Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Turning Her ‘Cancellation’ Into a Cash Grab

QAnon congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene might not have a lot to do in the House after being stripped of her committee roles, but that’ll just give her more time to swim around in the cash she’s raised off being an unrepentant conspiracy-theory peddler. 

On Wednesday, Greene was formally removed from the House Budget and Education committees she’d been assigned to on a mostly party-line vote, a move that will take her out of one of the main duties of her job. Before the vote, Greene made a speech where she tried to walk back her past comments and embrace of conspiracy theories. But she couldn’t keep it up for long, at one point equating the mainstream media to QAnon, arguing that both spread misinformation.

“When I say that I absolutely believe with all my heart that God's creation created male and female, when I am censured for saying those types of things, that is wrong,” Greene said at one point.

Greene predictably sent out a fundraising plea Wednesday downplaying her own comments, and asking why House Democrats instead don’t censure their own members, including Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib.

In the fundraising pitch, Greene outright lied about the members of the House progressive “Squad,” including making the obviously false claim that Ocasio-Cortez “encouraged protestors to ‘punch a cop,’” and falsely claiming Omar has called for the “eradication of Israel” and that Tlaib has “known ties to terrorists in Hezbollah” because the Palestinian-American congresswoman once posed for a photo with a man who has praised Hezbollah. (Tlaib said she didn’t known the man, denounced his statements, and said it’s “obvious he thrives on media attention from his recent posts.”)

Greene also claimed her expulsion from the committees was revenge, rather than a consequence of harassing victims of the Parkland shooting, liking Facebook comments calling for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s death, saying Omar and Tlaib (who were born in Somalia and Detroit, respectively) “really should go back to the Middle East,” and blaming wildfires in California on Jewish space lasers.

“This is all retribution because they know I still question the results of the 2020 election and I filed my bill to impeach Joe Biden last month,” Greene said in the fundraising pitch. “This is how the swamp treats people who stand up to them, because we stand up for YOU.” 

“So please remember, they are coming after me because I am standing up for you,” the pitch read. “We need to stick together. Please donate today.”

Of the half of Americans who’ve heard of her, Greene’s approval rating is underwater at 37% disapproval and 15% approval, a FiveThirtyEight average of three recent polls on Greene and other Republicans found. 

But even as she’s unpopular nationally, Greene’s attempt to grift for campaign dollars off her own removal for being a crank is working, according to Greene. Greene told the Washington Examiner this week that she’d raised more than $300,000 in the two days leading up to her removal, and last month she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she had raised $1.6 million after calls for her expulsion from Congress. 

Taken together, that’s nearly as much as Greene raised from contributions during her entire 2020 campaign, which she won unopposed, and could help pay off a $950,000 loan from that campaign. It could also form the basis for a run for higher office—after all, Georgia has another Senate election next year.