Murky red / Dull blue
Today: Tommy Craggs, late of “Game Theory” on HBO, and writer and editor at Mother Jones, HuffPost, Slate, Gawker Media, and Deadspin; and Miles Klee, culture writer at Rolling Stone, author of the novel Ivyland, and co-author, with Mads Gobbo, of the story collection Double Black Diamond.
Issue No. 476
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s True Colors
Tommy Craggs
New Goo Review
Miles Klee
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s True Colors
by Tommy Craggs
There was a long story in the New York Times Magazine about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s apostasies against the Trump White House last week that seems to have attracted mainly those with a kink for arguing online about political “purity tests.” As the wise poster once said, I refuse to participate in that kind of perversion, but it’s worth going back to give the story a read because it clarifies a signal misapprehension about MTG and MAGA and right-wing varieties of conspiratorial thinking and whether the Epstein affair has created more than a momentary political opening.
The author of the piece, Robert Draper, portrays MTG’s effort to force the release of the Epstein files not just as a pivot in her relationship with Trump, but as a meaningful development in her own political consciousness. The Georgia representative finds common cause with a Democrat, Ro Khanna; she defies the president in the face of his threats; and soon—the scales having fallen from her eyes—she begins to see how the MAGA movement’s leading figures “were no longer preoccupied with the pressing economic needs of her constituents,” as Draper puts it. Thus did the Epstein business set in motion the sentimental education of a “MAGA warrior.” As she tells Draper: “The Epstein files represent everything wrong with Washington. Rich, powerful elites doing horrible things and getting away with it. And the women are the victims.”
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