If you’ve ever listened to Georgia Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene speak or read one of her tweets, you’ve probably wondered: How did someone this completely unfit and unprepared for office ever get elected in the first place?
The answer, of course, is that Greene’s constituents in her North Georgia district elected her, and talking to some of them makes it painfully clear that they support her because they’re just as deranged as the person they voted for.
Stephanie McCrummen of the Washington Post recently paid a visit to the 14th congressional district of Georgia, and what she found is like something out of a novel written by Carson McCullers or Flannery O’Connor, filled with oddball characters and a level of Southern gothic that borders on absolute insanity.
Angela Rubino goes by the moniker “Burnitdown” in her online postings, and McCrummen spent some time with her while in the 14th, reporting:
Six years into the grass-roots movement unleashed by Donald Trump in his first presidential campaign, Angela Rubino is a case study in what that movement is becoming. Suspicious of almost everything, trusting of almost nothing, believing in almost no one other than those who share her unease, she has in many ways become a citizen of a parallel America — not just red America, but another America entirely, one she believes to be awash in domestic enemies, stolen elections, immigrant invaders, sexual predators, the machinations of a global elite and other fresh nightmares revealed by the minute on her social media scrolls.
Rubino, to put it simply, all but worships Greene:
In Greene, she did not see what much of America saw — a person willing to do almost anything to keep emotions running high, whether that meant perpetuating lies about election fraud, harassing a victim of a school shooting, speaking at a white nationalist conference or casting fellow citizens who disagree with her as ‘domestic terrorists.’ Instead, Rubino saw a person like herself: a political outsider who shared the same sense of urgency about the same dystopian America, one that required a popular uprising to save it.
Oh, and the people Rubino associates with are (as you’d expect) just as demented as her, as McCrummen discovered when she joined a vote canvas:
There was a military contractor who said he’d been reading a Russian book about CIA-sponsored regime change operations, which he believed included the last U.S. presidential election. There were women who believed public schools were indoctrinating children with left-wing ideology. Retirees who believed the coronavirus was a bioweapon. A mechanic who wore ear buds all day streaming ‘War Room,’ a podcast in which former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon was urging people to take over local Republican parties.
But perhaps the most disturbing thing Rubino said during the time McCrummen was with her is this tidbit she shared with a friend of hers, Melissa Smith:
“Did you ever see that clip about Hillary Clinton where she cut a girl’s face off and she wore it?” said Rubino, referring to one of the fake videos of the type always coming across her social media scroll. “I could hardly watch.”
How did Greene respond to Rubino when they met at a primary night event for the congresswoman? The encounter was a bit like two visitors from space as they bonded in mutual admiration:
Greene smiled and told people that instead of giving an off-the-cuff speech, she had written one out for once. And so in the more careful and polished manner of a leader on the rise, she began describing the America that Rubino believed in more and more, one at war with “globalists” and the “democratic communist agenda” and elites who “look down on us” and “hate us.”
She listened as Greene spoke of an “American revival.” She nodded along as Greene said, “It is we who will set the public agenda for the next decade.”
How did Marjorie Taylor Greene get elected? By pandering to people even more deranged and profoundly ignorant than she is.