The right-wing House candidate—and presumed future congresswoman—in Georgia known for her previous support of QAnon on Thursday posted a photo of herself with a rifle and a threatening message directed at the progressive women of color known as the “Squad.”
In the photo, which was posted on Facebook, Marjorie Taylor Greene holds an assault-style rifle next to black-and-white photos of Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Squad’s worst nightmare,” a banner at the bottom of the image proclaims.
“Our country is on the line. America needs fighters who speak the truth,” Greene wrote in the post. “We need strong conservative Christians to go on the offense against these socialists who want to rip our country apart. Americans must take our country back.”
Facebook has since removed the post for violating its rules against inciting violence. In a tweet Friday, Omar said that the post had already led to death threats. “Posting a photo with an assault rifle next to the faces of three women of color is not advertising. It’s incitement,” she wrote. “Facebook should remove this violent provocation.”
Greene is expected to win her race for the 14th Congressional District in Georgia, which is overwhelmingly Republican. She defeated her opponent in the primary runoff in August and would be the first member of Congress to have publicly supported the unfounded conspiracy theories of QAnon. “There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it,” she said in 2017. After her win, President Donald Trump tweeted out his support for her, calling her a “real WINNER” and “future Republican Star” who is “strong on everything.”
But while Trump endorsed Greene, and several others in her party have thrown their support behind her, some Republican leaders have expressed discomfort with the fringe candidate. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Steve Scalise have called comments she made “appalling” and “disgusting.” In June, Politico reported on a number of offensive remarks she had made in recent years. Greene had promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about George Soros, said Black people were “slaves of the Democratic Party,” said unemployment was the result of “bad choices” and being “lazy,” made a comment about “white people that are as lazy and sorry and probably worse than Black people,” and said that white men are “the most mistreated group of people in the United States.”
But she focused most of her vitriol on Muslims, who she believes should not be allowed in government. She conflated “Sharia law” with Islamic law in general and described it as a system in which men have sex with “little boys, little girls,” and marry their sisters and cousins. She told those who “want Islam” to stay in the Middle East and “have a whole bunch of wives, or goats, or sheep, or whatever you want.” Her threats against Omar and Tlaib are unsurprising given her previous complaints that the 2018 election, in which the two became the first Muslim women elected to Congress, heralded an “Islamic invasion of our government.”
Since winning her primary, Greene has not moderated her presence on social media. She has offered to give away a rifle she used in a campaign video in a raffle, telling the Washington Examiner that she was doing so “to trigger the angry gun-grabbing socialist-left that hates America.” She also recently defended the gunman Kyle Rittenhouse as someone who “acted in self defense against violent radical adult men” and told “ungrateful Americans” to leave the country. Earlier, she tweeted her defense of calling Nancy Pelosi a “bitch” in her victory speech (“She is a nasty, horrible person. And it was the first word that came to mind!”) and called Michelle Obama “the #1 racist in America,” among other inflammatory comments.