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This week, the Republican Party had the opportunity to distance itself from extremist bigotry and unhinged, violent-minded conspiracy theorizing, and utterly failed this most elemental test of responsible civic leadership. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the now-notorious QAnon-supporting freshman congresswoman from Georgia—who is on record approving the assassination of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, hounding Parkland school shooting survivor David Hogg for allegedly playacting his trauma stemming from the mass slaughter of his classmates, endorsing crazed accounts of Hillary Clinton and other Democratic leaders sporting the flayed skin of slain babies, and attributing the outbreak of wildfires in California to Jewish space lasers—might have been, at long last, the bright line beyond which the Trumpified, reality-averse and stoutly authoritarian Republican Party would not step, at the cost of whatever remains of its collective sanity.

But of course, it was not to be. Under the invertebrate direction of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the House GOP caucus declined to strip Greene of her committee assignments, giving the effective all clear to let violent delusion be standard-issue rhetoric in today’s Republican Party. It thus fell to the House Democratic majority to institute some basic standards of truth within the Capitol, just weeks after it was besieged by violent insurrectionists brandishing plenty of QAnon messaging, with a vote to strip Greene of her committee assignments on Thursday.
 

If anything about the Greene saga shocks you, you haven’t been paying attention to the past half-century of right-wing base-mobilization strategies, as New Republic staff writer Melissa Gira Grant notes. McCarthy and the other figureheads nominally directing today’s GOP can’t afford to banish Greene and her ilk to the outer darkness of respectable discourse for the simple reason that the deranged and conspiratorial cohort of the party is no longer its fringe. It is, in fact, the future of the Trump-era GOP. 

While Greene owes her recent notoriety to her own well-chronicled descent into QAnon social media delusion, many of her other outbursts are firmly in line with what today’s Republican Party trumpets as responsible—even morally virtuous—policymaking. It’s easy to call out the viral craziness, Gira Grant writes, but “more challenging, and more troubling, are all the ways Greene blends in with her party”:

An obsession with the alleged adoption of “Sharia law” in American town governments, or pleas for the babies lost to the nonexistent “after-birth abortion”—Greene shares these fever dreams with many in the MAGA camp and the Republican Party more generally. She is also very, very good at using them to make herself a household name. The party has seen this before, uncomfortably recently. It tried to turn the base that Trump motivated toward its own success, while also maintaining a respectable distance when necessary, even after those Trump voters then rioted, called Republicans traitors for not trying to overthrow an election, and came for their heads. Greene isn’t just trying to energize those voters. She is in Congress because she is one of them.

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And she’s also in Congress because she’s adopted the Donald Trump playbook: Come into media prominence by shamelessly lying, vilifying the opposition, then downplaying responsibility for everything you’ve said and done. When you’re called out on any of your loutish disregard for the truth or baseline values of public deliberation, claim to be the victim of the far-flung “radical left” conspiracy to disfigure free enterprise and expression and lay the sainted suburbs low with nonwhite interlopers, socialist dogma, and “Sharia law.” Lather, rinse, repeat. 

Indeed, as Gira Grant notes, Greene’s real-time conversion from Trumpism to QAnon cultism was so seamless as to be scarcely noticeable—which is why she’s only become controversial after winning election to Congress. Nothing in her broader public profile differentiates her in kind from the maximum leader of today’s GOP.

Like Trump’s, 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 on his path 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.

At the time, QAnon’s audience was still growing, and belonging meant becoming part of a kind of citizen media cargo cult, in which news stories on Breitbart or the Daily Caller were scrutinized for proof of the new pedophile world order. Greene was then a blogger, as Brandy Zadrozny at NBC News reported in June, responsible for posts like “MUST READ—Democratic Party Involved With Child Sex, Satanism, and The Occult,” which rounded up far-right news sites doing their own dubious aggregating, giving Greene the fodder to connect the dots from anti-abortion legislation, the Satanic Temple, D.C. society power couples, John Podesta, Backpage.com, Hillary Clinton, and Jeffrey Epstein. The site where Green blogged, AmericanTruthSeekers.com, may have been a few rungs below those others on which it relied for content. But Greene had become part of the same media circuit, transforming local journalism into truth-shredding right-wing website fodder and again into headlines to drive traffic from Facebook back to those websites. And from there, perhaps to Fox News. (And eventually, from the president’s indiscriminate mouth.) 

So far from being persona non grata, Marjorie Taylor Greene is the culmination of five decades’ worth of racist demagogy, culture-war fanaticism, and opportunistic conspiracy-mongering in the modern American right. And Kevin McCarthy knows that he’s more likely to regain a majority by indulging all the ugly, anti-democratic, and increasingly terrorist right-wing faction that he prefers to think of as the party’s “movement base.” After all, the man’s a moral imbecile, but, in matters of political calculation at least, he’s no fool.

—Chris Lehmann, editor

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