Chester Rambles

Hey, this is incredibly insensitive to the hundreds of VFX artists who worked incredibly hard, developing new techniques to make incredible shots like this.

“he polite thing to say would be that it brings me no joy to write these words. But the polite thing wouldn’t be the true thing (besides, politeness died with the rise of the “fuck your feelings” party). While everybody who works in and around the Capitol complex deserves to work in a place where they don’t have to risk crossing paths with somebody as deranged as Greene, it brings me (and, judging by how eagerly she pounced on Greene, Speaker Pelosi) incredible satisfaction to witness the GOP finally implicitly admitting that Greene is who they are now. She is the GOP without airbrushing, Fox News without the hair and makeup, or the Ivy League Vaseline on the lens obscuring the pock marks. She’s Sarah Palin, but not occasionally charismatic. She’s Steve Bannon, but not occasionally smart. She’s Donald Trump, but not occasionally funny. She’s the moral ugliness of the modern party laid bare, all the reasons that upstanding citizens shouldn’t vote for any Republican, conveniently combined into one person.”

“What House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and the rest of the party’s leadership would like is for Greene and others like her not to go away, but to just keep a lower profile. They want the unhinged base’s energy and anger to drive the turnout that could give Republicans back congressional majorities in the 2022 midterms. McCarthy doesn’t really care if you think House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) runs a satanic child-trafficking conspiracy and literally eats babies, as long as your delusions get you to the polling place. The trouble is that in today’s political world, there are no more dog whistles, messages heard by only one segment of your party but unnoticed by everyone else. Democrats decided to make Greene famous, and so she is. Now consider the alternative for Republicans. Let’s say they truly broke with the extremists and said they want nothing to do with them. The votes they lost by doing so would have to be made up somewhere, which would mean finding ways to appeal to the moderates who rejected President Donald Trump in 2020. That means developing new policies to improve people’s lives and building a party identity based on something other than anger and resentment.”

“the manufactured outrage and false equivalencies don’t hold up under even the most superficial scrutiny. If Republicans really cared about anti-Semitism in their ranks, there are dozens of members they would’ve rebuked before this, including Greene. Omar has never attempted to convince gun owners their freedom is being stolen let alone that regaining it means paying “the price of blood.” Waters has not once retraumatized the parents of school shooting victims by suggesting their children’s deaths were faked; nor has she trailed a school shooting survivor, shouting harassment the whole way. Neither Omar nor Waters egged on a white supremacist takover of the Capitol—labeling it a “1776 moment”—that got five people killed, including a police officer who served in Iraq. Greene has done all of those things, and ignoring the danger her actions pose to lay blame at Black legislators’ feet seems like a way to justify beforehand any future violence from her followers.”

“Republicans proved on Wednesday that they can’t disavow Greene—in fact, about the half the caucus gave her a standing ovation—any more than they could disavow their massive base of racists. The party that has made white supremacist grievances its entire political philosophy—leaning hard into fears about losing ground to undeserving Blacks and greedy globalist Jews—can’t change (racist, Islamophobic) horses in midstream now.”

“Here’s the GOP yet again tacitly admitting that while it publicly frets about Black Lives Matter and antifa, it is aligned with white extremists who are the real national security threat. Greene, even as she faced potential sanctions this week, continued to push white supremacist messaging intended to rile her white supremacist followers. On Tuesday, Greene used a photo of Omar on a fundraising tweet. (She’s done this before with AOC.) A day later, she claimed in a social media post that she is being targeted by Democrats for her “identity & my values,” which she listed in this order: “White, Woman, Wife, Mother, Christian, Conservative, Business Owner.” Earlier on Wednesday, she called her supporters “wonderful smart Patriots” who represent “real America.” And she repeatedly tweeted about Omar, accusing her of aiding “enemies of the American people that rioted,” namely “BLM/Antifa,” while decrying a House supposedly full of “members who supported, cheered on, & funded criminal thugs who riot, burn, loot, attack police, murder, & occupy federal property.””

“Greene has endorsed the killing of numerous high-profile Democrats. She helped moderate a Facebook page featuring death threats against them. Just before the election, she declared that if Democrats won, it would destroy “freedom,” which can only be won back “with the price of blood.” Greene also helped instigate the insurrection, heralding the event as the GOP’s “1776 moment.” Greene did condemn the assault after it happened. But, importantly, she has since kept on feeding the ideology that inspired it. In an extraordinarily deranged Twitter thread, Greene said that the Democratic caucus is “filled with” lawmakers who “cheered on” the destruction of cities, sleep with “our greatest enemy” and are out to “destroy Republicans, your jobs, our economy, your children’s education and lives, steal our freedoms, and erase God’s creation.” Let’s not mince words: This is a veiled exhortation to supporters to keep up the violent warfare against Democrats. If the threat Democrats represent is as she depicted it, what else could possibly constitute an adequate response?”