What may turn out in the long run to be the most important story of the 2020 election has gotten very little attention, although you have certainly heard of one of the people at its center, the rising star of the fascist Party, Marjorie Taylor Greene. She’s the one who rose to power and fame ranting on Twitter about Rothschild-funded space lasers, and personally harassing the parents of the children massacred at Sandy Hook. Being elected to Congress has not tempered her craziness; she has just been banned from Twitter for promoting misinformation about COVID-19 (her fanatical Jew hatred and repeated calls for violence against her political opponents did not seem to bother the social media powers that be).
What you probably haven’t heard is that Greene had a Democratic opponent in the general election named Kevin Van Ausdal, who quit the race and fled the state in part due to violent threats from Greene’s supporters. Read the entire Washington Post article. In a well-functioning democracy, Greene would be under criminal investigation to determine if she was behind the threats, but the Justice Department is, of course, preoccupied with administering slaps on the wrist to the January 6 putschists. If the Republican Party was anything like it was even thirty years ago, Greene would be a major embarrassment to it, and its other Congressional members would have joined with the Democrats in kicking her off all committees and expelling her from Congress, instead of giving her a standing ovation.
It would be easy to wave aside the story of Greene’s path to victory having been smoothed by violent intimidation of her opponent. Van Ausdal was also in the midst of a divorce, and the Congressional district he was competing for is known to be heavily right-wing. But the endorsement of Greene and her ultra-violent rhetoric by Republican Congressional leadership, not to mention the Very Stable Genius himself, suggest this would be a mistake. We are now living in a country where non-Party members cannot run in elections, at least in certain areas, unless they are prepared to face the threat and also the reality of violence. See, e.g., school board meetings bogged down in violent contention, menaces against county health officials attempting to do their jobs even in heavily Democratic areas, and, of course, the foiling of a dead-serious plot to kidnap and murder the Democratic Governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer.
Don’t let anyone tell you America faces a possibility of civil war. The civil war has already begun.
Emanuel Goldstein 