Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has set herself apart from other Donald Trump superfans in the Republican caucus through her lurid circulation of conspiracy theories, many of them racist. The most notorious one was a post suggesting that California wildfires had been set deliberately by space-based laser beams controlled by the Rothschilds, in order to clear land for rail stations (which were ultimately never built).
This belief is not (yet) official canon within the Republican Party, so Greene has been taking steps to distance herself from it. “This is a story that some leftist ‘journalist’ — really he’s an activist — wrote a hit piece on me and titled it ‘Jewish Space Lasers,’” Greene told Newsmax TV host Greg Kelly. “You know, the left-wing media, they just run the same lies over and over again and they call me an anti-Semite and say that I said something like Jewish space lasers, and I never did.”
To be clear, the story, which I wrote, did not say she used the words “Jewish space laser.” It accurately reproduced her entire post blaming the Rothschilds, and I noted that “the Rothschild family has featured heavily in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories since at least the 19th century.”
Greene now explains that she did not intend any anti-Semitic connotations. “I didn’t even know and didn’t find out until recently that the Rothschilds were Jewish,” she tells Ami magazine.
While any claim of ignorance by Greene has inherent plausibility, this hardly resolves the matter. She has also shared a video with a different classic anti-Semitic and explicitly racist conspiracy theory, claiming that “an unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists, and Zionist supremacists has schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation, with the deliberate aim of breeding us out of existence in our own homelands.”
Follow-up question: What about “Zionist supremacists”? Did she also not know they’re Jewish?
Even if we assume that Greene lacked familiarity with the not-very-thinly-veiled anti-Semitic undertones of that post, there still remains the fact that her underlying claim is completely bonkers. Greene’s explanation implies she was merely proposing that California’s wildfires had been deliberately set by space lasers controlled by a Gentile-run, or perhaps nondenominational, financial conspiracy.
Maybe the forest fires weren’t set by space lasers as part of a land-arbitrage scheme at all!
