Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) lashed out in a predictably antagonistic fashion after getting permanently banned (in a personal capacity) from Twitter this weekend. She still has an official account associated with her status as a Congresswoman, but she’d generally used the personal account for her most incendiary messages. In this instance, repeated violations of Twitter’s policy against spreading COVID-19 misinformation got her banned. Greene responded to her suspension in a statement on the right-wing social media platform known as GETTR. Greene ranted as follows:
‘When Maxine Waters can go to the streets and threaten violence on Twitter, Kamala and Ilhan can bail out rioters on Twitter, and Chief spokesman for terrorist IRGC can tweet mourning Soleimani but I get suspended for tweeting VAERS statistics, Twitter is an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth. That’s fine, I’ll show America we don’t need them and it’s time to defeat our enemies.’
Greene’s assertions about Waters, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) do not reflect the truth. The comments from Waters to which Greene was apparently referring included a remark calling on observers to engage in “confrontation” — which does not automatically entail violence. As for the supposed bailing out of rioters, a bail fund for which prominent Democrats gathered support was not somehow focused on exclusively getting violent individuals out of jail. And is Greene really one to authoritatively speak about supporting violence when it’s her own squad that fostered the attack on the Capitol and continues to perpetuate the circumstances that led to it?
Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s 465K-follower personal Twitter account, the one she used to say lots of false things, has been permanently banned from Twitter.
She still has a 386K-follower official account, which she has so far used for comparatively benign purposes.
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) January 2, 2022
As previously reported on this site, Harris expressed support back in 2020 for the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which provides cash bail support to residents of Minnesota. Most people who were arrested in the Minneapolis area in connection to protests around the time of Harris’s post didn’t even require bail money, and over one in four never even faced charges, suggesting that they themselves were victims of police overreach. Harris did not somehow single out violent rioters for support. For starters, cash bail requirements disproportionately impact lower income people, forcing them to stay in jail for longer, and supporting a measure of criminal justice reform doesn’t equal supporting criminals!
JUST IN: Twitter confirms to NPR that it has banned Marjorie Taylor Greene's account "for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy."
— NPR (@NPR) January 2, 2022
One of Greene’s last tweets was a dig at fellow Republican member of Congress Dan Crenshaw of Texas, who called for the usage of federal resources to increase COVID-19 testing capacities. Greene derided the idea of taking COVID-19 seriously enough to do such a thing; as she put it, “FEMA should not set up testing sites to check for Omicron sneezes, coughs, and runny noses.” The problem is that people are dying from the Omicron variant of COVID-19, as with other variants, but Republicans in office like Greene are overly concerned with proving their point to the level of ignoring the reality — suffering and all — that’s in front of them. In that ignorant tweet, Greene also said that Crenshaw shouldn’t characterize himself as “conservative” anymore, because it’s “hurting our brand.”
A Twitter spox tells The Daily Beast: "We permanently suspended the account you referenced (@mtgreenee) for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy."
— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) January 2, 2022
