Marjorie Taylor Greene's reaction to the Chauvin verdict was to compare BLM to the KKK
This week, Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene continued her ongoing streak of being absolutely the worst, using the guilty verdict in the Derek Chauvin murder trial to rail against the Black Lives Matter social justice movement, and insist that Chauvin's conviction was less a matter of careful jurisprudence and more the result of (her entirely imagined threat of) mob justice.
Speaking with ultra-right wing podcaster and conspiracy enabler David Harris Jr. on Wednesday evening, Greene lamented the Chauvin trial as resulting in a sham conviction, explaining that "I personally believe — and this is what I tweeted — that there was no way that we could see anything but a guilty verdict. There was so much pressure it was unreal."
The tweet Greene appeared to be referencing was one she sent the night before, in which she'd claimed that the nation's capital had been paralyzed by fear over the Chauvin trial and the specter of violence from the Black Lives Matter movement, which she claimed is "the strongest terrorist threat in our country."
Had D.C. been "completely dead" on a Tuesday night, that would have been understandable, I suppose. But as it happens, the District seems to have been having a fairly normal evening, as many, many, many respondents to Greene's tweet attested. But it wasn't so much her wildly — if predictably — inaccurate assessment of D.C. nightlife that put the congresswoman in a defensive crouch. Instead it was the pushback against her assertion that the Black Lives Matter movement is the "strongest terrorist threat" to the United States.
"I got called a racist nonstop," Greene complained to Harris Jr. at one point. Later she doubled down on her assertion, comparing BLM to the Ku Klux Klan.
"It's basically the same tactics that the Ku Klux Klan used to use," she insisted. "They used to go and take to the streets with their torches and their uniforms, and go out there like some sort of army."
Because if there's a natural comparison to be made, it's between a virulently racist organization responsible for who knows how many murders in the name of defending a bigoted system of racial discrimination and ... people who would like to not be killed by police.
In fact, as it so happens, the actual "strongest terrorist threat" to the country isn't the overwhelmingly peaceful movement asking for progress on civil, racial, and criminal justice. According to the Department of Homeland Security, it's the proliferation of right-wing white nationalist groups, the likes of which Greene herself has been associated with, during events like the attempted insurrection at the United States Capitol. But that's not as good a sound bite for the podcast, apparently.
