The Civil War produced two competing narratives, each an attempt to make sense of a conflict that had eradicated the pestilence of slavery.
Black Americans who believed in multiracial democracy extolled the emancipationist legacy of the war. These Reconstructionists envisioned a new America finally capable of safeguarding Black dignity and claims of citizenship. Black women and men created new civic, religious, political, educational, and economic institutions. They built thriving towns and districts, churches and schools. In so doing, they helped reimagine the purpose and promise of American democracy.
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For a time after the war, Black Reconstructionists also shaped the American government. They found allies in the Republican Party, where white abolitionists hoped to honor freedpeople’s demands and to create a progressive country in which all workers earned wages. Republicans in Congress pushed through amendments abolishing slavery, granting citizenship, and giving Black men the ballot. Congress also created the Freedmen’s Bureau, which offered provisions, clothing, fuel, and medical assistance to the formerly enslaved, and negotiated contracts to protect their newly won rights. With backing from the Union army, millions of Black people in the South received education, performed paid labor, voted in presidential elections, and held some of the highest offices in the country—all for the first time.
Black Reconstructionists told the country a new story about itself. These were people who believed in freedom beyond emancipation. They shared an expansive vision of a compassionate nation with a true democratic ethos.
Those who longed for the days of antebellum slavery felt differently. Advocates of the Lost Cause—who believed that the South’s defeat did nothing to diminish its moral superiority—sought to “redeem” their fellow white citizens from the scourge of “Negro rule.” Redemptionists did more than offer a different story about the nation. They demanded that their point of view be sanctified with blood. They threatened the nation’s infrastructure and institutions, and backed up their threats with violence.
The Redemption campaign was astoundingly successful. Intimidation and lynchings of Black voters and politicians quickly reversed gains in turnout. Reprisals against any white person who supported Black civil rights largely silenced dissent. This second rebellion hastened the national retreat from Reconstruction. Federal troops effectively withdrew from the Confederate states in 1877. White southerners soon dominated state legislatures once again, and passed Jim Crow laws designed to subjugate Black people and destroy their political power.
The official Reconstruction timeline usually ends there, in 1877. But this implies that the Reconstructionist vision of American democracy ceased to exist, or went dormant, without the backing of federal troops. Instead, we should consider a long Reconstruction—one that stretches well beyond 1877, and offers a view that transcends false binaries of political failure and success.
This view allows us to follow the travails of the Black activists and ordinary citizens who kept the struggle for freedom and dignity alive long after the Republican Party and white abolitionists had abandoned it. Black institutions, including the church, the schoolhouse, and the press, kept public vigil over promises made, broken, and, in some instances, renewed during the long march toward liberation. Their stories show that freedom’s flame, once boldly lit, could not be extinguished by the specter of white violence.
The concept of a long Reconstruction recognizes that a nation can be two things at once. After 1877, freedom and repression journeyed along parallel paths. Black Americans preserved a vision of a truly free nation in an archipelago of communities and institutions. Many of them exist today, and continue their work. This, perhaps, is the most important reason to resist the idea that Reconstruction ended when the North withdrew from the South: In a sense, the work of Reconstruction never ended, because the goal of a multiracial democracy has never been fully realized. And America has made its greatest gains toward that goal when it has rejected the Redemptionist narrative.
That the work of Reconstruction continued well after 1877 is illustrated by the life of Ida B. Wells, a woman who witnessed the death of slavery and fought against the beginning of Jim Crow. Wells kept alive the radical ideals of the Reconstructionists and punctured, through her journalism, the virulent mythology peddled by the Redemptionists. When Wells was born—in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862—her parents, Jim and Lizzie Wells, were enslaved. Later that year, the Union army took control of the town while staging an attack on Vicksburg. As they did elsewhere across the dying Confederacy, enslaved people in and around Holly Springs fled plantations for Union lines and emancipated themselves. But freedom proved contingent. Even when Union General Ulysses S. Grant made his headquarters in the town, Black refugees feared reprisals from their former enslavers. Their vulnerability to white violence, even under the watch of Union troops, foreshadowed the coming era.
After the war, Jim and Lizzie Wells chose to stay in Holly Springs. Jim joined the local Union League, which supported Republican Party politics and was committed to advancing Black male suffrage. In fall 1867, when Ida was 5 years old, her father cast his first ballot. Ida remembered her mother as an exemplar of domestic rectitude whose achievements were reflected in her children’s perfect Sunday-school attendance and good manners.
Ida grew up in a Mississippi full of miraculous change. She attended the first “colored” school in Holly Springs, a remarkable opportunity in a state that had been considered the most inhospitable to Black education and aspiration in the entire Confederacy. As a young girl, Ida read the newspaper aloud to her father’s admiring friends; just a few years earlier, it would have been illegal in Mississippi to teach her the alphabet.
In 1874, when Wells was 12, 69 Black men were serving in the Mississippi legislature, and a white governor, Adelbert Ames—placed in office partly by the votes of the formerly enslaved—promised to commit the state to equality for all. Around that time, Mississippi’s secretary of state, superintendent of education, and speaker of the House were all Black men.
The world around Ida was full of fiercely independent and economically prosperous Black citizens. These attainments buoyed her optimism for the rest of her life.
But the idyll of her childhood was brief. Redemptionist forces in Mississippi struck back against Black political power with naked racist terror. In December 1874, a white mob in Vicksburg killed as many as 300 Black citizens after forcing the elected Black sheriff, Peter Crosby, to resign. Massacres and lynchings continued unabated across the state through 1875. By 1876, the number of Black men in the state legislature had fallen by more than half. Following the contested election that year, the new president, the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, ordered the remaining active northern troops in the South to return to their barracks. Without the protection of federal troops, and with the symbolic abandonment by the president, Black people were on their own, completely vulnerable to voting restrictions, economic reprisals, and racial violence.
For Wells, the collapse of Reconstruction came at a moment of profound personal struggles. In 1878, her parents and one of her brothers died in a yellow-fever outbreak that killed hundreds in Holly Springs, leaving her, at 16, to care for five siblings, including her disabled sister, Eugenia. After Eugenia died, Wells moved to Memphis at the invitation of an aunt.
Wells’s escape from Mississippi did not protect her from the indignities of racism. In 1883, after a visit to Holly Springs, Wells purchased a train ticket back to Memphis, riding first class on a segregated train. She moved to the first-class car for white ladies after being bothered by another passenger’s smoking, and refused to go back to Black first class. Though barely five feet tall, Wells stood her ground until the white conductor physically removed her. She promptly filed suit and, initially at least, won $700 in damages before her two cases were reversed on appeal by the Tennessee State Supreme Court.
The defeat spurred Wells to find another means of fighting Jim Crow. She longed to attend Fisk University, and took summer classes there. By the end of the decade, she had become the editor and a co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, the newspaper founded by the Beale Street Church pastor Taylor Nightingale.
Wells took over editorial duties amid a surge of anti-Black violence, which had remained a feature of the South even after the Redemptionists achieved their goal of removing federal troops from the region. In the 1880s, the incidents began to intensify. In 1886, at least 13 Black citizens were lynched in a Mississippi courthouse, where free Black men were testifying against a white lawyer accused of assault. Attacks on Reconstructionists continued from there. The more that Black men and women engaged in political self-determination—choosing to own homes and businesses, to defend their families—the more thunderbolts of violence struck them. The bloodshed of Redemption was intended to touch the lives of all Black people in the South.
On March 9, 1892, that violence came to Wells’s life, when a mob of 75 white men in Memphis kidnapped three Black men: Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart. Moss was an owner of the People’s Grocery, an upstart Black cooperative that competed with the local grocery owned by William Barrett, who was white. The rivalry between the stores had escalated into a larger racial conflict, and Moss, McDowell, and Stewart had been sent to jail after guns were fired at a white mob that had attacked the People’s Grocery. Wells knew Moss and his wife, Betty, whom she considered one of her best friends. She was godmother to their daughter Maurine.
Moss, McDowell, and Stewart were given no due process or trial. Another mob took the men from jail and shot each to death, refusing Moss’s plea to spare his life for the sake of his daughter and pregnant wife. Their bodies were left in the Chesapeake & Ohio rail yard. The white-owned Memphis Appeal-Avalanche documented the horrors as fair justice for the troublesome Black men who had dared to fight white men.
In the Free Speech, Wells wrote a series of editorials decrying the killings and the constant threat of violence that Black Americans faced in the South, and urged northerners to renew their support for full Black citizenship. In one of those editorials, Wells called out the “threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women,” which was the justification for many lynchings. She filed the editorial shortly before a trip to the North. While she was gone, a group of men went to the Free Speech’s offices and destroyed the printing press, leaving a note warning that “anyone trying to publish the paper again would be punished with death.” She chose not to return to Memphis, and continued her campaign from New York.
That June, Wells wrote an essay, “The Truth About Lynching,” in the influential Black newspaper The New York Age. Wells reasoned that most anti-Black violence claimed its roots in economic competition, personal jealousy, and white supremacy. She also dispelled, again, the myth of Black-male sexual violence against white women. Wells pointed instead to the number of mixed-race children in the old Confederacy—evidence of the sexual violence that white men had inflicted on Black women.
Wells’s activism was more than a crusade to end lynching. She traveled the country and Great Britain to describe her vision of multiracial democracy. Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery and become the foremost civil-rights activist and journalist of the antebellum and Reconstruction eras, admired Wells and characterized her contributions as a “service which can neither be weighed nor measured.”
Wells first met Douglass in the summer of 1892, when he was 74; Douglass had written a letter to her saying he was inspired by her courage. The two developed a close friendship. “There has been no word equal to it in convincing power,” Douglass wrote of Southern Horrors, a pamphlet Wells published in 1892 based on her groundbreaking anti-lynching essay. The pair corresponded and worked together for the rest of Douglass’s life. With his death, in 1895, a torch was passed.
Wells’s efforts, in a period of racial fatigue among white audiences, helped continue the central political struggle of Reconstruction. She delivered hundreds of speeches, organized anti-lynching campaigns, and worked to galvanize the public against the Redemptionists. Wells told America a story it needed, but did not want, to hear.
Wells’s work also intersected with that of W. E. B. Du Bois, the scholar, journalist, and civil-rights activist who took a forceful stand against lynching. Their relationship was sometimes collegial, sometimes contentious; Wells never found with Du Bois the same rapport she’d had with Douglass. But she supported Du Bois’s then-radical view of the importance of Black liberal-arts education, and Du Bois was shaped by Wells’s advocacy and critiques.
Du Bois viewed the legacy of Reconstruction as crucial to understanding America. At the behest of another Black intellectual and scholar, Anna Julia Cooper, he published in 1935 his monumental Black Reconstruction. The book traced the origins of the violence that Wells denounced. He wrote that “inter-racial sex jealousy and accompanying sadism” were the main basis of lynching, and echoed Wells’s argument that white men’s violence against Black women had been the true scourge of the South. Du Bois also wrote that the Reconstructionists were engaged in “abolition-democracy,” which he defined as a broader movement for social equality that went beyond political rights.
Du Bois’s scholarship paved the way for a reconsideration of the era. He challenged the Redemptionist narrative of venal corruption and Black men who were either in over their head or merely served white northern puppet masters and southern race traitors.
Du Bois’s work is a starting point for contemporary histories. Eric Foner’s magisterial Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, published more than half a century after Black Reconstruction, added texture to the story of the period, then largely untold. Foner’s work reframed the era as an unfinished experiment in multiracial democracy.
In this tradition of expansion, the historian Steven Hahn’s Pulitzer Prize–winning A Nation Under Our Feet, published in 2003, widens earlier historical frameworks by looking beyond Reconstruction’s constitutional reforms. Hahn sought out the Black men and women who shaped Reconstruction at the state and local levels. More recently, the historian Kidada E. Williams’s I Saw Death Coming focuses on the daily lives of Black men and women during Reconstruction—witnesses to the violence of Redemption.
All of these works expand our conception of what Reconstruction was, and challenge the notion that the era came to an abrupt ending in 1877. They portray the era as a contested epic, where parallel movements for Reconstruction and Redemption rise, fall, and are recovered.
I first learned about Reconstruction from my late mother, Germaine Joseph, a Haitian immigrant turned American citizen whose love of history could be gauged by the crammed bookcases in our home in Queens, New York. My first lesson on Reconstruction came in the form of a story about Haiti’s revolution. Mom proudly informed me that Haiti had been the key to unlocking freedom for Black Americans: The Haitian Revolution, she explained, led to revolts of the enslaved, frightened so-called masters, and inspired Frederick Douglass.
Later, I found my way back to Reconstruction through an interest in the Black radical tradition, especially post–World War II movements for racial justice and equality. My mentor, the late historian Manning Marable, described the civil-rights movement, and the age of Black Power that followed, as a second Reconstruction. During this time, with a renewed interest in slavery and its aftermath, scholars rediscovered Du Bois’s work.
My research and writing of late has revolved around interpreting the past 15 years of American history, from Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House in 2008, to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election, to the events that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020. In my 2022 book, The Third Reconstruction, I argued that we might be living through another era filled with the kind of dizzying possibility and intense backlash that whipsawed the South during Wells’s life.
Today’s Reconstructionists have a vision for multiracial democracy that might astonish even Douglass, Wells, and Du Bois. Black women, queer folk, poor people, disabled people, prisoners, and formerly incarcerated people have adopted the term abolition from Du Bois’s idea of abolition-democracy, and now use it to refer to a broad movement to dismantle interlocking systems of oppression—many of which originated in Redemption policy. They have achieved important victories in taking down Confederate monuments; sharing a more accurate telling of America’s origin story and its relationship to slavery; and questioning systems of punishment, surveillance, and poverty.
But today’s Redemptionists have had their victories as well. Their apocalyptic story of the present, one in which crime and moral decay threaten to destroy America, rationalizes a return to a past America and aims to dismantle the Reconstruction amendments that underpin fundamental civil rights. Redemptionists promote a regime of education that reverses the gains historians have made since the revival of Black Reconstruction.
The health of American democracy continues to rest upon whether we believe the Reconstructionist or Redemptionist version of history. Reconstruction, as a belief, as an ideal, outlasted the federal government’s political commitments by decades. Black people, the country’s most improbable architects, continued to make and shape history by preserving this rich legacy, and bequeathing it to their children. Their story has remained the heart of the American experiment both when the country has acknowledged them—and, most especially, when it has not.
This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “The Revolution Never Ended.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
Death from colorectal cancer can be prevented by regular screenings. Controlling high blood pressure could prolong the lives of the nearly 500,000 Americans who die from this disease each year. Vaccinations help prevent tetanus, which could otherwise be lethal.
Clearly, preventive medicine can make a big difference to health.
And yet most people don’t get the preventive care that could save their lives. Indeed, as of 2015, only 8 percent of U.S. adults 35 and older had received all immunizations, cancer screenings, and other high-priority services recommended for them.
Researchers seeking to change that are borrowing a page from Facebook, Google, and other tech companies. By rapidly comparing small differences in how they communicate with patients—a process known as A/B testing—health-care workers can quickly learn what works and what doesn’t. The approach has already delivered several actionable improvements, though not everyone is convinced of its value.
Tech-oriented companies use A/B testing to make decisions about marketing slogans, web-page colors, and lots of other options. The key is randomization, meaning that people are randomly assigned to see different versions of whatever is being tested. Does a bigger “Subscribe” button on a website generate more clicks than a smaller one? Does one headline over a story capture more readers than another?
Leora Horwitz, an internist and a health-services researcher at NYU Langone Health, and her colleagues adopted this technique—which they call rapid randomized controlled trials—to learn how to improve the delivery of health-care services. Randomized controlled trials, or RCTs, are widely used in medicine, typically to test new drugs or other disease treatments. For example, patients may be randomly assigned to receive either a new drug or the current standard treatment, then followed for months or years to assess whether the new drug works better. But those trials are slow and expensive, in part because researchers have to recruit people willing to be in a medical experiment.
Rapid RCTs, by contrast, are not used to study new treatments, so nobody has to be recruited to participate. Rather, Horwitz’s goal is to improve health-care delivery through quick trials in which one can repeatedly test and fine-tune changes to health-care delivery based on what researchers learn from each test.
For example, Horwitz and her colleagues wanted to figure out how to get patients to book appointments to address care gaps—preventive services that are overdue. Because of the huge number of patients, physicians’ offices can’t contact everyone by telephone or through the online portal that NYU Langone uses to communicate with patients. So the health system needed to understand what type of reminders were most effective.
In the A/B test, patients with care gaps were divided into two sets: those who had signed up for an online-portal account and those who had not. Patients in each set were then sorted into different groups based on their health-care history. Patients who, based on past behavior, were unlikely to initiate appointments on their own were put in higher-risk groups; those who had eventually booked their own appointments in the past were assigned to lower-risk groups.
In one part of the test, several thousand patients who had no portal account were randomized so that some received a telephone-call reminder and others did not. Patients who received a phone call booked appointments to address 6.2 percent of the care gaps, compared with just 0.5 percent among those who were not called.
In another part of the test, some patients with portal accounts received a reminder message through that channel, while others did not. Of those who received the message, 13 percent scheduled the needed services, compared with 1.1 percent of those who were not contacted.
Importantly, the experiments revealed that a phone-call reminder was the most effective way to reach the subgroups of patients who were high-risk and the least likely to get their preventive services without a nudge. Shortly after the test results were known, NYU Langone prioritized all of its highest-risk patients to receive telephone reminders and greatly expanded its capacity for sending messages through the patient portal.
“When we learn something, we apply that to all of our messaging quickly,” Horwitz says. That immediately extends what they’ve learned to tens of thousands of people. “That’s gratifying.”
NYU Langone’s A/B testing is why many of the medical center’s female patients are now receiving short messages to remind them to schedule their mammograms. The researchers used rapid RCTs to test the wording on reminders sent through the online portal: Would shorter messages get better results? Indeed, patients who received a 78-word reminder scheduled nearly twice as many mammograms as those who received the old 155-word message.
In another investigation, to find out how to boost vaccination rates among very young children, Horwitz and her team turned to rapid randomized tests that compared one-text and two-text reminders to parents against no text reminder at all. Only the two-text reminder—one sent at 6 p.m., the other sent at noon two days later—made a difference, tripling the number of appointments scheduled. Most appointments were made after the second text, suggesting that this booster reminder was what triggered the parents to act.
Though it’s still new to the health-care sector, the idea of rapid RCTs is catching on. One research team—an economist, a physician, and a public-policy expert, none of whom was affiliated with Horwitz’s group—used the technique to learn how to increase the use of preventive-care services by Black men, the U.S. demographic group with the lowest life expectancy.
They recruited more than 1,300 Black men from Oakland, California–area barbershops and flea markets, asked them to fill out a health questionnaire, and gave them a coupon for a free health screening. A pop-up clinic, staffed with 14 Black and non-Black male doctors, was set up to provide the screenings, and the participating men were randomly assigned to a Black or a non-Black doctor. The result: Black men assigned to Black physicians were more likely to get diabetes screenings, flu vaccinations, and other preventive services than those assigned to non-Black doctors.
Some experts doubt that rapid A/B testing will ever become commonplace in health care. Darren DeWalt, a physician who directs the Institute for Healthcare Quality Improvement at the University of North Carolina, likes the concept, but he thinks most health-care organizations will avoid it for ethical reasons, possibly because people tend to disapprove of randomization, even in the context of something as innocuous as appointment reminders. “People in this country don’t like the idea that they are randomly allocated to something, even something as simple as that,” DeWalt says. “There’s a lot of suspicion around researchers in health care.”
Others criticize A/B testing as tinkering at the margins. Pierre Barker, the chief scientific officer for the nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston, believes that significant improvements in health-care delivery require an in-depth analysis of the problem to be solved, which may require many changes to the system. By contrast, rapid randomized controlled trials focus on a single, discrete change—say, the words used in a telephone script—rather than a broader effort to understand why patients don’t get preventive services and what can be done to change that.
“The attractiveness is how fast it can move, more than the size of the impact,” he says. “I remain to be convinced that you can get more than a small incremental change” from rapid randomized controlled trials.
It is true that the majority of NYU Langone’s care gaps were not resolved by the new reminders, says Horwitz, but the tests did provide information that led to hundreds of potentially lifesaving services being performed. That is what convinces her that the health-care industry should embrace rapid randomized trials.
“If you were working for a web company or an airline or any other industry, you would randomize as a matter of course—this is the standard practice,” she says. “But it is still very foreign in health care, and it shouldn’t be.”
THURSDAY, March 2, 2023 (HealthDay News) — Older Black men are more likely than others to die after surgery, according to a new study.
Black men have a higher chance of dying within 30 days of surgery compared to Black women and white adults, and their odds of death after elective procedures is 50% higher when compared to white men, researchers found.
This may be because of the “especially high cumulative amounts of stress” that Black men face contributing to declines in their physical health, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles said.
“While a fair bit is known about such inequities, we find in our analyses that it’s specifically Black men who are dying more, and they are dying more after elective surgeries, not urgent and emergent surgeries,” said study lead Dr. Dan Ly. He’s an assistant professor of medicine at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.
It’s possible that Black men may suffer from poorer pre-op treatment of chronic conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure, Ly said. Other possibilities to explain the findings include “delays of care due to structural racism and physician bias, and worse stress and its associated physical burden on Black men in the United States,” Ly said in a UCLA Health Sciences news release.
Using Medicare data from 2016 to 2018 for 1.87 million Black and white Americans ages 65 to 99, researchers looked at outcomes after eight common surgeries.
These were abdominal aortic repair, appendectomy, cholecystectomy to remove the gall bladder, colectomy to remove all or part of the colon, coronary artery bypass, hip replacement, knee replacement and lung resection.
Some of these procedures were done through emergency surgery and some as planned surgeries.
The death rate after surgery for Black men was about 3.05% compared with 2.69% among white men, 2.38% among white women and 2.18% among Black women.
For elective surgeries, the death rate was 1.30% among Black men, compared with white men at 0.85%, white women at 0.82%, and Black women at 0.79%.
Researchers noted the disparity between Black and white men began as early as seven days after surgery. It still existed 60 days after surgery.
Structural racism may partly explain these discrepancies, Ly said. Black neighborhoods are often near hospitals that lack high-quality resources such as specialists, including surgeons with advanced training. They may also lack the latest diagnostic imaging studies and tests.
Not having these benefits can lead to treatment delays resulting in more advanced disease. It may also lead to more difficult surgeries.
Researchers also pointed to exposure to toxic hazards that can increase disease severity.
“These differences in neighborhood, home environment and community resources may make it more challenging for Black patients, on average, to recover at home and to make postoperative clinical visits,” the researchers said. “Our finding that Black men experience a higher surgical mortality compared with other subgroups of race and sex is troubling, and is also seen with shorter life expectancy among Black men more generally.”
Among the study’s limitations are that it focused exclusively on Black and white patients. It used data from Medicare fee-for-service clients, so may not apply to other people.
Study findings were published March 1 in the journal BMJ. The study was funded by the U.S. National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.
More information
The organization KFF has more on disparities in health care for Black Americans.
SOURCE: University of California, Los Angeles Health Sciences, news release, March 1, 2023
She was very late. A man named Barry was compelled to lead the room in a rendition of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” to stall for time. But when she did arrive, the tardiness was forgiven and the Cobb County Republican Party’s November breakfast was made new. She wasn’t greeted. She was beheld, like a religious apparition. Emotions verged on rapture. Later, as she spoke, one man jumped to his feet with such force that his chair fell over. Not far away, two women clung to each other and shrieked. I was knocked to my seat when a tablemate’s corrugated-plastic FLOOD THE POLLS sign collided inadvertently with my head. Upon looking up, I came eye-level with a pistol tucked into the khaki waistband of an elderly man in front of me. “She is just so great,” I heard someone say. “I mean, she really is just amazing.”
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Marjorie Taylor Greene arrived in Congress in January 2021, blond and crass and indelibly identified with conspiracy theories involving Jewish space lasers and Democratic pedophiles. 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.
Nobody saw her coming. Not even Greene saw Greene coming.
II.
She was a product, her family loved to say, of the “Great American Dream.” There was a three-story home at the end of a shaded driveway in the small town of Cumming, Georgia, north of Atlanta; there was a finished basement in which Marge—and that is what she was called, Marge—and her friends would gather in faded nylon one-pieces after a swim in Lake Lanier.
Her father was Robert David Taylor, a Michigan transplant for whom a three-story home had never been guaranteed but who had believed acutely in its possibility. Bob Taylor was the son of a steel-mill worker; he had served in Vietnam; he had hung siding to pay for classes at Eastern Michigan University. He had married the beautiful Carrie Fidelle Bacon—“Delle,” to most people, but he called her Carrie—from Milledgeville, Georgia, and rather than continue with college, he had become a contractor and built a successful company called Taylor Construction. For Marjorie Taylor, the first of Bob and Delle’s two children, the result was a world steeped in a distinctly suburban kind of certainty: packed lunches and marble kitchen countertops, semiannual trips to the beach, and the conviction that everything happens for a reason.
She came of age in Cumming, the seat of Forsyth County. With her turtleneck sweaters and highlighted mall bangs, Marge Taylor might have been any other teenage girl in America. At South Forsyth High School, class of 1992, she was a member of the Spanish club and a manager of the soccer team. She may not have been voted Most Spirited, but she dressed to theme during homecoming week; she may not have had the Best Sense of Humor, but by graduation she had amassed her share of inside jokes with friends. “Shh … It’s the people outside!” her senior quote reads in the high-school yearbook. “Run the cops are here! I’m gone!!” She was “nice to everyone,” “upbeat,” with “tons of confidence,” recalls Leslie Hamburger, a friend of hers and her brother David’s. “I have nothing but good memories.” The good-but-not-great student was hardly, in other words, an overachieving scold already plotting her ascent to Washington. It’s difficult to imagine an 18-year-old Ted Cruz bothering with something called the Hot Tuna Club.
Illustration by Eric Yahnker. Source image: South Forsyth High.
Forsyth County was a calm, quiet, ordered place. But it had a history. In September 1912, an 18-year-old white girl was found bloodied and barely breathing in the woods lining the Chattahoochee River; she died two weeks later. Within 24 hours of her discovery, four Black men had been arrested and charged with assault. A white mob dragged one of the suspects from his cell and hanged him from a telephone pole. Two others were tried and executed. White residents then decided to undertake nothing short of a racial cleansing. On horseback, armed with rifles and dynamite, they drove out virtually all of the county’s Black population—more than 1,000 people. So successful were their efforts that the county would experience the modern civil-rights era vicariously at best. There were no whites only signs to fuss over in Cumming, because there were no Black people to keep separate.
In January 1987, a white resident organized a “Walk for Brotherhood” to commemorate what had happened 75 years earlier. The project was complicated by the immediate wave of death threats he received. Arriving from Atlanta, the civil-rights leader Hosea Williams called Forsyth the most racist county in the South. Oprah Winfrey came down to cover the event. But most people in Forsyth ignored the whole affair; broach it in conversation, and you were considered a pot-stirrer. George Pirkle, the county’s resident historian, was reminded of this as recently as 2011, when he readied for publication TheHeritage Book of Forsyth County. He told the mayor of Cumming about his plans to include the region’s Black history in the volume, and got an incredulous response: “Well, why in the world would you want to do that?” As Martha McConnell, the local historical society’s co-president then and now, told me, the subtext was clear: “Don’t be starting things.”
In the end, the Heritage Book did not go starting things. Look through it today and you will see the neatly arranged census data that cuts off at 1910. To include 1920, of course, would have revealed that the Black population was suddenly gone. To go beyond 1920 would have revealed that the Black population never came back.
All of which is to say that Marge Taylor’s worldview was shaped in a community artificially devoid of sociocultural conflict, a history scrubbed of tension. That’s the basic attitude here toward the past, Pirkle told me: “If you don’t talk about it, it goes away.”
Decades later, as they considered her scorched-earth rise to power—the conspiracy theories and racist appeals and talk of violence against Democratic leaders—some of her teachers would find themselves wondering how they’d failed to notice the young Marge Taylor. How was it that they had no memory of her holding forth in civics class, or waging a boisterous campaign for student office? How could it possibly be that in fact they had no memory of her at all?
III.
She did as she was supposed to do, graduating from South Forsyth High and then packing up and moving an hour and a half away, to Athens, for four years at the University of Georgia. She would flit all but anonymously through the campus of 20,000 undergraduates. For Marge Taylor, UGA was about becoming the first in her family to graduate from college—setting herself up to run Taylor Construction. Almost certainly it was also about meeting a nice man. Perry Clarke Greene was a nice man. Three years her senior, he was tall and earnest and came from Riverdale. He, too, was in the university’s Terry College of Business. They exchanged vows the summer before her senior year, in 1995.
Among the things I do not know about Marjorie Taylor Greene—she would not speak with me for this story—is what her wedding was like. A newspaper account, if it exists, has yet to turn up. I do not know whether she stood before an altar laden with white gladioli, as her grandmother once had, or whether the reception was a small affair at her parents’ home in Cumming or something bigger somewhere else. I also do not know whether, on that day, she was happy: whether the quiet and respectable life that now unfurled before the new Mrs. Perry Greene felt like enough.
The young couple moved into a three-bed, three-bath colonial with symmetrical shrubbery in the north-Atlanta suburb of Roswell. Perry Greene became an accountant at Ernst & Young, and Marjorie Greene became pregnant. In January 1998, she smiled alongside the other mothers with tired eyes and loose clothing as they learned to exercise and massage their newborns in the North Fulton Regional Hospital’s “Mother Lore” class.
It wasn’t long before Perry started working for his father-in-law as general manager of the family business. After facilitating the sale of Taylor Construction, in 1999, he moved on to Taylor Commercial, a former division of the company, which specialized in siding for apartment complexes and subsidized-housing projects. Soon after, Bob Taylor named his son-in-law president of the company.
Marjorie, meanwhile, tended to their one, two, and finally three children. There were lake days with Mimi and Papa, three-week Christmas vacations in the sun, and annual drives to visit Perry’s extended family in Oxford, Mississippi. A lot of time was spent traveling to fast-pitch softball tournaments—Taylor, the middle child, was barely a teenager when she started getting noticed. (“Can’t believe she is being recruited in 8th grade,” Greene would write on her personal blog after a weekend at one university.)
As for Taylor Commercial, it was eventually bought by Marge and Perry. Financial-disclosure documents filed in 2020, when Greene first ran for office, reveal a company whose value ranged from $5 million to $25 million. There is a photograph that Greene cherishes: of her as a child smiling alongside her father at a construction site. Bob did not want his daughter to see her inheritance as a given; Greene has said that her father once fired her from a job she held at the company as a teenager. But now the girl in the photograph was chief financial officer of Taylor Commercial; her college sweetheart was its president; her family was by that point living in a tract mansion in Milton, which borders Alpharetta. Who could say, of course, how regularly she made use of the indoor pool, or marveled at the built-in aquarium on the terrace level—two features of this “smart-home luxury estate,” in the words of a recent listing. But she could at least enjoy the fact of them.
Another thing I do not know about Marjorie Taylor Greene: I do not know precisely how long it was before the shape of her life—the quiet, the respectability, the cadence of carpooling and root touch-ups—began to assume the dull cast of malaise. Perhaps it was during one of the many softball tournaments, another weekend spent crushed against the corner of an elevator at the Hilton Garden Inn by grass-stained girls and monogrammed bat bags. Perhaps her Age of Anxiety arrived instead on a quiet Tuesday in the office of her multimillion-dollar company, when it occurred to her that running this multimillion-dollar company just might not be her purpose after all.
What I do know, after dozens of conversations with Greene’s classmates and teachers, friends and associates, is that by the time she reached her late 30s, something in her had started to break.
IV.
Later, on the campaign trail, Greene would anchor much of her story in the fact that she was a longtime business owner: a woman who’d always more than held her own in the male-dominated world of construction. In beautifully shot television ads, voters saw a woman whose days were a relentless sprint between building sites—hard hats, reflector vests, jeans—and light-filled conference rooms, where she wore dresses with tasteful necklines and examined important blueprints.
That is not a fully accurate picture. People at Taylor Commercial seem to have liked Greene personally, but she spent only a few years on the job and did not put her stamp on the company. Call her on a weekday afternoon, and there was a good chance she’d answer from the gym. She had “nothing to do with” Taylor Commercial, one person familiar with the company’s operations told me. “It was entirely Perry.” A 2021 article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitutionnoted that the Taylor Commercial website during those years scarcely hinted at Greene’s existence. The only flicker of acknowledgment came in the last line of Perry Greene’s bio, a reference to the wife and three children with whom he shared a home.
By 2011, the Journal-Constitution reported, Greene was no longer listed as the chief financial officer, or any other kind of officer. A year earlier, the company had been hit with state and county tax liens. Greene would one day joke about her lack of business acumen. But it doesn’t seem to have been terribly funny in the moment. Greene simply didn’t love the work. She had grown up with this business; she had gone to school for this business. And yet the girl in the photograph, as it turned out, had little interest in running this business.
Some people close to Greene would describe the ensuing dynamic—her own connection to the business weakening while her husband’s grew stronger—as a source of tension for the couple. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s path to Congress could perhaps be said to have begun here: when, in the aftermath of her tenure as CFO, she appeared determined to strike out in search of something to call her own.
In 2011, the same year she stepped away from her job, Greene decided to commit herself to Jesus Christ. Or recommit herself, perhaps. Last spring, Greene revealed, apparently for the first time publicly, that she was a “cradle Catholic,” born and raised in the Church. This disclosure was occasioned after Greene told Church Militant, a right-wing Catholic website, that efforts by bishops to aid undocumented immigrants reflected “Satan controlling the church.” In response, Bill Donohue of the conservative Catholic League demanded that Greene apologize. Greene felt moved thereafter to share the details of her own personal relationship with Catholicism, explaining that she had stopped attending Mass when she became a mother: when she’d “realized,” she said in a statement, “that I could not trust the Church leadership to protect my children from pedophiles, and that they harbored monsters even in their own ranks.”
Greene eventually decided to join North Point Community Church, one of the largest nondenominational Christian congregations in the country. And so during a service one Sunday, as applause and encouragement echoed across the sanctuary, Greene waited her turn to be immersed, blond hair tucked behind her ears, Chiclet-white teeth fixed in a nervous smile.
Many baptisms at North Point are accompanied by testimony, in which the congregant shares a brief word about her journey to Christ. Video of Greene’s testimony is no longer on the church’s website, but the journalist Michael Kruse described its key moments in an article for Politico. From the stage that morning, he wrote, Greene spoke about “the martyrs book,” meaning, I think, the Book of Martyrs, John Foxe’s 16th-century history and polemic on the persecution of Protestants under Queen Mary. As she’d considered the “conviction” of such men and women, “how they died for Christ,” Greene said, “I realized how small my faith was if I was scared to do a video and get baptized in front of thousands of people.” Before those thousands of people, she accepted Jesus as her lord and savior.
Greene’s congressional biography leaves the impression of deep and meaningful engagement with North Point, but according to a person in the church leadership, her involvement tapered off after several years. This person noted, somewhat ruefully, that Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who defied President Donald Trump, has long been involved in North Point, but “no one ever asks me about him.”
V.
It was around this same time that Greene, as she later put it on a local radio show, “finally got brave enough” to step into a CrossFit gym. Greene’s original gym of choice had been the Alpharetta branch of Life Time. The gym, with its LifeSpa and LifeCafe, bills itself as a “luxury athletic resort,” and it’s easy to see how Greene might have tired of the ambience. She is not—has never been—the kind of biweekly gym-goer who walks for 45 minutes on the treadmill while watching Stranger Things on an iPad. In one of the few candid shots of Greene in her 11th-grade yearbook, she is flat on her back on a weight bench, lifting two heavy-looking dumbbells. “Marge Taylor pumps some Iron,” the caption reads.
In 2007, a workout partner at Life Time told Greene about CrossFit, a fitness regimen that combines Olympic weight lifting with calisthenics and interval training; it has long been popular among law enforcement and members of the military. The two women went on CrossFit.com and printed out the workout of the day, or “WOD,” in CrossFit parlance. This was, in the early years of CrossFit, how most newcomers engaged with the program, printing out the WOD and heading to their regular gym. By the end of that first WOD, Greene was sold. In 2011, she started going to the CrossFit gym in Alpharetta.
What Greene found at the gym (or “box,” as it is known) was community. The coaches, the members, the stragglers who popped in “just to see what this is all about”—they loved her. This is something many observers in Washington and elsewhere do not appreciate about Greene: that she can be extremely likable, so long as you are not, in her estimation, among “the swamp rat elites, spineless weak kneed Republicans, and the Radical Socialist Democrats who are the demise of this country that we all love and call home.” She has a sugary voice and a personable, generous affect; she is, when she wants to be, the sort of person whom a stranger might meet briefly and recall fondly to their friends as “just the nicest woman.” “The softer side of Marjorie Taylor Greene is what her friends, neighbors, and the people who elected her know,” Jamie Parrish, a Georgia Republican and close friend of Greene’s, told me. Her supporters back home can seem genuinely confused by her chilly or hostile portrayal and reception elsewhere.
At CrossFit, Greene’s warmth made her a star. “CrossFit’s really intimidating,” she explained in one radio interview. “Most people’s experience with CrossFit is … they run across ESPN, and they see these monster people doing crazy amazing things, and they’re usually like, ‘Ohhh, I’m never gonna do that.’ ” But Greene could put people at ease. When she started coaching classes herself, the reviews were stellar. “I loved working out with Marjorie Greene,” Carolyn Canouse, a former client, told me by email. “She was patient with my lack of athleticism, and always encouraging and supportive to everyone in the gym. She would bring her dog to work with her sometimes (he was adorable!), as well as her children who were all down to earth and nice to be around.”
Eric Yahnker
Greene trained on most days and competed in a workout challenge known as the CrossFit Open; at her peak, she was ranked 47th in the U.S. in her age group. Over time, she seemed to regard CrossFit less as a grounding for the rest of her life and more as an escape from it altogether.
When Greene was running for Congress, a man named Jim Chambers, jarred by her self-presentation as a paragon of family values, wrote about her alleged extramarital affairs at the gym in a Facebook post. (The New Yorker’s Charles Bethea later reported on text messages from Greene apparently confirming one of the affairs.) Her first alleged relationship was with a fellow trainer. Chambers, who owned one of the CrossFit boxes at which Greene coached, recalled viewing her initially as “this married lady who was at least nominally Christian, maybe not especially, but led a very suburban life. And then, like, quickly thereafter, she confessed that her marriage was on the rocks and falling apart.” According to Chambers, Greene made no secret of the affair with the trainer. She talked openly about her problems with Perry—“different lives and interests … typical stuff,” as Chambers summarized it. “She struck me as an extremely bored person,” he added. Later, Greene apparently had an affair with another man at CrossFit, a manager whom Chambers had recently hired from Colorado; this relationship, Chambers said, was more serious, more involved, “a real affair.” (Greene’s office did not respond to a list of questions about the alleged affairs and other matters.)
By March 2012, she and Perry had separated. Four months later, she filed for divorce. Two months after that, the couple reconciled.
The family appeared to resume its ordinary rhythms. By January, Perry was posting again on Tripadvisor. This was no small thing. Before the separation, he had been in the habit of reviewing, with great earnestness, establishments ranging from the local Melting Pot (“As stated this is a fondue restaurant, so it is very unique”) to the Cool Cat Cafe on Maui (“My family loves their burgers so much we have ‘Burger Sunday’ every Sunday as our family dinner”), only to go conspicuously dark during the sadness and tumult of 2012. But come the new year he was back, sharing his thoughts about the Encore, in Las Vegas (“Great ambience. Wife and I loved it!!!”), and an Italian restaurant in Alpharetta whose wine list, he judged, was “pretty good!”
Marjorie, meanwhile, worked with a personal coach in the hope of qualifying to compete in the international CrossFit Games. For the next two years, she would busy herself with his intense weekly prescriptions, all the while chronicling her experience on a WordPress blog. “Test post,” she began in April 2013. “I’m testing posting on my blog from my iPhone … See if this works.”
Scattered among the posts about creatine supplements (“I love that stuff”) and the iPhone footage of Greene’s triple jumps, there are glimmers to suggest that her family had found its way back. “I decided that I’m going to make a little home gym in my basement,” Greene wrote in May 2013. “This way, on days I’m not coaching I can train at home and be around my kids. My husband thinks it’s a great idea. Hopefully, they can see Mom working hard, and I can set a good example for them.” Six months later: “Just hanging around the house this weekend with my family, and I’m really happy with that.”
Much of the time, however, the blog posts suggest someone pinballing from aggressive cheerfulness (“Totally doing the happy dance!!”) to the “negative thoughts” that could rush in with no warning: “I wish there was a switch to turn off those thoughts.”
VI.
“Confidence is also an area that I struggle in,” Greene wrote in one of her blog posts. “But I’ve decided to say ‘why not me?’ ”
In 2013, she set out to become a businesswoman again. Partnering with Travis Mayer, a 22-year-old coach and one of the top CrossFit athletes in the world, Greene opened a 6,000-square-foot box called CrossFit Passion, on Roswell Street, in Alpharetta. Two years later, they relocated to a space nearly twice the size. In 2016, however, Greene sold her stake. She no longer blogged about her WODs or anything else related to CrossFit.
It’s unclear what prompted so abrupt a turnaround; Greene hasn’t discussed the subject publicly. “She would go through a really hard workout and then just stop in the middle of it and start crying,” a person who was close to Greene during this time told me. “And that started happening more regularly toward the end. It was just too much stress.” (Mayer, who went on to rename the gym United Performance, which he still owns and operates today, did not respond to requests for comment.)
The other thing that happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2016 was Donald Trump. Greene’s family had never been especially political. Every fourth November, minus a cycle or two, Bob and Delle Taylor made sure to stop by the library or the First Baptist Church and cast a vote. It is reasonable to assume that the Taylors leaned right. For years, the family’s construction company was a major sponsor of the Atlanta libertarian Neal Boortz’s eponymous talk show. Boortz, one of the most popular radio personalities in America during the late 1990s and early 2000s, told me that Bob (who died in 2021) had been a good friend for decades. Still, the family did not give money to candidates, Republican or Democrat; they did not hold fundraisers at the house on Lake Lanier. For the Taylors, the 2016 presidential election commenced with no more fanfare than any other. On Super Tuesday, Bob, Delle, and Marjorie did not vote in either party’s primary. In fact, Marjorie had not voted since 2010.
Greene’s political origin story was not unlike that of millions of other Trump supporters. Despite having never hinted at an interest in politics, she found herself suddenly beguiled by a feeling, a conviction that despite the distance between Trump’s gold-plated world and her own, she knew exactly who he was. “He reminded me of most men I know,” she has said. “Men like my dad.”
In some ways, he was like her dad. Bob Taylor may not have been overtly partisan, but he rivaled Trump in his tendency to self-mythologize. In 2006, Greene’s father had published a novel with the small publisher Savas Beatie called Paradigm. As best I can tell, this is Taylor’s effort to demonstrate the value of a system he invented called the “Taylor Effect”—which purports to predict the stock market based on the gravitational fluctuations of Earth—in the form of a high-stakes international caper. The story follows twin scientists who discover an ancient Egyptian box in the bowels of the Biltmore estate, the contents of which, they soon realize, could “destroy many of the world’s most powerful families” if ever made public.
He considered his stock-market theory to be “the Genuine Article”; in the afterword, he likened himself to da Vinci, Galileo, Edison, Marconi, and the Wright brothers. “History,” he wrote, “is filled with characters who endured ridicule, imprisonment, and even death because they discovered things we know today with absolute certainty to be true.” Suzanne Thompson, a North Carolina author hired to help Taylor write Paradigm, recalls that Taylor had “a bit of an exalted sense of himself.” She was unaware that he was Marjorie Taylor Greene’s father, and gasped with dismay when I told her. “Oh my gosh, I had no idea. Oh my God.”
Although Greene’s political awakening was sudden, she would later portray her support for Trump as the unveiling of a well-formed political identity that she’d had no choice but to keep hidden. “I’ve always had strong feelings about politics, but when you’re a business owner, you have to really, really be careful about what you say,” she told a conservative YouTube vlogger in 2019. But when she sold her gym, “something magically happened to me: I didn’t have to worry about what members thought anymore.”
Greene may now have felt free to speak, but it was not clear what she wanted to say. It was clear only that she wanted to say something. It was as though she spent the first six months of Trump’s administration gathering up the scattered feelings and dim instincts that informed her attraction to his brand of politics and examining them under a microscope, twisting the knob until the edges came into focus. By July 2017, Greene was ready to start posting about politics.
She headed to American Truth Seekers, a now-defunct fringe-right website run by a New York City public-school counselor who went by the name Pat Rhiot. The contents of Greene’s earliest posts have been lost to the ether, but the headlines, archived by the Wayback Machine, summarize the brand Greene set out to establish from the very beginning: “Caitlyn Jenner Considering What?” was the first headline, followed over the next few days by “Female Genital Mutilation: America’s Dirty Little Secret” and “Exposed! Confidential Memo to Take Down Trump and Silence Conservatives!”
By August, when the full text of many of her blog posts become available, she was establishing her fierce devotion to gun rights and Donald Trump, and her antipathy toward conventional Republican politicians:
MAGA means get rid of our ridiculous embarrassing massive $20 Trillion dollar DEBT you put us in!! … You see we elected Donald Trump because he is NOT one of you, a politician. He is a business man, and a VERY successful one. WE elected him because he clearly knows how to manage business and money because we all know he has made plenty of it. Oh but not you people!
September saw her going after Hillary Clinton:
You know how we all have that one friend or family member that shows up to the party uninvited and just causes non-stop drama? They lie and make up stories and shift blame to everyone and everything, but constantly refuse to accept reality or the fact that maybe it’s their own fault. They ruin the party and make everyone miserable with all the crap they blubber out of their mouths, while they try to push their agenda on everyone and no one wants it. Yep Hillary. Can she just go away? Can she just go to jail?
Greene’s posts, by the standards of the 2017 far-right blogosphere, were more or less the usual fare, nothing terribly new or uniquely provocative. But Greene, in her brief time posting, had already picked up on something remarkable: People liked that she was ordinary. In the present landscape of conservative politics, ordinariness was a branding opportunity. Ordinariness ensured that even her most banal reflections would sparkle. Ordinariness allowed Greene to offer conservatives what the Alex Joneses couldn’t: affirmation that your neighborhood “full-time mom” and “female business owner” and “patriot” was fed up too. In the fall of 2017, Greene created a new Facebook page exclusively for the dissemination of her political thoughts.
The Republican base was in the market for a Marjorie Taylor Greene—a suburban woman who not only didn’t recoil from Trump but was full-throated MAGA. All over the internet, it seemed, were women who claimed to be conservative and yet could do nothing but choke on their pearls and complain about Trump’s tweets. But now here was regular Marge, who would put America first. Sweet southern Marge, who loved “family, fitness, travel, shooting, fun, and adventure,” and who, as would soon be clear, wanted very much to save the children.
VII.
Perhaps, decades fromnow, what will stand out most is how easily the dominoes fell.
Imagine it like this: #SaveTheChildren, right there at the top of the feed. You click on the hashtag—because who, given the choice, would not want to save the children?—and then, suddenly, you are looking with new eyes at the chevron Wayfair rug beneath your feet. It had been 40 percent off during the Presidents’ Day sale, but now you’re wondering: Had this one been used to transport a child, a trafficked innocent rolled up inside? And then not 10 clicks later you find yourself wondering about other things, too—other conspiracies, other dark forces. Because it is curious, now that you’re here, now that you’re wondering, that you can’t recall any CCTV footage of the airplane as it hit the Pentagon on 9/11. You had gone online to check if Theresa had posted photos from the baby shower and now, 20 minutes later, you log off with an entirely new field of vision, the unseen currents of the world suddenly alive.
Perhaps, for Marjorie Taylor Greene, the rug had been houndstooth and the baby shower had been Kerrie’s. But you don’t need the site-by-site search history to understand the narrative of Greene’s descent into QAnon, because the basics are so often the same.
QAnon followers subscribe to the sprawling conspiracy theory that the world is controlled by a network of satanic pedophiles funded by Saudi royalty, George Soros, and the Rothschild family. Though Republican officials have insisted that QAnon’s influence among the party’s base is overstated, former President Trump has come to embrace the movement plainly, closing out rallies with music nearly identical to the QAnon theme song, “WWG1WGA” (the initials stand for the group’s rallying cry, “Where we go one, we go all”). Yet since its inception, in the fall of 2017, when “Q,” an anonymous figure professing to be a high-level government official, began posting tales from the so-called deep state, no politician has become more synonymous with QAnon than Greene. To an extent, Greene had already signaled her attraction to conspiracy theories, questioning on American Truth Seekers whether the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas was a false-flag operation to eliminate gun rights. But with Q, Greene was all in. She has gone so far as to endorse an unhinged QAnon theory called “frazzledrip,” which claims that Hillary Clinton murdered a child as part of a satanic blood ritual.
Ramon Aponte, a right-wing blogger known as “The Puerto Rican Conservative,” became friendly with Greene soon after she began posting about Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory that a Washington, D.C., restaurant was involved in a Democratic-run child-sex ring. “Even though the mainstream news media ‘debunked’ it, nobody ever conducted an investigation on it,” Aponte told me. “And Marjorie Taylor Greene knew this … She was a voice for the silent majority.” (After a North Carolina man’s armed raid of the restaurant, in December 2016, Washington police did, in fact, investigate, and pronounced the theory “fictitious.”)
Was Greene a true believer? Her early outpouring of breathless posts gives that strong impression—she comes across as a convert intoxicated by revelation. But in time, her affiliation with QAnon brought undeniable advantages. It was not until she latched on to Q and Q-adjacent theories that Greene’s political profile achieved scale and velocity. The deeper she plunged, the larger her following grew. And the more confident she became.
As the months passed, she started experimenting with a new tone; she would still be regular Marge and sweet southern Marge, but she would also be Marge who told the “aggressive truth”—who wasn’t afraid to be real. In Facebook videos posted from 2017 to 2019, Greene talked about the “Islamic invasion into our government offices.” She said: “Let me explain something to you, ‘Mohammed’ … What you people want is special treatment, you want to rise above us, and that’s what we’re against.” She talked about how it was “gangs”—“not white people”—who were responsible for holding back Black and Hispanic men. She objected to the removal of Confederate statues, saying: “But that doesn’t make me a racist … If I were Black people today, and I walked by one of those statues, I would be so proud, because I’d say, ‘Look how far I’ve come in this country.’ ” The most “mistreated group” in America, she went on to say, was “white males.”
Illustration by Eric Yahnker. Source image: Marjorie Taylor Greene / YouTube.
By the end of 2018, Marjorie Taylor Greene was awash in validation. Especially from men. She found herself suddenly fielding marriage proposals in the comments beneath her selfies. “Ok ok ok so you’re totally gorgeous I got that the first time I saw u,” one person wrote, “but you seal the deal with what’s in your head, I love the message of truth u bring and inform all who will listen I’M SOLD!!!” Greene, as she often would upon reading such comments, clicked the “Like” button in response.
Greene began to meet up with people from her Facebook circle. In March 2019, she traveled to Washington, D.C., as the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on restrictive gun legislation. At one point, in a now-infamous confrontation, Greene began following David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida. The shooting had left 17 dead, and Hogg had come to Washington to make the case for gun-control measures. Wearing a black blazer and leggings, a pink Michael Kors tote slung over her shoulder, Greene accosted the 18-year-old and, with a friend capturing the encounter on video, badgered him about his support for the bill: “You don’t have anything to say for yourself? You can’t defend your stance? How did you get over 30 appointments with senators? How’d you do that? How did you get major press coverage on this issue?” Hogg walked on in silence as Greene continued: “You know if school zones were protected with security guards with guns, there would be no mass shootings at schools. Do you know that? The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.”
Greene would later trace her decision to run for office to the frustration she’d felt during that trip: No one had paid her any attention. That would have to change. As she posted on a website called The Whiskey Patriots just after the Hogg incident, and just before she launched her bid for Congress: “Let the war begin …”
VIII.
She ran and she won, of course, in Georgia’s Fourteenth District, in a largely rural outpost in the northwest corner of the state. Voters did not seem to care that Greene, who had judged the solidly conservative area to be friendlier to her chances than her home district in suburban Atlanta, had never actually lived there.
Shortly after she was sworn into office, in January 2021, her harassment of Hogg, as well as old social-media posts in which she endorsed the claim that the Parkland shooting was a false-flag operation, surfaced into public view. In her maiden speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, she set out to blunt the criticism she was receiving. Much of the speech was a disavowal of her own past statements. She conceded, for example, that 9/11 had actually happened, and that not all QAnon posts were accurate. “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true,” she protested.
As for David Hogg, she recounted an episode at her own high school when, she said, the “entire school” had been taken hostage by a gunman—an episode that she continues to invoke as a touchstone to explain everything that is wrong about security in schools and how she has a right to browbeat a school-shooting survivor like Hogg. But if her account failed to engender much sympathy, it was because it only nominally resembled reality.
On a September morning in 1990, during Greene’s junior year, a history teacher named Johnny Tallant was holding his class at South Forsyth High School when an armed sophomore entered the classroom next door, fired a rifle overhead, and marched the students there into Tallant’s classroom; for the next few hours, the sophomore held some 40 of his classmates, and Tallant, at gunpoint. The hostages later said they were initially terrified; the student threatened to kill them if his demands for candy, soda, and a school bus were not met. Eventually their nerves quieted. Many of the students knew their captor at least somewhat, and they weren’t altogether surprised when he put down his gun and began sharing with them “everything that was going on in his head,” as one hostage recalled. “He said he wanted to get away from things and make a point,” recalled another, adding that the student had repeatedly promised not to hurt them. “He said his parents were mean, that he was tired of how they treated him, and that he had no friends and just wanted to get away.” Gradually, as police delivered the snacks he’d asked for, the sophomore let most of the hostages go, including all the girls but one, who knew the student well and stayed behind to keep talking to him. Five hours in, when the remaining hostages moved to grab his gun, he did not resist; when the police burst in moments later, he did not fight back.
Tallant recalls that Greene reached out to him sometime before she launched her bid for Congress, in the spring of 2019. He had no idea who she was, or why she was calling him at home. He listened that day as the unfamiliar woman explained that she wanted to speak with him about the events of 1990—that she’d been a student at South Forsyth when everything happened. Still, Tallant struggled to place her. Greene had not been in his classroom. Everyone else at the school, including Greene, had been quickly evacuated and bused away. Tallant was taken aback by Greene’s intensity, her apparently sudden need, decades later, to discover flaws in the school’s handling of things: “She was asking me some crazy questions about—she was saying we should have had guns ourselves, you know … She sounded like kind of a nut.”
Tallant would not give her what she wanted. “I told her right off, we didn’t need guns,” he said. It wasn’t a political statement; for Tallant, it was just reality—the only conclusion you could draw if you took care to examine the particulars of the crisis, of the teenage boy at the center of it. The sophomore was known by classmates and teachers to struggle with seizures and other symptoms of epilepsy. As one of the hostages later put it: “I wasn’t scared of him. I was scared of what the police would do when he stepped into the hall, and I was afraid of what the police were planning to do as he walked from the room to the bus.”
But never mind. Greene hung up with Tallant and eventually proceeded with her preferred version of the story in her speech on the House floor: “You see, school shootings are absolutely real,” Greene said, her navy face mask emblazoned with the words FREE SPEECH in red letters. “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.”
“I know the fear that David Hogg had that day,” she pronounced. “I know the fear that these kids have.”
Did it even matter that Greene had not been taken hostage, or that the episode had been handled wisely and without bloodshed, or that the teacher in the classroom had told her she was wrong about her memories and her conclusions? By now, it may have occurred to Greene that performance was enough. That politics might in fact be that easy—as long as you were angry, or at least good at acting like it, most people wouldn’t bother to look beneath the hood.
IX.
In late September 2022, Perry Greene filed for divorce from Marjorie Taylor Greene on the grounds that the marriage was “irretrievably broken.” His timing—so close to the midterm election—did not go unnoticed in Georgia political circles. Six weeks later, on November 8, Marjorie easily won reelection to her second term in the House of Representatives.
Given her popularity among a segment of the Republican base, she is certain to play a major role in the GOP leadership, whether that role comes with a specific title and assignment or not. She wields power much like Donald Trump, doing or saying the unthinkable because she knows that most of her colleagues wouldn’t dare jeopardize their own future to stop her.
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. “I’m not going to mince words with you all,” she declared at a Michigan rally this fall. “Democrats want Republicans dead, and they’ve already started the killings.” Greene did not create this sensibility, but she channels it better than any of her colleagues.
In her speech at the Cobb County GOP breakfast, Greene bemoaned “the major media organizations” for creating a caricature of her “that’s not real” without ever, she said, giving her the chance to speak for herself. Afterward, I introduced myself, noted what she had just said, and asked if she was willing to sit down for an interview. “Oh,” she said, “you’re the one that’s going around trying to talk to [all my friends]. This is the first time you’ve actually tried to talk to me.” I explained that I had tried but had been repeatedly turned away by her staff. “Yeah, because I’m not interested,” she snapped. “You’re a Democrat activist.” Some of her supporters looked on, nodding with vigor.
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.
I think often of Greene’s blog post from July 26, 2014, and the question she posed to herself during her crisis of confidence. “Why not me?” she had written tentatively, trying it on for size. I think of it whenever I see Greene onstage, on YouTube, on the House floor, making performance art of rage and so clearly at ease with what she is. Were the question not in writing, I’m not sure I’d believe there was a time in her life when she’d been afraid to ask.
This article appears in the January/February 2023 print edition with the headline “Why Is She Like This?”
MIAMI, October 7, 2021 (Newswire.com)
– Black Men Talk Tech, a collective and conference series that supports emerging and elite Black tech entrepreneurs, officially announces this year’s 3rd Annual Unicorn Ambition Conference. Black Men Talk Tech Unicorn Ambition Conference is the only national conference that focuses on providing support for the Black man tech founder. This year, one of the special guests is keynote speakerRick Ross, a serial entrepreneur, rapper, songwriter, and bestselling author with an empire covering everything from fast-casual food, spirits, real estate, and music.
The Unicorn Ambition Conference is a national tech conference providing exposure and resources to Black tech founders who are building innovative companies and focused on massive growth or becoming the next “unicorn.” Since its inception, the conference has highlighted Miami and South Florida as an emerging tech hub, especially for the Blackcommunity. This year’s 3rd annual conference will be a hybrid event on October 21, over theHop.in virtual platform, with supporting in-person events in Miami before and after the conference programming.
Rick Ross added to his list of bestsellers with the recent release of The Perfect Day to Boss Up, which debuted on bestseller lists all around the country, including the prestigious New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists.
“We are elated to have mogul Rick Ross as a featured keynote speaker,” says Boris Moyston, one of the co-founders of Black Men Talk Tech. “Looking forward to his insights about how he chooses his tech investments and advice for entrepreneurs that will surely benefit our attendees.”
:BLACKPRINT at Meredith Corporation is sponsoring the Rick Ross Keynote.
:BLACKPRINT has joined as a media sponsor of this year’s Unicorn Ambition Conference and represents the Black voice of Meredith Corporation – home to brands like PEOPLE, Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, Shape, Health, Travel + Leisure and more.
Deleon, Crown Royal and Johnnie Walker are the official spirit sponsors for the Black Men Talk Tech Unicorn Ambition Conference Welcome Mixer. Additional sponsors of this year’s Unicorn Ambition Conference include JP Morgan Chase, Balsamiq, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, MorganStanley, Pitchbook, The Steve & Marjorie Harvey Foundation (SMHF), and Intuit.
About Black Men Talk Tech: Black Men Talk Tech is a tech collective and conference series that supports emerging and elite Black tech entrepreneurs. Despite the many successes of Black men in the tech industry, Black men are still underrepresented as founders. Black Men Talk Tech is fixing that problem by creating an authentic ecosystem for Black men who are scaling their startups to Unicorn status.
Media Contacts for Black Men Talk Tech: Demetria@PressPassLA.com Tiffany@PressPassLA.com
After selling more than 2,500 of its signature high premium beard care products online after first year in business.
Press Release –
updated: Feb 26, 2021
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va., February 26, 2021 (Newswire.com)
– The Voyade Company, Inc., a creator of high-quality beard care products tailored for black men, announced today the largest product launch in company history with the release of the Black Executive Grooming line.
To date, more than 2,500 products have been consumed by people all over the country including Canada. The new product line provides exceptional skin and beard conditioning for black men from high-quality ingredients, rather than standard department store brands, allowing people to boost their appearance anywhere—from the gym, to carpool duty or in the boardroom. The Black Executive Grooming Line is the newest innovation from the company that will allow black men to conveniently take steps toward achieving their goals and unleashing their full potential as a man.
After months of research, development, and testing, the Black Executive Grooming Line can be ordered online at thevoyade.com.
The Executive Line Details:
Shaving Soap: Their traditional shaving soap is made with goat’s milk and bentonite clay, which produces a very creamy, very thick foam. Combining these two beneficial ingredients provides detoxification, acne treatment, natural exfoliation and supports healthy skin microbiome.
Premium Aftershave Lotion: They use witch hazel to provide strong antioxidant and soothing astringent properties and hemp seed oil. They also use avocado oil, which improves skin elasticity; add some aloe vera, which is exceptional at providing great skin care properties – combined, this lotion contains a bevy of vitamins, minerals, and skin rejuvenating enzymes.
Hair & Skin Oil: Perfect for dry skin, hair, afro type hair and beards. They included vitamins & antioxidants, and omega fatty acids & proteins. Benefits include protection from elements, increased blood flow, natural astringent, enhanced beard growth, maintaining thicker hair, keeps skin softened, restored damaged/dry hair, and reduces split ends.
Hemp Hand Lotion: They use hemp seed oil, known to be rich in essential fatty acids and fantastic for all their customers’ skin.
Oatmeal & Shea Soap: Shea butter sewn with oatmeal to create a natural nourishing, soothing and moisturizing delight. Their soap is high in Vitamin E, D & Provitamin A and lathers very well. Since they don’t use animal oils, our soaps rinse right off without leaving a soapy film behind.
“It is with great happiness and genuine excitement that we announce the release of The Black Executive Grooming Line,” said Lorenzo L. Sellers, CEO and founder of The Voyade Company. “When you want to look your best on an Executive level at your job, in business meetings, or wherever, the new Black Executive Grooming Line, along with our other products, will give you that million-dollar look you deserve. Our customers, after all, are a part of a special type of elite.”
About The Voyade Company, Inc.
Founded by bestselling author, and Navy Sailor Lorenzo L. Sellers, Voyade was founded in Virginia in 2019, but officially established in 2020 and is defined by its unique, open-sell environment with an ever-increasing assortment of beard care products from carefully curated premium ingredients, featuring oils, balms, and butters.
NEW YORK, October 2, 2017 (Newswire.com)
– The second installment of Mobilizing Our Brothers Initiative’s MOBItalks will gather gay black men in the New York City area for personal and professional development sessions on Saturday, Oct. 7 at the Bronx Museum from 10 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Founded by award-winning advocate, DaShawn Usher and peer-led by a group of black queer men, the Bronx edition of MOBItalks will feature moving talks with DBQ Magazine founder, David Bridgeforth; writer and creator of RaceBaitR, Hari Ziyad; writer, Michael Arceneaux; and actor, Rico Pruitt.
The Bronx edition of MOBItalks is the second in a three-part personal and professional development series taking place in the city. The first MOBItalks event took place in Brooklyn with Emil Wilbekin, Karamo Brown, and Richard Brookshire who spoke about self-care, personal identity, and sexuality.
“As a black gay man, to be in a space where black queer people are having conversations about what’s affecting us and how we can support each other – sign me up every single time,” says Karamo Brown on his involvement with the platform. “I want to make people understand that who we are is our power.
Mobilizing Our Brothers Initiative (MOBI) was created in response to the lack of spaces for black gay men. MOBI offers a platform for these men to speak authentically about issues that directly affect them and allow them to form connections.
“Being able to connect black gay men across many different social classes, different education levels, across different ages, is the biggest thing I know that I can offer to the community,” says Usher.
MOBI exists as a space to take the time to assess where you are in life and realize that there’s a community that’s growing and exists. Following the first MOBItalks, MOBI serves as a bridge to connect guests to other avenues and services that are available to the community.
Attendees will be able to participate in personal and professional development sessions, stock up on essentials from Harry’s, take professional headshots by Steven Duarte and Welthē images, and screen for various services throughout the day including HIV, STIs, PrEP/PEP, health insurance, and primary care at each event.
MOBI is a series of curated social connectivity events for Black, gay and queer men to see their holistic self. The initiative seeks to cultivate the black, gay community through MOBItalks, a three-part personal and professional development series in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. In celebration of Black queer excellence, MOBIfest is a four-day citywide festival set for May 2018 that gives voice to the convergence of interactive arts, film, fashion, and music in Black queer culture. The initiative is funded by the New York City Department of Health and aims to promote health and wellness amongst black gay men.
Series will feature discussions with Emil Wilbekin, Karamo Brown, Richard Brookshire, Rico Pruitt, and a creative performance from “queer conscious” rapper, Jay Boogie
Press Release –
updated: Sep 6, 2017
New York, New York, September 6, 2017 (Newswire.com)
– In a social climate where many in the LGBT community feel Black, gay and afraid, a group of fearless Black men have come together to empower, organize, and inform their peers through the launch of Mobilizing Our Brothers Initiative (MOBI) on Saturday, September 23rd.
Founded by award-winning advocate, DaShawn Usher, MOBI aims to empower an often marginalized community and improve their lives both personally and professionally through peer-led programming.
“It was important for MOBI to be majority peer-led by other Black men from different intersectionalities of age, identity, and backgrounds who are experts in their respective fields,” says Usher. “This allows those involved to feel immersed in a community of people who face the same obstacles and triumphs as them.”
Recognized as the star of the film Blackbird and cast member on the latest season of Being Mary Jane, actor and MOBI Talent Manager, Julian Walker is one of those peers. But before he made his film and television debut, he felt like many in the Black, gay community growing up – afraid. His role in the controversial film Blackbird – a boy who is coming to grips with manhood, life and his sexuality in the face of opposition from society is all too familiar. It’s a story that most Black, gay men can relate to, even Walker himself. Growing up, it was difficult for him to find representations of himself – a Black, gay man in film and entertainment. This made him eager to align himself with a cause that creates a sense of community among men like him. Fast-forward to now, and he’s proudly heading up the launch of MOBI to do just that.
The first MOBItalks event will take place on Saturday, September 23rd from 9am – 4pm at Ilan Rubin Studio –14B 53rd Street, 7th fl Brooklyn, NY 11232 and will feature engaging talks surrounding sexuality, creative expression, and identity with speakers including journalist and LGBT Activist, Emil Wilbekin; “Real World” alum and television host; Karamo Brown; social commentator, Richard Brookshire; “queer conscious” rapper, Jay Boogie; and Rico Pruitt. Attendees will also participate in personal and professional development sessions and can screen for various services throughout the day including: HIV, STIs, PrEP/PEP, health insurance, primary care, and dental.
MOBI EVENTS
· Brooklyn – Saturday, September 23rd
· Bronx – Saturday, October 7th
· Harlem – Saturday, October 21st
The events will be live streamed for those who aren’t in the New York City area. Viewers will be able to watch, leave comments, and ask questions in real-time through the live stream.
MOBI is a series of curated social connectivity events for Black, gay and queer men to see their holistic self. The initiative seeks to cultivate the black, gay community through MOBItalks, a three-part personal and professional development series in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. In celebration of Black queer excellence, MOBIfest, is a four-day citywide festival set for May 2018 that gives voice to the convergence of interactive arts, film, fashion, and music in Black queer culture. The initiative is funded by the New York City Department of Health and aims to promote health and wellness amongst black gay men.
For press inquiries, please contact:
Kenneth Courtney Kenneth@mobi-nyc.com 917-289-2778
