Pop Quiz: Which of the following are things that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Prepper Bunker, Ga.) believes?
Forest fires are started intentionally by Jewish space lasers.
COVID-19 is a hoax.
Democrats are part of a global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) deserves to be executed.
The 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Wisc.) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) should go back to the Middle East to be with their goats.
The Sandy Hook and Parkland school shootings were “false flags,” meaning they were fake and part of a conspiracy to convince Americans to give up their guns.
Hillary Clinton once cut the face off of a child and wore it as a mask.
Hillary Clinton has murdered many people.
The Georgia election in 2020 was riddled with election fraud, but apparently not her own race, which she won.
All of the above.
The answer is, of course, all of the above. She is, as my dad was fond of saying, “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.”
Obviously, Republicans are furious, demanding that MTG be expelled from Congress and embarrassed that she considers herself one of them.
Ha, ha, ha, that is a joke. Republicans are doing no such thing. This is the party of Donald Trump, after all. They’ve spent the past four years becoming the party of right-wing conspiracy theorists and liars. They aren’t just going to throw all of that away. [Note: Republicans have actually spent decades becoming a fringe party, but this column can only be so long.]
A video surfaced recently of MTG chasing Parkland shooting survivor and gun law advocate David Hogg down the street in D.C. shouting conspiracy theory nonsense. She wants him to tell her why he supports “Red Flag Laws,” which confiscate guns from people deemed to be dangerous and can be the difference between life and death in domestic violence situations. She wants him to tell her why he’s hurting gun owners like herself. And she wants him to tell her where he’s getting money from. And, of course, he’s getting it from the Deep State cabal of Democrats for being a “crisis actor.” That’s what she’s implying, anyway.
In a country that had its shit together, a woman who harassed a young man advocating for common sense gun protection after kids got murdered at his school would be shunned publicly and completely. She would not be deemed a serious person. She would not be deemed a good person. She sure as hell would not be a congressperson.
But that’s not the country we live in. Trump didn’t begin America’s obsession with conspiracy theories, but he helped to normalize it. He helped to make people like MTG electable. After all, when you have a white supremacist clown for a president, why not fill up the rest of the government, too? Beep beep, it’s the Q-Anon clown car.
The media has not helped things. They treated Trump like the celebrity he is, never like a dangerously anti-democratic racist and misogynist who had no business running for president, let alone running the country. The media tried so hard to be “balanced” that they both-sides every argument as if “voter suppression is the real problem, not voter fraud” and “Hillary Clinton wears toddler skin masks while she flies planes releasing chem trails over the country” are two sides of a definitely very normal argument people can have.
Enough. The Republican Party is a party of radicalized extremists whose batshit crazy positions on things are literally killing people. Exhibit 1, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol for example. Exhibit 2, the COVID-19 denialism.
The Democrats need to step it up now that they have control of the House and Senate and presidency. Kill the filibuster and stop pretending that bipartisanship is possible with a party that embraces someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene. The Trump administration caused a lot of damage. The Democrats need to charge ahead like this country’s life depends on it. Because it does.
D’Anne Witkowski is a poet, writer and comedian living in Michigan with her wife and son. She has been writing about LGBTQ politics for over a decade. Follow her on Twitter @MamaDWitkowski.
