Published: 25 June 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
DAN COLEMAN: Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s litany of slurs about Jews reflect a disturbing post-Trump reality of US political life
BILL MAHER IS a comedian and host of the HBO’s long running talk show Real Time With Bill Maher. On June 11, his guest was Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist whose latest book is Cosmic Queries.
“Your book is about the big questions,” Maher opened, “and I’m going to get to the biggest one first: Jewish space lasers. How did the Jews get them up there?”
“The Jews are all powerful, apparently,” Tyson replied in a jocular tone, as he, Maher, and the audience broke out in laughter. For them, Jewish space lasers are an absolute absurdity.
Yet Tyson’s rejoinder was precisely the implication of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s 2018 Facebook post claiming that California’s wildfires were caused by space lasers controlled by the Rothschilds. Sure, her words sound crazy but we can never forget that within such craziness lie the seeds of antisemitic discrimination, violence, and, potentially, even genocide.
The views of Greene, a Republican from Georgia, are replete with inane conspiracy theories overlaid with a broad brush of racism. The Washington Post characterised her 2020 campaign for Congress as “marked by her racist, antisemitic and Islamophobic statements".
Greene shrugged off such criticism, labelling concerns about a campaign photo opportunity with prominent Georgian white supremacist Chester Doles, “the same type of sleazy attacks the Fake News Media levels against President Trump”.
The Washington Post characterised her 2020 campaign for Congress as “marked by racist, antiSemitic and Islamophobic statements".
When Greene took office, with a de-platformed Trump less in the public eye, she became the target of the lampooning that had for four years been heaped upon the former president.
