MTG's political rise followed same path as Capitol rioter's radicalization: op-ed

In a post to X this Sunday, Georgia GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene commented on a clip from Alexandra Pelosi's documentary "The Insurrectionist Next Door" in which Pelosi tries to get Jan. 6 defendant Paul Hodgkins to admit that he was misled by former President Donald Trump.

Then Pelosi, the filmaker daughter of Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), interviews him eight months later. She finds Hodgkins is still consuming right-wing media.

"You're still watching conservative television? You served eight months in jail for everything you believe in based on watching those shows and you're still watching them?" Pelosi asks.

"I was supposed to turn into a liberal with that or something. No, no my opinions on what's good and not good for the country have not changed," Hodgkins replies.

In her post, Greene said that the U.S. government is attempting to use the Capitol riot to "destroy" Trump.

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"But it didn’t work, it won’t work, and it will never work," Greene wrote. "Because it’s only exposing Democrats for who they really are, which will destroy them in the end."

In an op-ed for The Washington Post Monday, Philip Bump contends that the question isn't really about whether Hodgkins prefers conservative news outlets over liberal ones.

"The question was really about Hodgkins’s reliance on information sources that had misled him — but neither Hodgkins nor Greene view claims that the 2020 election was stolen as misleading," Bump writes. "Instead, they view the central tension raised by Pelosi as being between two political worldviews — despite the objective fact that the worldview they accept is false."

Even with the prison sentence he received, Bump says there's no evidence that Hodgkins was ever dissuaded from the belief system that led him to go to D.C. on Jan. 6, but "his exchange with Pelosi suggests that, by that point, he hadn’t."

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"He wasn’t going to turn away from One America or other outlets that present false information about the election or other things in part because he doesn’t recognize the information as false, and in part because he views the alternatives not as objective but as sitting on the other side of the partisan spectrum," writes Bump, who added that Greene's rise to politics was fueled by a similar belief system.

"She drew national attention for her embrace of QAnon conspiracy theories. She was a prominent supporter of Donald Trump and has oriented her politics around him. So she lifts up Hodgkins’s response ostensibly as a way to talk about how 'they' — presumably the elites, the media, the Democrats, all of them — are trying to deceive Americans so that they are hostile to Donald Trump."

Read the full op-ed over at The Washington Post.