Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
As America bunkered down for two catastrophic weather events—Hurricanes Helene and Milton—Joe Biden and his administration were faced with another unexpected emergency: MAGA conspiracies.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was perhaps the worst offender. Since the Georgia congresswoman claimed on X last week that “they can control the weather,” she has continued to imply that the hurricanes were part of a political plot. On Wednesday, she said that “everyone keeps asking, ‘who is they?’” claiming that “some of them are listed on NOAA,” referring to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Biden was forced to call out Greene as “beyond ridiculous,” while even other Republican lawmakers have called her out.
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“It is not enough to just laugh at these things anymore and say, ‘Oh, Marjorie Taylor Greene is absolutely insane,’ because she is. But when she told us a couple of years ago that she was not the fringe of the Republican party but the mainstream of the Republican party, we needed to believe her and take that seriously because what it is that they are saying and doing is altering our country and putting countless people in life-threatening danger because of their lies,” co-host Danielle Moodie said on the latest episode of The New Abnormal.
Greene has repeatedly boasted of a new Republican party replacing the old. She told War Room podcast host Steve Bannon in 2021: “We are not the fringe. We are the base of the party.”
Plus! Semafor’s National political reporter, Dave Weigel, talks about the Republican party’s obscene amount of TV and internet ads that express a whole lot of anti-transgender sentiments and why voters may not respond in the way the GOP is hoping for.
Then, Dying of Whiteness author Jonathan Metzl joins the show to talk about the MAGA mentality that the right wing has embraced—along with an examination of how we got here.
Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
