Spoiler alert: House Republicans never had any intention of taking substantive action against Marjorie Taylor Greene for her inciting, inflammatory rhetoric.
Sure, Greene is a ride-or-die QAnon adherent who cheered on the white supremacist Capitol insurrection and once gave a thumbs-up to a social media post stating Nancy Pelosi needs “a bullet to the head.” She also suggested Muslims shouldn’t serve in Congress and called Black people “slaves to the Democratic Party.” And there was that time in 2018 that she publicly opined that rich Jews were behind a space laser that set off wildfires in California.
The point is, Greene is an openly racist anti-Semitic Islamophobe who peddles insane conspiracy theories and promotes violence. She’s basically a sentient version of the GOP with a bullhorn, and the party isn’t interested in alienating its base. So instead of trying to defend her indefensible comments, Republicans are doing exactly what you should expect by attempting to distract from scandal by demonizing Ilhan Omar and Maxine Waters, two Black congresswomen.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy set the tone in a statement released Wednesday just ahead of the party’s decision not to punish Greene. The House minority leader claimed Greene’s support of “political violence and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories do not represent the values or beliefs of the House Republican Conference.” Were that actually true, he would have followed by removing Greene from her committee assignments, instead of whining that as “Democrats pursue a resolution on Congresswoman Greene, they continue to do nothing about Democrats serving on the Foreign Affairs Committee who have spread anti-Semitic tropes, Democrats on the House Intelligence and Homeland Security Committee compromised by Chinese spies, or the Chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee who advocated for violence against public servants.”
Waters chairs the Financial Services Committee, while Omar—whose Muslimness, Blackness and foreign-bornness have made her the target of dirty GOP smears since she entered Congress—sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee. Neither of those women should be mentioned in a conversation about House Republicans addressing Greene’s dangerous rhetoric. But this is the game the GOP has clearly settled on, and the party has been beating the drum of hate louder and louder in recent days, reprising the utterly false equivalence they’ve been trying to establish since before Greene was even elected.
On Tuesday, Republican Rep. Nancy Mace disingenuously compared Greene to Waters by claiming there are “crazies on both sides of the aisle.” Newt Gingrich, always a connoisseur of racist signifiers, accused Walters and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of being “part of lynch mob trying to destroy” Greene, imagining a revisionist history where women of color hanged Southern white women. A group of 16 Republicans from Greene’s district in Georgia pulled out the racist stops in an open letter that dredged up Islamophobic rumors of incest that conservatives have circulated for years; they also mentioned Louis Farrakhan, implicitly tying him to Waters. Rep. Brian Babin has filed an amendment to remove Omar from her position on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“If the Democrat Majority wants to go down this road,” Babin wrote on Twitter, “they should start by dealing with their own members who have been at this before and AFTER their election to Congress,” echoing McCarthy’s ridiculous contention that Greene has repented and turned over a new leaf since her election.
But the manufactured outrage and false equivalencies don’t hold up under even the most superficial scrutiny. If Republicans really cared about anti-Semitism in their ranks, there are dozens of members they would’ve rebuked before this, including Greene.
Omar has never attempted to convince gun owners their freedom is being stolen let alone that regaining it means paying “the price of blood.” Waters has not once retraumatized the parents of school shooting victims by suggesting their children’s deaths were faked; nor has she trailed a school shooting survivor, shouting harassment the whole way. Neither Omar nor Waters egged on a white supremacist takover of the Capitol—labeling it a “1776 moment”—that got five people killed, including a police officer who served in Iraq. Greene has done all of those things, and ignoring the danger her actions pose to lay blame at Black legislators’ feet seems like a way to justify beforehand any future violence from her followers.
Republicans proved on Wednesday that they can’t disavow Greene—in fact, about the half the caucus gave her a standing ovation—any more than they could disavow their massive base of racists. The party that has made white supremacist grievances its entire political philosophy—leaning hard into fears about losing ground to undeserving Blacks and greedy globalist Jews—can’t change (racist, Islamophobic) horses in midstream now.
That Republicans are trying so hard to redirect the well-deserved blowback about Greene’s anti-Black racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and overall toxic nuttery on to two Black women who have nothing to do with any of this captures just how perfectly at home she is in the party’s ranks.
Here’s the GOP yet again tacitly admitting that while it publicly frets about Black Lives Matter and antifa, it is aligned with white extremists who are the real national security threat. Greene, even as she faced potential sanctions this week, continued to push white supremacist messaging intended to rile her white supremacist followers. On Tuesday, Greene used a photo of Omar on a fundraising tweet. (She’s done this before with AOC.) A day later, she claimed in a social media post that she is being targeted by Democrats for her “identity & my values,” which she listed in this order: “White, Woman, Wife, Mother, Christian, Conservative, Business Owner.” Earlier on Wednesday, she called her supporters “wonderful smart Patriots” who represent “real America.” And she repeatedly tweeted about Omar, accusing her of aiding “enemies of the American people that rioted,” namely “BLM/Antifa,” while decrying a House supposedly full of “members who supported, cheered on, & funded criminal thugs who riot, burn, loot, attack police, murder, & occupy federal property.”
Greene—who was out here cheering a fascist rampage just last month—is super-bad at irony. But she’s got a real knack for targeting her Black women colleagues on social media and in real life. Rep. Cori Bush, a black woman newly elected to the House, noted that Greene verbally accosted her in a hallway while not wearing a mask. Bush went on to write that she is “moving my office away from hers for my team's safety.” (A video posted by Greene arguing her innocence actually validates Bush’s version of the story.)
Greene’s not going anywhere, regardless of the threat she clearly poses. Her GOP cohorts need her supporters, whatever the cost. It’s almost certain that there will be some kind of danger that results, but since when has the GOP cared about who might get hurt—especially when that’s likely to be Black women—when power is on the line?
