Opinion | Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Thick, Cracked Goggles of Grievance - The New York Times

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By Frank Bruni

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

I don't keep up with Marjorie Taylor Greene's tweets, having decided long ago that there were more pleasant and constructive uses of time, like lighting fire to my eyelashes. But I'm rethinking that judgment now. M.T.G. really does have something to say — or, rather, to tell us.

She tweeted a doozy the other day. Actually, she routinely tweets doozies, which I realized when I caught up with her Twitter account, bingeing on it the way I would an overlooked HBO Max series, if the series were an endless sequence of garish sights and ghastly sounds that robbed me of my will to live. This tweet garnered headlines — that's how I came to it — and deservedly so. Audaciously, incoherently, M.T.G. used it to try to turn Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard accused of leaking national security secrets, into a victim.

The leaks in question divulged classified information about U.S. surveillance of Russia that's vital to our assistance to Ukraine, where there are true victims, an entire ravaged country of them. And Teixeira's alleged actions didn't seem to have any high-minded prompt. He's more post-adolescent punk than principled dissident by my read.

But then my lens isn't M.T.G.'s. I don't wear her thick, cracked goggles of grievance, which reveal Teixeira as a martyr.

"Teixeira is white, male, christian, and antiwar," she tweeted, capitalizing on her professed faith without properly capitalizing it. "That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime." Her tweet, wanting for a good copy edit, went on to beseech its readers: "Ask yourself who is the real enemy? A young low level national guardsmen? Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine?"

President Biden isn't waging war in Ukraine. That's what Vladimir Putin is doing. And Teixeira's gender, color and religion have nothing to do with his arrest and looming prosecution, nor are they relevant to a legitimate, necessary debate about the degree, nature, costs and long-term usefulness of our aid to Ukrainians.

But they 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.

M.T.G.'s tweet is an extreme example from a self-infatuated extremist, but it's an example nonetheless. 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.

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.

Witness less flamboyant versions of this paranoid mind-set. Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, has built his brand around identifying the supposed threats to non-woke traditionalists and crafting or calling for measures that foil and punish their liberal oppressors. He trades aspiration for retribution, optimism for resentment.

He, too, wears goggles of grievance. They're just a little bit lighter than M.T.G.'s. A little bit looser. And they're not lined in fur.