Marjorie Taylor Greene and Louis Farrakhan don’t exactly see eye-to-eye on some pretty fundamental issues. Greene has described Black Lives Matter a terrorist threat and suggested Muslims don’t belong in government. Farrakahn has led the Nation of Islam for decades and spends a fair amount of time talking about the type of white-on-Black racism Greene insists doesn’t exist.
They share a few things in common, though, one of which Greene pointed out in a lengthy Twitter thread praising Farrakhan’s newspaper on Monday. The conspiracy theory-promoting Republican representative from Georgia recently discovered that those being held in the Washington, D.C., jail housing Capitol rioters are offered a Nation of Islam a paper. She name checks Farrakahn, a prominent antisemite, who, as the Southern Poverty Law Center puts it, “routinely accuses Jews of manipulating the U.S. government and controlling the levers of world power.” (The Anti-Defamation League has compiled an extensive list of Farrakahn’s bigoted comments.)
Greene spent several tweets praising Farrakahn and the Nation of Islam’s views on the Covid-19 vaccine, noting that they support the use of Ivermectin and oppose the use of the vaccine in children, as well as that Farrakahn describes forcing the vaccine on people as “a declaration of war.”
10. Louis Farrakhan says that forcing the vaccine is a “declaration of war.”
That is how strongly the Nation of Islam opposes @JoeBiden’s vaccine mandates that force unvaccinated people to lose their jobs. pic.twitter.com/UAvnlwjxG6
— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) November 8, 2021
Championing Farrakhan is rather dicey territory for Greene, so she takes pains to hedge her praise by clarifying that she is “strongly opposed to radical Islam” and that she did not find any of the Nation of Islam literature in the jail’s “Patriot Wing,” where Capitol rioters were reading the Bible. She also made sure to note that she believes in freedom of religion and that she and other Republicans “see and believe that all people have equal rights under the law and constitution and those rights extend to the unborn.” These beliefs come with quite a few caveats. As mentioned, Greene suggested Muslims should not be in government, and even tried to get Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) to retake their congressional oaths on a Bible.
Greene’s Twitter thread on Monday did not address Farrakhan’s well-known antisemitism — perhaps because this is the other area where the two share common ground. Greene has a long history of trading in antisemitic tropes. She’s trivialized the Holocaust by repeatedly comparing Democrats to Nazis. She’s claimed on multiple occasions that Jewish philanthropist George Soros is a Nazi, and even wrote on Facebook that California wildfires were started intentionally by a space laser funded by Jews. Greene has tried to temper some of these comments, and in June apologized for comparing mask mandates on Capitol Hill to the Holocaust. Her shout out to Farrakahn calls this apology’s sincerity into question.
Greene may seem diametrically opposed to Farrakhan, but when it comes to vaccines, the enemy of her enemy is her friend. She’s not going to let a little antisemitism get in the way of making what she thinks is a point. It may have even helped her warm up to the Nation of Islam leader.
