The Scariest Thing About Marjorie Taylor Greene

[Celerity]

She's proof that the terrible tropes of Trumpism aren't going away.

https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/wait-what/61d5bb077097fc002053fbb4/the-scariest-thing-about-marjorie-taylor-greene/



On January 3, 2021, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was sworn into office. One month later, she was removed from all her House committee assignments. Perhaps it wasn’t a huge shock that the representative who began her political career in 2017 writing about the “Clinton Kill List” for the now-defunct blog American Truth Seekers and then ran on the lie that Democrats were part of a satanic cabal (QAnon) would have so much trouble fitting in at the storied institution. But Greene has not had any trouble fitting into Trump’s Republican Party. If anything, she’s become one of the most prominent voices in the GOP’s antidemocratic iteration.

Her permanent suspension from her personal Twitter account this week confirms as much. While Republicans with a slightly better hold on reality like Representative Adam Kinzinger and Representative Liz Cheney are called “RINOs” and subjected to death threats, Greene is celebrated on Fox News. Greene even joined Tucker Carlson on the May 5 episode of his Fox Nation streaming show, Tucker Carlson Today, to make fun of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy for sharing an apartment with Republican pollster Frank Luntz, saying, “I was more curious, like, who gets the top bunk and who gets the bottom bunk.”

The mere fact that Greene is a celebrity in the GOP is a pretty grim indictment of where the Republican Party is right now. When she was stripped of her committee assignments, Greene—wearing a mask emblazoned with the phrase FREE SPEECH—gave a speech on the House floor, the gist of which was that she’d left behind QAnon and the conspiracy theories she ran on. But as The New York Times later reported, “Her contention that she broke away … does not square with a series of posts she made in 2019 and other social media activity from that time, including liking a Facebook comment that endorsed shooting Ms. Pelosi in the head and suggesting in the same year that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been replaced with a body double.”

But lack of committee assignments has not slowed Greene from her real work—largely publicity stunts and further radicalizing the Republican base. Before Twitter banned her personal account, Greene used dehumanizing language to describe Democrats, according to political scientist Brian Klaas: “Greene just referred to her political opponents as an infestation of ‘termites.’ In Rwanda’s genocide, Hutu killers referred to Tutsis as ‘cockroaches.’ Such rhetoric is the language of dehumanization and it’s extremely dangerous—and can incite political violence.”

Link to tweet

snip