QAnon’s favorite Congresswoman may say it’s been years since she shared far right conspiracy theories, but her website tells a very different story.
Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who represents Georgia 14th district, has a poorly setup WordPress-based website. Not terrible by itself, except the site inadvertently revealed a campaign to push an unfounded right-wing conspiracy theory about her Democratic colleague from Minnesota, Rep. Ilhan Omar.
“Flash poll!” reads a page setup on Rep. Greene’s website. “Did Ilhan Omar marry her brother from Somalia?”
It includes a poll with the option to vote either “Yes, she married her brother!” or “No.” Users must include their name, email, and zip code. This is a common campaign tactic for politicians looking to build their email lists, which they then used for fundraising.
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s website
Image: mashable screenshot
The page was discovered due to an unsecured folder on her WordPress website. It does not appear to have been previously promoted on any publicly-accessible platforms, like Facebook or Twitter,
The footer of the page reads “Paid for by Greene for Congress.”
Right-wing blogs and websites have been spreading this conspiracy theory about Rep. Omar since as far back as 2016. Numerous fact checkers have looked into these claims and have been unable to find evidence to back them up. Snopes declared the claim to be “unproven.” Rep. Omar has previously put out a statement calling the conspiracy theory “absolutely false and ridiculous.”
Yet, Greene’s website pushed the conspiracy theory as recently as Nov. 20, 2020, when the page was first uploaded to her website, according to the creation date from the unsecured WordPress website folder. Greene had also tweeted at Rep. Omar that same day, spreading the conspiracy.
This means Rep. Greene planned to fundraise off of the conspiracy theory even after she already won her election on November 3, 2020.
The poll lives on the URL “action.greene2020.com/omar-love-affair.” While Rep. Greene currently uses a different domain name for her website, the greene2020.com links are all still publicly accessible.
Other list-building pages on Congresswoman Greene’s website include calls to “Lock Hunter [Biden] Up!” and impeach President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. There are also pages pushing the “Stop the Steal” election fraud conspiracy.
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s promotion of right-wing conspiracy theories is well established. Greene has been a major advocate for QAnon, a right-wing conspiracy that claims former President Trump is waging a secret war against a global Satanic baby-eating trafficking ring run by Trump’s political enemies in the Democratic Party and Hollywood elites.
Recently, Rep. Greene’s years-old videos and Facebook posts spreading conspiracy theories about everything from 9/11 and the Parkland school shooting have resurfaced, putting the newly-elected Congresswoman in the spotlight.
Just last week, the House voted to kick Rep. Greene off of the Education and Budget committees as a consequence for spreading these conspiracies and for using violent rhetoric against her Democratic colleagues.
However, in a speech on the House floor prior to the vote, Rep. Greene attempted to put these conspiracy theories in her past, suggesting she hadn’t shared these beliefs since 2018. Based solely on the creation of the page attacking Rep. Omar, this simply isn’t true.
Furthermore, Rep. Greene had shared an article defending QAnon believers on Twitter in December 2020. The article was written by the co-founder of Gab.com, a far-right social media site that has been criticized for providing an online safe haven for white supremacists.
As Twitter user @z3dster noted, some of the links on these email list-building pages include mentions of Gab and also the now-defunct right-wing social network Parler in the URLs. This is typically done to track where users who click each link comes from, suggesting Rep. Greene was specifically promoting these links for audiences on Gab and Parler.
Following the elections in November 2020, Rep. Greene was hit with more than a dozen warning labels on Twitter after tweeting numerous conspiracy theories concerning Trump’s loss. Greene’s Twitter account was temporarily suspended earlier this year after she continued to tweet falsehoods concerning fraud in the 2020 Presidential election and the special election in Georgia.
As for the unfounded claim about Rep. Omar, GOP officials from Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district are now using them to attack the Democratic Congresswoman. Rep. Greene is even publicly joining them in spreading them once again.