Confronted with one of his own legal opinions – one that inconveniently contradicted his current stance – the nineteenth century jurist Baron Bramwell cleverly replied: “The matter does not appear to me now as it appears to have appeared to me then.” The Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene could not summon such wit and concision when disowning her own problematic views, but her apology – spoken behind a mask emblazoned with the words “free speech” – still managed to draw a standing ovation from her Republican colleagues. As Greene savoured her balm of their forgiveness, it was hard not to contrast her fate with that of Liz Cheney, the House Republican Conference Chair, whom the party’s “Freedom Caucus” had just attempted, unsuccessfully, to oust for the crime of “aiding the enemy” by voting for Trump’s impeachment.
Greene’s problematic views are too numerous to list here but they include assertions that the 2018 Parkland school shooting was a “false flag operation” with crisis actors; that certain Democratic politicians should be executed; that the results of the 2018 midterm election were tantamount to “an Islamic invasion of our government” and that Jewish bankers may have started California’s wildfires with a space laser. As she distanced herself from these lunacies, Greene stressed that she was just an ordinary citizen, drawn into public service by the charismatic former president, driven by concern that “our country has murdered over 62 million people in the womb … [that] our borders are open and some of my friends have had their children murdered by illegal aliens” and also by the hope that “maybe we can stop sending our sons and daughters to fight in foreign Wars.”
Placing the blame for her more exotic theories squarely on “the Internet” Greene conceded that the real issue was that “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true”. After setting the record straight, she said: “These were words of the past, and these things do not represent me, they do not represent my district, and they do not represent my values.” She even concluded with a flourish worthy of her hero: “Shall we stay divided like this? We allow the media that is just as guilty as QAnon of presenting truth and lies to divide us? Will we allow ourselves to be addicted to hate and hating one another? I hope not because that’s not the future I want for my children and it’s not the future I want for any of your children”
Like Trump, Greene’s superpower is her open contempt for both parties. She recently told the Washington Examiner that there is no significant difference between mainstream Democrats and Republicans. She wants a GOP filled with hands-on patriots who will help the former president to pursue his agenda “whenever he comes out with [it.]”
Although House Democrats stripped Greene of her committee posts, in many ways she remains closer to the base of the GOP than senior Republicans like Cheney. As New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has observed, Oregon’s Republicans recently approved a resolution that called the Capitol siege a “false flag” operation; Texas Republicans adopted the QAnon slogan “We are the storm” – while disclaiming any similarity to the original; the Chair of Wyoming’s Republican party, who was present at the January 6 rally has even said that “he might be open to secession.” Goldberg notes that “American conservatism — particularly its evangelical strain — has fostered derangement in its ranks for decades, insisting that no source of information outside its own self-reinforcing ideological bubble is trustworthy.” As with creationism, so with the lie that Barack Obama was a foreign born Manchurian candidate. The only difference today is that the party has been overrun by its fantasists.
This shameful moment in US history is a vivid reminder of the true costs of political opportunism. A perfect illustration of how easily propaganda can lead to insurrection, how lies deployed for partisan advantage can metastasize into a mindset that consumes the body politic. Opinions like those renounced by Marjorie Taylor Greene never remain safely in the past, as she and her fellow conspiracy theorists know all too well.
