MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE IS AS BAD AS YOU’VE HEARD

                         …This is Ms. Greene, wearing a mask that says “TRUMP WON”

 

She spreads conspiracy threats and threatens to kill lawmakers

 

If you haven’t heard of Marjorie Taylor Greene, you must be living under a rock. This wealthy woman is now a Freshman member of the U.S. House of Representatives.  She has also been assigned by the Republican leaders Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise to the coveted seat on the Education and Labor Committee.  Yes, this woman that says the Las Vegas and the Parkland school attacks never happened, she will now be on a committee that deals with our public school’s students.

Let me just give you the long list of items to show what kind of person Ms.Greene is, and why one individual feel that, “I would hope we can agree there should be no place, no committee assignment, but no place period for people [like Greene] who spreads conspiracies about school shootings or threatens to kill Democratic lawmakers.”

Here are some true examples of where Ms. Greene comes from and what she has done and what she believes:

As Marjorie Taylor Greene entered a runoff last year to be the Republican nominee for a U.S. House seat in Georgia, her opponent sounded the alarm. He warned top party officials that she had made several dangerous, baseless claims, and that she would tear apart the GOP if she won, and yes, she won.

Greene’s widely reported comments about the radical ideology of QAnon and other matters had not stopped a large group of top Republicans from urging her to run for the seat representing a deeply conservative district in north Georgia, and then issuing fervent endorsements.

Greene was “exactly the kind of fighter needed in Washington to stand with me against the radical left,” declared the radical Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

Debbie Meadows, who ran an influential political action committee and whose husband, Mark Meadows, became Trump’s Chief of Staff, had gushed, “We cannot wait to welcome her to Congress.”

Greene’s ascent demonstrates the extent to which key party leaders embraced her and propelled her to victory, despite her well-documented history of spreading false claims and violent rhetoric. Critical to Greene’s success was the early intervention on her behalf by some of the party’s most staunchly pro-Trump figures, and Greene’s ability to tap into the far-right online world where baseless claims thrive.

A resolution to expel Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) from Congress was drafted on Jan. 28, following her recently unveiled endorsements of political violence.

Now, Democrats point to Greene as a direct threat to their physical safety, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) saying the “the enemy is within the House,” in a reference to Greene and other gun-toting House members.

Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) announced last Friday she was moving her office away from Greene’s because of the turmoil and violence that Greene brings around her.

Some Republicans have warned that Greene’s support of QAnon and other theories would harm the party.  QAnon represents a sprawling set of false claims that have coalesced into an extremist ideology that has radicalized its followers, some of whom participated in the Capitol Riots on Jan. 6^th.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had said Greene’s comments were “appalling,” and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) said they were “disgusting.” But that didn’t seem to slow the large Republican support for Greene.

Greene, hired an advertising consultant who had once said the NAACP is “the Black KKK, only more violent and more dangerous.” She also spent $211,000 to advertise on Parler, the social media site that attracted adherents to QAnon. The next highest amount spent on Parler by a congressional candidate last year was only $1,400.

Now, Republicans have rewarded Greene with that coveted seat on the Education and Labor Committee, a post that she probably could not have won without the acquiescence of her onetime critics, McCarthy and Scalise.

The appointment, along with daily revelations of Greene’s past postings on social media, has led Democrats to call for some form of punishment.  After reports emerged that Greene in 2019 endorsed the execution of Democrats and said “Pelosi is guilty of treason . . . a crime punishable by death,” Pelosi said the decision by Republican leaders to put Greene on the Education panel was “absolutely appalling.”

Greene said in a statement to The Post that “Democrats and their spokesmen in the Fake News Media will stop at nothing to defeat conservative Republicans.” She tweeted that she’d had “a GREAT call with my all-time favorite POTUS, President Trump! I’m so grateful for his support. . . . I can promise u this. . . . I won’t back down, I’ll never apologize. And I’ll always keep fighting for the people.”

Greene posed for a photo with Joe Webb, and Jake Thomas, QAnon enthusiasts, while she held a rifle for pictures, at a campaign rally in Ringgold, Ga. in 2020.

Greene became an avid Trump supporter, but soon however, Greene began filming herself spreading an array of far-right views, laying the groundwork for her political persona.  Energized by Trump’s election, she became particularly entranced by QAnon. She adopted the baseless belief of an anonymous person called “Q” was revealing secrets about a child trafficking ring orchestrated by Democrats and global elites.

“Have you guys been following 4chan?.....Q?  Any of that stuff?” Greene asked her followers. “Q is a patriot, we know that for sure. . . . He is someone that very much loves his country, and he’s on the same page as us, and he is very pro-Trump.”

In that video, which Greene has since removed from her social media accounts, but it has been re-posted to YouTube, the future congresswoman told the uninitiated where to go to learn more: AmericanTruthSeekers.com, a now-defunct blog.

Greene’s author page on an archived version of the site, highlighted by NBC News, says she wrote 59 posts. One is headlined: “MUST READ — Democratic Party Involved With Child Sex, Satanism, and The Occult.” A January 2018 post extolled Q for possessing “obvious intelligence beyond the normal person.”

Greene also began advancing baseless theories that appeal to extreme gun rights advocates: that several mass shootings were “false flag” events that were staged by gun control proponents.  Greene said that “these included the 2017 massacre in Las Vegas and the 2018 Parkland school shooting.”

After the March 2019 shootings at Mosques in New Zealand that killed 51 people, Greene wrote, according to a Facebook screenshot made by the Southern Poverty Law Center: “This is a false flag shooting with an intent purpose to affect our 2A rights and try to frame those who are on 8 Chan.”

In a pair of videos taken in March 2019, just after the first anniversary of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 students and staff, Greene berated David Hogg, who survived the attack and has pushed for gun control measures.

Outside the U.S. Capitol, she trailed Hogg, repeating baseless theories and accusing him of trying to “take away my Second Amendment rights.” She called Hogg, then only 18 years old, “a coward” for not responding to her comments.

In an interview, Hogg said the run-in with Greene is indicative of the near-constant harassment he receives, including numerous death threats. Now Hogg is calling on House Republicans to strip Greene of her committee assignments and expel her from Congress.  Hogg is the one that said: “I would hope we can agree there should be no place, no committee assignment, but no place period for people who spread conspiracies about school shootings or threaten to kill Democratic lawmakers.”

As QAnon grew in prominence, so did Greene. She thrived in the algorithm-driven ecosystem of online right-wing commentary, said Michael Edison Hayden, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, an advocacy group focused on extremism that highlighted her views on its Hatewatch site in August 2019.

“Greene comes up in that world,” Hayden said. “She seeks to become an influencer on social media and is really a person of this new landscape for right-wing media, building her way up in popularity by embracing increasingly deranged conspiracy theories.”

Greene also embraced bogus claims about the 9/11 attacks, and she has posited that “laser beams from space may have started the California wildfires,” another baseless QAnon theory.

Greene supplemented her QAnon and gun theories with rants about Muslims.  Greene said Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, represented “an Islamic invasion into our government offices.” She said, falsely, that they couldn’t be sworn into Congress with a Koran, saying that the Christian Bible must be used.

Economically, Greene’s region depends heavily on manufacturing, especially the floor-covering industry centered in Dalton, where the Latino population has surged in recent years.  The city is a Democratic stronghold, along with the city of Rome.  Otherwise, the district remains overwhelmingly White, evangelical, pro-Trump and doggedly pro-gun.  A place where politics is grounded in resistance to a changing America.

Greene’s emergence briefly led to a round of reporting about her belief in extremist ideology and other comments.  This prompted the top two House Republicans, McCarthy and Scalise, to initially condemn her. “The comments made by Ms. Greene are disgusting and don’t reflect the values of equality and decency that make our country great,” said Scalise.

But that had little impact by comparison to the stepped-up support from other Republicans such as Debbie Meadows and her Right Women committee, who emphasized ties to Trump at a time when her husband was the president’s Chief of Staff.

With Greene’s $1 million loan to her campaign, Greene was able to run an extensive television ad campaign. Her campaign paid $656,000 for advertising, & polling, media buys and other services to a company called Neighborhood Research and Media, according to Federal Election Commission reports.

As for George Soros, who has supported Democratic candidates, Greene said, “George Soros is the piece of crap that turned in — he’s a Jew — he turned in his own people over to the Nazis.” In fact, Soros has told The Post that he used false papers at age 13 to survive the Nazi occupation of Hungary, and that any suggestion he turned over Jews to the Nazis is a “total fabrication.”

At Greene’s campaign events last summer and fall, her most visible and consistent support came not from QAnon followers but from county-based gun groups who claim thousands of members across northwest Georgia. The groups are part of the “Second Amendment sanctuary movement,” which aims to establish counties where gun restrictions are not enforced.

At one event where Greene headlined, a militia called the Georgia Three Percent Martyrs — which would later claim to have hundreds of members outside the U.S. Capitol on the insurrection day of Jan. 6^th.  They provided security, wearing camouflage, body armor, radios and in one case a battle ax.  “She is where she is now because of us,” Jonathan Ledwell, a gun group member, said at one of Greene’s events last summer.

Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) said he plans to introduce a resolution expelling her from the U.S. Congress. “What she is doing matters and can lead to violence,” Gomez said in an interview.

A spokesman on Wednesday said McCarthy found Greene’s comments “deeply disturbing” and said the house minority leader “plans to have a conversation with the Congresswoman about them” this week. Scalise said in a statement that “there is no place for comments like that in our political discourse.”

On Thursday, CNN reported that Greene had agreed to transfer $175,000 from her campaign to the National Republican Campaign Committee, which works to elect GOP members to the House. The transfer was confirmed by a knowledgeable official.

As of Friday, there was no word that any Republican leaders had raised concerns directly with Greene.

Copyright G. Ater 2021