How the "QAnon Candidate" Marjorie Taylor Greene Reached the Doorstep of Congress

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text: Charles.Bethea
@charlesbethea
Marjorie Greene may be a familiar name, but there's much more to know about her, her supporters & the district she'll represent. A deep-dive in NW Georgia, featuring mask-free rallies, QAnon, CrossFit, a billionaire's grandson, scared Republicans & more:

How the “QAnon Candidate” Marjorie Taylor Greene Reached the Doorstep of Congress
“There’s nothing she can do to lose my vote, unless she murdered a baby or something,” a local Republican official said. “Nothing.”
newyorker.com

https://www.newyorker.com/news/us-journal/how-the-qanon-candidate-marjorie-taylor-greene-reached-the-doorstep-of-congress

Georgia’s Fourteenth Congressional District was created by Republican legislators about a decade ago, after the 2010 census. It’s bordered by Tennessee to the north and Alabama to the west, with jagged lines in between—which reflect, in part, an effort to redraw the neighboring Ninth District around the home of a Republican congressman, Doug Collins. Except for Athens, where the University of Georgia is based, north Georgia is highly Republican, “largely because it has very few minorities, and if you don’t have minorities you have a Republican district there,” Charles Bullock III, a political-science professor at U.G.A., told me. “But the kinds of Republicans there may have changed.” The Fourteenth incorporates some of the old Seventh District, which, in the seventies and eighties, was represented, as Bullock put it, by a “paranoid urologist” named Larry McDonald. McDonald was a Democrat, but he was also one of the most conservative members of Congress and the second president of the John Birch Society, a group committed to the idea that the civil-rights movement was a Communist plot. In 1983, McDonald was on a Korean Airlines flight to Seoul that accidentally flew into Soviet airspace. “He was very much a Russian conspiracist,” Bullock said. “And, sure enough, the Russians shot down a plane he was on, and killed him.” An investigation concluded that the Soviets had most likely misidentified the aircraft as a U.S. spy plane.

Today, eighty-five per cent of the Fourteenth’s more than seven hundred thousand residents are white. Around fifteen per cent have graduated college, and most earn well below the national median income. The vast majority adhere to some version of Protestant Christianity, including a few unorthodox variations—one local believer described the area to me as “a greenhouse for heretical religious beliefs.” Three-quarters of the district’s residents voted for Donald Trump in 2016, and more than six thousand recently signed a petition to save a local statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Many politically active citizens in the area identify as Tea Party Republicans. “It’s never been a quiescent district,” Neill Herring, a lobbyist who grew up in Dalton, the district’s second-largest city, told me, citing an attempt by one of its counties, in 1860, to secede not only from the Union but from Georgia, too. Dalton, population thirty-three thousand, calls itself “the Carpet Capital of the world”—it has more than a hundred and fifty carpet plants employing tens of thousands of people. Slightly larger is Rome, a city in the center of the district which features a statue of Romulus and Remus—a gift from Mussolini, per local legend—whose naked bodies are occasionally diapered, in a show of modesty.

The Democratic Party has fielded a candidate in only three of the five congressional races held in the Fourteenth since it was created. The winner in each of those races was Tom Graves, a Republican, who announced, in December, that he would not seek reëlection. Daniel Eason, a former Delta Air Lines employee who lives in Rome and serves as the vice-chairman of candidate recruitment and membership for the Floyd County Democrats, told me it had been hard to find someone willing to run against Graves. The Party ran a candidate in 2018, but Eason couldn’t immediately recall his name. It was Steven Lamar Foster, a former physician who had not been vetted by the Party. His medical license had been suspended, it turned out, and he had been investigated by the U.S. Army years before. “Something to do with federal boats that he confiscated, for runs down to Central America,” Eason said. (Foster, who couldn’t be reached for comment, was doing charitable work in Honduras at the time; he was not convicted.) Foster also ran a nudist camp. “And he had a D.U.I. during the campaign,” Eason noted. In a drunken tirade during his arrest, Foster said, “I hate this county. I prayed to God that he would curse it. And guess what? He did.” “A truly wild candidacy,” Eason said. “We wound up being embarrassed he was even in the race.” Foster lost to Graves by fifty-three points, on the day he was released from jail.

This year, Eason helped the Party find a candidate with a clean record: a local I.T. specialist named Kevin Van Ausdal. When I first spoke to Eason, in early September, Van Ausdal was set to square off against Marjorie Taylor Greene, an entrepreneur who moved to the district only recently and who has, in the past, expressed a belief in QAnon, a sprawling set of delusional notions centered on the idea that President Trump is leading a fight against a “deep state” engaged in child sex trafficking, cannibalism, and Satan worship. Greene, who campaigns with a sort of aggro cheerfulness, has linked Hillary Clinton to pedophilia and human sacrifice and suggested that Barack Obama plotted to kill a Democratic operative with the help of MS-13. She described the 2018 midterms, which featured the victorious candidacies of Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, as “an Islamic invasion of our government.” Greene has also said that Americans now have “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out.”

*snip*

[CrispyQ]

1. How nice she got a PPP loan to finance her campaign.

I guess since that's not killing a baby, her supporters are OK with that.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142601214

Go crawl back under your fucking rock, you whacked out POS.

[bullimiami]

2. Refuse to seat her until she is prosecuted for stealing ppp money.