The Ascension of Marjorie Taylor Greene – The New Republic

Her self-styled business success also evokes Trump: She had her fathers money, from a construction business. A wealthy Alpharetta businesswoman is considering a run for the 14th Congressional District seat, the Rome News-Tribune reported in late 2019, one week after the districts congressman announced his retirement. Marjorie Taylor Greene did not yet live in the district. She folded up her congressional campaign in the district where did reside, nearer to Atlanta, and officially got into what was seen as the more winnable race for a Christian conservative, as the paper described her. No mention was made of her more extreme politics, the beliefs she apparently adopted in 2017, the earliest days of QAnon.

Like Trumps, Greenes 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, QAnons 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 READDemocratic 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 presidents indiscriminate mouth.)

Like any aspiring influencer, though, Greene was going to have to stake out her own brand. She made her own videos poring over QAnon drops, laundering them from further-flung websites onto social media platforms. In a series of now-deleted tweets supporting QAnon, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution reported, Greene told her Twitter followers to message her and she would walk you through the whole thing. (Media Matters was tracking such posts all through the 2020 election cycle, in which it counted 97 congressional candidates who had embraced QAnon.) Some of Greenes videos, Politico reported, pushed antisemitic conspiracy theories about constant QAnon target George Soros. She adopted the style of other far-right video demi-celebrities, doing stunts like targeting Muslim members of congress Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, attempting to track them down at the Capitol. She wrapped a fairly standard-fare GOP Islamophobic trope in maternalism: I truly feel like as a woman in America, I really need to go talk to these ladies as an American woman, as a business owner, as a motherI have two daughtersI never want to see Sharia in America.

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The Ascension of Marjorie Taylor Greene - The New Republic