Marjorie Taylor Greene Has a New Crazy Idea: Alexandra Pelosi, the daughter of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is a well-known documentary filmmaker who has made several movies, many of them for HBO, about American politics and culture. On January 6, 2021, the younger Pelosi was filming the proceedings, and that footage was included in both the January 6 Committee’s hearings and included in the 2022 documentary “Pelosi in the House.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has spent a lot of time in the last year going after the son of President Biden, and now she’s turned her attention to the daughter of another top Democrat.
This week, Greene tweeted a 90-second video of Alexandra Pelosi talking about January 6, stating that “time is going to remember January 6 differently.”
In the video, Alexandra Pelosi is talking to someone described by Newsweek as “the family of a Jan. 6 defendant,” although it’s not clear who the person is, or when the video was taken. The younger Pelosi says in the video that “media needs stuff to fill,” and that “as time goes on, it’s going to be less,” while also stating that some defendants will end up losing their jobs.
The filmmaker also tells the person she’s meeting with that “I know you’re not the bad guy.” She also says “if there was an insurrection, you were supposed to be in line, marching… you were supposed to have a plan.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene responded to the video by tweeting at the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee, stating “We need to take a look into this.”
It’s not exactly clear, however, what’s so damning in the video. The video, posted by a MAGA-associated Twitter character called DC Draino, states that “J6ers can’t get a fair trial in DC… Media overhyped it… Need a new war to distract Americans… J6 had ‘no guns, no plans…just people taking selfies’… No actual insurrection.”
But most of those assertions are made not by Alexandra Pelosi, but rather by the people she’s talking to. Pelosi is interviewing them, presumably in her capacity as a documentary filmmaker, which does not in any way mean that she necessarily endorses what the other people are saying.
Pelosi does state that the insurrection was unorganized and slapdash, which isn’t something that, say, any author of the January 6 Committee’s report would disagree with. But the younger Pelosi is not doing anything close to admitting that the insurrection was a hoax.
Strangely, the DC Draino video was posted back in June, but Greene did not tweet about it until this week.
The implication here is that there is some kind of conspiracy to make January 6 look worse than it was, under the bogus MAGA/Tucker Carlson line that the insurrection wasn’t real and was a setup of some kind and, I guess, that Alexandra Pelosi and her mother were the linchpins of that conspiracy.
Newsweek’s writeup, in a strange fashion, states that “some at the time zeroed in on the high production value of the film she provided to Congress as proof that the entire day was a government setup intended to malign supporters of the president, rather than the intentional effort to overthrow the government some members of Congress alleged.”
This is nonsense, of course, as January 6 was caused by the rioters, not by the filmmakers and news cameras who filmed it. It was exactly what it looked like on the day that it happened, and the hundreds of convictions of participants so far affirm that.
Newsweek also states that “Alexandra Pelosi played a significant part in shaping the story of Jan. 6.” But that’s not true either. The story of January 6 and the public perception of it was shaped mostly by the events having taken place on live television as they happened, as well as frequent news coverage in the weeks and months afterward.
On top of the live footage and news coverage afterward, numerous documentaries about that day were released in the months and years afterward, and the public didn’t see the younger Pelosi’s footage until the January 6 committee hearings in October of 2022, nearly two years after the riot. And even the documentary, which was released in December of that year, mostly focused on behind-the-scenes footage of the then-Speaker and what she was doing that day, as opposed to wider footage of the attack itself.
The events of January 6 were not a hidden secret — they happened on live TV in front of the world. And it wasn’t as though the public had one view of January 6 that was in any way changed by Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary.
Author Expertise and Experience
Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
