Earlier today, after Congresswoman Greene (R-QAnon) announced her opposition to the Equality Act, Congresswoman Newman (D-IL) tweeted out the following:
Our neighbor, @RepMTG, tried to block the Equality Act because she believes prohibiting discrimination against trans Americans is “disgusting, immoral, and evil.”
Thought we’d put up our Transgender flag so she can look at it every time she opens her door ??️⚧️ pic.twitter.com/dV8FatQFnx
— Congresswoman Marie Newman (@RepMarieNewman) February 24, 2021
It is important to note that Congresswoman Newman’s daughter is trans.
Ever the paragon of grace that is the flower of southern womanhood, Congresswoman Greene decided to respond this way:
Our neighbor, @RepMarieNewman, wants to pass the so-called "Equality" Act to destroy women’s rights and religious freedoms.
Thought we’d put up ours so she can look at it every time she opens her door ??? https://t.co/7joKpTh6Dc pic.twitter.com/aBGRSiIF6X
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (@RepMTG) February 24, 2021
Perhaps, you ask, Congresswoman Greene’s cruelty is lessened because she was unaware that Congresswoman Newman’s daughter is trans? Nope, it was fully informed and purposeful cruelty:
This is eventually going to get out of hand. We’ve already had one Democratic congresswoman move her office because of her concerns about Greene after several negative interactions with her. Greene’s schtick, along with Boebert’s* and Cawthorne’s, is to take the stunt, edgelord, shitposter behavior of Matt Gaetz and take it to the next level. I fully expect that Greene will, eventually, physically assault a Democratic member or a Democratic staffer. Or, even worse, she’ll try to do the stand your ground play:
- Start altercation
- Declare that one is being attacked
- Stand one’s ground killing one’s attacker
- Claim one had to stand one’s ground because if they hadn’t the person they started the altercation with and then killed would have killed them first.
It is only a matter of time before someone is hurt, if not killed, as a result of this asshole’s need to engage in performative bigotry to establish herself as the rightful Republican heir to Trump.
Obligatory:
* I’ve been a bit busy so didn’t turn it into a post, but shortly after – as within the hour of – the screen grabs of Boebert on the Natural Resources Committee video-teleconference with the gun display behind her, I immediately pulled the Palestinian Islamic Jihad flag, the al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade flag, and the Hezbollah flag. The first two have crossed rifles just as Boebert had on the shelf above and behind her head. The third has a single rifle being clutched by an upthrust hand. My conclusion, based on the imagery that Boebert was using, is that she was signaling her support for the violent liberation of Jerusalem from the Israelis.
Lyrebird
Go Rep Newman!
Go young Ms. Newman, too!
I’m not going to play the response video, I will just enjoy Rep. Newman’s smile.
dnfree
Nobody’s going to want an office next to the gun nut.
piratedan
I used to enjoy being a politics geek, trying my best to understand policy, how it’s made, the nuances of who benefits and how it works…
Nowadays, I hate that I’ve noticed how much I’ve changed my perspective from seeing these folks as the opposition into seeing them as the enemy. Guess that’s how they wanted it, but I’m trying to reconcile myself and my rage these days that makes me want to hurt these people. I won’t act on it, but I sure do think about it and that makes me think that I simply need to walk away and ignore this shit for the most part, vote Democrat when the time comes and shelve the rest.
I used to think that debates and conversations about nuance were neat and informative, now it simply seems black and white, us and them.
Cheryl Rofer
Ugh. I just saw that video a few minutes ago. Disgusting.
Redshift
@dnfree:
Especially since they only have to go through metal detectors in the way to the House floor.
mrmoshpotato
@piratedan:
In your defense, MTG is a NUTJOB. It’s disgusting that we essentially have YouTube trolls in Congress now.
Adam L Silverman
@piratedan: One of the hallmarks of fascism is to forcibly crash the public into the private. Even before we called it fascism, this was noted of the approach. If you recall the Oedipus cycle, one of the accusations that Creon – both Oedipus’s uncle and brother in law – charges Oedipus with is destroying the civic culture of the Theban polis by forcing the eradication of the space dividing the public from the private.
cain
@piratedan:
They see us as the enemy and act like it .. we should not give two shits about them. Work with actual partners not these performative jackasses that are looking to be media stars instead of actual policy people.
RaflW
My conclusion, based on seeing that Boebert had the crossed guns with apparent magazines full, is that she was signaling the likelihood that she will eventually bump the bookcase, and accidentally blow her own or some family member’s brains out.
Winston
Thing is any one who brandishes guns against the peaceful in our society which is supposedly stable is not defensive. It is intimidation and offensive.
Winston
How come I get a bunch of ads for camo gear and proud boys, oath keepers every time I refresh?
Zelma
@piratedan:
I understand where you are coming from and share your feelings. I find most Republican politicians absolutely disgusting and burn with a very unchristian hatred towards them. They are, almost to a man – or woman – lying hypocrites. I briefly saw that fake cornpone Kennedy questioning whichever woman he was condescending to and almost threw up. But I wonder if the hypocrites are less dangerous than the true believers. Or more. It’s hard to tell.l
Martin
@piratedan: Can’t debate fascists. You either purge them or be purged by them.
mrmoshpotato
@Winston: There are ass for the Proud Pricks (h/t Mike Malloy) and OafKeepers?
Buy some furniture, and go to Fort Lauderdale instead.
Winston
this is bullshit on these ads. When you get it fixed send me mail.
Adam L Silverman
@Winston: You know what you did…//
I have no idea.
Raven Onthill
She’s probably a malignant narcissist like Trump and she is extremely dangerous. But, of course, many of her Republican colleagues agree with her, they’re just too chickenshit to say it.
Ella in New Mexico
MTG wants attention because she got dumped from any committee work, which, TBH she probably would have been completely absent for if it didn’t involve some kind of media stunt to get the world focused on HER. She’s a TOTALLY useless POS
On one hand, we all need to monitor her and her antics.
On the other hand, I just had a 45 minute primary care visit with a lovely young trans woman who placed her trust in me that i will help her in her journey to become fully female. And all I can say is I will do everything in my power and my medical knowledge to make her be able to fulfill that wish. Because it’s clearly the right thing, for her and for the world.
70-80% of America is with her and me, not MGT.
MGT is the voice of the ugly, divisive, hurtful past. Really. Don’t give her too much air…
Well, maybe just enough to suffocate HER’S
Adam L Silverman
@Winston: More seriously, I’ve emailed the appropriate folks to let them know what is going on so it can be fixed.
Winston
@Adam L Silverman: I’m the only one that sees this and only on this thread? Then I better get off it.
Adam L Silverman
@Winston: I run adblockers, so I don’t see any of them. My guess is that it is somehow tied into the fact that Marjorie Taylor Greene is in the title of the post and that has something to do with the algorithm serving up the ads. I’ve let Cole and Watergirl know. It’ll get fixed.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@dnfree: The Speaker should mover her into the Ford Office Building.
Adam L Silverman
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Parking lot.
tokyokie
@Adam L Silverman: If the parking is in a garage, well those have been terrorist targets. I say give her a tent in a crosswalk.
HumboldtBlue
@tokyokie:
It was good enough for the National Guard.
@Ella in New Mexico:
You’re why we read this blog.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: I’m good with that.
Another Scott
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
They’re all standing with her. The sides are as clear as can be.
We have to make progress by being united Democrats.
Cheers,
Scott.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
These Republicans today would have been against emancipation, women voting, the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, the end of child labor and anything else worthwhile this country has ever done.
Brachiator
It’s tiresome watching these right wing hypocrites trying to establish a narrow Christianist supremacy by calling it “religious freedoms.”
I don’t have much interest in Marjorie Taylor Greene, except to see how far the other Republicans are willing to go to support her. Amidst all this noise, the Republicans are marginalizing whatever few GOP moderates remain. Ultra-conservatives don’t seem to care if they end up in the deep end of lunacy.
Danielx
@piratedan:
Well said.
HumboldtBlue
And now for something completely different.
Sloegin
If you’ve got a twitter account, report the hate. Do whatever you can, no matter how small. SMH doesn’t cut it anymore. They’re dangerous.
Brachiator
@piratedan:
The problem is that these right wing nut jobs see America and most Americans as the enemy.
Their vision of the world has ossified into a crabbed reality in which nothing exists but Trump, religious intolerance and the Second Amendment.
Millard Filmore
@tokyokie:
Go play in the traffic?
RaflW
@Lord Fartdaddy:
Sizable numbers of people have indeed been against each of those things in their time. The labels for who was for and against have changed, but the types of minds and (shriveled, fearful) hearts are a throughline of humanity.
But progress comes, in fits and starts.
Chetan Murthy
This dickweed Greene has never heard of intersex children. Poor, deluded, sick MTG. I remember still the first time I read about the atrocities committed upon the bodies of poor defenseless intersex infants in our country [I never inquired what happens in other countries, for fear that it’d be even -worse-] and ….. the idea that somehow people can think there are only two genders is …. cray-cray.
And I say that as a decidedly cishet male, about as cishet as they get, goddammit.
P.S. And then, then, *then* we come to subject of people who find out that their mental wiring doesn’t match their genotype and/or phenotype. But long before that, the idea that there are only male and female, and nothing else, is ….. ridiculous.
Greene needs to take a few courses in human physiology. Or maybe moral philosophy.
James E Powell
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
Republicans haven’t been in favor of anything good or decent since I was in high school – the Nixon years. They are a coalition of racists and people who want to repeal the 20th century. Why should I regard them as anything but enemies?
mrmoshpotato
@Brachiator:
There’s nothing ultra-conservative about these fucking nutjobs.
Adam L Silverman
@Adam L Silverman: Cole got back to me. He said that the advertisements are based on the browser history of each person who accesses Balloon Juice.
lurker
@Adam L Silverman:
@Winston:
The bit about depending on browser history makes sense. However, it will also depend somewhat on content. You would likely get some different ads if this was a post about mustard or meyer lemons.
Clearing your cache and cookies can help – should be in preferences or settings or some similar place depending on your browser. Which browser are you using?
Mary G
MTG put up a video not long after Jan. 6 – I’m not going to look for it to link to it for obvious reasons – where she led a group of four or or five of her staffers on a trip through the underground tunnels of Congress on her way to the floor to vote about something or other and the person shooting the video made sure to catch all the directional signs to various wings leading to other buildings and groups of offices they passed. I’m sure the layout isn’t top secret knowledge given how many people have worked there over the decades, but the image of her “mischievous owning the libs” face and tittering minions retraumatizing people who had been in fear for their lives just days earlier made me want to punch her. Badly.
She is more dangerous than Boebert because I believe she wants blood in the streets and is smarter and more likely to accomplish it, while staying safely away.
Love Rep. Newman getting right in her face, though.
mrmoshpotato
@lurker:
And if you were searching for mops online recently…
Roger Moore
@Chetan Murthy:
While I agree with much of what you say, it’s important not to confuse sex and gender. They’re related but not the same thing. Sex is anatomical* while gender is social. To put it more concretely, male and female are about biology, but masculine and feminine are social constructs. Society expects people with particular anatomy (sex) to adopt an associated social role (gender), and that association is so strong that many, maybe even most, people have trouble seeing the anatomy and social role as separate things.
Obviously, intersex people are a direct challenge to this. They can’t be assigned one of the two standard sexes, so society doesn’t know which gender to assign them to, either. That freaks people out badly enough that they do things like surgically assigning intersex babies to one sex or the other.
*This is an oversimplification. There is also a genetic sex determined by genes and chromosomes, but society is much more concerned with anatomical sex than genetic sex.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@mrmoshpotato:
I was searching for Miops, hope I spelled it right.
cain
@Adam L Silverman:
The new firefox will let you put cookies in a container so it can’t be shared with other organizations – that should confound these ads since they can’t figure out where you’ve been.
Anne Laurie
To repeat myself: Boebert is a one-trick wannabe, and Cawthorn is a subadult raised in a Christianist vealpen. But MTG is a genuine nutcase with money, and that makes her dangerous.
Best hope, IMO, is that her family (which is where she gets the money) has enough sane members left to intervene. Unfortunately, since they didn’t discourage her from district-shopping for a place where she could spend a bunch of that money getting elected in the first place, they may be sympathizers!
lurker
@lurker:
@cain:
Choosing the do not track option can help, but not all organizations honor that. Some of this is tracked based on unique identifiers for your device and browser, so you cannot get around it completely. Doing some additional searches for mops or miops or mopes may lead to different results. Have noticed that if I make a bunch of spurious searches after looking for gifts, it makes it less likely that my spouse will notice what I am looking for in the way of a gift for her.
James E Powell
@Anne Laurie:
Our hope is that she runs for senate in two years and loses in the primary.
Anne Laurie
To be frank, my personal hope is that she’s caught doing something very illegal with her money well in advance of the 2022 cycle, and that in the ensuing shoot-out no non-MTG supporters are seriously injured. Because that’s what it will take to get her out of public life, IMO.
Steeplejack
@Winston:
Use an ad blocker and throw in a few bucks occasionally to the blog via the donation button. Or contribute a bit when there’s a bleg.
Dan B
@Adam L Silverman: It’s necessary to remind myself that there are debates about whether or not LGBTQ people like me should be equal in the eyes of the law and afforded dignity and equity. I have in laws who believe that gay couples like me and my partner would be fine if we just didn’t “Force your being gay on people.” And we have all the rights we need. I’m invisible as a cis white guy but make a point of being visible even though it’s uncomfortable and often frightening. Who will turn out to be the closet case who is triggered? Who is the Quanon who believes the US needs to rid itself of “pedophiles”*. LGBTQ people are mostly quite ordinary and become familiar if we’re there everyday. When we’re invisible it feels to most people that we’re hiding something insidious and deceptive. Having in laws say we should not force ourselves on people is a sign of not taking threats to us, or blindly ignoring the threats as well as the solution. Th Equality Act is most valuable for its symbolism and its echoes in the larger community of Americans. Laws don’t guarantee protection for people who are maligned but a good strong nudge is helpful.
I’m glad for the BJ’ers who get this. Having grown up in a very dark era I’m rarely sure of support. Leftover PTSD. Abuse of minorities who cannot pass or cannot be invisible rattles me like shocks from an explosion. I numb myself but the horror is only tamped down so I can go on living
It reminds me of every gay wedding I’ve attended. At each one the tears flowed. Relief from fear and pain for a moment unlocked the great store of suppressed grief we all shared but had not adequately mourned.
Geminid
@Winston: You might be able to cleanse your ad palette by taking a minute or two researching sellers of flowering plants and shrubs. I looked up flame azalea sources the other day and got some real pretty ads for most of a week!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Maybe.. Green is desperate for attention and Newman is a bit of an idiot for giving it to her. Mostly Congress is turning into Highschool though.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Hmm should we start a betting pool for how long before one of Green’s kid’s publicly announces they LGTB? How long before Green’s ex-girlfriend goes public?
evodevo
Xtianists have been paranoid about this for years…but most of them either homeskool or have their kids in Xtian religious schools….why would they be so worried about this? I assume this would only apply to public govt. supported sports/schools…oh, wait…Dominionists want to control EVERY public space…and impose their rigid social beliefs on EVERYONE, via legislation…
wenchacha
@Chetan Murthy: People born intersex present a problem for the folks who like to say “God doesn’t make mistakes.” Like many of their problems, they just deny it ignore facts that don’t fit with their delusions.
Another Scott
@Roger Moore: +1
Plus, there are Chimera.
Humans don’t really fit into boxes, and that’s a great thing.
Cheers,
Scott.
dimmsdale
I’ll just mention DARVO, an acronym for phenomena surrounding a lot of the fascist right these days.
The quick & dirty definition is: “DARVO refers to a reaction perpetrators of wrong doing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. DARVO stands for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.” The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim — or the whistle blower — into an alleged offender. This occurs, for instance, when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of “falsely accused” and attacks the accuser’s credibility and blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation.”
Hopefully we will NOT see it surfacing in the form of some gunned-up congressperson provoking a fight, accusing the other party of starting it, then killing the other party in “self defense”, claiming THEY started it. I don’t believe “stand your ground” idiocy applies in the US Capitol. Hopefully not, anyway.
link: https://dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/defineDARVO.html
Geminid
@wenchacha: Some Bible thumpers might respond, we wouldn’t have problems like intersex babies and a 20% rate of miscarriage if Eve hadn’t eaten from the Tree of Knowledge. But they would still have a hard time explaining why if Eve was created from Adam’s rib, he still ended up with nipples.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@wenchacha: The correctly reply is
“So you are claiming to know the mind of God, which by definition is infinite, beyond space and time and therefor ineffable?”
Just speaking as someone who amuses themselves by screwing with God Botherors heads, the real fun is dumping questions like these on them and making them explain it so they have to listen to their own nonsense.
Anyway, it’s all BS anyway because Donald Trump has replaced God and Jesus on the Religious Right as their deity.
Jay
@Winston:
BJ doesn’t control ad content.
Algorithms do.
So a post on gun nutz, pulls up ads targeted to ammosexuals.
JCNZ
Empty G.
dnfree
@Dan B: We are in our seventies. My husband’s cousin the same age is gay. He even had a long-time boyfriend who died when they were in their sixties, I think. But he never called himself gay until a few years ago, and he said what a relief it was to finally just be able to say it matter-of-factly. It’s been a long time coming and it still isn’t all the way here.
Ken
MTG is just awful. And I have to say that she wears her cross jewelry quite proudly. If she is the representation of Christ, I don’t want a fucking thing to do with Him or any of his evil followers! She needs to hop back into the basket of depolorables.
J R in WV
@Winston:
One of the Ad serving groups (perhaps Google itself) thinks you are a budding Nazi who needs to stock up on that signify bullshit!
I’m not saying you are a nazi, just that an ad server suspects you could be a nazi.