Dear BTC, There Is No Reason to Preach at Us Just Because Some People Complain When You Show MGT Snippets on Your Show
- john raymond
- 2 minutes ago
- 4 min read
You opened a recent segment with a premise that is, on its face, correct: politics is not church, temple, or marriage. It is not a sacrament, and it does not require moral purity. It is the business of cobbling together coalitions with imperfect people for limited, concrete ends.
On that level, your defense of using Marjorie Taylor Greene’s words against Donald Trump is sound. The problem is not your decision to air her clips. The problem is the way you decided to scold your audience for objecting to it, as if a noisy subset of cranks defined everyone watching you.
There will always be people who react to any MTG clip with, “Why are you putting that evil woman on my screen?” Some of them are just drive-by haters. Some of them are shell-shocked from years of watching fascists get normalized by mainstream media. Some of them simply do not trust that “platforming to critique” won’t slide, over time, into “platforming that normalizes.”
That mix of motives is inevitable. You are a political commentator on YouTube. You will never have an audience entirely composed of serene, stoic, strategically disciplined saints. If you wait for that, you will be talking to a mirror.
Instead of treating that background noise as what it is—a fixed cost of doing this work—you elevated it into a set piece: a lecture about purity politics, emotional fragility, and the need to “hold two conflicting thoughts in our heads.”
The effect is not clarifying. It is condescending. You spoke as if your core audience is too thick to understand that they can both despise Marjorie Taylor Greene and still weaponize her grudging admissions about Trumpist violence. In reality, most people on the left have been doing exactly that for years.
This is the quiet insult baked into your segment. You act as if you are the first one to notice that we can say, “She is right about this one thing,” while also saying, “She is an arsonist who helped build the fire that now threatens her.” You frame “politics is not religion” as if it were a bold revelation, instead of the most basic operational insight that any organizer, staffer, or serious observer internalized long ago.
Your audience knows that coalitions are made with imperfect people. They also know the difference between using an enemy’s confession as evidence and laundering that enemy’s reputation. The fact that a few loud viewers shout at you every time you show MTG does not mean your broader audience needs a remedial sermon.
That is where your tone goes wrong. You do not distinguish between the inevitable crank and the legitimate concern. There are, of course, “numbskulls” in any comment section who will howl at the mere sound of Greene’s voice. Ignore them.
But there are also people who are not stupid at all, who ask: how much airtime should we give to fascists, even when we are “using” them? How do we keep our work from becoming one more corridor in the funhouse they have built?
Those are not purity questions; they are editorial questions. They deserve engagement, not a patronizing reassurance that this is “not church or temple.”
Meanwhile, the positive ask you made of your audience is almost nonexistent. You gesture vaguely at “amplifying” MTG’s critique of Trump because she can reach people you cannot.
Fine. But what, exactly, do you want your viewers to do differently? Stop criticizing her? Stop calling her complicit? Retweet her posts without commentary? Pressure Democratic leadership to treat her as a partner on security and political violence?
You never say. You invoke the language of coalition, but you never specify the coalition’s terms, the mechanism, or the target. You are not whipping votes in the House; you are making a video.
Your real coalition is informational: a temporary overlap between your narrative (“Trump is dangerous and uses violence”) and hers (“Trump is dangerous and I am now afraid”). You do not need to chide your viewers to recognize that overlap; most already do.
What your audience hears instead is this: because some fraction of them yell at you for playing MTG clips at all, you aim your rhetorical fire at “the left” as if they were children who cannot handle moral ambiguity.
You spend valuable time proving that you are savvy enough to use a fascist’s confession against her own camp, rather than simply doing that work and letting the results speak for themselves. It is self-justification dressed up as strategy.
The irony is that you are complaining about complainers in the same way you accuse them of confusing politics with religion. You treat emotional discomfort in your own comments section as a problem to be solved at the level of doctrine—“remember, this is politics, not church”—instead of accepting it as the ambient static that comes with a large, heterogeneous audience.
You do not need them all to be happy with every editorial choice. You only need to be clear, to yourself and to the majority, that your standard is consistent: we will show MTG when her words reveal the violence and rot of Trumpism, and we will bracket that with her full record so no one confuses this temporary overlap with redemption.
That is the real answer to the critics who hate seeing her face. Not a sermon about coalition-building. A simple, adult statement of editorial principle: “We will use every piece of evidence available, including admissions from those inside the fascist camp, and we will never forget who they are and what they have done.”
Say that once, clearly, and move on. Let the inevitable cranks scream into the void. Your job is not to re-parent them. Your job is to keep documenting a regime that openly flirts with political violence and to make that reality legible.
You are not wrong to run MTG’s words when they expose the danger of Trump and his movement. You are wrong to act as if the existence of a handful of angry viewers means your entire audience needs to be talked down from some childlike misunderstanding of politics.
Trust instead that most of the people watching you already know how to hold two thoughts at once. What they need from you is not a scolding, but sharper analysis and clearer stakes.
The cranks will always be there. You do not need to win them. You just need to stop letting them define how you talk to the rest of us.
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