Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this? (2023)

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she was very late🇧🇷 A man named Barry was forced to lead the room in a rendition of Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA". endure time. But when she arrived, the delay was forgiven and the Cobb County Republican Party's November breakfast was redone. She was not greeted. She was seen as a religious apparition. Emotions bordered on ecstasy. Later, as she spoke, a man jumped so hard that his chair fell over. Not far away, two women grabbed each other and screamed. I was thrown into my seat when a corrugated table neighbor appearedFLOODING THE ELECTIONSShield accidentally collided with my head. Looking up, I came to the level of a pistol tucked into the khaki waistband of an elderly man in front of me. "She's so good," I heard someone say. "I mean, she really issimply unbelievable.“

Marjorie Taylor Greene arrived in Congress in January 2021, blonde and gruff, and indelibly identified with conspiracy theories involving Jewish space lasers and Democratic pedophiles. She had barely established herself in office when she was relieved of her duties on the committee; she was summoneda "cancer" for the Republican Partyby Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell; and now she has a loud voice in the most important decisions of the GOP on Capitol Hill, because her party leaders know, and she knows that they know, that she has become too popular with her constituents to risk upsetting them.

Nobody saw her coming. Not evenVerdesaw Greene coming.

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she was a product, his family liked to say, of the “Great American Dream”. In the small town of Cumming, Georgia, north of Atlanta, a three-story house sat at the end of a shaded driveway; There was a ready-made basement where Marge—and that's what she was called, Marge—and her friends would gather in faded nylon swimsuits after swimming in Lake Lanier.

David A. Graham: Marjorie Taylor Greene is just a symptom of what the GOP is missing

His father was Robert David Taylor, a Michigan transplant who was never guaranteed a three-story home but always firmly believed it was possible. Bob Taylor was the son of a steelworker; he had served in Vietnam; He had hung detours to pay his Eastern Michigan University tuition. He married the beautiful Carrie Fidelle Bacon - called "Delle" by most people - but he called her Carrie - from Milledgeville, Georgia, and instead of continuing on to college, he became a contractor and ran a construction business. hit called Taylor Construction. For Marjorie Taylor, the first of Bob and Delle's two children, the result was a world of suburban certainties: packed lunches and marble kitchen counters, biennial trips to the beach and the belief that everything happens for a reason.

She came of age in Cumming, the county seat of Forsyth. With her turtleneck and sharp mall fringe, Marge Taylor could have been any other teenager in America. At South Forsyth High School born in 1992, she was a member of the Spanish club and manager of the football team. She may not have been voted most vivacious, but she dressed thematically during prom week; She might not have the best sense of humor, but by the time she graduated, she'd racked up her share of inside jokes with friends. "shh... It's the people out there!' is her senior citation in her high school yearbook. "Run, the police are here! I went!!" She was "nice to everyone", "optimistic" and "very confident", recalls Leslie Hamburger, a friend of hers and her brother David. "I only have good memories". in other words, the good-but-not-great student was hardly an overzealous scold, already plotting her advance to Washington. It's hard to imagine an 18-year-old Ted Cruz playing with something called the Hot Tuna Club.

Forsyth County was a quiet, peaceful, orderly place. But it had a story. In September 1912, an 18-year-old white girl was found bleeding and barely breathing in the woods along the Chattahoochee River; She died two weeks later. Within 24 hours of her discovery, four black men were arrested and charged with assault. A mob of whites dragged one of the suspects out of his cell and hanged him from a telephone pole. Two others were tried and executed. The white residents then decided to do nothing less than racial cleansing. On horseback, armed with rifles and dynamite, theydisplaced practically the entire black population of the district– more than 1,000 people. So successful were his efforts that the county would experience the modern civil rights era indirectly at best. there were noneonly whitesSigns to be concerned about in Cumming because there were no black people to keep apart.

In January 1987, a white resident organized a "go to the brotherhood' to commemorate what happened 75 years earlier. The project was complicated by the immediate spate of death threats he received. Hailing from Atlanta, civil rights activist Hosea Williams called Forsyth the most racist borough in the South. Oprah Winfrey came down to cover the event. But most people in Forsyth ignored the whole matter; If you brought it up in conversation, you were considered a pot-shaker. George Pirkle, the county historian, was not reminded of this until 2011, when he was preparing for publication.It is Forsyth County Heritage Book🇧🇷 He told the mayor of Cumming about his plans to include the area's black history in the volume and received an incredulous response: "Well, why on earth would you want to do that?" As Martha McConnell, then and now co-president of the local history society, told me the subtext was clear: "Don't start."

In the end is theheritage bookit didn't work from the start. If you look today, you will see the census dates neatly arranged, ending in 1910. Of course, including 1920 would have shown that the black population had suddenly disappeared. Going beyond 1920 would have shown that the black population never returned.

All of which means that Marge Taylor's worldview was formed in a community artificially devoid of sociocultural conflict, a history erased by tension. That's the basic attitude here towards the past, Pirkle told me: "If you don't talk about it, it will pass."

Decades later, as they reflected on her scorched-earth rise to power — the conspiracy theories, racist appeals and talk of violence against Democratic leaders — some of her professors wondered why they hadn't noticed young Marge Taylor. How come they didn't remember her struggling in civics class or doing a fun campaign for a student office? How is it possible that they didn't remember her?

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she acted likeShe was supposed to do that, graduate from South Forsyth High, then pack her bags and move to Athens for an hour and a half, where she would spend four years at the University of Georgia. She would fly around the campus of 20,000 students almost anonymously. For Marge Taylor, UGA was the first in her family to graduate from college - and establish herself as the leader of Taylor Construction. It was almost certainly about meeting a nice man. Perry Clarke Greene was a good man. He was three years older than her, tall and serious, and from Riverdale. He was also at the university's Terry College of Business. They exchanged vows the summer before their senior year in 1995.

One of the things I don't know about Marjorie Taylor Greene — she wouldn't talk to me for this story — is what her marriage was like. A newspaper report, if any, must have come up. I don't know if she stood before an altar laden with white gladioli, as her grandmother used to, or if the reception was a small event at her parents' house in Cumming, or something larger elsewhere. I don't know either if she was happy that day: if the quiet and respectable life that now unfolded before the new Mrs. Perry Greene was enough for him.

The young couple moved into a symmetrical colonial-style three-bed, three-bathroom bush in the North Atlantic suburb of Roswell. Perry Greene became an accountant at Ernst & Young and Marjorie Greene became pregnant. In January 1998, she smiled alongside other tired-eyed, relaxed mothers as they learned to exercise and massage their newborns in North Fulton Regional Hospital's "Mother Lore" class.

It wasn't long before Perry started working for his father-in-law as general manager of the family business. In 1999, after facilitating the sale of Taylor Construction, he moved to Taylor Commercial, a former division of the company that specialized in siding apartment complexes and subsidized housing projects. Soon after, Bob Taylor named his son-in-law president of the company.

Meanwhile, Marjorie took care of one, two and finally three children. There were days at sea with Mimi and Dad, three-week Christmas vacations in the sun, and annual trips to visit Perry's extended family in Oxford, Mississippi. Much time was spent traveling to fast-pitched softball tournaments—Taylor, the middle child, was just a teenager when she started to draw attention. ("I can't believe she got hired in the 8th grade," Greene wrote on her personal blog after a weekend at university.)

Taylor Commercial was eventually purchased by Marge and Perry. Financial disclosure documents filed in 2020, when Greene first ran for office, reveal a company valued between $5 million and $25 million. There is one photo that Greene cherishes: of her as a child, smiling beside her father on a construction site. Bob didn't want his daughter to take her inheritance for granted; Greene said thatHer father fired her oncefrom a job he had at the company as a teenager. But now the girl in the picture was CFO of Taylor Commercial; her college boyfriend was her president; At this time, her family lived in a mansion in Milton, on the border with Alpharetta. Of course, who's to say how regularly she used the indoor pool or marveled at the terrace-level built-in aquarium -- two hallmarks of this "luxury smart home estate," as a recent listing put it. But at least she could enjoy it.

Another thing I don't know about Marjorie Taylor Greene: I don't know exactly how long it took the shape of her life — the calm, the seriousness, the hitchhiking pace and root touches — to start taking on the dull look of unease. Maybe it was during one of the many softball tournaments, another weekend spent squashed around the corner of an elevator at the Hilton Garden Inn by grass-stained girls and monogrammed batbags. Perhaps her Age of Anxiety arrived at the office of her multimillion-dollar company on a quiet Tuesday, when it occurred to her that maybe running this multi-million-dollar company wasn't her job after all.

What I do know from dozens of conversations with Greene's classmates and teachers, friends and co-workers is that something inside her began to crack when she reached her 30s.

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laterDuring the campaign, Greene anchored much of her story to being a longtime business owner: a woman who has always proven herself in the male-dominated construction world. In beautifully filmed television commercials, voters saw a woman whose days were a relentless race between construction sites - hard hats, reflective vests, jeans - and light-filled conference rooms, where she wore tastefully cutout dresses and examined blueprints. vital.

That's not a very accurate picture. People at Taylor Commercial seem to have taken a liking to Greene personally, but she's only been in the job a few years and hasn't made her mark on the company. Call her on a weekday afternoon and there's a good chance she'll answer from the gym. It has "nothing to do with" Taylor Commercial, a person familiar with the company's operations told me. "It was all Perry." ONEArticle 2021 inThe Constitution of the Atlanta Journal noted that the Taylor Commercial website gave little evidence of Greene's existence during those years. The only spark of confirmation came in the last line ofPerry Greene biography, a reference to the wife and three children with whom he shared a house.

Until 2011 theConstitution of the magazinereported, Greene was no longer listed as a chief financial officer or any other type of director. A year earlier, the company had been hit with state and local tax liens. Greene would one day joke about his lack of business acumen. But he didn't look particularly funny at the moment. Greene just didn't love the job. She grew up in this business; she had gone to school for this business. And yet, as it turned out, the girl in the photo had little interest in running this business.

Some people close to Greene would describe the resulting dynamic — her own connection to the business fading while her husband's has strengthened — as a source of tension for the couple. Perhaps it could be said that Marjorie Taylor Greene's journey to Congress began here: when, after her tenure as CFO, she seemed determined to leave in search of something to call her own.

In 2011, the same year he quit his job, Greene decided to commit to Jesus Christ. Or maybe commit again. Greene apparently revealed this publicly for the first time last spring.she was a "cradle catholic", born and raised in the church🇧🇷 The revelation came after Greene told Church Militant, a right-wing Catholic website, that the bishops' efforts to help undocumented immigrants reflected that "Satan controls the church." In response, Bill Donohue of the conservative Catholic League asked Greene to apologize. Greene was then led to share the details of her personal relationship with Catholicism, explaining that she stopped going to Mass when she became a mother: to protect my children from pedophiles and that they harbored monsters even within their own ranks.

Greene eventually decided to join North Point Community Church, one of the largest non-denominational Christian congregations in the country. And so, during a Sunday service, as applause and encouragement echoed through the sanctuary, Greene waited her turn to be submerged, blond hair tucked behind her ears, gum-white teeth set in a nervous smile.

Many North Point baptisms are accompanied by testimonies in which parishioners share a brief word about their journey to Christ. The video of Greene's testimony can no longer be found on the church's website, but it can be found by journalist Michael Krusedescribed its key moments in an article forPolitically🇧🇷 That morning, he wrote, Greene spoke from the stage about the "Book of Martyrs", which I believe meant:aBook of Martyrs, John Foxe's 16th-century history and the controversy of the persecution of Protestants under Queen Mary. As he reflected on the "conviction" of such men and women "when they died for Christ," Greene said, "I realized how small my faith was when I was afraid to make a video and be baptized in front of thousands." ." In front of these thousands of people, she accepted Jesus as her Lord and Savior.

Greene's congressional biography leaves the impression of a deep and significant commitment to North Point, but, according to a church leader, his commitment waned after a few years. This person noted with some sadness that Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who defied President Donald Trump, had long been involved with North Point, but "nobody ever asks me about him."

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it was roundAt the same time, Greene, as she later put it on a local radio show, "finally got brave enough" to join a CrossFit gym. Greene's original gym was the Alpharetta branch of Life Time. The gym, with its LifeSpa and LifeCafe, bills itself as a "luxury sports resort," and it's easy to see how Greene might tire of the surroundings. She's not - never was - the type of biweekly gym-goer who attends and runs 45 minutes on the treadmill.Weird stuffon an iPad. In one of the few candid photos of Greene in her 11th grade yearbook, she is lying on her back on a weight bench and lifting two heavy-looking dumbbells. "Marge Taylor pumps some iron," the caption reads.

In 2007, a Life Time training partner told Greene about CrossFit, a fitness program that combines Olympic weightlifting with calisthenics and interval training; It has long been popular with law enforcement and the military. The two women went to CrossFit.com and printed out their workout of the day, or “WOD” in CrossFit parlance. For example, in the early days of CrossFit, most newcomers would join the program, print the WOD, and head to the regular gym. At the end of that first WOD, Greene was sold. In 2011, she started attending the CrossFit gym in Alpharetta.

What Greene found at the academy (or "box" as it's called) was community. The trainers, the members, the latecomers who stopped "just to see what the point is" - they loved them. This is something that many observers in Washington and elsewhere fail to appreciate about Greene: that she can be extremely likable, as long as she doesn't associate someone with "the swamp rat elite, the cowardly weak Republicans and the radical socialist Democrats." ". those who are the bane of this land we all love and call home.” She has a sugary voice and a kind, generous affection; She is the kind of person, when she wants to be, that a stranger might briefly meet and fondly remember her friends as "just that".the most beautiful"The softer side of Marjorie Taylor Greene is what her friends, neighbors and the people who voted for her know," said Jamie Parrish, a Georgia Republican and a close friend of Greene. representation and reception elsewhere.

At CrossFit, Greene's heat made her a star. "CrossFit is really intimidating," she explained in a radio interview. “Most people's experience with CrossFit is … they come across ESPN and they see this.Monster-people doCrazyamazing things, and they usually say, 'Ohhh, I'll never do that.'" But Greene was able to calm people down. When she started teaching coaching classes, the reviews were rave. "I loved working out with Marjorie Greene," Carolyn Canouse, a former client, told me via email. "She was patient with my lack of athleticism and always encouraged and supported everyone at the gym. She sometimes brought her dog to work (he was adorable!), as well as her children, who were all down to earth and pleasant to be around."

Greene trained nearly every day and competed in a training challenge known as the CrossFit Open. At her peak, she was ranked 47th in the US in her age group. Over time, she seemed to see CrossFit less as a foundation for the rest of her life and more as an escape from it.

When Greene was running for Congress, a man named Jim Chambers, shaken by his self-image as a model of family values, wrote in a Facebook post about his alleged extramarital affairs in academia. 🇧🇷the new yorkerit's charles bethealater reported via text messagesvon Greene, who appears to be confirming one of the cases.) Her first alleged relationship was with another trainer. Chambers, who owned one of the CrossFit boxes Greene trained in, recalled initially seeing her as "a married woman who was at least nominally Christian, maybe not particularly, but lived a very suburban life. And then, not long after, she confessed that her marriage was in shambles and falling apart. According to Chambers, Greene did not hide the affair with the coach. She was open about her problems with Perry - "different lives and interests ... typical things", as Chambers put it. "She he struck me as an extremely bored person," he added. Greene later apparently had an affair with another CrossFit man, a manager Chambers recently hired from Colorado; that relationship, Chambers said, is more serious, more complicated, "a real affair. ". (Greene's office did not respond to a list of questions about the alleged affairs and other matters.)

In March 2012, she and Perry split. Four months later, she filed for divorce. Two months later, the couple reconciled.

The family seemed to resume its usual rhythm. In January, Perry posted again on Tripadvisor. That was no small feat. Before the breakup, he was in the habit of seriously reviewing establishments ranging from the local Melting Pot ("Like I said, a fondue place, so unique") to Maui's Cool Cat Cafe ("My family loves their hamburgers so much, we have Burger Sunday as a family dinner every Sunday) only to go noticeably dark during the gloom and turmoil of 2012. But by the new year he was back, sharing his thoughts on the encore, Las Vegas ("Great atmosphere. My wife and I love it!!!"), and an Italian restaurant in Alpharetta whose wine list, he said, was "very good"!

Marjorie, meanwhile, was working with a personal trainer in hopes of qualifying to compete in the CrossFit International Games. For the next two years, she dove deep into her weekly recipes as she chronicled her experiences.to blog wordpress🇧🇷 "Test post," she began in April 2013. "I'm testing my blog post from my iPhone... Let's see if this works."

Sprinkled among posts about creatine supplements ("I Love That Stuff") and iPhone images of Greene's triple jumps are hints that her family has found its way back. “I decided to set up a small home gym in my basement,” Greene wrote in May 2013. “That way, on days I'm not working out, I can work out at home and be with my kids. My husband thinks it's a great idea. I hope they can see mum working hard and I can set a good example for them." Six months later: "Just spending time at home with my family this weekend and I'm really happy about it."

More often than not, however, blog posts suggest someone is shifting from aggressive happiness (“Fully happy dancing!”) to the “negative thoughts” that can creep in without warning: “I wish there was a button to push these thoughts away . 🇧🇷

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“Confidence is veryan area I struggle with," Greene wrote in one of his blog posts. "But I decided to say, 'Why not me?'"

In 2013, she started to become a businesswoman again. Working with Travis Mayer, a 22-year-old trainer and one of the top CrossFit athletes in the world, Greene opened a 6,000-square-foot box called CrossFit Passion on Roswell Street in Alpharetta. Two years later, they moved to premises almost twice as large. In 2016, however, Greene sold her stake. She no longer blogs about her WODs or anything else related to CrossFit.

It's not clear what led to such an abrupt turn; Greene has not discussed the matter publicly. "She went through a really tough workout and then stopped halfway through and started crying," a person close to Greene told me at the time. “And it happened more regularly towards the end. It was a lot of stress." (Mayer, who renamed the United Performance gym he still owns and operates today, did not respond to requests for comment.)

The other thing that happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2016 was Donald Trump. Greene's family was never particularly political. Every fourth of November but a cycle or two, Bob and Delle Taylor made a point of stopping by the library or First Baptist Church and voting. It's reasonable to assume that the Taylors leaned right. For years, the family-owned construction company was the main sponsor of Atlanta freedom fighter Neal Boortz's eponymous talk show. Boortz, one of America's most popular radio personalities in the late 1990s and early 2000s, told me that Bob (who died in 2021) had been a good friend for decades. Despite this, the family did not give money to candidates, Republican or Democrat; They did not hold a fundraiser at the Lake Lanier home. For the Taylors, the 2016 presidential election began without more fanfare than any other. On Super Tuesday, Bob, Delle and Marjorie did not vote in either party's primary. In fact, Marjorie hadn't voted since 2010.

Greene's political origin story was no different than that of millions of other Trump supporters. Though she had never shown an interest in politics, she was suddenly intoxicated by a feeling, a belief that, despite the distance between Trump's golden world and her own, she knew exactly who he was. "He reminded me of most men I know."she said🇧🇷 "Men like my father."

In a way he hasguerralike her father. Bob Taylor may not have been overtly partisan, but he rivaled Trump in his tendency to mythologize himself. 2006 Greene's fatherhad published a novelcalled the small publisher Savas BeatieParadigm🇧🇷 As far as I can tell, this is Taylor's effort to demonstrate the value of a system he invented called the "Taylor Effect" - which purports to predict the stock market based on Earth's gravitational fluctuations - in the form of an international bet high-risk caper. The story follows twin scientists who discover in the bowels of the Biltmore estate an ancient Egyptian chest whose contents, they soon realize, "could destroy many of the world's most powerful families" if ever made public.

He regarded his theory of the stock market as "the real article"; in the afterword, he compared himself to Da Vinci, Galileo, Edison, Marconi, and the Wright brothers. "History", he wrote, "is filled with characters who have endured ridicule, imprisonment and even death for discovering things we now know with absolute certainty."Is correct🇧🇷 Suzanne Thompson, North Carolina writer hired to help Taylor writeParadigmHe recalls that Taylor had "a slightly heightened sense of self". She didn't know he was Marjorie Taylor Greene's father and was dismayed when I told her. "Oh my God, I had no idea. Oh dear God."

While Greene's political awakening was sudden, she later portrayed her support for Trump as revealing a well-formed political identity that she had no choice but to hide. "I've always had a strong connection to politics, but as a business owner you have to be very, very careful what you say," she told a conservative YouTube vlogger in 2019. But when she sold her gym, "something magic happened to me: I didn't have to worry about what the members were thinking anymore".

Greene may have felt free to speak up now, but it wasn't clear what she meant. It was clear that she meant it.any🇧🇷 It was as if she had spent the first six months of Trump's tenure collecting the scattered emotions and weak instincts that underlay her attraction to his brand of politics and examining them under a microscope and turning the dial until the rough edges became sharp. By July 2017, Greene was ready to post about politics.

Seyward Darby: There is nothing amusing or funny about Marjorie Taylor Greene

She went to American Truth Seekers, anow defunct far-right websiteheaded by a school counselor from New York who went by the name of Pat Rhiot. The content of Greene's early posts was lost in the airwaves, but the headlines archived by the Wayback Machine sum up the brand Greene wanted to establish from the beginning: "Caitlyn Jenner Considering What?" was the first headline, followed by Female Genital Mutilation: America's Dirty Little Secret and Exposed! Confidential memo to oust Trump and silence conservatives!”

In August, when the full text of many of her blog posts became available, she demonstrated her fierce devotion to gun rights and Donald Trump, and her dislike of mainstream Republican politicians:

In September, she walked behind Hillary Clinton:

Greene's posts were pretty much standard by the standards of the 2017 far-right blogosphere, nothing terribly new or uniquely provocative. But Greene had already noticed something remarkable in her short time: people liked her to be ordinary. In the current scenario of conservative politics, normality was an opportunity to promote itself. Common made even his most mundane reflections shine. Ordinary allowed Greene to offer conservatives what the Alex Joneses couldn't: confirmation that his "full-time mother" and "business owner" and neighborhood "patriot" had had enough too. In the fall of 2017, Greene created a new Facebook page just to publicize his political thoughts.

The Republican base was in the market for a Marjorie Taylor Greene — a suburban woman who not only didn't shy away from Trump, but was a full-fledged MAGA. All over the internet, it seemed, were women who called themselves conservatives who could do nothing but choke on their pearls and complain about Trump's tweets. But now here was the normal margin that would put America first. Sweet Southern Marge, who loved "family, fitness, travel, shooting, fun and adventure" and who, it would soon become clear, was desperate to save the children.

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Maybe decades later now, what will stand out the most is how easily the dominoes fell.

Think of it like this: #SaveTheChildren, at the top of the feed. You click on the hashtag - because given the choice, who wouldn't want to save the kids? It was 40% off during the Presidents' Day sale, but now you're wondering: was itDiesone was used to transport a child, did an innocent drug dealer roll inside? And then, less than 10 clicks later, you're wondering about other things too - other conspiracies, other dark forces. Why thatIt isFunnily enough, now that you're here, now that you're wondering, you don't remember any CCTV footage of the plane hitting the Pentagon on 9/11. You've gone online to see if Theresa had posted pictures of the baby shower and now, 20 minutes later, you're logging off with a whole new perspective, the invisible currents of the world suddenly come to life.

Maybe for Marjorie Taylor Greene the rug was a pied-de-poule pattern and the baby shower was Kerrie. But you don't need site-by-site search history to understand the narrative of Greene's fall from QAnon because the basics tend to be the same.

QAnon followers subscribe to the widespread conspiracy theory that the world is controlled by a network of satanic pedophiles funded by Saudi King George Soros and the Rothschild family. While Republican officials have insisted that QAnon's influence on the party's grassroots is exaggerated, former President Trump has openly embraced the movement and ended rallies with music.almost identical to the QAnon theme song, "WWG1WGA" (the initials stand for the group's rallying cry "Where do we go one, we go all"). But since its inception in the fall of 2017, when “Q,” an anonymous person posing as a top government official, began publishing stories of the so-called deep state, no politician has become as synonymous with QAnon as Greene. To some extent, Greene had already signaled his attraction to conspiracy theories by questioning the American Truth Seekers whether the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting was a false flag operation to eliminate gun rights. But with Q, Greene was all-in. She even went so far as to support a dishonest QAnon theory called "Frazledrip" which claims that Hillary Clinton murdered a child as part of a satanic blood ritual.

Ramon Aponte, a right-wing blogger known as "The Puerto Rican Conservative", became friends with Greene shortly after she started posting about it.Pizzagate, the conspiracy theorythat a Washington, DC restaurant was involved in a child sex ring run by the Democratic Party. "Although the mainstream news media 'debunked' it, no one has ever done an investigation into it," Aponte told me. “And Marjorie Taylor Greene knew it…

Was Greene a true believer? Her initial outpouring of breathless posts makes a strong impression—she comes across as a convert drunk on revelation. But over time, her affiliation with QAnon brought undeniable benefits. It was only when she clung to the adjacent Q and Q theories that Greene's political profile reached scale and speed. The deeper she dived, the more her following grew. And the more confident she became.

As the months passed, she began experimenting with a new shade; She would still be regular Marge and sweet Southern Marge, but she would also be Marge telling the "aggressive truth" - who wasn't afraid of that?real🇧🇷 In Facebook videos posted from 2017 to 2019, Greene spoke about the "Islamic invasion of our government offices". She said, "Let me explain something to you, 'Mohammed'...Is it over therePeople want special treatment, they want to be above us, and we are against that.” She spoke about how it was the “gangs” – “non-whites” – who were responsible for retaining black and Hispanic men. She protested the removal of the Confederate statues, saying, "But that doesn't make me racist... If I were a black man today and I walked by one of those statues, I would be so proud because I would say, 'Look, how far have I come in this country The "most abused group" in America, she continued, is "white males."

In late 2018, Marjorie Taylor Greene was flooded with validation. Especially from men. She suddenly found herself making marriage proposals in the comments below her selfies. "Ok ok ok so you are totally beautiful. I understood that the first time I saw you," one person wrote, "but you seal the deal with what's on your mind, I love the message of truth you bring and lets everyone know Listen I'm SOLD!!!" Greene, as she often does when reading comments like this, clicked the "Like" button in response.

Greene started dating people in her Facebook circle. In March 2019, she traveled to Washington, D.C., where the Senate Judiciary Committee was holding hearings on restrictive gun laws. At one point, in a now-infamous confrontation, Greene began tailing David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The shooting left 17 dead and Hogg came to Washington to lobby for gun control measures. Wearing a black blazer and leggings, a pink Michael Kors bag slung over her shoulder, Greene accosted and harassed the 18-year-old, as a friend filmed the encounter, for his support of the law: "You don't have that, you yourself something to say? Can't defend your position? How did you get over 30 meetings with senators? How did you do that? How did you get huge press coverage on this issue?" Hogg remained silent as Greene continued, "You know, if school zones were patrolled with armed security guards, there wouldn't be mass shootings in schools. You know that? The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.”

Greene later attributed her decision to run for office to the frustration she felt during that trip: no one had paid any attention to her. That would have to change. As she posted on a website called The Whiskey Patriots shortly after the Hogg incident and shortly before posting her candidacy for Congress, "Let the war begin..."

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she ran andShe won, of course, in Georgia's 14th Precinct, in a largely rural outpost in the northwest corner of the state. Voters didn't seem to care that Greene, who found the staunchly conservative area more opportunity-friendly than her suburban Atlanta hometown, had never lived there.

Shortly after she was sworn in in January 2021, her harassment by Hogg, as well as old social media posts supporting claims that theThe Parkland shooting was a false flag operation, appeared in public. at thehis inaugural speech on the floorof the Chamber of Deputies, she tried to mitigate the criticism she had been receiving. Much of the speech was a denial of his own previous statements. For example, she acknowledged that 9/11 really happened and that not all QAnon posts were correct. "I was allowed to believe things that weren't true," she protested.

As for David Hogg, she recounted an episode at her own school when, as she put it, "the whole school" was taken hostage by a sniper - an episode she continues to cite as a touchstone to wrap it up, explain the What's happening. wrong with school safety and how right she is to bully a school shooting survivor like Hogg. But if her account did not attract much sympathy, it was because it corresponded only nominally to reality.

On a September morning in 1990, during Greene's freshman year, a history teacher named Johnny Tallant was teaching at South Forsyth High School when an armed sophomore entered the next classroom, firing a rifle at himself. himself and the students inside Tallant's classroom marched in. Over the next few hours, the sophomore held about 40 of his classmates and Tallant at gunpoint. The hostages later said they were scared at first; The student threatened to kill her if his demands for candy, soft drinks and a school bus were not met. Eventually, her nerves calmed down. Many of the students knew their captor at least a little and weren't entirely surprised when he lowered his gun and began sharing with them "whatever was on his mind", as one hostage recalled. "He said he wanted to get away from things and leave a mark," recalled another, adding that the student had repeatedly promised not to hurt her. "He said his parents were mean, he was tired of how they treated him and he had no friends and just wanted to get away." When the police delivered the snacks he wanted, the sophomore released most of the hostages, including all but one of the girls, who knew the student well and stayed behind to talk to him further. Five hours later, when the remaining hostages moved to retrieve his weapon, he offered no resistance; When the police broke in shortly afterwards, he couldn't resist.

Tallant recalls Greene reaching out to him in the spring of 2019, shortly before he ran for Congress. He had no idea who she was or why she was calling him at home. That day, he overheard the unnamed woman explain that she wanted to talk to him about the events of 1990-that she was a student at South Forsyth when it all happened. Still, Tallant tried to track them down. Greene was not in his classroom. Everyone else at the school, including Greene, was quickly evacuated and taken away. Tallant was stunned by Greene's intensity, his seemingly sudden need, decades later, to expose the flaws in the way things were handled at school: "She asked me some crazy questions about - she said we should have guns ourselves, you y'know... She sounded like "some kind of wacko".

Tallant wouldn't give her what she wanted. "I told her right away that we don't need guns," he said. It wasn't a political statement; for Tallant it was simply reality - the only conclusion one could draw from itThey struggled to scrutinize the details of the crisis, the focus of the teenager. Classmates and teachers knew that the sophomore was struggling with seizures and other symptoms of epilepsy. As one of the hostages later said: “I wasn't afraid of him. I was scared of what the police would do if he walked down the hall and I was scared of what the police would do as he walked from the room to the bus.”

But it does not matter. Greene hung up on Tallant and finally continued with his favorite version of the story in his speech on the floor of the house: "See, school shootings are absolutely real," Greene said, his navy mask emblazoned with the wordsSPEAK FREEin red letters. "I understand how horrible it is because when I was 16, in 11th grade, my school was a gun-free zone and one of my classmates brought guns into school and held the whole school hostage."

"I know the fear that David Hogg felt that day," she explained. "I know how scared these kids are."

Did it matter that Greene had not been taken hostage, or that the episode had been handled wisely and bloodlessly, or that the teacher in the classroom had told her that she was wrong about her memories and her conclusions? By now it may have occurred to Greene that the performance is sufficient. In fact, this policy can be that simple — as long as you're angry, or at least good at acting like it, most people wouldn't bother looking under the hood.

IX.

end of september 2022, Perry Greene filed for divorce from Marjorie Taylor Greene, claiming the marriage was "broken beyond recovery". His timing - so close to the mid-term elections - did not go unnoticed in Georgian political circles. Six weeks later, on November 8, Marjorie was easily re-elected to her second term in the House of Representatives.

Given its popularity with a segment of the Republican base,She will certainly play an important role in leading the Republican Party., whether or not that role is associated with a specific title and task. Wielding power much like Donald Trump, she does or says the unthinkable, knowing most of her peers wouldn't dare jeopardize their own futures to stop her.

Barton Gellman: O impeachment de Joe Biden

What Marjorie Taylor Greene accomplished was this: She tapped into the paranoia inherent in conspiracy thinking and assured a sizable constituency that it's okay - no, honestly -give in to your suspicionsabout the left, the republican establishment, the media. "I won't mince my words," she declared at a rally in Michigan this fall. "The Democrats want the Republicans dead, and they've already started the killing." Greene didn't create that sensibility, but she channels it better than any of her peers.

In her Cobb County Republican Party breakfast speech, Greene berated "major media organizations" for creating a caricature of her "that is not real" without ever, she said, giving her the opportunity to admit it to herself. same speak. After that, I introduced myself, wrote down what she had just said, and asked if she would be willing to sit down for an interview. "Oh," she said, "you're the only one walking around trying to talk to [all my friends]. This is the first time you've actually tried to talk to me.” I explained that I had tried but had been repeatedly rejected by her team. "Yes, because I'm not interested," she snapped. "You're a democratic activist." Some of her supporters looked on and nodded vigorously.

Whether Greene actually believes what she says now is almost beside the point. She has no choice but to be who her followers think she is, for her power depends on theirs. Not only do they not care about the mechanics of real leadership – diplomacy, compromise, patience – they represent everything her followers despise. Softening or embracing a better belief is admitting defeat.

I often think back to Greene's blog post on July 26, 2014 and the question she asked herself in her crisis of confidence. "Why not me?" she had written experimentally and experimented with size. I think about this whenever I see Greene onstage, on YouTube, on the floor of the house, making performance art angry and obviously comfortable with who she is. If the question wasn't in writing, I'm not sure I would believe there was a time in her life when she was afraid to ask.

This article appears inJanuary/February 2023Print edition entitled "Why is she like that?"