![]() ![]() In 2017, disenchanted with mainstream news coverage of Trump’s presidency, she turned to online message boards where she discovered QAnon, at the time a fringe internet subculture. She became increasingly political – and radical. ![]() In her telling, Greene was not particularly political before 2016, when she was galvanized by the billionaire’s “plain talk”. “We’ve been waiting to have a congressman that would take a stand for conservative causes and be a voice for us that we felt we’ve never had.” “We’re thankful for her,” said Dianne Putnam, chair of the Whitfield county Republican party, which is situated in Greene’s district. Greene represents an ascending far-right movement within the Republican ranks that carries the banner of Trump’s grievance politics – and the support of his loyal supporters who are now critical to the party’s future. He was there to lobby lawmakers in support of passing gun safety measures, while she was there to oppose them. In another video, she accosts the gun-control activist David Hogg, who survived the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, as he walked down a street in Washington. In posts unearthed recently, Greene wrote in 2018 that a devastating California wildfire was caused by a Jewish-controlled “laser” beamed from space.f Most notably, she embraced QAnon, a conspiracy that claims Trump is trying to save the world from a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. She also trafficked in a slew of conspiracy theories, many of which are rooted in antisemitism, Islamophobia and white nationalism. ![]() In those social media posts and videos, only some of which she disavowed and many of which came to light before she was elected, Greene indicated support for executing top Democrats, including the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi claimed that Muslims should not be allowed to serve in government and compared Black Lives Matter activists to neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, also condemned Greene’s statements, but ultimately declined to take any punitive action, arguing that she should not be punished for remarks made before she was elected. Yet Greene’s exile – over the objection of all but 11 House Republicans – has only exacerbated the growing chasm within the party, between an emboldened extremist movement that flourished under Trump’s presidency and an increasingly isolated group of conservatives who want to move beyond the divide-and-conquer politics of the last four years.Īs pressure built on Republicans to discipline Greene, Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, called her “looney lies” a “cancer” to the party and the nation. Hours later, the House rendered its verdict, stripping Greene of her committee assignments in an extraordinary rebuke of the first-term lawmaker who Donald Trump once praised as a “future Republican star”. ![]() “The party of Lincoln, the party of Eisenhower, the party of Reagan is becoming the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the party of violent conspiracy theories,” the House rules committee chairman, Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said in a floor speech. She remained in the chamber for the debate, as her colleagues litigated her past – and sought to tie it to her party’s future. Instead, a defiant Greene warned that those seeking to “condemn me and crucify me in the public square for words that I said and I regret” were wading into dangerous political territory that would haunt them should Republicans reclaim the majority. “I also want to tell you 9/11 absolutely happened,” she declared, somewhat sheepishly, after previously questioning whether a plane really flew into the Pentagon.ĭespite a show of contrition, however, she offered no explicit apology. She said school shootings in Parkland and Sandy Hook were “absolutely real”, and not so-called “false flag” events designed to build support for gun control laws, as she once suggested. Greene renounced her embrace of QAnon, an ideology the FBI has called a potential domestic terrorism threat. ![]()
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