Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Controversies Are Piling Up.
Republicans Are Quiet.
In a video from 2018, Ms.
Greene falsely suggested that 9/11 was a hoax, President Barack Obama was a
Muslim and the Clintons were guilty of murder.
- Published Jan. 29, 2021Updated Jan. 30, 2021, 11:31
a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — Marjorie Taylor Greene had
just finished questioning whether a plane really flew into the Pentagon on
Sept. 11, 2001, and flatly stating that President Barack Obama was secretly
Muslim when she paused to offer an aside implicating another former president
in a crime.
“That’s another one of those Clinton
murders,” Ms. Greene said, referring to John F. Kennedy Jr.’s death in a 1999 plane crash, suggesting
that he had been assassinated because he was a potential rival to Hillary
Clinton for a New York Senate seat.
Ms. Greene casually unfurled the
cascade of dangerous and patently untrue conspiracy theories in a 40-minute video that was originally posted
to YouTube in 2018. It provides a window into the warped worldview amplified by
the freshman Republican congresswoman from Georgia, who in the three months
since she was elected has created a national brand for herself as a
conservative provocateur who has proudly brought the hard-right fringe to the
Capitol.
In the process, Ms.
Greene, 46, has also created a dilemma for Republican leaders, who for months
have been unwilling to publicly rebuke or punish her in any way for her
inflammatory statements, in part for fear of alienating voters delighted by her
incendiary brand of politics and conspiratorial beliefs.
After avoiding the issue for months in
the hope that it would resolve itself, Republicans are now facing calls from
Democrats to expel Ms. Greene from Congress, pressure from a prominent group of
Jewish Republicans to discipline her, and private consternation from within
their own ranks.
Their reticence to take action is yet
another example of how Republican leaders have allowed those forces to fester
and strengthen. Some leaders have privately said they are eager to move past
the fringe movements and the charged messaging used by President Donald J.
Trump that fueled the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Representative Kevin McCarthy,
Republican of California and the minority leader, has yet to say anything
personally about Ms. Greene’s comments or conduct, even after a week in which a
slew of problematic social media posts and videos have surfaced from the years
before she was elected. In them, Ms. Greene circulated and endorsed a seemingly
endless array of hate speech and conspiracy theories explicitly rooted in
Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and the belief that government actors were secretly
behind a sweeping range of violence.
The liberal watchdog group Media
Matters for America reported last summer on
the video in which Ms. Greene questioned a basic fact about the deadliest
terrorist attack in history, falsely called Mr. Obama, who is Christian, a
Muslim, and hinted that the Clinton family had Mr. Kennedy killed. Since then,
much more has emerged about her conspiracy claims.
Ms. Greene suggested
in a 2018 Facebook post, unearthed this week by Media
Matters, that a devastating wildfire that ravaged California was
started by “a laser” beamed from space and controlled by a prominent Jewish
banking family with connections to powerful Democrats. She endorsed executing Democratic lawmakers, including Speaker Nancy
Pelosi. She served as a prolific writer for a now-defunct conspiracy
blog called “American Truth Seekers,” writing posts with headlines including “MUST
READ — Democratic Party Involved With Child Sex, Satanism, and The Occult.” And
she argued that the 2018 midterm elections — in which the first two Muslim
women were elected to the House — were part of “an Islamic invasion of our
government.”
Ms. Greene has repeatedly claimed in
multiple videos and social media posts that several school shooting massacres
were “false flag” events perpetrated by government officials in an attempt to
drum up support for gun control laws. In an October 2020 video surfaced on Friday by Mother
Jones, she said that the “only way you get your freedoms back is
it’s earned with the price of blood.”
Ms. Greene is perhaps best known for
having endorsed QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy movement that claims that Mr.
Trump was facing down a shadowy cabal of Democratic pedophiles. (She told Fox News last
year that she decided to “choose another path,” and a spokesman, Nick
Dyer, told The New York Times this week that she did not
support QAnon.)
Sent a list of detailed questions about
her beliefs and postings, Mr. Dyer declined to respond to any of them. In her
own statement posted on Twitter on
Friday afternoon, Ms. Greene assailed the “radical, left-wing Democrat mob” and
reporters she said were trying to smear her, and claimed she was profiting
politically and financially from the outrage she has provoked, saying that
every negative news report “strengthens my base of support at home and across
the country.”
She also issued what amounted to a
threat to top Republicans who might be contemplating punishing her, warning
that they would pay steep consequences.
“If Republicans cower
to the mob, and let the Democrats and the fake news media take me out,” Ms.
Greene said, “they’re opening the door to come after every single Republican
until there’s none left.”
The statement came as
internal pressure was mounting for Republican leaders to address Ms. Greene’s
comments. The Republican Jewish Coalition, which over the summer intervened in
a rare move to back Ms. Greene’s primary challenger, disavowed the
congresswoman in a scathing statement and said it was “working closely with the
House Republican leadership regarding next steps.”
“She repeatedly used offensive language
in long online video diatribes, promoted bizarre political conspiracy theories,
and refused to admit a mistake after posing for photos with a longtime white
supremacist leader,” the group said. “It is unfortunate that she prevailed in
her election despite this terrible record.”
A spokesman for Mr. McCarthy told Axios this
week that newly surfaced Facebook posts written by Ms. Greene and reported by CNN, in
which she discussed executing top Democratic politicians, were “deeply
disturbing” and that Mr. McCarthy planned to “have a conversation” with her
about them next week.
But Mr. McCarthy’s silence so far
reflects, in part, the sway Mr. Trump still has over the Republican Party and
its leaders. The former president has praised Ms. Greene effusively and refused
to condemn QAnon, despite being asked to disavow it repeatedly while in office.
On Friday evening, Representative Jim
McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts and the chairman of the House Rules
Committee, suggested Democrats could move unilaterally to strip Ms. Greene of
her committees if Republicans did not act.
“We could break precedent,” Mr.
McGovern said on CNN. “We should talk about that if nothing changes.”
In her own telling, Ms. Greene became
more outspoken about her politics in 2016, after she sold the CrossFit gym she
owned and felt she no longer needed to worry about alienating her customers by
stating her beliefs.
She began traveling
to Washington for conservative events, including a prayer rally hosted by the
White House, and to lobby lawmakers against
passing gun safety measures. On one such trip, Ms. Greene accosted David Hogg,
a student who had survived a 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., who was also on
Capitol Hill, but to lobby in support of stricter gun laws. In a video that CNN reported this
week, Ms. Greene follows Mr. Hogg as he walks toward the Capitol, calling him a
“coward” and accusing him of “using kids” to promote his own political agenda.
When Ms. Greene decided to run for
Congress, she initially started her campaign in a Georgia district held by
Representative Lucy McBath, a Democrat. But after Representative Tom Graves, a
Republican, announced he would retire, Ms. Greene moved her campaign to his
more conservative district. She eventually placed first in a crowded primary
race, and advanced to a runoff election against Dr. John Cowan, a mild-mannered
neurosurgeon.
On the campaign trail, Ms. Greene
presented herself as a deeply conservative, pro-Trump Christian mother and
business owner, arguing that her work in the construction industry had imbued
her with the toughness that comes from working in a male-dominated field. She
railed against the ascendant progressive wing in Congress, emphasized the
importance of the Second Amendment while toting an AR-15, and
warned of “thousands” of immigrants “pouring over” the southwestern border.
Ms. Greene largely veered away from the
conspiratorial on the trail, though she did cut a campaign ad claiming that “‘Deep State’
actors tried to sabotage President Donald J. Trump before he even took office”
and claimed on her campaign
accounts that George Soros, the billionaire investor and
Democratic donor, was “bankrolling left-wing movements worldwide who want to
destroy Israel.”
The messaging raised alarm at the time
among House Republican leaders and some members of the Georgia delegation who
worried that if elected, Ms. Greene could create a grave problem for their
party. But they never mobilized to defeat her. While the top three House
Republicans condemned a series of racist videos Ms. Greene made, surfaced by Politico,
only Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, endorsed
Dr. Cowan. Mr. McCarthy and Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the
third-ranking leader, stayed neutral.
Privately, according to a person
familiar with their thinking, top Republicans hoped that outside groups would
swoop into the primary race in support of Dr. Cowan and weaponize Ms. Greene’s
incendiary comments against her, dooming her candidacy. But the outside effort
never materialized.
Instead, Ms. Greene’s campaign received
an important boost when the political arm of the ultraconservative Freedom
Caucus endorsed her, as did Representatives Andy Biggs of Arizona, the group’s
chairman, and Jim Jordan of Ohio, a founder. She handily won the runoff in August
and cruised to victory in November.
That left Republican
leaders hoping that, once sworn in, Ms. Greene would clean up her act,
disavowing her past comments and dialing back her outlandish rhetoric.
Instead, she charged into Congress and
immediately faced scrutiny for her support of the “Stop the Steal” campaign
that falsely claimed that Mr. Trump had won the 2020 presidential election.
She referred to Jan. 6, the day
Congress was slated to formalize the election results, as Republicans’ “1776
moment” in the lead up to the violent storming of the Capitol by pro-Trump
rioters. After the rampage, she pledged that Mr. Trump would “remain in office”
and that attempts to remove him from the White House constituted “an attack on
every American who voted for him.”
Days later, she announced she would
file articles of impeachment against President Biden.
“Troll level: EXPERT,” Dinesh D’Souza,
a right-wing firebrand, wrote on Twitter.
Ms. Greene liked the post.