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Arkansas Granny

(31,483 posts)
Wed Feb 3, 2021, 03:12 PM Feb 2021

The Ascension of Marjorie Taylor Greene

Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a video of herself titled “Marjorie Greene Confronts David Hogg” to YouTube on January 21, 2020, shot the year before. In it, she follows the Parkland shooting survivor while berating him for not debating her, informing him she had a concealed carry permit. One year later, when CNN published their story “Video surfaces of Marjorie Taylor Greene confronting Parkland shooting survivor with baseless claims,” rebroadcasting the video, it blew up, and Greene’s stature with it. Families of Parkland victims were brought onto cable news to challenge Greene’s past assertions that the school shooting was a “false flag,” not an original lie, just one common on the Infowars side of the online right wing media, and one she had espoused openly before arriving in Congress. This is who she is and has been. Nothing needed surfacing. Her bid to become an insult-influencer was sitting right there, on her own YouTube account.

Whether or not Greene is a sign of what the Republican party has become—or has long contained, from the Birchers onward—she strongly resembles its former leader. Greene has emerged from the same mold as Donald Trump, starring in her own always-rolling kind of reality show meant to convert attention into influence, vengeance into votes. She is best known for endorsing QAnon, as The New York Times has described her—not just that QAnon is what we most associate with her, but that she is someone whose association with QAnon made her famous. Some Democrats have turned that media attention back on her, trying to hold Greene up as the “face” of the Republican Party; the DCCC dropped its first 2022 campaign ads Tuesday, targeting Republicans who, as the ad intones, “stood with Q, not you.” Greene is fundraising off of the notoriety she sought out, saying she brought in $1.6M in the days following calls for her expulsion. All this may further elevate her into a Trumpian figure, a rich sacrificial lamb. She now warns, as her Facebook Live on Tuesday was captioned, “The radical left wing mob is trying to take me out!”

Though none of her conspiratorial beliefs are news anymore (as her own press rep told a reporter this week) and have sometimes been dismissed as mere opportunism, they are being treated now as a threat to democracy. After the events of January 6, that is entirely fair. We are also past the point of debating whether or not it is right to give Greene more of a role in the spectacle we now live in. She is a member of Congress who has been telling her supporters and opponents alike that it may take a violent battle to defend her fundamentalist worldview, and that she is ready, and looking for recruits.

The freshman congresswoman from Georgia has positioned her Christian “family values” against what she considers to be “communism,” by which she appears to mean Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In the Republican primary last year, she essentially ran against the Squad. Democrats, Greene claimed cooly in a January 2020 campaign video, “they want to murder babies up until the day of birth”—a fiction also shared by Trump—”and they want to take away our guns.” It’s a common refrain for her: Abortion is “the greatest evil” and women for gun control need to “grow some balls.” Before her Senate run, Greene accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of treason in a Facebook video: “It’s, uh, it’s a crime punishable by death is what treason is.” A few days before her election night victory in November, Greene said in a Facebook Live interview, “The only way you get your freedoms back is it’s earned with the price of blood.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/161222/ascension-marjorie-taylor-greene


This is a very informative article. She's much worse that I had imagined.
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The Ascension of Marjorie Taylor Greene (Original Post) Arkansas Granny Feb 2021 OP
Arkansas Granny... Upthevibe Feb 2021 #1
Be glad Florida didn't give us Laura Loomer too NEOBuckeye Feb 2021 #2
"The party had essentially been made extremist-proof" dalton99a Feb 2021 #3

NEOBuckeye

(2,778 posts)
2. Be glad Florida didn't give us Laura Loomer too
Wed Feb 3, 2021, 03:38 PM
Feb 2021

Greene is bad enough. Lauren Boebert is awful as well, but doesn't quite approach the level of shrillness of Greene and Loomer together.

dalton99a

(81,065 posts)
3. "The party had essentially been made extremist-proof"
Wed Feb 3, 2021, 03:48 PM
Feb 2021
Like Trump, Greene’s conspiratorial worldview was out in the open before she seriously sought elected office. The man whose time in the White House ended without a concession, mired in obsessions about vast voter fraud, started his path there by pushing the lie that Barack Obama was an illegitimate president. On Facebook, meanwhile, Greene went from being a Trump supporter in 2016 to a QAnon follower within a year. ...

February 2019 seems to be when her efforts began to pay off, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The previous December, at a conference, Greene met media grifters like Roger Stone, Laura Loomer, and Mike Cernovich. She then organized a “rally” in Washington to support Trump’s border wall, along with an Infowars contributor and an anti-immigration activist, which the group used as an “opportunity to livestream its confrontations with lawmakers’ staff members.” This brings us back to where we began: the David Hogg video, which, before it was on CNN, or YouTube, first appeared on her Facebook page in 2019.

The month before Greene launched herself, Republicans stripped Representative Steve King of his committee assignments, after years of his racist, anti-immigrant remarks. It took so long, the political science professors Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman wrote at the time, in part because the party had essentially been made extremist-proof. The GOP had been “captured” by what they called “The Long New Right,” defined by “a politics centered on mobilizing group resentment and conflict, and a determined refusal to police boundaries.” Greene was only barely a player at that point, but a half-century of Republican strategy helped pave the way for her: trying to wield their own openly racist, even violent fringes for electoral victory, and being faced again and again with the reality that they could not control them. They were them. That’s a bit different than saying Greene is the future of the party. She is just part of its legacy.

Greene is not some wayward suburban CrossFit wife, a Trump supporter who lost herself in a conspiratorial riptide. Neither are her brothers and sisters in QAnon, a trap Democratic leaders like DCCC chair Sean Patrick Maloney risk falling into themselves by positioning “college educated voters” as their opposite. Marjorie Taylor Greene has only benefited from being so underestimated. It gave her GOP power brokers time to make her a real candidate. Even after January 6, after Greene refused to accept the election of Joe Biden, many of her donors have stayed with her, according to a Georgia Recorder analysis. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy may reportedly be leaning towards asking Greene to resign from the House education and labor committee, but that’s what was offered as the compromise position, an attempt to keep Democrats from voting to strip her of all committee assignments, which they will take up on Thursday. Greene is winning in her party, not because she’s particularly good at playing the political heel, as Trump tried, but because it’s not at all beyond belief that she will be able to get away with it.
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