Marjorie Taylor Greene is a bigot who unabashedly supports violence against the American government and the leaders who dedicate their lives to the protection of our democracy. The time for joking about her ludicrous antisemitic commentary is over.
Before 2016, it would have been impossible for any of us to imagine that a Member of Congress would blame Jews for an inferno destroying millions of acres in the state of California. It would have been impossible to believe that a conspiracy theory as shocking as QAnon could take root in a major political party or that adherents to this conspiracy would reinvigorate the blood libel tropes about the “Rothschilds” which have led to the murder of Jews throughout history. Today, this is being normalized without even the slightest consequence.
As is true for most rabid antisemites, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s hatred for minority communities does not begin and end with the Jews. She has spread Islamophobic, racist, and ableist rhetoric with reckless abandon. She has despicably referred to the election of Muslim public servants as an “Islamic invasion.” She has directly compared Black Lives Matter activists to neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, and perpetuated deeply racist tropes about Black people and gang membership and drugs. She uses ableist slurs to deride people with Downs Syndrome. She is the embodiment of unhinged white supremacy, and is unapologetic in her grotesque enmity of our democracy, our country, and its beautifully diverse citizenry.
Despite her depravity, Greene received a coveted assignment to serve on the House Committee on Education and Labor — which oversees federal education programs from preschool to higher education. Greene has denied the fact that the Sandy Hook massacre and Parkland shooting took place, calling them “false flag” operations and going so far as to harass high school student, gun control advocate and Parkland survivor David Hogg, doubling-down on her Jew-hatred by falsely claiming that he receives funding from George Soros. Her presence on this committee makes a mockery of the courageous students and activists of all stripes who have dedicated their lives to protecting the next generation, after watching their friends and classmates, children, slaughtered in their classrooms.
Greene also demands to carry a firearm on the floor of the House of Representatives, even in the aftermath of the violent siege on the Capitol in which hundreds of lawmakers feared for their very lives. She is disgusting and dangerous, and her incendiary, hateful comments must be widely condemned by those in positions of leadership, across the political spectrum. The toleration of this behavior, by anyone, is an abdication of the duty of our elected leaders to protect and serve the people –– all the people –– of this country.
In 2019, when former Rep. Steve King made comments supporting white supremacy and white nationalism — which came after a long and documented history of King’s racism and antisemitism — Republican leaders stripped him of his committee assignments and denounced his bigotry. Why has there been such deafening silence with regard to Marjorie Taylor Greene, from whom there are hours of recorded messages of pure, unadulterated hate?
Antisemitism is not unique to any one political party, movement, society, or political structure. It manifests as a conspiracy theory that blames Jews for the ills of a society, and morphs to fit different narratives relating to those ills as they are defined by people with even diametrically divergent worldviews. People of conscience have an obligation to confront, expose, and destroy antisemitism whenever and wherever it exists — especially when it is inconvenient or even harmful to their partisan goals.
Zioness exists to ensure an activist home for progressive Jews, and we work to purify domestic movements for justice so that they can operate free from this cancerous form of hate, which destroys everything it touches. It is difficult to stand up to bigotry in the movements and spaces in which you find your organic political home, and we know it takes courage. But no matter where you identify ideologically, if you point somewhere else instead of looking within, if you engage in “what aboutism” to avoid responsibility or accountability in your own spaces, if you don’t stand up to confront the scourge of Jew-hatred in your own political or activist home –– you are politicizing and weaponizing antisemitism, not fighting it, and the consequences are on you.