It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single person in possession of a belief in one really stupid conspiracy must also believe in a bunch of other, equally stupid conspiracy theories. Like potato chips, you can't have just one. You can't just believe in chemtrails or QAnon or a flat earth or that you have a bunch of alien hybrid babies somewhere floating around the universe, you have to also believe that orgone or vinegar can protect you from said chemtrails, that satanic ritual abuse is real, that the moon landing was faked or that you can activate your alien starseed DNA by listening to techno on YouTube.
Sometimes this is simple maintenance. In order to believe in one very stupid thing is true, you have to believe in a bunch of other stupid things that support that belief. Sometimes it's just general crank magnetism. Once you decide one impossible thing is true, other impossible things seem a lot more plausible.
Thus, it should not surprise you at all to learn that Marjorie Taylor Greene, the woman most likely to become the first QAnon nutbag in Congress, was also a 9/11 truther who believed Barack Obama was a Secret Muslin.
Yesterday, Media Matters revealed the existence of a video in which Greene claimed that a plane had not ever crashed into the Pentagon, despite the fact that a plane definitely did crash into the Pentagon.
During the video, Greene discussed the 9/11 attacks and stated, "We had witnessed 9/11, the terrorist attack in New York and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania and the so-called plane that crashed into the Pentagon. It's odd there's never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon. But anyways, I won't — I'm not going to dive into the 9/11 conspiracy. But 9/11 had happened. Our country was very much into a war. We had invaded Iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction that we never found at that time. We were basically destabilizing the Middle East."
She then said, regarding Obama, "Yes. I do believe he is a Muslim. And yes, Valerie Jarrett is, too."
Barack Obama, for the record, was not a Muslim. Also there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim. It's not illegal! Also, just for the record, if he were a Muslim posing as a Christian who also faked a birth certificate or whatever else he did, would he not have also been clever enough to change his middle name? Like he's gonna go through all that, fake being an American, fake being a Christian, but keep the middle name "Hussein"? Really?
Another investigation, by NBC's Brandy Zadrozny, uncovered a now-defunct website called "American Truth Seekers" for which Greene wrote multiple articles. In them, she not only accused Democrats of being baby-eating Satanic pedophiles, but she also claimed multiple mass shootings were false flags designed to weaken the Second Amendment, accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of having their enemies killed, and perpetuated the conspiracy theory that Seth Rich was murdered by the DNC.
After Media Matters published the initial article, Greene responded via Twitter, complaining that she was being attacked for her opposition to open borders and "globalist neocon nation building wars." She then went on to complain about these wars as if she were not currently running for office as a member of the party that got us into them in the first place.
She then attempted to walk back her 9/11 trutherism, but defended it by saying "The problem is our government lies to us so much to protect the Deep State, it's hard sometimes to know what is real and what is not."
Yes, we all know the government lies to us. Usually not so much to protect the "deep state" as to help the wealthy and powerful become even more wealthy and powerful. I certainly don't trust the government. This distrust, however, does not lead me to believe stupid things that I, or someone else, made up. A healthy distrust of the government means that you don't automatically believe everything you're told simply because it comes from someone in power, particularly when there are valid reasons to believe it's not true. You know, like the "weapons of mass destruction" that Marjorie Taylor Greene's party insists existed in Iraq! It gets unhealthy when you start following that up with hypotheticals and believing the hypotheticals and filling in the blanks yourself.
If your thought process is anything like...
A) The government lies.
B) The government says there is no such thing as flying elephants.
Therefore C) Dumbo was a documentary and the government has a fleet of flying elephants it uses for nefarious purposes of some kind
... then you are not a good detective and you should not use your brain to attempt to draw conclusions, ever. We may not always know whether or not something is a lie, but the thing we make up ourselves is almost always definitely not going to be true.
