MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan said it would be a mistake to dismiss the explosive rhetoric from conspiracy theorist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who last week called for a “national divorce” splitting red states from blue ones.
“We know none of this is going to happen in America, at least anytime soon,” Hasan said. “Thankfully.”
But there’s another point to Greene’s “ridiculous rhetoric,” and that’s to get people ― mainly white conservatives ― “dangerously angry, to radicalize their racial grievances, to indulge their sense of victimhood, to turn them against their neighbors, but especially against Washington, D.C., and the two coasts,” Hasan said.
Greene has a long history of inflammatory comments, Hasan noted. He played a clip of her claiming that Democrats want Republicans dead “and they’ve already started the killings.”
“You may be thinking, ‘That is bonkers, but Republican kooks like Greene have been saying bonkers, inflammatory and dangerous things for decades,’ and that is true,” Hasan said. “But those previous kooks in previous decades didn’t have an ‘ironclad bond’ with the speaker of the House, as Greene does.”
Greene is a close ally of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who has rewarded her loyalty with plum committee assignments.
“Those previous kooks were called out by so-called moderates in their own Republican Party when they proposed things as crazy as a national divorce,” Hasan said. “That’s sadly is just not the case anymore.”
See more in Hasan’s Sunday night monologue: