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Why Marjorie Taylor Greene Just Championed Louis Farrakhan

The 2021 anti-vax crossover nobody asked for

By Yair Rosenberg
Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene
Getty

GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has seldom met a conspiracy theory she wouldn’t tweet. She’s shared 9/11 myths, declared that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim, and even liked a tweet suggesting that Israel’s Mossad was behind the assassination of JFK. Most notoriously, however, she claimed that the Jewish Rothschild banking dynasty was setting forest fires with a secret space laser.

It’s hard to top a track record like this. But today, Greene found a way. In a 17-tweet thread against COVID-19 vaccination and mandates, she cited an unusual authority in support of her position: infamous anti-Semitic hate preacher Louis Farrakhan.

On the surface, this anti-vax alliance might appear confusing. What does a white Christian woman from Georgia have in common with the Black leader of the Nation of Islam? How did the two somehow end up on the same team? But the answer is simple: They are both conspiracy theorists, and as I’ve written, anti-Semitism is the ultimate conspiratorial glue that brings everyone together:

As long as there are conspiracy theorists seeking scapegoats to blame for the nation’s problems, there will be anti-Semites. That’s because anti-Semitism is the world’s biggest and most durable conspiracy theory. It constructs itself as the ultimate explanation for how the world works, and blames powerful shadowy Jewish figures for all problems…

The reason figures like the Rothschilds or the fictional Elders of Zion remain salient targets even today is that any conspiracy theorist seeking someone to blame for the world’s ills is just one Google search away from centuries of literature telling them that that someone is “the Jews.” In other words, you might start out as a free agent conspiracy theorist with no particular problem with Jews, but the deeper you dive into this world, the more likely you’ll ultimately land on Jewish people as the ultimate culprits. Many conspiracy theories have followed this trajectory to anti-Semitism, from David Icke’s bizarre ravings about Illuminati lizard people and “Rothschild Zionists” to QAnon today.

Simply put, once a person like Greene has decided that an invisible hand is behind the world’s problems, it’s only a matter of time before they decide it belongs to an invisible Jew.

This is equally true for Farrakhan, who, like Greene, has railed against the Rothschilds, and whose “anti-Semitism is more or less the same old anti-Jewish arguments and conspiracies, repurposed as a way to blame Jews as the architects of white supremacy,” in the words of my colleague Adam Serwer. As reactionary conspiracy theorists, Greene and Farrakhan see the world in remarkably similar ways.

What’s surprising is not that they’ve found common cause, but that it took them this long to find each other.

Artist’s rendering of the Jewish space laser moving to target Marjorie Taylor Greene and her new BFF (Getty)

In any case, Greene’s continued forays into the anti-Semitic fever-swamp raise many questions, like: Will the Republicans who so loudly condemned the co-chairs of the Women’s March for their well-documented Farrakhan fandom condemn their own lawmaker for the same? Will those progressives who apologized for or ignored the conduct of the Women’s March co-chairs feel any shame when they suddenly assert that actually, Farrakhan is bad? And finally, why hasn’t Greene been zapped by the space laser yet?

I’m not optimistic about the answers to the first two questions, but this incident is a good reminder to the rest of us that the only way we are going to beat anti-Semitism is if we condemn it based on principle, not partisanship.

To the last question, though, the answer is obvious: The Jews and their God have terrible aim. As the old joke goes:

A rabbi and a priest go golfing, but the rabbi keeps missing his shots. Whenever this happens, he angrily exclaims, “Goddammit, I missed!” At each hole, the rabbi swears, and at each hole, the priest shakes his head. Finally, on the final hole, the exasperated priest declares, “Rabbi, if you continue with this disrespect for the Lord’s name, so help me, may He strike you down right here on the green.” The rabbi swings, misses, and swears. Suddenly, a lightning bolt descends and incinerates the priest. A heavenly voice then cries out, “Goddammit, I missed!”

Even so, I wouldn’t stand too close to Greene on Capitol Hill. Just to be safe.

As always, send your tips, comments, and targets thoughts to deepshtetl@theatlantic.com.

Yair Rosenberg is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Deep Shtetl, about the intersection of politics, culture, and religion.