A Vast Empty Space

Marjorie Taylor Greene claims that Canada is helping Mexicans invade the United States. Alex Panetta reports:

Here's an attention-grabbing charge: the idea that Canada might be assisting an invasion of the United States by the other country on the continent.

Even more surprising? The comment came from a member of the United States Congress during a congressional hearing in Washington.

That member was Marjorie Taylor Greene, the controversy-courting Republican best known as a gleeful flinger of partisan bombs.

It came during a hearing organized by Republicans titled: "Biden's Growing Border Crisis: Death, Drugs, and Disorder on the Northern Border."

Ms. Greene pointed to the number of apprehensions at the Canada-U.S. border:

She alluded to an increase in Mexicans being stopped trying to enter the U.S. between ports of entry, with U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials reporting 1,604 such incidents at the northern border in the first four months of this fiscal year compared with 882 for all of last year.

"It's extremely concerning, and dangerous to the United States of America's national security, that Canada's immigration policy allows Mexicans to travel, to Canada, without a visa," Taylor Greene said. 

"It seems that Canada wants to participate in Mexico's invasion of the United States.... They end up coming into the United States."

Those numbers should be placed in context:

The number of apprehensions is indeed up significantly from the last few years. But even at the current pace, Border Patrol Agents would stop fewer than 9,000 people coming from Canada this year; that's less than in the early 2000s, and a rounding error compared to the more than two million on the Mexican border. 

Several Republicans, other than Taylor Greene, went out of their way to point out that their issue wasn't with Canada. The chair of the hearing, Dan Bishop of North Carolina, said: "They're friends — not anything other than that." 

The problem, several Republicans said, was that the northern border is severely understaffed. Barely 10 per cent of U.S. Border Patrol Agents are stationed along the vast Canadian frontier, and even among that limited pool many are seconded for stints at the busier Mexican border.

The head of the U.S. Border Patrol Agents' union, Brandon Judd, said: "It's impossible to patrol the [northern] border." He said there's only one agent every 30 miles (48 kilometres).

Those kinds of details escape Ms. Greene. Americans are proud of their vast empty spaces. One of those spaces sits on Ms. Greene's shoulders.

Image: NY1

Toppling The Regime

Marjorie Taylor Greene is no intellectual giant. But she knows what she's doing. These days she has taken to calling Joe Biden's government a "regime." Greg Sargent writes:

No U.S. lawmaker rhapsodizes about political violence as enthusiastically as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. On Saturday, the Georgia Republican raged: “Democrats want Republicans dead, and they’ve already started the killings.” After the FBI search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, Greene suggested the United States is embroiled in “civil war.”

The term “regime” is a mainstay of Greene’s political vocabulary, and right-wing authoritarian nationalists in Congress and the media are using it more and more prominently. Understanding the term is essential to grasping what’s happening with today’s MAGA-fied right and why some experts fear we may be hurtling toward rising political violence and instability.

Greene is on the leading edge of this trend. After the Mar-a-Lago search, she suggested that only “countries during civil war” typically see such “rogue” behavior by the state. Soon after, the term “regime” quickly became central to the right’s Mar-a-Lago narrative as a way to express that thought.

The January 6th insurrection failed. But Greene is a sign that another insurrection is coming:

It’s telling that all the “regime” talk exploded after the Mar-a-Lago incident. After all, the search was authorized by a judge who saw probable cause to believe that three federal statutes may have been violated. It ended up recovering reams of classified documents that Trump hoarded, after his own lawyers suggested to investigators that none remained.

To call this the work of the Biden “regime” is really to say that the act of applying the law to Trump will be treated as fundamentally illegitimate. When Greene claims this is the stuff of civil wars and rogue regimes, she really means that holding Trump accountable to the law should be regarded by his supporters as an act of war.

What's going on?

Conservatism scholar Joshua Tait explains how this works in his etymology of the “regime” term for the Bulwark. The word, Tait notes, is meant to invoke a sense that a range of U.S. institutions — the administrative state, the media, universities, etc. — have been irredeemably captured by the left, creating a “regime” that in some vague sense exercises hidden but tyrannical control.

As Tait writes, in this formulation, Trump is the tribune of “the people” — selectively defined — who is waging war on their behalf against this disguised tyranny. The “regime” has fought back with more oppression, which proves the truth of the original formulation in a conveniently self-reinforcing loop.

“What do people ultimately do to regimes?” Tait asks rhetorically. “They topple them.” To call the legitimately elected Biden administration “the regime,” Tait argues, “is an implicit call to overthrow it.”

Steven Levitsky, a scholar of democratic breakdown, sees this as roughly analogous to Latin American countries in which the concerted delegitimization of elected governments was followed by coups.

“To call a democratically elected government a ‘regime’ is to deliberately undermine its legitimacy and justify authoritarian and violent acts against it,” Levitsky tells me.

The mainstreaming of the term among Republicans bodes badly for what’s to come, Levitsky warns. This comes after a large swath of Republicans went all in with Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and then with placing him beyond accountability for the mob’s coup attempt, and as political violence is increasingly glorified in GOP politics.

Now the term “regime” is being employed strategically to justify the further abandonment of democracy, Levitsky notes: “This is clear evidence that a big sector of the party is now on authoritarian terrain.”

It's tempting to see Taylor Greene as an airhead -- because, in some ways, she is. But she is also very dangerous.

Image: Time Magazine

No One's Home

If ever there was a woman who fits the stereotype of the dumb blonde, it's Marjorie Taylor Greene. The woman who has referred to Hitler's secret police as the "Gazpacho" and a petri dish as a "peach tree dish," has now taken aim at Justin Trudeau. Alex McKeen writes:

When Marjorie Taylor Greene — the Georgia representative who has loudly supported QAnon conspiracy theories — took aim at Trudeau over Twitter Tuesday, a conspiracy theory reference came in the very first line.

“Trudeau quickly filled his father’s shoes,” she posted to Twitter. “But in Canada not Cuba.”

The quip appeared to be a reference to the baseless online conspiracy theory that Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro’s son. It originated in right-wing chat rooms around 2018 and re-emerged around the time of the Freedom Convoy this winter. Justin Trudeau’s father was former prime minister Pierre Trudeau.

The larger context of Greene’s tirade against Trudeau was not about his parentage, but guns.

Numerous gun rights promoters in the U.S., already on the defensive following the mass shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas that killed 19 students and two adults, reacted to the news from Canada with disdain.

In a Twitter thread aimed at Trudeau, Greene wrote that the move was a “terrible violation of rights to innocent Canadians” and suggested that Canada needs private citizens to be “heavily armed” in order to deter attacks from other countries, like Russia.

There was a song several years ago about a woman like Greene. The lyric read, "I gaze upon that lovely dome, and realize there's no one home."

Image: The Toronto Star