Tag: politics

How Marjorie Taylor Greene Went From QAnon Acolyte to MAGA Exile

Pundits have offered elaborate explanations for the evolving views of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican whose resignation from Congress takes effect today, but I don’t think you need a detailed theory to explain this woman’s journey from QAnon acolyte to MAGA exile. You just need to recognize one central fact about her: She actually believes things. Some of the things she’s believed are absurd, but that’s secondary. She has beliefs, and she’s willing—not always, but more often than the average D.C. pol—to put those beliefs ahead of other considerations.

You could already catch a hint of this during Greene’s original 2020 congressional campaign. Back then, she attracted national attention for her past interest in QAnon, a tapestry of conspiracy theories in which President Donald Trump was supposedly secretly working with special counsel Robert Mueller to defeat a cabal of elite satanic pedophiles who consume children’s blood. In those days, articles about Greene frequently linked her to another Q-friendly figure, the Colorado congressional candidate Lauren Boebert, who entered the House at the same time as Greene and eventually had a contentious falling out with her. (Greene was booted from the Freedom Caucus after she reportedly called Boebert a “little bitch.”) But even in 2020, anyone paying close attention could have seen an important difference between the two candidates. Greene had actually embraced the Q worldview (though she insisted that she had come to reject it). Boebert, asked about QAnon on the conspiracist show Steel Truth, had replied by saying she “hope[d] that this is real”—a statement delicately phrased to appeal to the Q-ish voting bloc without committing her to its worldview. Boebert was playing a cynical political game. Greene, for better or for worse, was a believer.

Not just a believer: a particular kind of believer. Most Americans don’t spend their lives soaking up the dogmas of the two big parties’ competing fan bases. To the extent that they pay attention to politics, they often adopt their views piecemeal, mixing opinions from the left and the right and, sometimes, from strange folks on the fringes. So you might be, say, an affluent woman in an Atlanta suburb, founder of a CrossFit gym, who rarely reads the op-ed pages of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal but scrolls frequently through Facebook, absorbing rumors that the typical Times or Journal reader might regard as nuts. That was Greene, part normie and part weird—weird, in fact, because she was so normal.

The most infamous idea Greene expressed in her pre-congressional days came in 2018, when she wrote a Facebook post blaming that year’s California wildfires on space lasers controlled by the Rothschild banking family. The Rothschilds play a starring role in many antisemitic conspiracy theories, so when Greene’s post resurfaced in 2021, many people concluded the congresswoman was not merely loopy but an antisemite. Greene responded that she simply hadn’t known that the Rothschilds are Jewish. Maybe she really didn’t know, or maybe that was a lie. But if any congressperson could plausibly claim such naivete, it would be Greene. This wasn’t the Rothschild tale of someone who grew up surrounded by anti-Jewish folklore; it was the Rothschild tale of someone surrounded by folklore that had fallen out of its original context and floated like driftwood in a digital sea.

Sometimes someone with that sort of background comes to Washington, gets acclimated, and drops those early influences like a striver carefully eliminating every trace of his hometown’s accent. But Greene didn’t. She kept believing things, and that led to trouble with her party.

Even during Donald Trump’s first stint in the White House, you could see a simmering tension between two types of MAGA—the kind that was basically just pro-Trump, and a wilder, woolier bundle of Trump-era currents on the populist right. (One way to tell the difference: Check whether someone’s skepticism about the national security state disappears when the three-letter agencies pursue people not named Trump.) Greene was, along with Florida’s Matt Gaetz, the most notable Republican from the second group to have made it to Congress. Their views did not always track with the party line, particularly when it came to foreign policy. Greene once joined Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a self-described socialist from Michigan, in signing a letter asking the government to drop the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and she did it the very same week she joined a Republican push to censure Tlaib for some comments about Israel.

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EU official plotted to ‘organise resistance’ against Hungary’s Orban, files show

As the EU has sought to prolong the Ukraine proxy war, expropriate frozen Russian assets, and enlarge the bloc at any cost, Viktor Orban’s Hungary opposed it at every turn. Now, with his support teetering, leaked documents reveal a major EU official plotted a long-term covert campaign to oust him.

A senior EU official has been secretly seeking to remove Hungarian President Viktor Orban since at least 2019, according to leaked documents reviewed by The Grayzone. The files show in January 2019, the International Coordinator for the Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs, Marton Benedek, authored a “project proposal” aimed at “developing a permanent coordination forum to organise resistance against the Orban regime.” In addition to his role at the European border control agency, Benedek currently heads Brussels’ “cooperation” with Libya.

Read Benedek’s anti-Orban project proposal here.

The impetus for Benedek’s plot was “an unprecedented set of anti-regime demonstrations in Hungary and among expat Hungarians” over controversial proposed legislation allowing businesses to compel employees to work overtime, and delay payment of their wages for an extended period. Thousands took to the streets before and after its implementation.

According to Benedek, outrage over what he referred to as “the slave law” had “compelled a small group of some 30 political, trade union and civic leaders to coordinate their activities, agree on a set of minimum objectives and funding principles, and jointly plan future action.” This had given birth to “an ad hoc coordination forum… which could develop, over time, into an incipient political coordinating body that could credibly challenge” Orban’s rule.

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Watch Zohran Mamdani’s Crazy Tenant Advocate Explain How She Thinks Collectivized Housing Will Work

Another video has surfaced of Zohran Mamdani’s tenant advocate Cea Weaver. In the last one, she claimed that home ownership is a form of white supremacy.

In this one, she explains how she believes collectivized housing would work. This has to be seen to be believed.

It’s like listening to a seven year-old talk about how to do real estate in a way that’s ‘fair’ to everyone.

This is apparently from an interview she did with the folks at Reason Magazine in 2021, in which she says:

“What I am envisioning, is a world in which the housing is owned by a collective and people are paying 30% of their income in order to live in their housing. If your income is zero, you pay zero. If your income is $500,000 a year, you’re paying 30% of that. And the government is providing the sort of… the government is sort of owner, or not even owner, the government doesn’t have to be the owner but the government is making sure all of that sort of works and cash flows.”

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Reality TV Star Spencer Pratt Announces Los Angeles Mayoral Bid, Vows to ‘Expose the System’

Reality television star Spencer Pratt is taking the city of Los Angeles to task, as he launches a mayoral bid one year after losing his home in the destructive Palisades wildfire.

Pratt, 42, announced his campaign for office while delivering remarks at the “They Let Us Burn” rally set up by the Palisades Fire Residents Coalition on Jan. 7.

“It’s official,” Pratt captioned the video of his speech posted on X. “I’m running for Mayor of LA. I’ve waited a whole year for someone to step up and challenge Karen Bass, but I saw no fighters. Guess I’m gonna have to do this myself.”

The rally landed on the anniversary of the wildfire in the Pacific Palisades, which burned more than 23,000 acres and destroyed 6,837 structures. Twelve people lost their lives.

Pratt gathered alongside other residents in demanding accountability from California leaders and local agencies, who they say have not made progress in creating a clear prevention plan or taking other precautionary actions.

“The system in Los Angeles isn’t struggling, it’s fundamentally broken,” Pratt told a crowd of fire survivors and rallygoers. “It is a machine designed to protect the people at the top and the friends they exchange favors with while the rest of us drown in toxic smoke and ash.”

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Vivek Ramaswamy’s bodyguard hit with federal drug trafficking charges over fentanyl and meth dealing allegations

Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s family bodyguard was arrested last week and hit with federal drug trafficking charges after authorities found pills containing fentanyl, methamphetamine and MDMA, as well as steroids, at the home he shared with his bodybuilder wife. 

Justin Salsburey, 43, and his wife, Ruthann Rankin, were taken into custody on Dec. 30, following the execution of a search warrant that allegedly discovered a trove of illegal drugs – some stashed in nicotine pouch containers – at the couple’s home, jail records and court documents show. 

Salsburey was employed by a private security firm contracted by Ramaswamy’s family to provide protective services, a campaign spokesperson told The Post, noting that the family was “alarmed to hear this disturbing news.” 

“Upon being informed of this matter in recent days, the outside security firm immediately removed the individual from the security detail,” Connie Luck, a spokesperson for the Republican gubernatorial candidate, said.  

“Prior to employment, the individual cleared multiple background checks conducted by the security company, as well as FBI and BCI background checks, most recently conducted by OSU Medical Center in September 2025,” Luck continued.

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In An Attempt To Smear Trump The Left Is Butchering Ancient History

“Ancient Sparta explains 2026,” Ishaan Tharoor asserted in a Dec. 30 column for The Washington Post. Readers at first glance might be deceived into thinking Tharoor’s analysis would offer insightful commentary about the continued relevance of ancient Greece. But no.

“Myths of Sparta,” claimed Tharoor, “shadow” the rhetoric of the right, which, he said, implicitly carries themes aligned with fascism and even eugenics. Beyond straining the credulity of his readers, Tharoor’s tired analysis suggests that perhaps a good New Year’s resolution for the left would be to abandon ridiculous historical analogies that ironically say more about their liberal promoters than they do about contemporary conservatives.

Trying (and Failing) to Connect MAGA to Hitler via Sparta

Prominent on Tharoor’s list of supposed champions of the ancient militarized slave-based oligarchy of Sparta is Pete Hegseth. The War Department secretary, Tharoor argued, “openly channels supposed Spartan values when he extols the newfound ‘warrior ethos’ of the Trump administration, tightens the Pentagon’s standards for grooming and physical fitness and links the mission of the U.S. military more closely to the White House’s political agenda.” A Google search failed to find a single example of Hegseth talking about Sparta since he assumed office. And if promoting physical fitness standards is “Spartan,” then so is Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign.

Yet Tharoor soldiered on with his faulty analogy: “The waning of the postwar ‘rules-based’ order and the apparent retreat of globalization — sped, in part, by President Donald Trump’s trade wars — has returned us to a kind of ‘Spartan’ moment, some analysts say.” He cites Swedish economic historian Johan Norberg: “There’s very much the Spartan mentality — that the world is a zero-sum game, and if somebody else benefits, you’re worse off. And that seems to be the Trumpian worldview as well, and why Sparta is an ideal for people on the MAGA right.”

Now I could be wrong, but I doubt Trump spends much time thinking about Thermopylae.

Failing to identify any obvious examples of conservatives embracing a “Spartan worldview,” Tharoor (surprise!) returned to Jan. 6. He noted that “some rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, wore Sparta-themed helmets. They also flew flags emblazoned with the Spartan idiom ‘Molon Labe.’” He also indicted gun owners: “U.S. gun rights activists invoke ‘Molon Labe’ as a slogan, a rejection of anyone who would contravene their Second Amendment freedoms.”

Thus did Tharoor make his tenuous connection: A single appropriated Spartan slogan and a few Sparta-themed helmets at a rally from five years ago are enough for him to associate conservatives with the Nazis, given that Hitler admired the Greek city-state for destroying “sick, weak, deformed children.” This comparison is beyond risible — it is sick, given that it is the contemporary left’s pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia policies that are a threat to vulnerable children, whose “quality of life” is deemed insufficiently worthy of being saved. Approximately two-thirds of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome in the womb, for example, are aborted in the United States.

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Democrats’ Faux-Masculinity Superhero Tim Walz Implodes

Tim Walz dropping out of Minnesota’s gubernatorial race hearkens back to the early days of the Harris-Walz 2024 ticket. Less than a week after Kamala Harris secured the Democrat presidential nomination, she selected Walz as her running mate. In Democrats’ imagination, the Minnesota governor would magically sweep the working class, rural voters, and men into the fold like Joe Biden 2.0, all while serving as the Democrat model of manhood — an obsequious, plushie personality nearly entirely feminine in nature, with a few accoutrements of manhood tacked on. Mercifully, the plan failed, along with the Harris-Walz candidacy.

The leftist faux man failed then too, with Trump winning men by a wide margin, but Walz’s resignation from the race for governor is the formal confirmation of that failure, the last sputter in his puttering tenure as Dem comic book star. Democrats won’t let go of their perverted concept of manhood, but it’s a bust as a political tool.

Notably, the welfare fraud dumpster fire that finally sank Walz is really a feature, not a bug, of leftist masculinity. Filled with “compassion” and “Minnesota nice,” Walz oversaw the shoveling of billions of dollars into the coffers of Minnesota’s Somali population, and even on his way out, he touted a new welfare program rife with more fraud opportunities. But that’s exactly what the ideal leftist man does. Forking over taxpayer dollars, whether to spoon-feed the insatiable appetite of “empathy” or atone for colonialist escapades (U.S. or otherwise), is an essential duty. To do so to any lesser degree — even to benefit U.S. citizens — is a cardinal sin that will ostensibly lead to the deaths of millions.

As Democrats’ apex male protagonist, Walz engaged performatively in numerous other activities, such as installing tampons in men’s bathrooms. He also pushed through legislative revisions removing protections for babies born alive after failed abortions — in a state where babies so-called “doctors” tried to kill were already being left to die anyway. He also signed off on driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, along with taxpayer-funded health care (a measure he’s since repealed). He made Minnesota a sanctuary state for trans-identifying children, inserting himself in parent-child relationships as a fierce proponent of permanent bodily mutilation. Less significantly, Walz spent the 2024 campaign overzealously hurrahing Harris like an insecure male cheerleader desperate not to steal her thunder.

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Federal prosecutors launch new probe into NY AG Letitia James involving campaign payments to longtime hairdresser: report

Federal prosecutors have opened a new probe into New York state Attorney General Letitia James, connected to past campaign payments to her longtime hairdresser, who was indicted in Louisiana last month on bank fraud charges.

Investigators are looking into a total of $36,000 that James’ campaign paid Iyesata Marsh, owner of a Brooklyn hair salon and an event manager, between May 2018 and February 2019 during the AG’s successful re-election bid, according to sources and reports.

Roughly $22,000 of the payments were for using Marsh’s studio as a campaign office for the last four months of James’ campaign, according to a past Wall Street Journal report.

People familiar with the probe told the New York Times — which first reported the new investigation, along with CBS News — that prosecutors want to talk with Marsh about past financial transactions involving James and her campaign.

The probe, which is in its early stages, according to the Times, comes as other efforts by the Department of Justice to secure an indictment against James for a separate mortgage fraud allegation failed to stick.

Marsh, of Queens, was indicted by Louisiana federal prosecutors last month on charges of bank fraud and aggravated identity theft tied to the purchase of a Land Rover, according to court documents. 

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Roy Cohn: From ‘Red Scare’ Prosecutor to Donald Trump’s Mentor

There are certain behind-the-scenes figures in American politics who, like Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, seem to turn up everywhere. One of the most notorious is Roy Cohn, a man whose influence spans several decades of hot button issues, Republican politicians and LGBT history.

Cohn was a prosecutor in the Rosenberg spy trial, chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, a close friend to Nancy Reagan and a personal lawyer for Donald Trump. He was also a closeted gay man who helped purge suspected gay and lesbian employees from the government. Cohn died from AIDS-related complications in 1986, and afterwards was portrayed in the 1990s Broadway play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.

McCarthyism and the Lavender Scare

Roy Cohn entered the spotlight early. At age 23, he was a prosecutor on the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were convicted of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union in 1951 and executed by electric chair two years later. This gained him attention from two fervent anti-communists: longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Cohn became chief counsel to McCarthy as well as a chief architect of what we now call “McCarthyism”—the interrogation and purging of federal employees based on McCarthy’s unsupported claim that the government was filled with communists. In addition to this very public Second Red Scare, Cohn and McCarthy also led the less-public Lavender Scare against federal employees suspected of being gay.

It’s unknown how many employees the Lavender Scare forced out between the late ‘40s and early ‘60s, but the number is likely in the thousands. Like communists, McCarthy considered gay people security risks because of their supposed mental instability.

“In lavender Washington, Cohn was known as both a closeted homosexual and homophobic, among those leading the charge against supposedly gay witnesses who he and others believed should lose their government jobs because they were ‘security risks,’” writes journalist Marie Brenner in Vanity Fair.

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World War III Unfolding Before Our Eyes

The Neocons have won. Taking Venezuela followed the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis agenda to prevent Russia from installing nukes as a countermeasure for Ukraine. There are now even discussions about using military force to seize Greenland, but the most audacious direct slap in the face to Russia is the seizing of a tanker with a Russian flag, and Putin assumed would be enough to warn the US to keep its hands off it.

Russia had staked its reputation and geopolitical credibility on conferring official protection on the shadow-fleet oil tanker the Neocons pushing for WWIII have pursued with total disregard for the consequences. As the more than two-week pursuit of Bella 1 unfolded, Russia re-flagged the vessel with its own colors, renamed it the Marinera, and added it to an official Russian ship database. The Neocons do not give a shit. What they hell, they send other people’s children to die – never themselves. The re-flagging to a Russian ship was assumed it would say hands off or war. The Neocons want war. This is about the total destruction of Russia which they have been dreaming about since childhood. People like John Bolton joined the National Guard so he did not have to go to Vietnam.

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