Marjorie Taylor Greene’s apocalypse
I wonder if Lauren Boebert got the memo. It turns out that sin, and not the perturbation of tectonic plates or the ordinary and predictable movement of planets, suns and moons, cause earthquakes and eclipses. That, anyway, is what the screeching MAGA cretin Marjorie Taylor Greene is claiming.
The 4.8-magnitude earthquake that rattled the New York City area on Friday was no ordinary earthquake, according to MAGA Marj, it was another warning from On High. “God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent,” Greene wrote on X, (formerly known as Twitter). “[E]arthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come.”
Recall that Greene also blamed California’s wildfires on Jewish space lasers. She also said that Democrats were intentionally setting fires to food processing plants, that mass shootings and 9/11 were “false flags,” and flooding at the 2023 Burning Man festival was God’s way of “making sure everyone knows who God is.” Greene is the self-anointed go-to “expert” on disasters.
I must make a point to ask my sister, who lost her home and everything she owns in the 2017 Santa Rosa fire, or my friends in New Jersey, whose home was damaged in Friday’s earthquake, if they’ve repented yet. I’m sure they’ll be relieved to know the REAL REASON for their personal calamity.
I would also like to acknowledge Republicans everywhere for remaining silent in the midst of Greene’s latest regurgitation of ignorance and bullshit. Their craven default approval is an exemplar for Republicans everywhere.
Meanwhile, I would like to submit to the Congresswoman from Georgia another possible explanation for the current mess we’re in. An alternative truth, if you will.
Rampant ignorance and mediaeval superstition are behind many of the problems we face today. When government representatives promote ignorance, make wild claims without evidence, give voice to nutjobs claiming the American government is hiding space aliens and spaceships, waste taxpayer money with investigations into innocent people, maybe it’s no accident that 2024 looks more like 1424.
It has long been a source of frustrated irony to me that so much anti-science nonsense is spread on that triumph of technology and the scientific method called the internet. Our tolerance — especially Republican tolerance — of unscientific idiocy can be measured in part by the absence of outrage at Marjorie Taylor Greene’s ignorant proclamation.
I have no quarrel per se with religion. I have a big quarrel with mixing religion and government. Joe Biden is a Catholic who leaves his Catholicism at home. So should it be with all in government. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.