Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Guillotine
Revolutionary Lessons for America's Dumbest Rebel
Historical examples of revolutions eating their own are as common as dirt and as bloody as a butcher's floor.
The French Revolution's Reign of Terror, during which Maximilien Robespierre and his crew guillotined not just the aristos but their fellow revolutionaries faster than you can say "liberté," took a turn and devoured its own.
When his abuse of power on the Committee of Public Safety became outrageous enough, Paul Barras, one of the conspirators against him, said, “Unless Robespierre dies, we all die.” Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, one of the other architects of the Revolution, also felt under the loving embrace of the National Razor once the movement he helped create turned on him.
They were two of the Revolution’s most powerful men…then they were heads in a rough-hewn rush basket.
Or look at Stalin's Soviet Union—old Joe didn't just go after the czarists; he wiped out his Bolshevik buddies by the truckload in a decades-long paranoia party. Pound for pound, Stalin was even bloodier than his predecessor, V.I. Lenin. The purges today are with poison, radioactive tea, anti-aircraft missiles, and open-window incidents, but Putin’s kleptocratic revolution, using violence against your opposition is a feature, not a bug.
Castro didn’t stop when he’d defeated the Batista government; he purged his revolutionary brothers in arms with vigor. Huber Matos, Aníbal Escalante, Carlos Franqui, and Camilo Cienfuegos were just a few who were killed, exiled, imprisoned, or died in mysterious plane crashes.
The song is as old as time.
The revolution begins, and so do the power games, and before you know it, everyone's either holding a gun or dodging bullets. These purges and internal witch hunts don't just rip the guts out of the revolutionary ranks—they turn the noblest of causes into a cynical scramble to survive, leaving everyone wondering just what the hell they were fighting for in the first place.
It was inevitable that this chapter in the Trump Revolution would reach where we are right now. Everyone in the MAGA party is now locked in a revolution where purity and obedience to the cause are everything. The dying normies are begging the young bomb-throwers just to let them get through November, but the monsters are hungry and loose in the countryside, rabid for RINO blood.
Matt Gaetz (R-She Looked 18, Officer) led the first purge in the House, driving out Kevin McCarthy, but Marjorie Taylor Greene is determined to lead the next.
Forget about winning elections. Forget about winning hearts and minds. They want to win the war against even the faintest remnants of the GOP Establishment.
It’s all about the purity of the base. The conceit is simple: John Stuart Mill's idea that intense minority factions drive political and social movements because of their higher levels of engagement and willingness to take action.
In today’s MAGA faction, the idea isn’t to win support or power; it’s to punish those in your movement who lack sufficient dedication to the cause.
Even among people deeply dedicated to chaos, disruption, and political arson, these movements reach a point where their performance art collides with the reality that even radical fringe movements cannot survive on a diet of chaos alone.
Just as there are in mathematics, information theory, and philosophy, there are boundaries even in chaotic systems, a point where entropy compression leads to an end stage of chaos. The process ends either from heat death or mathematical finality.
The chaos becomes self-termination, or at least self-limiting. We’re approaching that moment at two places in American politics right now: the American college protest movement over the Israel-Hamas war and the MAGA caucus in the House. We’ll leave aside solving Mideast peace and the political impact of America’s fashionable upper-class college revolutionaries, an assignment above my pay grade for now.
In the MAGA revolution, Marjorie Taylor Greene now sees herself as a radical enforcer of the Trump Revolution. Marjorie Taylor Greene believes that next week will be her moment of triumph, and she’ll get to take Mike Johnson’s hide home to nail up in her garage gym and send a chilling message to apostates.
Her colleagues have begged her to stop, knowing that if she succeeds, their paper-thin majority may end even before November. And yet, she persists.
She defied Michael Watley, Trump’s hand-picked choice for the RNC. In a meeting yesterday, Watley laid out the case that the Margehadi tactic of trying to detonate yet another Republican Speaker was doomed not only to failure but would hurt the GOP ticket from Trump on down.
Worst of all, in the minds of the Mar-a-Lago Mafia, Marge is committing the unforgivable in of taking the spotlight off Donald Trump, the Martyr of Manhattan, the Nelson Mandela of our time, the greatest civil rights figure of this century, the unjustly persecuted Donald J. Trump. Attention is his currency; her plan will rob him of days of press and opportunities for petulant fundraising emails.
Today, she’s raging to anyone who will listen that she’s the one pure Member left, the torchbearer for the MAGA movement in vocal opposition to noted progressive socialist Marxist commie libertine and noted swinger, debaucher of young women, and overall Enemy of the People Mike Johnson.
You know, “Red Mike” the raging libtard Soros shill and RINO sellout. That Mike Johnson.
Pardon me while I seek professional help for this eye roll. I think I may have pulled an ocular muscle.
Naturally, Steve Bannon joined her amen chorus today, launching a spittle-flecked rant against Mike Johnson. He’ll pull much of the MAGA media into the fight on the side of the Khmer Marge faction.
I’m not certain Greene has more than a handful of votes, and certainly not enough to overcome the massive political embarrassment of Hakeem Jeffries saving Johnson’s speakership.
She’s about to fail, and failure is often fatal politically (and often otherwise) in revolution. Watch in the coming weeks as her most loyal lieutenants turn on her. Et tu, Chip Roy?
Never pull an unloaded gun.
The moment you get your bluff called, it’s over. Your counterparty is either going to shoot you, beat your ass, or laugh in your face.
That’s precisely what’s about to happen to Greene.
Saint-Just and Robespierre’s last seconds of consciousness were spent staring at the walls of the rush baskets into which their severed heads had thunked a moment before. All the power and attention of the revolution had turned its baleful, bloodthirsty glare onto them, and the wind of politics changed them from dictators to corpses.
The National Razor is not available as a punishment in these United States, but political punishments are just as deadly in the egos and hearts of America’s Most Ambitious. I wonder how Greene will feel when the political tumbrel delivers her to the place of her demise.
Rick, this is the most poetic and brilliant piece of political writing I have ever read. It's got it all: historical perspective, scathing, yet sardonic language, and a clear eye about what id happening in the bowels of political insanity. May we doge the knife and live for a better day.
This was a great history lesson leading into one of the biggest belly laughs I’ve had yet this week. Thank you! I hope Marge and Bannon have their figurative members chopped off soon.