“Congratulations to future Republican star Marjorie Taylor Greene with a big primary win from Congress in Georgia against a very tough and smart opponent,”
wrote Donald Trump. “Marjorie is strong on everything and never gives up – a real WINNER!”
Who, you ask, is Marjorie Taylor Greene? Now that she’s almost certainly the next member of Congress in Georgia’s strong Republican 14th District, she’s a public supporter of the QAnon movement – a broad-based conspiracy theory that came to life in early 2017 and is based on a belief that there is a high-level government officer, “Q”, who is leaking clues on Internet message boards about a series of massive “deep state” conspiracies at work in the country.
“Q is a patriot,” Greene said in a nearly 30-minute long video from 2017. She called the conspiracy theory “something worth listening to and paying attention to,” adding: “He is someone who is his country. very loving, and he’s on the same page as us, and he’s very pro-Trump. “
In short: Greene is set to be the first QAnon congresswoman. And now she has the very public support of Trump.
If all this does not concern you, it should. And for a Republican party in Washington that is already worried about what its decision to do for Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP will mean for the future, Greene’s victory is the worst nightmare.
Here’s a quick overview of just what Greene said:
“She’s a hypocrite. She’s anti-American. And we’ll kick that b * tch out of Congress.” – Green on home speaker Nancy Pelosi (California) at her victory party Tuesday night.
* Said African-Americans are “held slaves for the Democratic Party.”
* Named George Soros a Nazi.
* Referred to the election of two Muslim members of Congress in 2018 as the beginning of a “Muslim invasion.”
*
Tweeted in the wake of a Washington Post story about her leadership in the primary June: “The Chinese propagandists at the Washington Post attack me in the same way they attack Donald Trump, and other conservatives.”
And that’s completely separate from their public support of QAnon! Which is a baseless conspiracy theory that believes, among other things, that Trump was recruited by the military to run for president in 2016 because he alone was not looking at the world’s secret power brokers, and the hole they could have break over American society. And that “Q” continues to signal that the likes of Hillary Clinton will be rounded up in a mass arrest for suspected crimes against society. While QAnon is not responsible for the Pizzagate conspiracy – the horrific and misguided idea that Clinton and her crowns were involved in a pedophilia ring at a pizza shop in northwest Washington – there is a lot of overlap between the two faith groups. . Including, it turns out, Greene.
“I am very excited that there is now a once in a lifetime opportunity to take out this worldwide cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, and I think we have the president to do it,” she said in 2017.
This – all of this – is what Trump embraced Wednesday morning – even though the Republican Party’s top two leaders in the House of Representatives have distanced themselves from Greene following the revelations about her xenophobic and racist remarks. This, all this, is what Trump praised as “strong at everything” and a “real WINNER.”
But why? Because Trump himself loves conspiracy theories. His candidacy for president was rooted in one – the false idea that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. He has pushed a number of conspiracy theories into office – from the debunked idea that Obama orchestrated a campaign to spy on him during the 2016 campaign to the idea that Democrats inflated the death toll from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico to an unfounded allegation that 3 to 5 million illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election. (For a more comprehensive list of Trump conspiracy theories, check this out.)
While Trump has never fully embraced the QAnon movement, he has retweeted LOTS of QAnon-linked accounts – and supporters of the movement are forever searching through his tweets and public statements for proof that he is sending signals to them about the timing of the planned arrest of high-level Democrats for their role in some mass conspiracy.
His embrace of Greene is the most prominent move by Trump to support the QAnon movement, however. While it is not entirely clear that Trump knows the details of the Q movement (or any other belief of Greene), it really does not matter. The President of the United States – as he has done all his time in office – has given coverage and encouragement to the belief system from the mainstream. Not only that, he welcomed these foreign candidates and groups to unite them with the Republican Party.
And Greene will not be the last of the Q-class to infiltrate the Washington Republican class. In another show of momentum for the movement, Oregon Republicans nominated a House of Representatives candidate who hotly spoke of Q. Lauren Boebert, who is Colorado Rep. Scott Tipton in a Republican primary last month in a Trump district won handsomely in 2016, he said during the primary campaign: “Everything I have heard from Q, I hope this is true, because it only means America is stronger and gets better. “
Donald Trump has sown this soil. Now the broader Republican Party will have to deal with what lies beneath.
.
Related
