ABP: Always. Be. Projecting.

A coda to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “national divorce” proposal.

(Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

1. Projection

One of my maxims is that projection is the sincerest form of Trumpism. And in yesterday’s comments section, a reader picked up on how Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “national divorce” views are largely based around her projecting onto “Blue states” the kind of stuff she wants to do in “Red states.”

Here’s the comment:

I think the most fascinating thing in this isn't MTG's call for a national divorce, but her vision for what blue states would look like.

Forced pledging of allegiance to identity groups, government sponsored antifa training, etc.

It's like each idea is a fun house bizarro twist on something conservatives want. Their world view is so narrow they believe that everyone wants the same means as them, just put to opposite ends.

If this is genuinely what conservatives believe the left wants, then no wonder we've lost our ability to communicate across political divides.

Now, in case you didn’t unroll the entire MTG list of divorce policy proposals, here’s what she brought to the table:

• “States would have full control of their public education. . . . In red states, there would be varying degrees of more traditional public education, charter schools, homeschooling, technical training, and college and universities. Red states would likely ban all gender lies and confusing theories, Drag Queen story times, and LGBTQ indoctrinating teachers, and China’s money and influence in our education while blue states could have government controlled gender transition schools.”

• “Red state schools would bring back prayer in school and require every student to stand for the national anthem and pledge of allegiance while blue states would likely eliminate the anthem and pledge all together and replace them with anthems and pledges to identity ideologies like the Trans flag and BLM. Perhaps some blue states would even likely have government funded Antifa communists training schools.”

• “Companies would no longer have to meet ESG scoring measures on anything from hiring to work culture to products. In red states companies could hire based on work related qualifications not identity and return their focus on their customers, once again going back to real customer service and treating the customer like the king. Blue states would likely enforce ESG and require identity to mandate everything perhaps even what customers are allowed to consume based on their identity. We already saw Democrats give life saving monoclonal antibodies to people of color before white people during covid.”

• “Red states would likely have highly supported law enforcement officers and well funded agencies. Police officers would be well trained, paid, equipped, and seen as heroes once again, not portrayed as racists thugs. Red states would also support citizen’s right to bear arms and self defense. In red states, law abiding gun owners wouldn’t go to jail for shooting an attacker, their right to self defense and defense of property would be protected. Crime rates would be very low. Red state citizens would be safe. Criminals would be locked away swiftly when they broke the law. Justice would be served. In blue states, who knows. Police could be anything from unarmed social workers to doing what Democrat lawmakers have been calling for all along, abolishing the police. And in blue states, they would immediately disarm their citizens of course because those bad guns get up and kill people by themselves all the time.”

In fairness to MTG, this isn’t all projection. Some of it is just evidence that she believes that the Bannon War Room Version of America is reality. Do you think that after a “national divorce” Virginia would have kids pledge allegiance to a “Trans flag”?

(Side note: Is that a thing? Is there a “Trans flag”?)

But the best part about all of this is that deeper into her thread, Greene castigates Democrats for needing “safe spaces” to “protect their fragile minds” from ideas with which they disagree.

Yet in the very first tweet, she says that “everyone” she talks to believes we need a “national divorce.”

If true, that would be one heck of a bubble Marjorie has found herself in. A real safe space where fragile minds are protected from even having to talk with people who think a national divorce is a bad idea.

One last question: Presumably Marjorie Taylor Greene talks to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy quite a lot. Does this mean that he favors a “national divorce”?

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Sorry, one more thing: In MTG’s telling, the Red states would require school children to stand and say the Pledge of Allegiance. This is a line from the Pledge:

. . . one nation under God, indivisible . . .

So she wants to create two countries by having a national divorce and one of her casus belli is that kids today aren’t required to pledge their allegiance to a single, indivisible America.

Irony is dead.

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2. Ted!

Bulwark alum Ted Johnson’s first Washington Post column is out and as you’d expect: It’s great.

This is the first Black History Month in a time in which lynching is a federal crime and Juneteenth is a national holiday. Last March, President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act — only three Republicans voted against the measure in the House, and the Senate passed it by unanimous consent. The preceding summer, the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act became law, when it, too, passed with the Senate’s unanimous consent and just 14 House Republicans opposing it.

And yet, shortly before this Black History Month began, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) blocked an Advanced Placement African American Studies course from being offered in his state’s high schools. His decision flowed from more than two years of manufactured outrage on the right over structural racism and elements of Black history. Critical race theory was anthropomorphized into an anti-American boogeyman lurking in our schools and libraries. The term “woke” was transformed into a catchall pejorative used to condemn a range of nonspecific critiques, including disdain for the comprehensive accounting of our nation’s history on race.

This Republican two-step, already spreading from Florida to Virginia and beyond, proclaims Black History Month with one hand while furiously erasing the ability to teach that history with the other. The result is a politics that honors Black achievement but recoils from a deeper exploration of that which makes such progress nothing short of a national miracle.

It celebrates Juneteenth while glossing over the horrors of chattel slavery. It takes pride in criminalizing lynching (after nearly 250 attempts across more than a century of trying), yet discourages discussions that touch on the terroristic intent of this often-communal violence. It quotes the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and celebrates the “colorblindness” of Frederick Douglass while ignoring their social and policy critiques that would have them labeled as disciples of wokeism today.

Read the whole thing.

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3. Marvel and Geopolitics

Dan Drezner had me at at hello:

Read the whole thing.