Even MTG sees this evil truth

The Georgia Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who on Friday announced her shock resignation from Congress, has been dissed and ridiculed by the left for years. Progressives mocked her lies, shredded her conspiracies, exposed her QAnon nonsense, and denounced her cruelty. And through it all she never once feared for her life.

She fundraised. She smirked. She gave speeches, traveled the country, and strutted through Congress like she owned the place.

But the second she angered the Republican base, barely 48 hours after she resisted Donald Trump’s demands and broke from the MAGA line, she suddenly feared for her life and needed private security.

She told reporters and the world on Twitter that she’d been warned about threats to her safety coming from Trump’s supporters. Death threats. Serious ones. The man she once called her political soulmate — Trump — had turned on her instantly, publicly labeling her a “traitor” and mocking her fear.

For years she thought she was part of the mob. Now she’s discovering Trump and his followers only ever thought of her as their useful idiot.

This is the difference that America and our mainstream media refuses to say out loud:

When you cross Democrats, you get a political argument. When you cross the MAGA right, today’s GOP, you get threats of violence. And not metaphorical threats: real ones. The kind of threats that force a sitting member of Congress to hire armed guards because she dared anger their god-king.

So let’s stop pretending this is random.

What Greene is experiencing now is the inevitable consequence of what’s known as “stochastic terrorism,” the weapon of choice for Trump and the modern GOP.

Stochastic terrorism means the leader doesn’t need to tell anyone directly to commit violence: he just smears his target, inflame his base, calls his target a “traitor” and “enemy,” and then gleefully waits for the most unhinged followers to “get the message.”

It’s like the infamous plaintive cry from King Henry II, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?“ that led to the murder of archbishop Thomas Beckett. The violence becomes “plausibly deniable,” but entirely predictable.

This has been Trump’s signature political method for a decade now.

This is how the Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss were hunted, harassed, stalked, and driven into hiding after Trump singled them out by name.

This is how the man who tried to shatter Paul Pelosi’s skull was radicalized.

This is how election workers, librarians, teachers, judges, prosecutors, journalists, and now Greene herself end up on the receiving end of death threats.

It’s how the January 6th assault on our Capitol happened, leading to the deaths of three police officers.

Trump knows how his words will be received. The GOP knows it. They’ve built an entire political apparatus on the expectation that some fraction of their followers will respond with violence.

This is nothing new; it’s the same tactic used by authoritarians throughout history.

• The Klan used it during Reconstruction.
• Fascist movements used it in the 1930s.
• Trump’s MAGA movement and his “bros” use it today.

You vilify your target. You paint them as an existential threat. You whip up your crowd. And someone will decide to “do something.”

You don’t need orders: you just need followers who believe you’re speaking for God and country.

Trump has mastered this, and Greene is now caught in it.

Our nation’s Founders warned us about this, over and over: just read George Washington‘s farewell address to the Nation:

“This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind … It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.”

They didn’t fear foreign armies as much as they feared internal demagogues who could inflame a faction into violence.

James Madison wrote that the “means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” Washington warned that “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” could exploit factions to destroy the Republic from within. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both warned that once a demagogue captures a faction, the people become tools, not citizens.

That is exactly where we are today. Take it from someone — me — who’s been on the receiving end of death threats like this for years.

One of America’s two major political parties has normalized violent intimidation as a form of political expression. It enforces loyalty not by persuasion but by fear.

It encourages resentment and rage and then pretends to be shocked, “Shocked, I tell you!” when those emotions spill into threats or bloodshed.

Remember when Mitt Romney told a confidant that he and other Republican senators were afraid to vote to impeach Trump because it would endanger their lives and those of members of their families? What’s extraordinary is that while Romney and other Republican senators wimped out, Greene stood her ground.

And now, as a result, even Greene has discovered what happens when you step outside the lines of a movement built on menace.

The outrage here isn’t that Greene feels unsafe. It’s that she finally feels what millions of Americans have been living with ever since Trump taught his followers that violence is patriotism and that critics are enemies.

The outrage is that we still pretend this is a healthy democracy when one faction uses threats of violence and the media pretends it’s normal.

The outrage is that this monster — which last dominated America during the era of the Ku Klux Klan — keeps growing because too many people in power are afraid to name it.

The outrage is that rightwing outlets keep feeding this beast for profit.

This must be confronted. We can’t keep ignoring the rising tide of political violence tied directly to Trump’s rhetoric and the GOP’s ecosystem of rage.

Federal law enforcement must treat rightwing stochastic terrorism as a real threat to national security.

Like with the Church Commission in the 1970s, we need hearings, investigations, and consequences. We can’t wait until the next shattered skull or the next Ruby Freeman or the next terrified election worker or, God help us, the next January 6th.

If Greene has finally seen the monster, good. Now, the rest of us can’t afford to look away.