Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jewish Space Lasers & Anti-Semitism Within the White Nationalist Movement

Historians in the future will look back at this era of Republican politics and wonder if someone laced their coffee with LSD, perhaps at a CPAC conference. Political Scientists look on with a mixture of horror and amusement as the GOP sinks further into the muck of QAnon, stolen elections, Bill Gates virus hoaxes, deep state cabals, and now Jewish space lasers.

Newly elected Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of GA is becoming the post-Trump face of the GOP by being just a bit more crazy than her colleagues, and that is saying something. Her theory seems to be that there just isn't any hoax too nuts for the Trumpists in her party.

New York Times: "The Georgia freshman is best known for endorsing QAnon, the right-wing movement convinced of the fiction that Donald Trump is a messiah sent to defeat a cabal of Satan-worshiping, child-abusing, deep-state villains. But this is just one of the bizarre lies she has peddled. Her greatest hits include promoting the conspiracy theory that blames the 2018 Camp Fire wildfire in California on a space laser controlled by a prominent Jewish banking family, suggesting the Obama administration used its MS-13 “henchmen” to murder a Democratic National Committee staff member and floating the idea that the Clintons had John F. Kennedy Jr. killed. She has dabbled in 9/11 Trutherism and contended that various school shootings were false-flag operations. She also traffics in racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim talk."

Her "Jewish space laser" nonsense, however, is her pièce de résistance, the wackiest of all her wacky conspiracy theories, her injectable disinfectant moment. And, it also exemplifies the dark and sometimes hidden anti-Semitism within QAnon and America's white nationalist movement.

VOX: "First-term Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claim that the 2018 California wildfires were ignited by a space laser controlled by a corporate cabal, including the Rothschild banking firm, is objectively ridiculous. It’s okay to laugh about it."

"And yet it is, at the same time, kind of horrifying. It’s the latest in a long line of conspiracies about the Rothschild family, and those conspiracies are always, at root, anti-Semitic: Since the 19th century, people have used claims that this one particular wealthy family controls the world to cast aspersions on Jews in general."

The Conversation: "Calls to exterminate Jews are common in far-right and white nationalist circles. For example, the conspiracy theorists of QAnon, who hold “that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who are plotting against Mr. Trump,” traffic in it regularly."... "More commonly, including in recent days, QAnon has targeted Jewish billionaire philanthropist and investor George Soros, whom it portrays as the primary figure shaping and controlling world events. A century ago, the Rothschilds, a family of Jewish bankers, was depicted in much the same way."

So, yes, it's fine to laugh at Marjorie Taylor Greene but realize that her anti-Semitic messages are meant to resonate with a particularly ugly sub-group within America's growing white nationalist movement.

Professor Jonathan Sarna's piece in the Conversation is a really good primer on the history of anti-Semitism and white nationalism. You can read it here.

#news #politics #whitenationalism

By: Don Lam & Curated Content