Essay: A (White Supremacist) Woman’s Place is in the House
Essay: A (White Supremacist) Woman’s Place is in the House
Marjorie Taylor Greene photo SAUL LOEB/GETTY IMAGES
If Donald Trump could give birth, it would have been to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, both of whom are clearly created in his image.
When Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wore a face mask that said CENSORED to the House floor on Wednesday as she expressed her objection to the impeachment of President Donald Trump, two things were loud and clear: her voice--she was, in fact, not censored--and her bombast--as Trumpian as the man she vehemently defended.
A week earlier, Greene’s fellow first-time GOP lawmaker Lauren Boebert made her debut on that same House floor by giving another loud and clear defense of Trump, shouting and waving her hands in a tirade about why she was voting to overturn the results of the presidential election. As a mob of insurrectionists gathered outside, she spoke on their behalf inside.
“I have constituents outside this building right now! I promised my voters to be their voice!”
Greene and Boebert referred to January 6 as Republicans’ “1776 moment,” in a reference to the American revolution. They are the first QAnon supporters to be elected to the United States Congress. The only two female insurrectionists who were killed on January 6 were also both white women who supported QAnon.
Two women inside the House. Two women outside the House. All fighting to keep Trump in office.
If they were not white, from any other country, or certainly if they were Muslim, these women would be called fanatics, thus is the privilege of whiteness. White womanhood is privilege sweetened with an innocence and fragility that white women--liberal or conservative, Trump-voting or not--are adept at weaponizing.
So I am calling them fanatics.
Trump might have lost the election but he won white women voters with a bigger margin than in 2016 - 52% in 2016 to 55% in 2020.
The insurrectionists within and without were not revolutionaries. They were not fighting a tyrannical state. They were fighting to extend the tyranny of white supremacy, which has seen its fruition in Donald J. Trump.
Greene and Boebert are part of a red wave that made history in the November elections. They are among the record-breaking 17 new female GOP lawmakers who were elected to Congress in November. They might not have been among the fanatics who stormed the Capitol on January 6, but Greene and Boebert’s views very much make them fanatics within that same building. If the female insurrectionists were footsoldiers of the white supremacist patriarchy who had misread proximity to the power of white men as their own power, then Greene and Boebert are their golden calves.
Lawmakers like Greene and Boebert are emblematic of white women who undergird right-wing populism - as voters and candidates. Just because they are so fond of posing with weapons, don’t take a Glock as a stand-in for feminism.
The record number of Republican women who flipped blue seats red are anti-feminists who are enjoying the fruits of what feminism has long fought for--the power to make laws that will affect our lives--all as they cut feminism at its knees by opposing abortion rights, paid family leave, equal pay, and espouse racist views.
All but one of the new GOP female lawmakers are white. Thanks to its own white supremacy that acts like cataracts impairing its ability to see its own racism, the U.S. media will tip toe around them, and refuse to call them out for the racists and fascists among them.
That QAnon, a far-right conspiracy movement which the FBI labelled a domestic terror threat in 2019, elected Greene and Boebert to Congress speaks volumes to the depraved depths that white supremacy will plunder as it clings to power.
Lawmakers like Greene and Boebert are emblematic of white women who undergird right-wing populism - as voters and candidates. Just because they are so fond of posing with weapons, don’t take a Glock as a stand-in for feminism.
If Trump could give birth, it would have been to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, both of whom are clearly created in his image.
They walk like Trump; they talk like Trump. And they hate like Trump.
A 2017 study into right-wing populist voters in Germany, France, Greece, Poland, Sweden and Hungary by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES), found that women are increasingly drawn to right-wing populist parties and are often more radical than their male peers. The Sisterhood of White Supremacists on either side of the Atlantic have this in common: a virulent hatred of Islam, Muslims, and migrants.
The predictably-craven Republican leadership initially backed Greene and Boebert’s male GOP opponents because party leaders thought the two women were extremists who did not stand a chance in primaries. Just as they did with Trump. And when he - and Greene and Boebert - won, the GOP embrace was swift.
“Margie,” a voter in Georgia told the New Yorker, “is like the female version of Trump to me.”
Political consultant and columnist Eric Sondermann told WestWord, an independent publication in Denver: “you can’t find a lot of candidates that are more Trumpian than Lauren Boebert.”
If Trump could give birth, it would have been to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, both of whom are clearly created in his image.
They walk like Trump; they talk like Trump. And they hate like Trump.
Right wing hate depends on a steady diet of Islamophobia. Trump promised a Muslim Ban which he said was to protect white women from Muslim men, among other reasons. Greene, ever the disciple, turbocharges hatred of Islam and Muslims.
The especially vile Greene has put Trump’s bigotries on steroids. In Facebook videos unearthed by Politico after she won her primary last year, she “suggested that Muslims do not belong in government; thinks black people ‘are held slaves to the Democratic Party’; called George Soros, a Jewish Democratic megadonor (who escaped the Nazi occupation of Hungary) a Nazi; and said she would feel ‘proud’ to see a Confederate monument if she were black because it symbolizes progress made since the Civil War.”
Like Trump, both Greene and Boebert are obsessed with the progressive Democratic congresswomen known as the Squad.
In September, Greene posted on her candidate Facebook page an image of herself holding a gun alongside images of Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib and encouraged going on the "offense against these socialists."
"We need strong conservative Christians to go on the offense against these socialists who want to rip our country apart," her post's caption read. Facebook removed the photo, saying it violated the social network's policies.
It is a direct line between such incitement and the violent mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6.
Boebert has actually compared her semi-automatic pistol to Ilhan Omar’s hijab.
After her primary victory, Boebert said in an interview that she was “the antidote to the Squad.” She said she’s tired of no one challenging Ocasio-Cortez’s agenda.
Right wing hate depends on a steady diet of Islamophobia. Trump promised a Muslim Ban which he said was to protect white women from Muslim men, among other reasons. Greene, ever the disciple, turbocharges hatred of Islam and Muslims.
In her videos, Greene is particularly preoccupied with the increase in Muslim members of Congress. And ranted - as many Republicans before long have - against adherents of Sharia. Remember the “creeping Sharia” legislation passed in several states in the first decade of the Oughts to ban a Sharia that no one had voted for?
"If you want Islam and Sharia law, you stay over there in the Middle East," Greene ranted. "You stay there, and you go to Mecca and do all your thing. And, you know what, you can have a whole bunch of wives, or goats, or sheep, or whatever you want. You stay over there. But in America, see, we’ve made it this great, great country. We don’t want it messed up."
Boebert owns the Shooters Gallery restaurant in Rifle, Colorado, where she encourages employers to openly carry guns. She has said she wants to take her Glock into the Capitol and has actually compared her semi-automatic pistol to Ilhan Omar’s hijab.
Many of the Republican women who flipped blue seats to red are not moderates nor are they interested in “unity” unless it is a unity with the fascism that Trump has unleashed with their support - he is fruition, remember, not aberration.
The GOP has long been a party of white supremacy, misogyny, Islamophobia, and a host of other oppressions. And GOP women understand the very specific role they play to maintain it. They are also learning that to succeed against the boys, they must outdo the boys in hate-- enter Greene and Boebert.
A week before the elections Trump promised women in Michigan “We're gonna get your husbands back to work!” This during a pandemic that has been a fucking disaster for women. But Trump et al understand it has been a fucking disaster that has disproportionately hurt Black and Indigenous and women of colour.
Soon after that Five-Star General of White Supremacist Patriarchy Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the Supreme Court, Senate Judiciary Chair Senator Lindsay Graham said women in America can achieve anything if they are pro-life, embrace religion and follow a traditional family structure.
When she does wear masks, Greene’s message is loud and clear, not censored, just as her voice was on the House floor on Wednesday.
On January 4, she posed with fellow first-time GOP lawmakers while wearing a mask that said “Stop the Steal” echoing Trump’s false claim that he had won the presidential election. Two days later, violent extremists incited by Trump rallied under that same slogan and stormed the Capitol in the attempted coup.
Two white women fanatics on the outside, Two white women fanatics on the inside. Four footsoldiers of white supremacist patriarchy.
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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