Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is trying to lecture us on how humor works. Sarcasm, specifically. That’s Greene’s defense of her weekend comment that “if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.”
”It goes against our fundamental values as a country for a Member of Congress to wish that the carnage of January 6th had been even worse, and to boast that she would have succeeded in an armed insurrection against the United States government,” the White House had said in a statement, to which Greene responded, “The White House needs to learn how sarcasm works. My comments were making fun of Joe Biden and the Democrats, who have continuously made me a political target since January 6.”
Greene is totally one of those women who posts like 10 Facebook quizzes a week purporting to show that she’s the most sarcastic, sassiest boss babe in circulation, isn’t she? The cultural style in which “It’s sarcasm!” is a shield for any aggression or misstep is a powerful one, and she fits the bill.
But anyway.
RELATED STORY: Greene tells gala brimming with white nationalists that she would've led a successful Jan. 6 attack
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Here are Greene’s comments, made at a New York Young Republicans Club gala on Saturday:
“Then Jan. 6 happens and next thing you know I organized the whole thing, along with Steve Bannon here. And I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed,” she said, adding, “See that’s the whole joke, isn’t it? They say that whole thing was planned and I’m like, are you kidding me? A bunch of conservatives, Second Amendment supporters, went in the Capitol without guns, and they think that we organized that? I don’t think so.”
If “New York Young Republicans” makes you think of a bunch of preppy Wall Street guys who just want lower taxes, think again. Greene said this at an event also attended by the white nationalist founder of the racist VDARE site, an event at which guests “applauded members of an Austrian political party founded by World War II-era German Nazi party members,” Hatewatch reported. That is the context in which Greene says she was just joking about how if she and Steve Bannon had organized Jan. 6, attendees would have been armed.
Was Greene joking? Kind of, but this is what happens when extremist Republicans try to do humor. They inadvertently show that they’ve spent way too much time thinking about how they would have done an attack on the U.S. Capitol differently and better. Just as Mark Wahlberg fantasized about how, if he’d been on one of the planes hijacked on 9/11, “it wouldn't have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, ‘OK, we're going to land somewhere safely, don't worry,’” Greene has fantasized about how January 6 would have gone down differently with her in charge.
The recent Oath Keepers trial revealed that people planning for violence on January 6 spent a lot of time thinking about weaponry, and how to work around the Washington, D.C., gun laws that could have caused them to be arrested and detained without ever making it to the Capitol. The Oath Keepers had a large weapons stash in a Virginia hotel room to be within reach if they needed them. But Greene has the unthinking bravado to just say that the insurrectionists should have gone charging in carrying weapons that would have gotten them arrested on their way to pre-insurrection rally. She’s really not a great strategic thinker.
Speaking of Greene’s strategic mind, her comments came amid a House Republican leadership battle in which she’s backing House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy even as he comes under attack from others on the far right. Her comments won’t cost McCarthy any votes, since Greene’s role was already to validate him as an acceptable choice for pro-insurrection extremists. But she highlighted how, if McCarthy becomes speaker, he will do so only because he was able to convince pro-insurrection extremists that he himself was close enough to them to deserve their support.
McCarthy has promised to restore Greene’s committee assignments as speaker, so her “if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed” comments directly speak to the kind of views McCarthy intends to elevate, as Democrats were quick to point out.
“I simply think that Kevin McCarthy and the Republican conference need to decide which side of the insurrection they’re on,” Rep. Jamie Raskin told The Hill. “The side of the officers and the Constitution, or the side of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump?” Greene, of course, voted against awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the police officers who fought off the attack on the Capitol.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is who congressional Republicans are. Come January, she will exercise outsized power on their leadership. And she just let us know that she’s spent a lot of time going over January 6 in her mind, thinking about what she would have done differently and how she could have changed the outcome.