Controversial Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene faced another social media battle this week – after Twitter permanently suspended her for spreading Covid misinformation – when fellow conservative, Texas Rep Dan Crenshaw, suggested she “might be an idiot” on Instagram.
Mr Crenshaw, a veteran known for his signature eye patch and action-style videos depicting him fighting Antifa, was hitting back at the Georgia congresswoman after she claimed he was hurting the conservative brand following an interview he gave to Fox News.
She took issue with the former Navy Seal’s insistence that President Joe Biden needed to get the pandemic under control. He told Fox: “So what the federal government should be doing, again, is using their FEMA resources to bolster a lot of these testing sites, open up new testing sites.”
Ms Greene said on Instagram that FEMA should not be used to set up test sites “sneezes, coughs, and runny noses”.
Mr Crenshaw, who has been critical of Ms Greene before, responded: “Hey, Marjorie, if suggesting we should follow Trump [SIC] policy instead of Biden mandates makes you mad, then you might be a Democrat – or just an idiot.”
Ms Taylor Greene announced Monday that, following her Twitter suspension, she’d also been barred from posting on Facebook. The Georgia politician is a vocal opponent of mask mandates and critic of Covid mitigation measures.
“Facebook has joined Twitter in censoring me,” she wrote on Gettr, a social media platform favored by some right-wing conservatives. “This is beyond censorship of speech.”
The Georgia Republican “has seen her profile soar due to numerous controversies relating to her incendiary social media posts, which have included bigotry, Islamophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, support for conspiracy theories and calls for violence against her political enemies,” Politico reported.
Last month, Mr Crenshaw took aim at Ms Greene’s Freedom Caucus while speaking at an event in his hometown of Houston that was hosted by the Texas Liberty Alliance PAC.
While he did not name Ms Greene or other specific members of the Caucus – founded in 2015 before the first-term Georgia politician joined Congress – Mr Crenshaw referred to “grifters in our midst, not here, not in this room. I mean in the conservative movement.
“Lie after lie after lie, because they know something psychologically about the conservative heart – we’re worried about what people are going to do to us, what they’re going to infringe upon us, that’s the nature of conservatism,” The Washington Post reported that Mr Crenshaw said.
He said there were “performance artists” as well as legislators in Congress and the former “get all the attention.”
“They’re the ones you think are more conservative because they know how to say slogans real well,” he said. “They know how to recite the lines that they know our voters want to hear.”
Ms Greene, a 47-year-old mother-of-three, has repeatedly landed in the headlines for promoting extreme and far-right theories, including those espoused by QAnon.
