Greene was born in Milledgeville, Georgia, on May 27, 1974, the daughter of Robert Taylor. She graduated from South Forsyth High School in Cumming, Georgia in 1992, and the University of Georgia with a Bachelor of Business Administration in 1996.
Marjorie Taylor Greene (born May 27, 1974) is an American politician, businesswoman, and far-right conspiracy theorist serving as the U.S. representative for Georgia's 14th congressional district. A member of the Republican Party and supporter of Donald Trump, Greene was elected to Congress in November 2020 and sworn into office on January 3, 2021.
In statements made during 2019, and in a February 4, 2021 House floor speech in which she explained her position on gun rights and school shootings, Greene alluded to being affected by a September 1990 incident at her high school in which an armed student held other students hostage for over five hours: "I understand how terrible it is because when I was 16 years old in 11th grade my school was a gun-free school zone and one of my schoolmates brought guns to school and took our entire school hostage." Contemporaneous news reports from the time note the armed student held 53 students hostage.
In an August 11, 2020, Facebook post, Greene said she had married Perry Greene in 1995. The couple have three adult children. On July 3, 2012, Marjorie Taylor Greene petitioned Fulton County Superior Court, Family Court Division for an uncontested divorce. She and her husband both retained counsel, but the court didn't grant the petition, and dismissed it without prejudice on September 11, 2012. Greene allegedly engaged in multiple extramarital affairs before filing her divorce petition, but she has denied the allegations.
Greene has said there are links between Hillary Clinton and pedophilia and human sacrifice and, in 2017, speculated that the Pizzagate conspiracy theory is real. Greene claimed Clinton murdered her political enemies in a revival of the "Clinton Kill List" conspiracy theory. In one of her own videos, posted to YouTube in 2018, Greene suggested the death of John F. Kennedy Jr. in a plane crash in 1999 was a "Clinton murder" because he was a possible rival to her for a New York senate seat.
Greene's father, Robert Taylor, founder of Taylor Commercial, a construction company based in Alpharetta, Georgia, sold the company to Greene and her husband, Perry, in 2002. The couple are vice president and president, respectively, of the company. Greene was listed as the C.F.O. of the company from 2007 to 2011.
In 2011, when she stepped down as C.F.O. of Taylor Commercial, she took up CrossFit and began to post on social media and publish podcasts. By 2012, Greene was working as a part-time coach at CrossFit On The Move, an Alpharetta gym owned by Jim Chambers, who said that CrossFit "had kind of taken her life over", adding, "She had a lot of time and a lot of money" and a vague ambition "to run a gym". In August 2013, Greene co-founded a CrossFit gym, CrossFit Passion, in Alpharetta along with then-22-year-old Travis Mayer, before later selling the business.
In a 2011 video, Greene said that during her childhood she and her family "attended church off and on" and that she was baptized for the first time at age seven so that she could take her first communion with her school class. She noted that during her marriage the church she and her husband attended "went through a revolting scandal." She was subsequently rebaptized in 2011 into North Point Community Church, an evangelical megachurch network based in Alpharetta, in a baptism published in the aforementioned video. Greene speaks often about her faith, and has said that she wants to bring "my faith and my family values to Washington".
Greene won the August 11 runoff. She was considered an overwhelming favorite to win the seat in the general election, as the 14th district typically votes heavily Republican; it has a Cook Partisan Voting Index of R+27, making it the nation's 10th-most Republican district and the third-most Republican district in the Eastern Time Zone. Among Georgia's congressional districts, only the neighboring 9th district is more Republican. Since the 14th's creation in 2012, no Democrat has won more than 30% of the vote. Trump carried the 14th with 75% of the vote in 2016, his eighth-best performance in the nation. On the day after Greene's runoff victory, Trump tweeted his support for her, describing Greene as a "future Republican Star" who "is strong on everything and never gives up – a real WINNER!"
In response, Solaren, a solar energy company, noted several fundamental problems with the conspiracy theory, including that its space-based solar power system did not beam power using the visible light part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and so could not be observed as the "blue beams of light" referenced by the conspiracy theory; that the system does not use lasers, and so could not have "laser beams"; that Solaren's power contract with PG&E ended in 2015; and that by 2021, Solaren had not in fact launched any solar power satellites into space at all, let alone had one in space in 2018.
Beginning in 2017, Greene authored 59 articles as a "correspondent" for the now-defunct "American Truth Seekers", a conspiracy news website, and beginning in January 2018, 27 articles for Law Enforcement Today, a website that bills itself as "unapologetically in support of those who hold the Thin Blue Line." In 2017, Greene visited Washington, DC to protest against a Republican gun control compromise.
Greene supported the debunked far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, saying in videos posted in 2017 on Facebook that the theories were "worth listening to". She stated in a video, "There's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it."
In the November general election, Greene won with 74% of the vote. Van Ausdal, whose name remained on the ballot, took 25%. Greene became the second Republican woman to represent Georgia in the House. The first, Karen Handel, was elected to represent the 6th in a special election in 2017, but was defeated for a full term in 2018. Greene thus became the first Republican woman elected to a full term from a Georgia district.
Greene opposes the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and described it as a "radical Marxist" group. In a video, she compared BLM activists to white nationalist participants at the Unite the Right rally which took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. She ended one of her videos commenting: "The most mistreated group of people in the United States today are white males."
In a 2017 video posted to Facebook, Greene expressed doubt that the perpetrator of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, a large-scale incident she believes was intended as an attack on the right to bear arms, acted alone. Greene claimed that the August 2017 Charlottesville white nationalist rally, in which a counter-protester was killed in a car attack, was an "inside job". She believes the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand were a "false flag" for the same end.
Greene's Facebook account in 2018 and 2019 expressed support for the execution of leading Democrats, including Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton, as well as support for the execution of Federal Bureau of Investigation agents. For example, when another poster asked in April 2018: "Now do we get to hang them?? Meaning H & O???", Greene's account responded: "Stage is being set. Players are being put in place. We must be patient. This must be done perfectly or liberal judges would let them off." Greene did not deny the authenticity of the reported content, instead responding that the CNN article was "focused on my time before running for political office", that "teams of people manage my pages", and that CNN had reported on content that "did not represent my views". The progressive advocacy organization People For the American Way formally called for Greene to face expulsion from the House of Representatives over her comments, a process that would require support from two-thirds of the House.
In 2018, Greene shared a video, With Open Gates: The Forced Collective Suicide of European Nations repeating the antisemitic white genocide conspiracy theory that "Zionist supremacists" are conspiring to flood Europe with migrants to replace the 'native' white populations. The video, uncovered by Media Matters for America, said that those supporting refugees are using "immigrant pawns" to commit "the biggest genocide in human history". In sharing the video, Greene wrote that: "This is what the UN wants all over the world". The white genocide conspiracy theory has been associated with white supremacy and espouses the unsubstantiated belief that white people will eventually become a minority in Europe and North America due to declining white birth rates and high rates of immigration. Greene has also falsely called George Soros, a Jewish businessman and Holocaust survivor, a Nazi. She promoted the conspiracy theory that Soros' family collaborated with the Nazis in Hungary and is "trying to continue what was not finished".
In a 2018 Facebook post found by Media Matters in January 2021, Greene argued the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, was an organized "false flag" operation. In another post, she argued that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was also a false flag operation. In another Facebook post later in 2018 she wrote, "I am told that Nancy Pelosi tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that 'we need another school shooting' in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control." The survivors of shootings, such as Fred Guttenberg, David Hogg, and Cameron Kasky, have condemned Greene's remarks and demanded her resignation from Congress. Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland shooting and a gun control advocate, has been called "#littleHitler" by Greene. She denounced Hogg as an "idiot" who is trained "like a dog" while being interviewed for a gun-rights group in Georgia in 2019. A video from March 2019 shows Greene following and taunting Hogg accusing him of using children for his cause. Following the encounter, she called him a "coward" and falsely claimed he is funded by George Soros. The website Snopes found the video uploaded by Guttenberg and others was the second incident in which Greene targeted Hogg. Both incidents occurred on March 25, 2019, and Greene live-streamed the first to her Facebook account. The second video was uploaded to Greene's YouTube account in January 2020.
In a 2018 interview, Greene expressed support for a conspiracy theory that a plane did not hit the Pentagon during the September 11 attacks; she referred to "the so-called plane that crashed into the Pentagon" and said that "it's odd there's never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon" (despite an abundance of evidence). On another occasion, at a conservative conference in 2018, she said 9/11 was part of a U.S. government plot. Following an August 2020 Media Matters for America report on her comments, Greene wrote on Twitter, "Some people claimed a missile hit the Pentagon. I now know that is not correct." She has claimed Democratic National Committee staff member Seth Rich was murdered by the MS-13 street gang on Obama's behalf. According to Greene, Obama is a secretly a Muslim; in actuality, he is a Christian.
Greene was a top official of the Family America Project, a conservative group founded in January 2018. She was a moderator of the organization's Facebook group, which included death threats against Democrats, bigotry directed at the Obamas and support for multiple conspiracy theories, including claims associated with the John Birch Society of the U.S. government being infiltrated by communists.
In January 2021, various media outlets reported that in November 2018, Greene's Facebook account shared a conspiracy theory about the deadly Camp Fire in California, suggesting that it could have been caused by "space solar generators" in a scheme involving California governor Jerry Brown, companies PG&E, Rothschild & Co and Solaren. The Rothschild family, a supposed "international cabal of Jewish bankers", has been the target of numerous antisemitic conspiracy theories since at least the 19th century. Jewish groups such as the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and Anti-Defamation League criticized Greene's promotion of conspiracy theories tinged with anti-Semitic overtones and commentators, elected officials, and others ridiculed it. Fred Guttenberg criticized Greene, writing, "She denies that my daughter died in Parkland ... and yet, because my last name is Guttenberg, because I am Jewish, she thinks I shoot lasers at forests and start fires."
In a January 2019 Facebook video, Greene said, "It's a crime punishable by death is what treason is. Nancy Pelosi is guilty of treason." Greene made the video to promote a petition made to the White House for the impeachment of Pelosi for treason, due to Pelosi's opposition to the border wall, as well as alleged sanctuary policies of Pelosi that "are serving illegals and not United States citizens". In February 2019 Facebook live-streamed videos, Greene suggested that Pelosi would "suffer death or she'll be in prison" for "treason", without discussing a trial. Greene then suggested that Democratic Representative Maxine Waters was "just as guilty of treason as Nancy Pelosi".
In February 2019, Greene and a group of her supporters walked through a congressional office building with the stated intent of making Omar and Tlaib (who had taken their ceremonial oaths of office using Qurans) retake their oaths on Bibles. Greene falsely claimed that an oath-taking on the Bible was required by law; Article VI of the Constitution in fact specifically provides that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."
In a February 2019 interview, Greene suggested that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been replaced in public appearances by a body double. A QAnon-related conspiracy theory held that Ginsburg had died years earlier, and that Democrats used a body double to conceal that her death occurred so they could hold onto her Supreme Court seat during Trump's presidency. Ginsburg actually died on September 18, 2020, during Trump's presidency, and Trump appointed Amy Coney Barrett as her replacement.
Greene began her 2020 candidacy in Georgia's 6th congressional district on June 4, 2019, stating her commitment to balance the federal budget and restrain Congress from using its constitutional power to spend new money into existence, adding: "If we look at our country as our household, we're going to go under foreclosure because we're overspending. I look at it that way as a business owner and then I also look at it as a mom." She also had harsh criticism of her expected primary opponent Karen Handel's support for large omnibus spending bills and record of losing elections: "She's lost seven races in her entire political career… She steps down from seats that she does win so she can campaign for something else. Basically I would call her [a] professional campaigner, but she loses."
On December 13, 2019, Greene shifted her campaign to the 14th district after incumbent Tom Graves announced he would not run for reelection there. The district includes much of northwestern Georgia, from the Chattanooga metropolitan area to the fringes of Atlanta. Greene has long lived in Alpharetta, which is in the 6th district. Members of the House are constitutionally required to live in the state they represent, but not necessarily in the same congressional district, so there would have been no legal barrier to Greene running for the 14th from Alpharetta. But Greene said soon after considering a run for the 14th that she intended to move to that district if she ran there. She subsequently bought a home in nearby Paulding County, which is in the 14th district. Following her election, by the time she was sworn in, in January 2021, Greene claimed she had moved to Rome, Georgia, in the 14th district, but FEC filings show her still residing around Alpharetta.
According to her author biography page, Greene wrote 59 articles for the now-defunct conspiracy theory website American Truth Seekers, including one linking the Democratic Party to "Child Sex, Satanism, and the Occult". When Greene ran for the House of Representatives in 2020, she distanced herself from that conspiracy theory and said she had not referred to "Q" or QAnon during her campaign. She said she no longer had a connection with it and mentioned having found "misinformation".
On February 29, 2020, Greene attended a gun rights rally in LaFayette, Georgia, with "American Patriots U.S.A.", a far-right group attempting to further its influence with Georgia Republicans, which has formed an alliance with the far-right group American Brotherhood of Patriots and the far-right militia Georgia III% Martyrs to advocate for Georgia’s secession from the United States. At the rally, she held up an American Patriots U.S.A. banner while posing for photos with Chester Doles, a 5th generation Ku Klux Klansman and Grand Klaliff leader who has nearly a dozen assault arrests and served two separate prison sentences in Maryland—the second, and longest, for the vicious 1993 beating of a black man he and a fellow Klansman left for dead.
On March 2, 2020, the Georgia Republican Party contributed $5,220 to her campaign treasury.
In July 2020, Greene said on Twitter that "children should not wear masks", rejecting recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other public health professionals. She described restrictions imposed in the United States Capitol in response to the coronavirus pandemic, including face mask requirements, as "Democrat tyrannical control". She opposes any form of mandatory mask-wearing, compulsory vaccination, or lockdowns in response to the pandemic. She described mask-wearing as "oppressive" on Twitter, prompting a response from Anthony Fauci, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, who described Greene's stance as "disturbing". Greene refused to wear a mask in a secured room with other members of Congress during the storming of the United States Capitol in January 2021. After sheltering with Republicans who refused to wear a mask during the attack, it was reported that multiple Democratic representatives had tested positive for COVID-19 including Bonnie Watson Coleman, Pramila Jayapal and Brad Schneider.
Taylor Commercial, widely listed in business directories in recent years as a residential renovation and siding contractor, received, during the 2020 pandemic, Paycheck Protection Program funding from the Small Business Administration in the amount of $182,300. SBA filings declared Taylor Commercial expected to save 12 jobs with the federal funds. During a July 2020 Republican congressional primary debate, Greene's main opponent, neurosurgeon John Cowan, questioned Greene's acceptance of the PPP money despite her opposition to Congressional appropriations of relief funds during the pandemic.
Greene opposes abortion. In an August 2020 interview with Fox News, she indicated her support for defunding Planned Parenthood.
Greene participated in a pro-Second Amendment rally in Ringgold, Georgia, in September 2020. At the rally, she said she would always protect the rights of gun owners and would not vote for any laws making it harder for people to possess guns. She declared, "The government will never tell me how many guns I can own, and how many bullets I am allowed to fire if someone were to attack me or my kids." In September 2020, Greene tweeted her intention to give away an AR-15 style rifle she used in one of her campaign advertisements.
On September 3, 2020, Greene shared a meme to her Facebook page depicting herself holding an AR-15 style rifle next to a collage of pictures of Democratic representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. She wrote that it was time for "strong conservative Christians to go on the offense against these socialists who want to rip our country apart". The caption underneath the images read "Squad's worst nightmare". House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described the meme as a "dangerous threat of violence" and Omar demanded that the meme be deleted after claiming it had triggered death threats. In response to questions from Forbes about whether the meme was a threat, a Greene campaign spokesperson called the suggestion "paranoid and ridiculous" and a "conspiracy theory". Facebook deleted the meme the following day for violating its policies on inciting violence, prompting Greene to claim that Democrats were "trying to cancel me out before I've even taken the oath of office".
Greene was expected to face Democratic IT specialist Kevin Van Ausdal, but he withdrew from the race on September 11, 2020. This left Greene unopposed in the general election.
On September 19, 2020, Greene appeared at a gun rights rally in Ringold, Georgia, where the Georgia III% Martyrs provided security "wearing camouflage, body armor, radios and in one case a battle ax".
In an interview with gun activist Chris Dorr on October 27, 2020, a week before election day, Greene told viewers: "The only way you get your freedoms back is it's earned with the price of blood." On January 29, 2021, The New York Times detailed Greene's support for and past ties with extremist militia groups, including the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers, some of whom participated in the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol.
After the first round of voting in the 2020 election, Politico rereleased videos Greene published in which she expressed racist, antisemitic, and Islamophobic views. Her support for bigotry and the QAnon conspiracy theory in the videos were condemned, including by conservatives such as House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and Republican Whip Steve Scalise. Some of Greene's social media postings and publications remained on the Web through her 2020 campaign. After they drew attention in January 2021, she deleted them.
In late January 2021, far-right British political commentator Katie Hopkins interviewed Greene, who said that she would "love to trade [Hopkins] for some of our white people here that have no appreciation for our country."
Greene is a strong supporter of former President Donald Trump; on January 4, 2021, she called for the results of the election in Georgia to be "decertified". When asked if doing so would affect her own seat and that of other Georgia Republicans (all of whom were elected on the same ballot), Greene said, "We're just talking about the President's race."
In response to the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021, Greene called for an end to violence and for support for President Trump. She refused to wear a face mask while sheltering in place during the riot, and during the debate to impeach Trump she tweeted, "Democrats must be held accountable for the political violence inspired by their rhetoric." This prompted Democratic representative Jason Crow to call her "morally bankrupt", "depraved" and "frankly dangerous".
Greene's Twitter account was locked for 12 hours on January 17, 2021. A Twitter spokesperson said that Greene was sanctioned "for multiple violations of our civic integrity policy". Twitter's action was based on a company policy it had used to remove thousands of QAnon-related accounts after the storming of the United States Capitol. Before the suspension, Greene's posts included false claims about voting fraud and statements blaming electoral officials in Georgia for their failure to act on such claims. Upon returning to Twitter the next day, she criticized the company: "Contrary to how highly you think of yourself and your moral platitude, you are not the judge of humanity. God is."
Greene filed articles of impeachment against Joe Biden alleging abuse of power on January 21, 2021, the day after Biden's inauguration. In an interview with Greg Kelly of Newsmax, she claimed Biden is "willing to abuse the power of the office of the presidency and be easily bought off by foreign governments, foreign Chinese energy companies, [and] Ukrainian energy companies".
On January 27, 2021, Representative Jimmy Gomez announced he had drafted a resolution to expel Greene from the House following reports that she had previously called for violence against Democrats online. Representative Jake Auchincloss also called for Greene's resignation or expulsion due to her threats of violence against fellow lawmakers. On January 28, 2021 with the revelations of Greene's threats against Democratic members of the House, Pelosi spoke of an "enemy within the House of Representatives" and the need to increase security measures, stating that this referred to members ... who want to bring guns on the floor and have threatened violence on other members of Congress", seemingly alluding to Greene and other Republican members such as Lauren Boebert, who wanted to bring a gun onto the House floor. Pelosi also criticized the House Republican leadership for placing Greene on the Education Committee after Greene had questioned the authenticity of deadly school shootings around the country.
WRCB-TV reporter Meredith Aldis was threatened with arrest on January 27, 2021, when she tried to ask a question at a town hall event about a video in which Greene is seen harassing David Hogg.
On January 29, 2021, Representatives Nikema Williams and Sara Jacobs authored a censure resolution against Greene for making threatening comments to her congressional colleagues. The resolution included a call for her resignation.
Democrats condemned Greene's incendiary statements and promotion of conspiracy theories. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz introduced a motion to remove Greene from her committee assignments, saying, "Greene's appalling behavior both before her election and during her term has helped fuel domestic terrorism, endangered lives of her colleagues and brought shame on the entire House of Representatives... Based on her actions and statements and her belligerent refusal to disavow them, she should not be permitted to participate in the important work of these two influential committees." On February 1, 2021, House majority leader Steny Hoyer gave House minority leader Kevin McCarthy and other Republican House leaders an ultimatum: unless they stripped Greene of her committee seats within 72 hours, the Democrats would bring Wasserman Schultz's resolution before the full House. McCarthy has called some of Greene's comments "deeply disturbing".
As controversy grew about her previous comments, Greene removed her old social media posts, and spoke before the House Republican Conference on February 3, 2021, to assert that her social media content did not reflect who she is. About half those in attendance rose and applauded after her comments. That day, the Democratic-controlled Rules Committee passed Wasserman Schultz's resolution to remove Greene from her committee assignments. McCarthy indicated his conference would not act against Greene. Pelosi chastised McCarthy for acquiescing to Greene, referring to him as "McCarthy (Q-CA)". The next day, February 4, the full House voted to remove Greene from her committee assignments. The vote was 230 to 199, with 11 Republicans joining all Democrats.
Before February 4, 2021:
During the Electoral College vote count, Greene was among a group of Republican legislators who unsuccessfully objected to votes won by Biden, despite federal agencies overseeing election security saying it was the most secure in American history. After falsely asserting Trump was elected in a landslide but the election had been stolen from him, Greene filed articles of impeachment against Biden the day after his inauguration, alleging abuse of power. The House of Representatives voted to remove Greene from all committee roles in response to a series of incendiary and violent statements that Greene had previously made. Eleven Republicans joined the unanimous Democrats in the vote on February 4, 2021.
Greene was briefly a member of the Committee on the Budget and the Committee on Education and Labor before she was removed from all committee assignments on February 4, 2021, for incendiary remarks she had made before her election.
Since February 4, 2021:
On February 9, 2021, Shaun Holmes, the father of a 10-year-old boy with Down syndrome, confronted Greene at a Whitfield County Republican Party meeting. Asked about her use of the word "retard" to refer to individuals with the syndrome, Greene said, "I guess it was a slang word. You can actually look it up in the dictionary", adding, "I do apologize for that being offensive to anyone."
On February 24, 2021, Greene tried to block the Equality Act while it was being debated on the House floor. She proposed replacing it with a bill that would exempt nonprofit organizations, allow people to sue the federal government "if their religious rights are violated", and prevent trans women and girls from participating in women's sport.