Marjorie Taylor Greene — the far-right conspiracy theorist who has Donald Trump’s blessing as a Republican nominee for Congress in Georgia — left an online trail a mile long visible via the Internet Archive, CNN reported on Tuesday.
Greene is a believer in QAnon, a movement of extremists that espouse the baseless belief that Trump is secretly waging war against an underground cabal of Illuminati-style Satanic pedophiles who secretly run the “deep state,” the Democratic Party, Hollywood, the media, and essentially whatever else happens to be on their grievances list at any given time. (QAnon aficionados’ sole source on this is an anonymous account claiming to be a senior intel official that posts on image boards like 4chan and 8chan.) The movement has swelled in recent years, bolstered by Facebook and other social media sites; Greene is one of dozens of 2020 congressional candidates who has professed their support for QAnon.
Greene was previously reported to have filmed videos filled with racist, anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic hate speech, as well as claims that liberal financier and Holocaust survivor George Soros was a Nazi collaborator and that the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting might have been a false flag. She’s tried to walk all of this back, but CNN found Greene has also moonlighted as a blogger for a conspiracy website named American Truth Seekers, which went offline in 2019 but never deleted its social media accounts or videos hosted elsewhere.
In one archived post from 2017, Greene engaged in a little Nazi revisionism: specifically, that an infamous terror attack during a neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, North Carolina that year which killed protester Heather Heyer and wounded scores of others was an “inside job” and that white supremacists were present to further the “agenda of the elites.” This was all part of a “coordinated war” for Barack Obama to oust Donald Trump, Greene wrote:
What would be the agenda of the elites? Hmm.. Remember Barack Obama’s roots are in community organising. As a matter of fact that’s about all he did before he became President. It’s also been reported that Obama has an office set up in Washington DC that is being run like a war room, with daily meetings. What would they be up to?
Greene also questioned the guilty of James Alex Fields Jr., the white supremacist who carried out the attack and has since been sentenced to life in prison on 29 hate crimes charges. She claimed it might be the counter-demonstrators’ fault, echoing a right-wing obsession with the idea that running over protesters is a form of self defence:
Whether this is true or not, it is beyond tragic that James Alex Fields Jr rammed his car into the crowd killing 1 and injuring 19 others. If it was intentional and premeditated, then he deserves to be held accountable. Yet if his reaction was out of fear and hitting the crowd was actually an accident, then that changes the narrative of what happened in Charlottesville this past weekend
In a November 2017 post found by CNN, Greene cited another conspiracy website as evidence that Pizzagate, a baseless internet rumour that a DC-area pizza joint is at the centre of a Democratic child sex trafficking ring, was “real”:
Yet when you go to the website, it tells as if Seth Rich is speaking from the dead saying all the horrible things are true. That Hillary rigged the election against Bernie Sanders. That John Podesta had him murdered. That John Podesta is a pedophile and pizza gate [sic] is real
(QAnon is basically Pizzagate on steroids, so it’s not surprising Greene believed it.)
Finally, according to CNN, Greene wrote in a previously unreported Facebook post that Democratic House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi is “a criminal, guilty of treason by refusing to lead her political party to fund the wall and border security measures that would protect our national security.” She added Pelosi should be impeached, removed from office, and possibly executed. In other words, par for the course when it comes to QAnon.
QAnon has become increasingly close to mainstream — or at the very least, tolerated — in the Republican Party thanks partially to the White House, which sees the movement as a collection of the president’s most hardcore supporters. According to the Guardian, key GOP donors to Greene’s campaign include the House Freedom Fund, groups connected to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and his spouse, the chairman of the board of the Heritage Foundation, and a “number of Republican mega-donors.” Greene tweeted on Tuesday evening that she had been invited to the White House for Trump’s Republican National Convention acceptance speech.