31. Marjorie Taylor Greene: Antisemite?

Newly-elected Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has firmly established herself as the village idiot in Congress by spouting QAnon conspiracy theories and suggesting "a bullet to the head" for Nancy Pelosi and other opponents. But is she antisemitic as well?

Yes. Her resort to antisemitic tropes is well documented. And the QAnon delusion itself is a thinly disguised retread of classic antisemitism.

In her latest upchuck, arguing against vaccination, she wrote that "vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi's [sic] forced Jewish people to wear a gold star." So much for the Holocaust; no worse than tyrannical pandemic restrictions.

Earlier she had indulged the fabulous hallucination that the Rothschilds (shopworn stand-in for world Jewry) and others funded a space laser that ignited a major wildfire in California. Maybe she actually believed the "Jews in Space" sketch in Mel Brooks' "History of the World"?

She also shared a video by British racist Nick Griffin, warning that an "unholy alliance" including "Zionist supremacists" was plotting to destroy Europe by "breeding us out of existence in our own homelands."

And so on. But is adherence to QAnon in itself antisemitic? Consider: the guiding phantasm of the movement, as revealed by the anonymous Q, is that the world is controlled by a powerful, secretive cabal that kidnaps children and harvests their blood. Sound familiar?

The blood libel, accusing Jews of using murdered children's blood for ritual purposes, goes back to the twelfth century. It was picked up by the infamous antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purports to describe a Jewish cabal that controls the world.

QAnon, in its purest form, echoes the Protocols. It adds Griffin's "Replacement Theory" of a plot to supersede white Europeans with other races, including Jews. The link to Jews was made clear by the marchers in Charlottesville: "Jews will not replace us."

Apart from the Rothschilds, the Hungarian-born philanthropist George Soros has become the avatar of Jewishness for this new antisemitism. Greene has latched onto Soros as a symbol of world Jewry, accusing all who offend her of being on Soros' payroll. She even malignantly accuses Soros -- a Holocaust survivor who was 14 years old at the end of the war -- of being a Nazi collaborator: "the piece of crap who turned . . . his own people over to the Nazis."

Greene won election in November by almost 75 percent of the vote in her rural district. Is she a harbinger of more to come? God help us.

If there were any decency remaining among Congressional Republicans, this whacko would be expelled. In its history, Congress has expelled twenty of its members, many for much less malicious behavior. But don't count on it.