If you’re wondering who the woman in the white fur-colored coat who shouted “liar, liar” to Pres. Joe Biden during his State of the Union Address, that was none other than controversial, Georgia, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. She lived up to her reputation Tuesday night, spitting out belligerent nuggets such as “China is spying on us” and “Secure the border” and stood and raised her hand to give the president an emphatic thumbs-down. She bellowed her insults loud enough to be picked up by the television cameras and seemed to be proud of her antics, bragging about it later.
So who is MTG, as she’s often referred to?
Green was first elected to congress representing a conservative north Georgia district in 2021. The wealthy representative, 48, earned her money from her family’s construction business. Her father, Robert Taylor, founded a construction company, which Greene eventually helped manage. She founded a gym called CrossFit Passion, which she promoted in the media, helping her to become known.
Soon, however, Greene began filming herself spreading an array of far-right views, laying the groundwork for her political persona. Energized by Trump’s election, she became particularly entranced by QAnon. She adopted the baseless belief an anonymous person called Q was revealing secrets about a child trafficking ring orchestrated by Democrats and global elites.
Her social media posts before she entered Congress included language suggesting support for executing top Democrats, her personal Twitter account was suspended for violating COVID misinformation policies (and was recently reinstated after Elon Musk took over the company) and she was part of a group of Republican lawmakers that objected to the certification of the 2020 election.
Greene also advanced baseless theories that appeal to extreme gun rights advocates: that several mass shootings were “false flag” events that were staged by gun control proponents. Greene said that these included the 2017 massacre in Las Vegas and the 2018 Parkland school shooting.
In a pair of videos taken in March 2019, just after the first anniversary of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 students and staff, Greene berated David Hogg, who survived the attack and has pushed for gun control measures.
Outside the U.S. Capitol, she trailed Hogg for nearly two minutes, repeating baseless theories and accusing him of trying to “take away my Second Amendment rights.” She called Hogg, then 18 years old, “a coward” for not responding to her.
Greene also embraced bogus claims about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and she has posited that laser beams from space may have started California wildfires, another baseless QAnon theory.
In August, Greene told Fox News that she once had supported the theories of QAnon but said she “decided that I would choose another path.”
Greene supplemented her QAnon and gun theories with rants about Muslims. Greene said Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, represented “an Islamic invasion into our government offices.” She said, falsely, that they couldn’t be sworn into Congress with a Koran, saying that the Bible must be used.
Shortly after she was sworn into congress, Democrats, supported by 11 Republicans, voted to strip her of her committee memberships. But this year, with Republicans back in the majority, MTG’s position in Congress has grown, particularly since she was one of the early supporters of Kevin McCarty who struggled over 15 votes to secure his position as Majority Leader.
In Congress, she’s a member of the Freedom Caucus, Congress’s most conservative group.