'Where did Marjorie Taylor Greene come from?
[...] she was a product, her family loved to say, of the “Great American Dream.” There was a three-story home [...] Marge—and that is what she was called, Marge[...]
[...] was a member of the Spanish club [...] “Shh … it’s the people outside!” her senior quote reads in the high-school yearbook. [...]
Forsyth County was a calm, quiet, ordered place. [...] white girl was found bloodied and barely breathing [...] Within 24 hours of her discovery, four Black men had been arrested [...] A white mob dragged one of the suspects from his cell and hanged him from a telephone pole. Two others were tried and executed. [...] On horseback, armed with rifles and dynamite, they drove out virtually all of the county’s Black population—more than 1,000 people. So successful were their efforts that the county would experience the modern civil-rights era vicariously at best. There were no whites only signs to fuss over [...] because there were no Black people to keep separate.
[...] community artificially devoid of sociocultural conflict, a history scrubbed of tension. That’s the basic attitude here toward the past[...]: “If you don’t talk about it, it goes away.”
[...] Who could say, of course, how regularly she made use of the indoor pool, or marveled at the built-in aquarium on the terrace level—two features of this “smart-home luxury estate,” [...]
[...] I do not know precisely how long it was before the shape of her life—the quiet, the respectability, the cadence of carpooling and root touch-ups—began to assume the dull cast of malaise. [...]
[...] on the campaign trail, Greene would anchor much of her story in the fact that she was a longtime business owner[...] In beautifully shot television ads, voters saw a woman whose days were a relentless sprint between building sites—hard hats, reflector vests, jeans—and light-filled conference rooms, where she wore dresses with tasteful necklines and examined important blueprints.
That is not a fully accurate picture. People at Taylor Commercial seem to have liked Greene personally, but she spent only a few years on the job and did not put her stamp on the company. Call her on a weekday afternoon, and there was a good chance she’d answer from the gym. She had “nothing to do with” Taylor Commercial[...] “It was entirely [her then husband].” [...]
[...] the same year she stepped away from her job, Greene decided to commit herself to Jesus Christ.[...] she was a “cradle Catholic,” born and raised in the Church.[... She claims] she had stopped attending Mass when she became a mother: when she’d “realized,” [...] “that I could not trust the Church leadership to protect my children from pedophiles, and that they harbored monsters even in their own ranks.”
Greene eventually decided to join [...] one of the largest nondenominational Christian congregations in the country. [...]
Many baptisms at [...] are accompanied by testimony[...] As she’d considered [...] “how they died for Christ,” Greene said, “I realized how small my faith was if I was scared to do a video and get baptized in front of thousands of people.” Before those thousands of people, she accepted Jesus as her lord and savior.
[...]
She has a sugary voice and a personable, generous affect; [...] sort of person whom a stranger might meet briefly and recall fondly to their friends as “just the nicest woman.” “The softer side of Marjorie Taylor Greene is what her friends, neighbors, and the people who elected her know,” [...]
[...] CrossFit, a fitness regimen that combines Olympic weight lifting with calisthenics and interval training; it has long been popular among law enforcement and members of the military. [...]
At CrossFit, Greene’s warmth made her a star. “CrossFit’s really intimidating,” [...] “Most people’s experience with CrossFit is … they run across ESPN, and they see these monster people doing crazy amazing things, and they’re usually like, ‘Ohhh, I’m never gonna do that.’?” But Greene could put people at ease. [...]
“She struck me as an extremely bored person,” [...]
Scattered among the posts about creatine supplements (“I love that stuff”) and the iPhone footage of Greene’s triple jumps [...]
[...] “confidence is also an area that I struggle in,” Greene wrote [...] “But I’ve decided to say ‘why not me?’?”
[...] “She would go through a really hard workout and then just stop in the middle of it and start crying,” [...] “And that started happening more regularly toward the end. It was just too much stress.” [...]
[...] Greene’s political origin story was not unlike that of millions of other Trump supporters. Despite having never hinted at an interest in politics[...] “He reminded me of most men I know,” [...] “Men like my dad.”
[...] Greene’s father had published a novel [...] called Paradigm. As best I can tell, this is Taylor’s effort to demonstrate the value of a system he invented called the “Taylor Effect”—which purports to predict the stock market based on the gravitational fluctuations of Earth—in the form of a high-stakes international caper. The story follows twin scientists who discover an ancient Egyptian box in the bowels of the Biltmore estate, the contents of which, they soon realize, could “destroy many of the world’s most powerful families” if ever made public.
He considered his stock-market theory to be “the Genuine Article”; in the afterword, he likened himself to da Vinci, Galileo, Edison, Marconi, and the Wright brothers. “History,” he wrote, “is filled with characters who endured ridicule, imprisonment, and even death because they discovered things we know today with absolute certainty to be true.” [...]
The Republican base was in the market for a Marjorie Taylor Greene—a suburban woman who not only didn’t recoil from Trump but was full-throated MAGA. [...] here was regular Marge, who would put America first. Sweet southern Marge [...]
[...] It was not until she latched on to Q and Q-adjacent theories that Greene’s political profile achieved scale and velocity. The deeper she plunged, the larger her following grew. And the more confident she became.'
Why Is Marjorie Taylor Greene Like This?