Rep. Taylor-Greene remains obstacle to peace

Rep. Taylor-Greene continues to incite racist supporters, wreaking chaos and disorder

Charles Horn, Staff Columnist

Battalions of soldiers manned barricades and camps in the streets of the nation’s capital as the country was split by violent insurrectionists threatening the very tenets of democracy embedded in our constitution. A divided Congress tried to mend the divided nation and together voted to expel those who threatened the safety and sanctity of representative government. This was 1861, as 17 members of the house were expelled for their support of the nascent Confederacy.

One hundred and sixty years later, soldiers slept underneath plaques commemorating the volunteers who answered Lincoln’s call to defend the United States. They defended the capitol from the supporters of the president who had rampaged through the sacred halls, chanting death threats to elected officials, murdering Capital Police Officer Brian Sicknick and brutally attacking other officers, attempting to stop the peaceful transition of power from occurring. These insurrectionists had been urged to fight, answering a call to “mobilize” from a newly elected congresswoman who is a great threat to the continuance of American democracy.

The House must put aside partisan differences and take action to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from office. Greene, the newly elected representative from Georgia, believes in a fantasy world so detached from reality that it borders on insanity. The case has exceeded sedition and has arrived at treason. Greene has called the election of Muslim members of Congress an “Islamic invasion,” has filed articles of impeachment on the first day of President Biden’s administration, subverted American democracy by echoing baseless conspiracies on election fraud and has intentionally endangered her colleagues by refusing to wear a mask while trapped in the capitol building.

Each day that Greene is allowed to continue as a legislator undermines the institution of American democracy. Greene’s years of recent conduct sully the institution that she serves. Her baseless harassment of Parkland survivor David Hogg for being an alleged “crisis actor” was a disgrace. Greene also espoused a ludicrous anti-semitic conspiracy that the fires that engulfed California were a consequence of a Rothschild-funded space laser.

Greene has time and time again shown us her true colors. Her social media rants display a deep hatred and anger at an America that no longer resembles her ethnostate ideal. In one post she questions the veracity of 9/11, saying “there’s never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon” and in another she called President Obama and his senior advisor Valerie Jarret “Muslims” who were opening borders to orchestrate an Islamic invasion. When discussing Confederate monuments, Greene said she would be “proud” if she were Black and saw a monument. She also denied the existence of systemic racism and said that white men are the most discriminated group in America.

Unsurprisingly, Greene also subscribes to the disproven, anti-democratic conspiracy QAnon that originated on 4Chan in 2017. Greene has called the anonymous poster “Q” a “patriot” and “worth listening to,” implicitly endorsing QAnon’s calls and predictions for mass arrests of Democrats and celebrities that are supposedly part of an international conspiracy to extract adrenochrome from children. Yet despite the initial misgivings of Republican leadership, no true effort has been made at punishing or even censuring Greene. Instead, Representative Liz Cheney, the third-ranking House Republican, seems almost certain to be punished for joining Democrats in impeaching Donald Trump, the central figure in the lie of a stolen election.

Trump has called Greene, encouraging her to keep up her assault on the transition of power. Greene raved about this to her more than 300,000 followers, saying “The blood-thirsty media and the socialists hate America.” To her supporters, Greene is not a conspiracy theorist but a prophet. One supporter, when interviewed by an NBC producer, posited that “Noah was a conspiracy theorist himself when he built the ark, so who are we to say that it’s true or not?”

Greene’s ark is not one of salvation, but rather an ark that takes acts of violence and racial supremacy on board two by two. Her theories endanger the lives of her colleagues each day she continues to be allowed within Congress’s halls, and her actions threaten to infect American democracy like terminal cancer. The choice is simple, impeach and remove Greene or be prepared for the next wave of white-supremacist, anti-democratic insurrectionists to be sworn in rather than storm in.