Feb. 10 – “QAnon Fears That Greene’s Obsession with Jewish Space Lasers Is Distracting Her from Battling Baby-Eating Cannibals” – THE BOROWITZ REPORT
Democratic political consultants love Marjorie Taylor Greene, someone they can use in ads as the face of the GOP and its lunatic fringe.
But comedians might love her more: She has given them badly needed material in the absence of former President Donald Trump.
We Georgians have known for months the hot mess that U.S. Rep. Greene brings to the table. A few years ago, she dipped into the pond that was QAnon and emerged online with the insane theories about Satanic child sex rings, Deep State plots and George Soros, a triple threat of suppositions that helped her build a following and, eventually, a ticket to Congress.
Now Greene has a bigger stage and has gone national. She’s everywhere in the Big Time media, which is where late-night TV hosts and their writing crews fish for material. Greene, who Jimmy Kimmel called the GOP’s “screwiest, Q-iest member,” has arrived just in time for them.
“Part of it is that Trump dropped off the radar. I think a lot of us had an outrage hole in our hearts that was empty,” said Rob Kutner, an Atlanta native who wrote for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and later for Conan O’Brien. “Outrage is the rocket fuel for political comedy.”
Trump, he said, used to flirt around the edges of conspiracy stuff, but Greene “wears this on her sleeves and brings it to a new dimension.”
Greene has been recently lampooned for talking about “Jewish space lasers” causing wildfires in California. But actually, it wasn’t quite that.
In 2018, she was on Facebook “just asking questions” about the fires and mentioning that some people said they saw “lasers and blue beams” coming to Earth. Then she tied it in a nice wacky package with PG&E power company, former California Gov. Jerry Brown and the Rothschilds. The Rothschild family, of course, is the age-old anti-Semitic trope that says Jews are behind all sorts of scheming for world domination.
After getting some pushback from her Republican comrades, Greene last week came out with sort of a non-apology news conference, saying she “stumbled across something called QAnon.”
“I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true. I’d ask questions about them and talk about them. And that is absolutely what I regret,” Greene said.
She added that she’s a normal mom, taxpayer and businesswoman. “If it weren’t for the Facebook posts and comments that I liked in 2018, I wouldn’t be standing here today,” she said.
Yes, I guess she’s right on that. Later, she got even more truthy, saying “school shootings are absolutely real” and “9/11 absolutely happened. … I definitely want to tell you it’s not fake.”
As punishment, the Democratic House leadership stripped Greene of her committee assignments.
I called Democratic state Rep. Scott Holcomb, who chuckled while talking about Greene’s cartoonish qualities. “It’s almost unimaginable how she’s made herself irrelevant in just a few weeks” by being stripped of her House committee duties, he said. “But at the same time, she’s gotten so much attention.”
That is the danger. And it’s not funny. In fact, Greene says she raised a bunch of money because of it.
“People viewed Trump the same way in 2015,” Holcomb said. “He wasn’t credible; he was a joke. People tuned in for entertainment. Then he was elected.”
Holcomb said if Greene were to run in a GOP primary against Gov. Brian Kemp, who is not exactly Trump’s bestie, “she could be a credible threat from Day One. I’d like to think she’d lose in a general election. But … “
Democrats are buying ads to remind voters of the things Greene was “allowed to believe” and are tying her to the GOP, a party that really doesn’t want her but is afraid to say so for fear of angering Trump.
“Does she represent the future for the Republican Party?” Holcomb asked. “Democratic consultants might cheer at that idea. But that’s an awful thing. If she represents the Republican Party, then God help us all.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution