Green had said on Infowars a week prior to this and there were a few articles that got written about her appearance and how it strongly implied support for violence against trans people.
What grifters do in this kind of situation is double down.
They recognize that there's a tension in them thar hills, and they get to mining for it immediately.
The attention hijacking economy runs largely on outrage, so if someone's mad at you about something, the best way to keep that outrage and attention pipeline open is to do more of the thing that made people angry.
And it was well known in all the big think tanks that doing this would make Russia go in, and Putin kept warning and kept warning, and he said two weeks ago on the eve of this, just say that you're not going to bring Ukraine into NATO, and I will not invade.
And stop shelling the East.
And stop trying to infiltrate and sabotage in the south area there at the port they've got that Russia annexed eight years ago because the West and Soros bragged that they overthrew Ukraine.
I was scheduled, and I'm still going right now, to go to California next week to be on some really big podcast and interview some huge folks and do some other meetings and things.
And I'm probably still going to go, but I'm watching this very carefully.
Things are so dangerous, World War III kickoff, I may not go.
I mean, that's how dangerous and how bad the situation is.
And just believe me, I got some interviews shut up out there that'll break the internet.
He seems like the only person who really fits this description of being a large platform and someone who'd be stupid enough to let Alex come on and spew his shit unchallenged.
Tucker's based in New York, so it's not him.
Right.
I feel like most people in California wouldn't have Alex on.
Yeah, I think that Russell Brand, Jimmy Dore, and Bill Maher, in that order of descending likelihood, are the people that I would put in the possible...
But honestly, if history is prelude, this thing's going to end up just being some weird podcast I've never heard of.
So this is absolutely going nowhere, and then Marjorie will be able to make a huge deal out of how the evil government doesn't want accountability because they wouldn't accept her bill.
Essentially, this bill is a propaganda trap, and she knows exactly what she's doing.
designed to fail because of what it entails.
The bill would require the prohibition of not only taking voice votes in the House, but also would make it so representatives could only vote yay or nay, prohibiting them from voting present.
It's honestly hard to tell if Marjorie really doesn't understand the basics of how Congress works, or if this is really just a childish outburst of someone who doesn't get to do whatever she wants.
Under the current rules, anyone can call for a roll call vote if They disagree with the voice vote.
But in order to be taken to a roll call vote, one fifth of the quorum needs to agree to it.
Marjorie likely can't drum up one fifth of the House's support for her desire to slow down every piece of legislation to a complete halt, but she still wants to get her way, and this bill is an attempt to do that.
But still, like, whatever it is, she doesn't have numbers.
And like I said, there's no downside to this move that she's making.
This bill is gonna fail, and when it does, it'll be a prime opportunity to hijack everyone's attention with claims that the House is covering up their votes, which will feed into Marjorie's attention economy and revenue streams.
And the reason why this bill is so important is it would stop Congress from passing bills by voice vote.
That's where just there's a handful of members of Congress sitting on the House floor and they simply say yes and no.
Well, there's 435 members of Congress, Alex, and this bill would force every single member of Congress to actually have to vote and not vote by proxy, show up to work, and vote in person and on record so the American people can see our job performance.
When the debate is ended, the Speaker, holding the bill in his hand, puts the question for its passage by saying, Gentlemen, all of you who are of the opinion that this bill shall pass say aye, and after the answer of aye's, all of those of the contrary opinion say no.
The affirmative and negative of the question, having been both put and answered, the Speaker declares whether the yeas or nays have it by the sound, if he be himself satisfied, and it stands as the judgment of the House.
But if he be not himself satisfied, which voice is the greater, or if before any other member comes in the House or before any new motion made, any member shall arise and declare himself dissatisfied with the Speaker's decision.
If Alex had any understanding of the Founding Fathers he pretends he studied and idolizes, he would probably kick Marjorie Taylor Greene out of the studio for daring to propose a bill that spits in the face of Thomas Jefferson's rules for how the House conducts business.
Yeah, you're actively promoting and endorsing somebody who wants to undo the Jeffersonian model of how the voice votes are taken in the house, and it's a disgrace to the tradition of America.
Anyway, knowing this, that not only does voice voting go back to the literal beginning of the House of Representatives, it also predates the American government.
I know you can only do ten minutes with us today, but then a vote got pushed back, and you can go a little bit the next hour, but we're only going to keep you five minutes to the next hour because I want you to be able to respond to the lies.
And we're live right now, but later...
I'm going to take what you actually said in studio two weeks ago and then put it on the front so we can have a video to get out there to counter the fraud.
But just to start to give the preface of what happened, we were talking about men in girls' showers, biological men in front of little girls, and some of these men, it was in the news, have assaulted women and are being given light.
prison sentences and men are getting women pregnant in prison and raping them and you said my husband would beat them into the ground who doesn't agree that if a woman rapes a woman or a man rapes a woman or a little girl that they need to have their head beaten in you didn't say beat up rupaul on you know their tv show you didn't say beat up you know some some transgender person This isn't true.
Although Alex was in a deep hole of mostly fake stories that he uses to push intense hatred of trans people to his audience, Before Marjorie's comments, Marjorie wasn't responding to any of that stuff with her comments that led to violent talk.
Here's where things get a little bit complicated.
She was responding to a fake version of that story about Camp Pally when she said that her husband would beat somebody up, but ultimately, the only thing that triggered that response in her was that a non-binary person worked somewhere where kids were present.
The fact of this nonbinary person's existence in that space is enough for her to experience as an attack or violation on a child, so that's how they talk about it, and that leads to them fantasizing about committing violence.
But here's the tell that they know what they're doing.
In order to make their violent rhetoric seem defensible to their audience, they have to pretend that stories like the one from that camp are about grown men sleeping or showering with 5th grade girls, because if they actually expressed their real grievance, it would be way too obvious that they were full of hate and bigotry.
They don't come to their audience and say that they're mad that trans or non-binary people are allowed to have jobs in places where kids might be, because in reality what they're saying is that they don't think that children should have any exposure to trans or non-binary people, which ultimately leads to...
Yep.
It's really clear how this goes, because think about it.
Ultimately, what this story they're responding to is about is about a couple of parents who were uncomfortable.
Their kids came back from camp and said that they met a counselor who was non-binary.
There was no crime committed.
There was no problem.
It was just fifth graders meeting a non-binary person.
If this is enough to merit the reaction that Alex and Marjorie are having, then where would they draw the line?
Like, could trans or non-binary people work in retail?
Could they work in a library?
Could they be teachers?
You can easily see how much of society Alex and Marjorie wish to exclude people from under the pretend justification of protecting children or whatever.
But here are two things that they would never do.
They would never discuss the underlying stories as they really happened, because if they did, it would become way too clear that they're overreacting.
And they would never be honest about what they want, because if they did, their bigotry would be way too clear.
They only respond with grotesque bullshit and anger because that's the feeling they want their audience to experience and adopt towards trans and non-binary people.
Anger and a prejudice of fear that they pose a threat to children by their existence in public.
That's not what she said, and you can see even from this rewriting of her position how indefensible her comments were.
Marjorie is trying to rationalize her approval of violence by lying about the circumstances of the story from that camp.
If there was a camp counselor, regardless of gender, showering with the kids, and it makes a bit more sense to be incensed, but that's a fabrication that's just from her bigotry and the bigotry of the right-wing media that she consumes.
She's pushing a fake version of a real situation in order to justify her reaction of endorsing violence, and that's an essential element of this that she steadfastly refuses to accept, because she knows that She doesn't want an accurate image of this to be seen, that she's endorsing violence against trans and non-binary people who work anywhere that might involve children.
That's the position that she's actually expressing.
I don't want to sound like a broken record, but this is just disgusting behavior to see from someone who's in elected office.
If Marjorie's position was just that people who assault children should be arrested, or even if she understands that a parent's instinct would be to respond violently if their child was assaulted, that's fairly uncontroversial, and no one would really have wasted ink writing about her comments.
The problem and the issue that Marjorie and Alex will not disaggregate from their bullshit is that she and Alex believe that trans and non-binary people existing in public is in and of itself an assault on children.
They won't make this position that they hold clear because they know that to do so would mean some real problems, particularly for Marjorie, since she still has a lot to lose with the fundraising and stuff that being in the house gives her access to.
She's not relevant outside of being a lunatic who's in the house.
Now, biological men are trying to act like they're women as camp counselors going into showers with fifth graders or sleeping in their cabins with other little girls or boys.
That is completely wrong.
And it's okay for me to say that they might...
They might need a lesson.
There's nothing wrong with that, and I'll double down and I'll say it again.
But she's coming on, and there is a part of me that's keenly aware that a midterm is coming up, and it might just be something where it's like, ah, maybe I'll be able to get some voters out of this.
But it's a bit more of a connection than it appeared previously.
And the way it's manifesting is predictable and also troubling.
It's predictable in the sense that...
She's trying to sell these stupid right-wing publicity stunt bills to his audience to get everyone excited and create these narratives around the house is hiding everything they do behind voice votes or whatever the fuck.
There's that.
That's standard.
That's what you expect from an Infowars person.
But there is a level of...
The transphobic rhetoric that is being deployed by her and Alex in conjunction with her that is further than some of the stuff that maybe happens on a more regular basis.
I have a tough time putting any kind of summation on this other than to say, like, I find this deeply troubling and I think it's something that, you know, deserves to have, you know, an eye cast upon it.
You know, I don't think it's something that should be overlooked, obviously.
I think it's a bad enough thing when a sitting person in Congress...
Who's not named Ron Paul, shows up on Alex's show.
I think that's a problem.
And then when the content is like this, it's just...
And then it's also a person who spoke at Fuentes' bullshit.
I think that Marjorie Taylor Greene is somebody who...
Getting outraged at her feeds the cycle.
And you can see how this writing about her and her comments leads to her being able to do a victory lap on Alex's show and double down on stuff and create a larger false presentation of what she was saying.
And she's vulnerable in the GOP primary.
There have been polls that have shown that there is a possibility that someone could beat her in that primary.