Columnist shreds 'self-infatuated extremist' Marjorie Taylor Greene for defending 'reckless brat'

Shortly after federal authorities announced the arrest of Jack Douglas Teixeira on allegations the 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard member leaked sensitive national security documents in an online chatroom, Marjorie Taylor Greene rushed to his defense.

“Teixeira is white, male, christian, and antiwar…That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime,” the far-right congresswoman from Georgia tweeted.

“Ask yourself who is the real enemy? A young low level national guardsmen? Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine?”

The New York Times’ Frank Bruni took the congresswoman to task for her remarks in a newly published column that ran under the headline “Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Thick, Cracked Goggles of Grievance.”

Bruni notes that there is no indication that Teixeira’s gender, race or religion were a factor in his arrest, and point out that it is Vladimir Putin’s Russia — not Joe Biden — who is waging war in Eastern Europe.

Describing Greene as a "self-infatuated extremist," Bruni writes that her views “have everything to do with the manner in which an alarming fraction of Americans regard and respond to political developments today.”

“They look for evidence of offense to, and persecution of, whatever group of people they identify with. They invent that proof when it’s not there; when it is, they upsize it. Either way, their predetermined sense of grievance is the prism through which all is passed and all is parsed. It’s their Rosetta stone. It’s their binky.”

Bruni notes that Greene’s tweet, although an extreme example, is no outlier.

“A reckless brat is arrested, President Biden arches an eyebrow, a bluebird falls from the sky: M.T.G. can see the lefty secularism and reverse racism — the wokeness, in a polarizing word — in any turn of events,” he writes.

“So can many others on the right, which has no monopoly on willful misreads, but is currently conducting a scary and profoundly dangerous master class on them. Witness their conspiracy theories, their militias, their actions on — and then revisionism about — the Jan. 6 rioting. Witness the evolution of Donald Trump’s blather, which leans ever more heavily on the insistence that investigations of him are really attacks on his supporters, who confront the same horrible oppression that poor Airman Teixeira does.”