Marjorie Taylor Greene has one noteworthy skill, and it has little to do with passing legislation: The former congresswoman knows how to make headlines. If she didn’t, she might not have won office at all. A 2019 story in Hatewatch, a publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center, traced her rise to Facebook, where she had unleashed conspiracy theories to a growing audience. She said that Representative Ilhan Omar had married her own brother; that Nancy Pelosi was “guilty of treason” and would “suffer death” or go to prison for her crimes against the American people; that the Parkland, Florida, school massacre was a “false flag” operation. In another video, she harassed Parkland survivor David Hogg, who, she claimed, did the bidding of Jewish philanthropist George Soros. Elsewhere, she said Soros was a “Nazi himself.” In other posts, she said that the Rothschilds had created a “laser beam or a light beam” in space and used it to cause wildfires in California and that Q, the godlike figure behind QAnon, was “a patriot.” That’s why she supported Donald Trump. “There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it,” she once said.

Greene has since deleted many of her old social-media posts and distanced herself from QAnon. The internet had “sucked” her in, she said in a 2023 interview with Fox News. Then she lied. “I never campaigned on those things. That was not something I believed in,” she told Howard Kurtz. Has Greene changed? She apparently wants people to think so. Over the past year, she has fashioned herself into a MAGA dissenter by attacking Trump over his tariffs, his bellicose foreign policy, and, most vocally, his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. In November, Trump revoked his endorsement of her; days later, Greene announced her resignation from the House. A Republican with Trump’s backing will now face a Democratic challenger in a runoff for her old seat. Greene is out of power, but neither she nor her party can outrun her ideas.

Now that Greene is gone, she is understood best as a limpet always clinging to a larger entity. She gravitated first toward the conspiracy world, then focused her efforts on the person of Donald Trump. In both cases, Greene made an existing phenomenon work to her benefit, which does not make her a grifter, exactly. There is no evidence she feigned any of her most violent and paranoid beliefs, nor has she disavowed them all. She apologized in November for posting a picture of herself with a gun next to a photo of Omar and the “Squad,” but that is not the same thing as a comprehensive mea culpa for her fringe and violent views. Last summer, she announced a congressional hearing on “weather modification” after some conservatives blamed floods in Texas on cloud seeding. A couple of months later, she told Bill Maher that aliens might be fallen angels.

Greene is far-out but not too far-out for today’s Republican Party. Though congressional Republicans condemned her when she first won office, she found surer footing as an ally of Trump and played a key role in the elevation of Kevin McCarthy, the short-lived Speaker of the House. McCarthy repaid the favor by appointing her to a subcommittee on the pandemic, which allowed her a new and visible opportunity to promote conspiracies about public health. She had a texting relationship with the president of the United States, or so she has claimed. Her rise mirrored the GOP’s descent into conspiracy land. The party could not marginalize Greene while embracing Trump, who once accused Senator Ted Cruz’s father of fraternizing with Lee Harvey Oswald. At the height of the pandemic, as Trump urged Americans to inject bleach, Greene railed against masking, and other Republicans forged an alliance with anti-vaccine activists across the country. Now Robert F. Kennedy Jr. preaches conspiracy from a position in the Cabinet.

In normalizing Greene, the GOP fell in line with the fringe, much as it has done in the past. Before Greene and MAGA, there was the tea party, which popularized paranoia with small-government conservative politics. In a now-infamous 2009 rant, Rick Santelli alleged that President Obama would “reward” bad financial decisions through foreclosure relief and that soon we’d end up like Cuba. Tea-party patriots understood what he meant: The first Black president did not work for them but for others; he’d stolen America and then given it away. That idea — that America was somehow being manipulated by outside forces — often accompanied other fringe theories about race, politics, and power. In The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, scholars Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson observed a tea-party activist in Virginia who linked “local sustainable planning efforts,” like bike paths, to “a grandiose, decadeslong, U.N.-hatched conspiracy” that would impose a “globalist totalitarian dictatorship” on the United States. Tea-party supporters fed on “a steady flow of programming” from various conservative groups and provided “a warm and largely unskeptical reception to ideas ranging from practical policies to conspiratorial visions,” Skocpol and Williamson wrote. We have this era and this movement to thank for the birther conspiracy, which claimed Barack Obama was not born in the United States and had presented a fake birth certificate to prove his eligibility for the presidency. Obama is long out of office, but the lie persists. Trump is a notorious birther, and last February, Greene boosted the same baseless theory.

The tea party is gone, but it refashioned the conservative movement, which absorbed it in the end. The same may prove true for MAGA and the conspiracists it has empowered, including Greene. She was never powerful enough to survive her conflict with Trump. Instead, she owes her career to the opportunism of the American right. Establishment conservatives deride the fringe, or downplay it, until it becomes a pathway to power. The birther conspiracy flourished because it was an appeal to racial hierarchy — a way to discredit a Black president and his policies. Greene may be a political liability now but only because she has criticized the god-king Trump and not because of her conspiracism. Antisemitism is gaining traction, and so is the racist paranoia she helped amplify. J.D. Vance accused Haitian immigrants of eating cats and dogs because it was convenient, not because it was true. Conservatives ranging from Trump to Charlie Kirk have professed versions of the “great replacement” theory, which says Democrats are importing voters via open borders. Last week, the Miami Herald reported that campus Republicans had shared racist memes in a group chat they called “Gooning in Agartha,” which is a reference to Nazi esoterica. To Heinrich Himmler, a leading Nazi, the lost civilization of Agartha was an Aryan utopia that proved the superiority of the white race. Agartha, of course, is a fantasy. But conspiracies leave material wreckage in their wake. Whatever Greene does next, her legacy is assured. We’ll be living with the fringe for a long time to come.

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