Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has long been an exquisite paranoiac. In November, 2017, she posted a video to Facebook. “There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out,” she said on the now-deleted video, adding, “I think we have the president to do it.”
Greene’s Satanic panic, and her faith in Trump, may have been misplaced. But her anxieties about a far-flung child-rape network were not too far off. Like the rest of us, Greene has been confronted by the sordid Jeffrey Epstein emails, which implicate in his abuse web a startling cadre of white, patriarchal elites, from anarcho-syndicalist Noam Chomsky to neoliberal Larry Summers to uber-nationalist Steve Bannon to Saudi authoritarian Mohammad bin Salman.
At the same time, Trump, who Greene and many on the far right had hoped would destroy a child-rape network, seems to be one of them. “Of course he knew about the girls,” wrote Epstein about Trump in an email from December 2019.
And so the resignation letter Greene dropped on Friday, a see-ya-never bombshell announcing she’s quitting Washington, is a rich text. For one, it prophesizes the collapse of the GOP into “Neocons, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Military Industrial War Complex, foreign leaders, and the elite donor class.” But its message is also simple. MAGA’s long-suffering trad wives, male and female, are no longer standing by their man.
Instead, they’re protecting the kids.
“I refuse to be a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better,” Greene wrote. “Standing up for American women who were raped at 14, trafficked and used by rich powerful men, should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the president of the United States, whom I fought for.”
In quitting Congress, Greene has thus slipped the moral knot that still seems to strangle many on the MAGA right. Sympathizers with QAnon, the woolly crusade against global pedophiles that seized the minds of fully one quarter of Republicans as recently as 2021, are confronted with the exposure of an actual global network of pedophiles. And Trump isn’t in the least preparing to bust it, because he’s mired in it. “There is no ‘plan to save the world’ or insane 4D chess game being played,” Greene wrote.
Greene’s hasty exit may have surprised those casual observers who see her as nothing more than a shill for Trump. Online, it was another story. To the 4chan stans who’ve been chronicling the crash-out of MAGA for months—over Israel and Epstein—it was no surprise at all.
For one, it’s not even the first time Greene has left a powerful institution for enabling child sexual abuse. Years ago, when Greene became a mother, she “realized,” according to her later statement about the Catholic Church, “that I could not trust the Church leadership to protect my children from pedophiles, and that they harbored monsters even in their own ranks.”
She’s also been tilting away from MAGA and toward America First for quite some time. “Watch for ‘AFAO’ hats lol,” a TikTok friend texted me the second Greene’s letter dropped. “America First America Only” is Greene’s own slogan, and some of those who embrace it now disdain Trump’s movement as MIGA—Make Israel Great Again. “I’m definitely concerned about a foreign country’s influence on our own,” Greene told Megyn Kelly in August. The recent unmasking of top MAGA influencers as trolls in Russia, India, and Nigeria is surely doing little to appease her fear that MAGA has become a foreign op.
The background here can seem opaque, so let’s keep it concise. With the murder of Charlie Kirk in September, an isolationist, antisemitic clique calling itself “America First” started to check out of MAGA, which they saw as too beholden to Israel and even obscurely involved in Kirk’s assassination. This group was composed largely of bellicose and antisemitic ethnostaters like Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson. These influencers make up in online authority what they lack in legislative power.
In moving closer to them, Greene is also showing her frustration with the MAGA-controlled legislature. In her letter, she faults MAGA for disempowering Congress with the shutdown and the continued support for foreign wars, while her own right-wing domestic bills—which, to be clear, exist to smite social justice initiatives—sit “collecting dust.” Her paranoia, which has often served her well, clicked into high gear.
Recently on “Breaking Point,” Bill Maher asked Greene what she thinks of the fact that many in Trump’s inner circle, including Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller, are now living on military bases. In a striking reaction shot, Greene absorbed the news with visible fear: “I’m one of those people they call a conspiracy theorist. When I hear something like that, I think, ‘What do they know that I don’t know?’”
Read the resignation letter closely and it’s clear Greene is simply done with all of the men she sees as barbarous aristocrats, from American oligarchs to foreign leaders. “Corporate and global interests remain Washington’s sweethearts [and] Americans’ hard earned tax dollars always fund foreign wars, foreign aid, and foreign interests,” she wrote. “No matter which way the political pendulum swings, Republican or Democrat, nothing ever gets better for the common American man or woman.”
That addition of “woman” may sound somewhat less than woke. But it’s surprisingly radical in her patriarchal party—and it’s key to understanding Greene’s break with MAGA. For all her superstitions and bigotry, Greene has become a heroine to the women Epstein trafficked, abused, and outmaneuvered as girls—the minors Epstein maintained Trump “knew about.” On November 18, the day after Trump had called Greene a “traitor” for insisting he come clean about his Epstein ties, she stood like a mama bear, maybe even an avenging angel, surrounded by a big group of those survivors.
“I want to speak goodness and love and hope into the women standing behind me and all of the other survivors whose names you don’t even know but stand with these women,” she said. “They are survivors and they are strong and they are courageous and they are daughters of God.”
Greene seemed more serene and expansive and even blessed than she ever has. She didn’t seem paranoid anymore, or the least bit afraid. Perhaps it’s because she’s already scouted out a new home with the marquee groypers, including their leader, Nick Fuentes. At the very least, she’s refusing to condemn Fuentes, and Fuentes, in return, is giving Greene flowers on X. So whatever comes after MAGA for Greene, there’s strong chance it will be worse.
