Marjorie Taylor Greene’s first few weeks in Washington were particularly eventful: The newly elected member of the House of Representatives from the US state of Georgia was both ridiculed and feared by the media and colleagues. The reappearance of a Facebook post in which Greene claimed that a space laser could have caused the California forest fires in 2018 attracted particular media attention. A Jewish space laser. But Greene is not just a laughing stock: Because of her support for the storming of the US Capitol in early January 2021, the House of Representatives decided to remove her from two committees.
The Republican politician initially made headlines as the “QAnon” candidate, who appeared at election rallies with armed right-wing extremists. Greene received a lot of criticism for an election commercial in which she holds a semi-automatic rifle and harassed Democratic congressmen. In 2020 she ran for the US House of Representatives – unsuccessfully. On the second attempt, Greene secured a rural constituency nomination in Georgia. Despite her long history as the unabashed disseminator of various conspiracy narratives, she won the primary. In the actual race for the seat in the House of Representatives, Greene had an easy game: she got 74 percent of the vote after her opponent resigned for personal reasons.
In the final stages of the election, however, Greene showed a new face: She continued to share conspiracy stories, but distanced herself from QAnon. However, it cannot be called a new chapter in her political career. The day after the November 2020 election, Greene shared disinformation about election fraud. Ironically, she doubted Biden’s Georgia election results, the same election result that she declared the winner. In the days leading up to the Capitol storm, Greene urged her audience to “fight” for Trump. On January 4, she accompanied Trump at a campaign event for the runoff election for two Senate seats in Georgia, an election that both Republican candidates lost. The next day, the day before the Capitol was stormed, she posted a video of herself in the capital, “the District of Communism”, as she calls Washington DC.
Greene is combative …
Before Biden’s election victory was confirmed in Congress, Greene wanted to raise an official objection to the election results. But before she could do that, Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. Greene found himself in a difficult situation: should the Trump mob fight or should they not? She tweeted a video and thanked her supporters for the “protest,” while appealing to her fans to stay peaceful. When she posted the video, Trump supporters had already broken into the building. Later that evening the House of Representatives met again and Greene was finally able to present her objections to the election result, even if the political debate was different after the “storm”. A month later she hinted that the striker no real Trump supporters were. So whoever is supposed to have stormed the Capitol instead, Greene offered no answer.
Despite calls from the Democrats to remove Greene from office after the Capitol storming, the Republican agitator remains in Congress. Instead of addressing the storming of the Capitol, Greene has since focused on the alleged violence of her political opponents. She still insists that the “Black Lives Matter” movement or “the Antifa” is the real threat in the country. She also claims to be supporting the police, even though several police officers died as a result of the riot in Washington.
But Greene gained even more media attention in the days that followed when journalists searched their old social media posts. A video reappeared, in which she harassed a survivor of a school massacre in Parkland that killed 14 students and three adults. Greene had previously claimed that the school massacre was faked, a so-called “false flag” action. Greene’s Facebook post mentioned above, in which she claimed Jewish space lasers could have caused the California wildfires. She pointed to a possible involvement of the Rothschild family, a common anti-Semitic “dog whistle”.
However, their behavior in the US Congress is more dangerous than their old social media posts, even if many of their motions are more of a symbolic character and are part of their own self-presentation. So she already tried to initiate impeachment proceedings against Biden. Or she supported you trans-hostile bill. Or they tried to brand “Black Lives Matter” flags as “Hate America Flags”. Or she got into one verbal argument with Democratic Congresswoman Cori Bush, a Black Lives Matter activist, over Greene’s refusal to wear mouth and nose protection in Congress. Greene then harassed Bush on Twitter, after all, Bush had to move her office because Greene was her roommate in the House of Representatives.
When Greene was then removed from two committees, she was not entirely dissatisfied with it, even if eleven party colleagues also voted against her. Because she used this as an opportunity for fundraising and to stage herself as a victim. On her Telegram channel, she referred to Democrats as “idiots” because of this decision for “giving someone like me free time”. Green shows little interest in the political process in Washington. Political trolling seems to be their main target. The real danger to Greene lies in her normalization of anti-democratic values. Now that a second impeachment case against Trump has failed, he will probably not disappear from the political stage anytime soon. And his political legacy can be seen in the character Marjorie Taylor Greene.
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