Marjorie Taylor Greene Just Spent $100,000 on Kevin McCarthy’s Used Chapstick

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene won big on Tuesday—and no, it wasn’t for new concessions on the debt ceiling.

It was for Kevin McCarthy’s used Chapstick.

During House Republicans’ private weekly meeting, they paused discussing the looming federal debt default to auction off McCarthy’s lip balm, Politico reported. Specifically, it was a cherry-flavored, Representative Aaron Bean campaign–branded Chapstick. Greene placed the winning bid of $100,000.

Greene beat out several other contenders, but she reportedly only began bidding after the House speaker agreed to have dinner with the auction winner and any guests of their choice (including donors). Her payment will go to the House Republicans’ campaign arm.

Democrats were rightfully livid, pointing out that Greene was throwing cash around while her party fights to cut spending for childcare, health care, food aid, and veterans’ benefits. Robert Garcia said the move was “gross but on brand” for Greene, while Summer Lee called it a “blatant slap in the face to Americans.”

Nydia Velazquez said the auction demonstrated “GOP priorities in a nutshell,” while Ilhan Omar—a frequent target of Greene’s xenophobia and Islamophobia—didn’t even bother to dress her outrage up in formal language.

The GOP is holding the country hostage as the party refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a very standard congressional procedure, even as the United States hurtles toward defaulting on its debt. Should the U.S. fail to pay its bills, there will be potentially catastrophic consequences for both the domestic and global economy.

At least Greene will be able to put the chapstick to good use. Her lips must be chapped from all the kissing up she does to McCarthy and Donald Trump.

On Tuesday, Rick Scott warned socialists and Communists not to come to Florida, saying that the state is “openly hostile” toward them.

“Florida is openly hostile towards Socialists, Communists, and those that enable them. Before traveling to Florida, please understand that the state of Florida devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by Socialists and others who work in the Biden Administration,” the former governor and current Florida senator warns.

Read as written, Scott is not only expressing open hostility to millions of Americans sympathetic to socialist and Communist ideals and nations. He also explicitly notes he “devalues” the “challenges faced by Socialists and others who work in the Biden administration.” Would those challenges include the looming debt ceiling crisis? Or climate change, which threatens to drown Florida? Or that millions in this country lack good and affordable health care (perhaps something that could be solved by—*gasp*—the government)? Funnily enough, the answer as to whether Scott and Republicans devalue and dismiss those challenges would be a resounding “yes.”

Scott’s useless and juvenile “advisory” comes in the wake of the NAACP issuing an earnest travel advisory for people of color and LGBTQ people visiting Florida. The organization’s advisory was in direct response to a state that, under Ron DeSantis’s reign, has relentlessly targeted immigrants, LGBTQ people, women, those afraid of being killed in a mass shooting, people exercising their right to vote, teachers, students, and libraries.

Meanwhile, Scott’s advisory against socialists mimics the House wasting our time and money to pass a bill in February “denouncing the horrors of socialism.” That time, though, 109 Democrats joined the farcical exercise in proving that they too are drunk on capitalist Kool-Aid.

It’s bad enough that Scott is making a mockery of the NAACP—an organization his colleague Ted Cruz has also criticized for apparently not honoring its original mission of advancing civil rights. It’s another thing that apparently both Scott and Cruz can’t understand, or more likely are excited about, how Florida is actively demolishing people’s civil rights. All the more comical, given that Cruz based much of his complaint on the notion that Democrats are the real racists because of people like George Wallace—whose rhetoric is indistinguishable from Scott’s in his new advisory against socialism.

And it’s the cherry on top that, as TNR has written previously, in “a country ailed by the callousness of capitalism—as people are subject to a continual stream of mass shootings, ruthless police brutality, and having to resort to GoFundMe in order to pay for rent and hospital bills—members of Congress spent their workday instead denouncing socialism.”

It’s amazing that the most powerful people in the United States get to also be remarkably lazy and incredibly dull. And Ted Cruz is the cream of the crooked crop.

Over the weekend, the NAACP issued a travel advisory for Florida, stating that the state is “openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.” The advisory came, according to the historic organization, in response to Ron DeSantis’s “aggressive attempts to erase Black history and to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Florida schools.”

Senator Cruz, ever the galled-fellow, called the move “utterly dishonest.”

American historian Kevin Kruse responded, pointing out that despite Cruz’s (and other Republicans’) insistent invocation of Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader’s political legacy simply doesn’t align with conservatives’ views on race in America.

Cruz retorted by repeating what Kruse had already said, that George Wallace was a Democrat, as if that was some exculpatory evidence that conservatives are the real torchbearers of King’s legacy, and the left, actually, are the real racists.

Of course, Cruz either still somehow doesn’t know or, more likely, willfully ignores basic history to whip up outrage among any impressionable followers. Wallace was among the slate of twentieth-century Democrats who deployed the “Southern strategy”: increasing support among white voters by whipping up racist sentiment against African Americans.

Sounds familiar to exactly what Cruz is doing by attacking the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for its bold act of expressing concern for Black people, huh?

After all, Wallace’s speeches, which railed against “hippies,” civil rights “agitators,” “lazy” welfare recipients, atheists, “pointy-headed intellectuals,” “anarchists and Communists,” antiwar “radicals and rabble-rousers,” and beatniks are something you might readily hear on any number of programs hosted by Cruz’s media circle, from Ben Shapiro and Michael Knowles, to Cruz’s own armchair-and-cigars podcast (one he hosts almost daily, when he instead could be serving the people who elected him).

But the idea that political party names (Republican, Democrat) don’t correspond to the ideologies beneath them and can change throughout time is simply too complicated for Cruz’s mental capacity, or, more likely, too historically true for his offensive pursuit to proselytize a made-up view of America. It seems impossible for Cruz—who has pathetically bowed down to a serial criminal and sexual abuser who has insulted Cruz’s own wife—to imagine that members of a political party could actually criticize and separate themselves from detestable figures who claim to be part of the same party.

For what it’s worth, note that the NAACP’s advisory was certainly not a dismissal of Florida. “The NAACP proudly fights against the malicious attacks in Florida, against Black Americans. I encourage my fellow Floridians to join in this fight to protect ourselves and our democracy,” said Leon Russell, chair of the NAACP Board of Directors.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and her boyfriend are back at it again with the bald-faced hypocrisy, this time attacking strippers.

In the latest episode of her podcast, MTG Battleground, which aired Monday night, Greene and her boyfriend, Brian Glenn, discussed how some strip clubs had drive-thru performances during the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Glenn, who works for the conservative Right Side Broadcasting Network, said the move was “ridiculous.”

“This is one of the things that Covid should’ve shut down and kept shut down, is strip clubs,” Greene says, as they both laugh. “The very fact that Covid forced the strippers out in public … that is appalling to me.”

But in an old news video, Glenn did a segment on male strippers that definitely brought the dancers out in public. He opens the segment by saying you could consider the dancers “therapists.” It’s not clear when the segment was filmed, but the microphone that he holds during the video bears the logo for the local Dallas-Fort Worth Fox news station. Glenn worked for that station from 2013 to 2015.

During the news segment, Glenn wears a vest over a cutoff flannel shirt and chaps over jeans. Two male dancers teach him how to strip his clothes off in time to music.

Glenn seemed to think strippers were just fine in that video. But now, he and Greene are laughing about how Covid should have put an entire industry out of work.

These two clips began circulating online just a day after Greene, who has gone out of her way to viciously attack drag queens, tweeted that she was “literally lol’ing” at an old video of Glenn wearing drag on the local Dallas news.

Once again, it appears that physical actions of wearing drag or sex-related work are not the issue. The problem for Greene and other Republicans like her are the people doing them.

Donald Trump allegedly knew he was supposed to return every single classified document after he was subpoenaed for them, but he kept hundreds of papers anyway.

Federal prosecutors have about 50 pages of notes from Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran, who apparently warned the former president about complying with the subpoena, The Guardian reported Monday. These notes could be significant in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Corcoran found about 40 classified documents in the estate storage room last June and told the Department of Justice that that was all there was to be found. The FBI raided Mar-a-Lago two months later and seized 101 additional classified documents.

The notes reveal that Trump and his valet Walt Nauta knew exactly where and when Corcoran was planning to search for the documents at Mar-a-Lago. The Justice Department is paying particular attention to Nauta, according to The Guardian, who had previously testified that Trump asked him to move boxes out of the storage room both before and after the subpoena was issued.

The Guardian suggested that it is possible prosecutors are investigating whether Nauta knew exactly what was in the boxes he was moving. According to Corcoran’s notes, Nauta had offered to help him look through the boxes in the storage room, which Corcoran declined. But he took breaks during the multiday search, leaving the storage room unattended multiple times.

The grand jury hearing evidence in the case was able to see the notes after a judge ruled in March that some of Trump’s attorney-client privileges could be “pierced.” Prosecutors for Smith’s team found that Trump intentionally misled his own lawyers, including Corcoran, about keeping classified materials when he left office.

U.S. Judge Beryl Howell ordered Corcoran to comply with a grand jury subpoena for testimony on six different lines of inquiry. She also ordered him to hand over records of Trump’s alleged “criminal scheme,” including handwritten notes, invoices, and transcriptions of personal audio recordings.

In addition to Smith’s investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents and role in January 6, the former president is also under investigation in Georgia for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and he has been indicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for paying hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels.

Trump was found civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll—and on Monday, she sued him for defamation again over comments he made about her during a CNN town hall.