Another day, another opportunity for Marjorie Taylor Greene to make a mistake that would sink anybody with integrity, or at least the capacity to register shame. Her gaffes aren’t just embarrassing or weird; the majority consist of often-bizarre and sometimes highly dangerous lies.
Her zealous insistence that the 2020 election was stolen would be merely ridiculous if Greene didn’t wield legislative power — or if a mechanism existed to punish politicians for knowingly spreading seditious lies. And one huge reason why we no longer live in a world where basic standards exist for being in charge (even Nixon had the decency to resign) resides in the very person Greene met with today: Steve Bannon.
Greene is soon to appear on Steve Bannon’s War Room, a podcast in which the noted propagandist and his guests talk about totally normal things, like how a disease that has killed millions worldwide isn’t real. In fact, Steve Brannon has beat out competition the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Charlie Kirk, and Ben Shapiro to host the podcast that spreads the most disinformation, with a whopping 20% of everything said on Bannon’s show being a straight-up lie. Greene should feel right at home.
Let’s be clear: Bannon isn’t just a dangerous liar, he’s a criminal. Firstly, there are those with which he’s been formally charged, which include fraud, money laundering, conspiracy, and contempt of Congress. The first three charges relate to Bannon’s involvement in “We Build The Wall,” a project through which an unnamed associate of Bannon solicited funds from donors using online crowdfunding platform GoFundMe, promising “100%” of proceeds would go towards building Donald Trump’s totally original Mexico-U.S. border wall. As anybody familiar with Republican politics will likely guess, this did not happen.
Bannon claimed he was volunteering his time, unpaid, so devout was his belief in the campaign’s mission, but federal and state prosecutors both argued he instead funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to himself and other associates. While Trump used his last day in office to pardon Bannon for the federal crime, that doesn’t work on a state level, so Bannon is still being charged in New York. Despite being the very people he defrauded, many Trump supporters and Republicans are still highly supportive of the ex-White House chief of staff.
Bannon’s contempt of Congress charge relates to his refusal to testify or supply documents to the Jan. 6 Committee. He was found guilty and sentenced to four months in jail, but is currently free pending his appeal. But since Bannon’s reality-stretching capacity doesn’t extend to making himself believe he complied with a House Select Committee subpoena, he’s pivoted to an equally-familiar defensive tactic: blaming everything on George Soros, the hard right’s narrative safety blanket when reality doesn’t match the story they’ve told themselves. He also claims spurious “political prisoner” status, and implied that his ultra-conservative followers should take the law into their own hands, which, considering his deep involvement in the unfurling of events at the Capitol in Jan. 2021, is a bold strategy.
Crucially, most of Bannon’s crimes have escaped formal jurisprudence: There’s his relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein, noted child-sex trafficker of the billionaire class; that time he used illegally-obtained data to undermine democracies abroad; or the years he ran a media engine that disseminated, among other things, Russian kleptocratic propaganda — and, of course, his masterminding an attempted authoritarian coup, although given the cognitive challenges demonstrated by Jan. 6 participants as a whole, “mastermind” might be the wrong word. Then there’s today’s news morsel: A former Bannon associate and a potential spy was arrested last night in New York.
So, Steve Bannon’s just a perfectly normal, uncontroversial person for Greene to have met with. But are we really surprised, given how low her bar is already?
