The New Yorker:

The congresswoman is demanding Speaker Mike Johnson’s ouster. Is it principle—or a fund-raising ploy?

By David D. Kirkpatrick

When Marjorie Taylor Greene first entered politics, she was hardly a natural at fund-raising. She was the owner of a CrossFit gym—and a construction company that was founded by her father—before she successfully ran for a congressional seat in suburban Georgia in 2020. To help fund her campaign, Greene put up about $1.4 million of her own money. Then, almost as soon as she had won, a national scandal broke out about her long record of bizarre, violent, and antisemitic statements: she had promoted a call for “a bullet to the head” of then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; mused about the hanging of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama; praised the QAnon conspiracy theory; asserted that the Jewish investor George Soros was actually a Nazi; and blamed California wildfires on “space lasers” funded by the Rothschilds.

That’s when the money started pouring in. In a repudiation of Greene’s inflammatory statements, members of Congress voted to strip her of her committee assignments—traditionally, a lawmaker’s main calling cards for seeking campaign donations—but Greene found that no trouble at all. Instead, she cashed in on the outrage of her fellow-lawmakers by making a torrent of online appeals to maga voters. “Never before has a Republican been under attack like me since the Democrats tried to impeach and remove President Trump from office,” one of her fund-raising e-mails declared. “And without your support, I have no way of defending myself.” In the first quarter of 2021, she raised a staggering $3.2 million, with an average donation of thirty-two dollars.

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