The social critic Neil Postman believed that Ronald Reagan embodied the “Epistemology of Television,” as he wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death: The Gipper was the product of a society fixated on screens, rather than the written word. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who is now retiring after just four years in Congress, might best be seen as an embodiment of the “Epistemology of Algorithms”: a creature of social-media-driven populism.
Dismissed for years as the “QAnon Congresswoman,” Greene leaves Washington a different woman. Drained of her bubbling “optimism,” as one source close to her put it, Greene is now divorced from her husband and divorced from her president — but faithfully married to the cause of America First.
It was, in Greene’s own telling, the algorithms that sent her spiraling into conspiracy theories in the 2010s. It was algorithms that rocketed her to prominence. It was algorithms that made her one of the GOP’s top fundraising assets. And it may have been algorithms that sent her packing, though they’ll almost certainly guide Greene to her next destination soon enough.
This is a new form of populism, a strain that represents the online rage fueling an uneasy horseshoe alliance between the populist Left and Right. And it’s no longer confined to the internet. Greene’s arc is what happens when the everyman’s rage is stoked by social media — sometimes for the better and sometimes for worse — and then escapes the algorithm for Washington, DC.
In her early days in DC, Greene was dogged by headlines like “Marjorie Taylor Greene indicated support for executing prominent Democrats in 2018 and 2019 before running for Congress” and “Video surfaces of Marjorie Taylor Greene confronting Parkland shooting survivor with baseless claim.” Sworn in about 24 hours before the Jan. 6 riot, Greene was elected amid pandemic fever, cruising to a comfortable victory, in which she won 75% of the vote.
That put her about six points ahead of Donald Trump in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, situated in the state’s northwest corner between Tennessee and Alabama. Greene originally planned to run in her own, more affluent district that included some of Atlanta’s shifting suburbs, but swapped her bid to the much less competitive 14th District, after the incumbent representative announced his retirement in 2019.
Georgia 14, long home to the state’s carpet industry, is heavily rural and populated by voters who blame NAFTA and immigration for their economic struggles. Trump was impressed, calling her a “future Republican star” and sending the media — along with the GOP establishment — into a tizzy.
Born in Milledgeville, a small city of 17,000 in central Georgia, Greene proudly remembers growing up around her family’s construction company. She graduated from South Forsyth High School in 1992, then the University of Georgia in 1996. Six years later, she purchased Taylor Commercial from her father.
In 2022, after 29 years together and 27 years of marriage, Greene’s husband Perry filed for divorce. Greene herself had filed 10 years earlier amid allegations of cheating, though the pair reconciled before calling it quits after she entered Congress. Several months later, Greene and newly divorced conservative media figure Brian Glenn — best known for questioning Volodymyr Zelensky’s wardrobe in the Oval Office — confirmed they were dating. They became engaged on Monday.
Like many Gen-X moms, Greene racked up an extensive Facebook history during the 2010s. Animated by the strains ObamaCare had put on her family’s successful business, the future congresswoman got hooked on Trump early.
But her sense of injustice and distrust also sent her in bizarre directions. She questioned whether school shootings were false flags, whether a plane really hit the Pentagon, and what was going on with the internet poster named “QAnon.” Her Wikipedia page is full of reminders of a febrile recent past, including forays into #Pizzagate and Seth Rich, among other conspiracy theories, as Greene used Facebook as a form of activism and started blogging for a website called American Truth Seekers sometime around 2017.
In the spring of 2019, Greene shouted at Parkland survivor David Hogg in Washington, and filmed a Facebook Live video outside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office telling the lawmaker to “get rid of your diaper.”
A little more than a year later, the mother of three, Crossfit enthusiast, and small-business owner earned her own office on Capitol Hill, not unlike AOC, the bartender-turned-congresswoman she’d been yelling at months earlier.
Her pandemic-era campaign made good use of the backlash. “I’ve made all the right enemies,” Greene tweeted during her run. “The Fake News Media hates me. Big Tech censors me. The DC Swamp fears me. Now Soros and the Dems are trying to take me down. I’m running to Save America and Stop Socialism.”
But it was in the new year, after Jan. 6, that a newly elected Greene delivered one of the most significant speeches on the House floor in modern history. Her remarks barely budged the perception of Greene in Washington, and were quickly forgotten. But they shouldn’t have been.
As a vote loomed to strip Greene of her committee assignments, she calmly took to the floor to explain herself. “What you need to know about me is I’m a very regular American, just like the people I represent in my district,” Greene said, mouth hidden behind a face mask emblazoned with the slogan FREE SPEECH. “And like most people across the country, I never, ever considered a run for Congress or even to get involved in politics. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t a political person until I found a candidate that I really liked, and his name is Donald J. Trump.”
But, Greene continued, “when we elected President Trump, and then I started seeing things in the news that didn’t make sense to me like Russian collusion, which are conspiracy theories also, and have been proven so, these things bothered me deeply, and I realized just watching CNN or Fox News, I may not find the truth.”
“And so,” Greene remembered, it spiraled from there, “What I did is I started looking up things on the internet, asking questions, like most people do every day, using Google. And I stumbled across something and this was at the end of 2017 called QAnon.”
Greene said she walked away from QAnon and fringe conspiracy trends later in 2018, after discovering holes in the theory. She said her campaign never mentioned the word QAnon. She said she believed Parkland survivor David Hogg.
The speech was contrite and honest, a genuine explanation for how her rational distrust of institutions steered her, and many others, down unfortunate rabbit holes. That experience, if anything, is utterly representative. In her case, it represents both the good and bad: asking the questions, believing the lies, then abandoning them when the facts went in another direction.
“Two sources separately pinned the blame for Greene’s turn on House Speaker Mike Johnson.”
But Greene’s words landed like a lead balloon in DC, where there is scant tolerance for the experience of the ordinary American outside the halls of power. Greene, though, managed to lose only 11 GOP votes when Democrats orchestrated a push to take away her committee assignments amid a full court press from media and the Beltway establishment.
One congressional insider remembers a tense private meeting ahead of the vote. “She came in and it was during this bruising time of all of her Facebook posts and previous statements being unearthed. This was space laser time,” the insider said. But while Greene was “defiant at first,” she apologized. She stood up and said she was sorry to her fellow members for having to answer for her. “Anytime you get a reporter with concerns about me, you don’t have to answer, just tell them to talk to me,” she told the meeting, striking a “super conciliatory” tone, the insider says.
This “changed the whole mood of the room.” Republicans came up to the microphone and announced they’d vote in her favor. Greene had successfully “lowered the temperature.”
The mild air, of course, did not last long. Outside the GOP conference, Greene shouted at AOC, repeatedly sought Joe Biden’s impeachment, shouldered heavy fines for refusing to wear a mask, and spoke at — then distanced herself from — a conference held by Nick Fuentes.
Republicans took back the House majority in 2022, restoring Greene to committee assignments. Greene supported Kevin McCarthy for speaker, and the two remained on good terms even while the Florida populist firebrand Matt Gaetz, with whom Greene once embarked on an “America First” speaking tour, engineered McCarthy’s ouster. Ironically, it was Greene’s sparring with other MAGA populists that ended her time with the hard-Right House Freedom Caucus in 2023.
Nevertheless, “she was in a good spot, she was a productive member of Congress,” the congressional insider recalls of Greene’s tenure before this fall. That same source referred to Greene as Trump’s top “guard dog” in Congress for years. She defended Trump against virtually every charge for half a decade, before and after coming to DC. Just last year, Greene called the president “sweet” and said she was “loyal and unapologetically supported him everywhere and all the time.”
It was the second Trump administration’s handling of Jeffrey Epstein documents that first drove a wedge between Greene and the president. Then Trump struck Iran, further alienating Greene, whose views on foreign policy lean toward an anti-interventionist flavor of “America First.” Finally, during the government shutdown, Greene started criticizing Republicans sharply for ignoring an imminent health-care crisis: the lapsing of subsidies that would send premiums skyrocketing for low-income people. This brought with it opportunities for the congresswoman, long Trump’s staunchest defender in the House, to join CNN and The View and 60 Minutes.
By mid-November, Trump had enough. Deeming Greene “Wacky Marjorie,” he posted on Truth Social to say he’d endorse a primary challenge in Georgia 14. Just a few days later, Greene announced her retirement from Congress.
Two sources separately pinned the blame for Greene’s turn on House Speaker Mike Johnson. As the government shutdown lingered for weeks and weeks, becoming the longest in history, Johnson didn’t take seriously the problem of members leaving DC with heaps of time on their hands. They were idle, looking for fights and itching for media hits. And it’s certainly true that Greene’s differences with Trump escalated during this time.
Greene could be the tip of the iceberg for Johnson, who now faces a rumored wave of retirements from a deeply frustrated and demoralized conference. What should really keep Republicans up at night is whether Greene’s darkened sentiment is representative of voters, in the same way her experience on Facebook in the first Trump term represented a real growth in conspiracism fueled by institutional failure leading up to the pandemic.
Tempting as it may be to chalk Greene’s turn up to personal eccentricities, and that’s hardly out of the question, Republicans aren’t just losing a pain in leadership’s behind — they’re losing the member with the single highest share of small-dollar donors in all of Congress.
And that’s not just about money. It means Greene resonates with her party’s base better than almost any lawmaker. (AOC is in a distant second place on that list.)
Yet her departure seems to have prompted a sigh of relief in the House. “I doubt there was a single member sad to see her leave,” one senior House Freedom Caucus source in the lower chamber told me, describing her behavior as “super unprofessional.” Other sources remembered her early days in Congress warmly, but acknowledged she came with a flip side. “She’s genuinely a nice person, but she can lose her shit and be a mean person too,” said one.
In Greene’s case, her policy populism came in temperamental populist packaging. That is to say, she opposed the substance of her party’s policy agenda during Trump II, from the economy to foreign policy, but stylistically she also opposed the longstanding norms of politeness and collegiality with the other side. As Democrats like Jasmine Crockett are starting to flirt with this personality populism, Washington should wonder whether it’s possible to keep a lid on both flavors — the substance and the style.
Asked about Greene’s retirement, one insider pointed out the news didn’t leak strategically to Beltway rags or break in a juicy sitdown interview before the congresswoman made her announcement. She simply posted it to social media. Ostensibly unscripted and shot on a cellphone, the video featured Greene saying, “Loyalty should be a two-way street and we should be able to vote our conscience and represent our district’s interest, because our job title is literally ‘representative.’”
“She gets the value of wearing your heart on your sleeve,” the source noted. “That’s something Trump taught the Republican Party…. When she talks, a lot of conservative women across the country say, ‘You know what? I’m a pissed-off mom who’s getting crushed by all these stupid things in Washington.’ She’s been able to speak for a lot of people.”
This is the Epistemology of the Algorithm, a double-edged sword. It exploits our reasonable distrust of institutions, pulling us into irrational conspiracies for rational reasons, stitching together paranoia and anger, driving highs and lows. Consider the Greene who “lowered the temperature” in the private GOP conference meeting ahead of Democrats’ effort to oust her from committees. Then consider the Greene who got booted from the Freedom Caucus.
The insider described her jokingly as “bipolar,” but in a broader sense, that description makes sense. We’re in the liminal space between life before algorithmic social media and life after it. Gen X and Millennials aren’t quite one or the other. But we can see what’s coming, and Washington is not prepared. Greene wasn’t either.
A not insignificant part of Trump’s support came from algorithmic populists like Greene, people whose political awakening began with Trump and the reaction to him. They got online. They dug deep. They saw Trump as a disruptor. This is a populism built on social media, where the incentive system rewards strong emotion. It’s black and white: trust and distrust, love and hate, in or out.
Trump’s second-term flirtation with elite interests, from Epstein to foreign policy to Big Tech, puts him on the wrong side of that equation for algorithmic populists like Greene. She’s only a representative for a few more weeks, but she will represent a virtual district of likeminded people for years to come.
