Marjorie Taylor Greene was a product, her family said, of the American dream.⁠ ⁠ She “arrived in Congress in January 2021, blond and crass and indelibly identified with conspiracy theories involving Jewish space lasers and Democratic pedophiles,” Elaina Plott Calabro reports. “She had barely settled into office before being stripped of her committee assignments; she has been called a ‘cancer’ on the Republican Party by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell; and she now has a loud voice in the GOP’s most consequential decisions on Capitol Hill because her party’s leaders know, and she knows they know, that she has become far too popular with their voters to risk upsetting her.” How was it possible no one saw her coming? Greene’s path to Congress could perhaps be said to have begun when, in the aftermath of her tenure as CFO at her family’s multimillion-dollar company, she appeared determined to strike out in search of something to call her own. She did not find it in the malaise of being a suburban housewife, or in the community at her church, or in her CrossFit gym, but in politics she finally found it. “Confidence is also an area that I struggle in,” Greene wrote on her blog on July 26, 2014. “But I’ve decided to say ‘why not me?’ ”⁠ ⁠ “What Marjorie Taylor Greene has accomplished is this: She has harnessed the paranoia inherent in conspiratorial thinking and reassured a significant swath of voters that it is okay—no, righteous—to indulge their suspicions about the left, the Republican establishment, the media,” Plott Calabro continues at the link in our bio. “Whether Greene actually believes the things she says is by now almost beside the point. She has no choice but to be the person her followers think she is, because her power is contingent on theirs. The mechanics of actual leadership—diplomacy, compromise, patience—not only don’t interest her but represent everything her followers disdain. To soften, or engage in better faith, is to admit defeat.”⁠ ⁠ 🎨: @ericyahnker