Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s giddy social media post about releasing more Jan. 6 footage could be some of the best news Democrats get all week.
As malicious as the Georgia Republican tends to be, I have to imagine Democrats feel fairly confident in their electoral chances with her steering the Republican Party’s agenda — or, at least, helping dictate its focus — in the lead-up to the 2024 elections.
On Wednesday, Greene claimed that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had given two right-wing pundits and “a third outlet” what she described as “unfettered access” to the thousands of hours of video footage obtained by McCarthy. She tweeted:
I’m excited to share the good news that just as I promised the J6 tapes are being released!@SpeakerMcCarthy has given @jsolomonReports, @Julie_kelly2, and a third outlet unfettered access to the J6 tapes, and their reporting on it starts tomorrow.
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) May 31, 2023
This is the transparency the…
Having a déjà vu moment?
You may remember McCarthy previously released Jan. 6 footage to then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who tried to downplay the threat posed by rioters by cherry-picking parts that don’t show violence.
Here, we seem to have a similar scenario. As Mediaite noted, the two journalists Greene tagged in her tweet are known to spread right-wing conspiracy theories.
The initial release was largely seen as a dud. And Carlson, whose team had hyped the footage as exculpatory for conservatives, seemingly acknowledged this by allowing the story to fall by the wayside.
Nonetheless, it looks like Greene is pining for another go?
As I noted the first time around, this strategy seems like a self-own for Republicans.
The assumption that the broad American public is interested in reliving Jan. 6 — one of the most traumatic and damaging political attacks in U.S. history — is the type of logic you’d expect from an alien who has never spent a moment interacting with actual humans in the United States.
Or, perhaps, it’s just the twisted logic of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
It’s notable that several media outlets have sued the federal government to obtain the footage McCarthy has selectively leaked. (NBC News previously asked him to share the footage, to no avail.)
When a right-wing Twitter account claimed Republicans were reneging on their promise to release the footage to the public, Greene offered a deranged excuse. People could use facial recognition software to identify people who were on the Capitol grounds that day and then “ruin their lives,” she claimed.
With Republicans like these, Democrats hardly need political advisers. Just paint Marjorie Taylor Greene as the brain of the operation and watch America shriek in terror.
I would love for everyone to be able to see the J6 tapes except the funded Antifa internet trolls that can’t wait to comb through every ounce of video with facial recognition software in order to doxx every person that simply stood on the Capitol grounds that day so they can ruin…
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) June 1, 2023
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.