This Thursday morning, on the second day of 2025, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) woke up and must’ve barely had her morning coffee when she decided to open her X app and launch straight into her always excessive “America first” hate-mongering routine.
We can assume “become a more reasonable person” was not on the Georgia congresswoman’s list of New Year’s resolutions. Her rhetoric regularly strives to reinforce systemic prejudices and harmful stereotypes, and in this case, that includes Islamophobia.
In every nation, we can find morally reprehensible groups. America has, for instance, the Proud Boys, and other neo-fascist organizations; Afghanistan has the Taliban. This is not a direct comparison — the Proud Boys have thankfully never taken control of the government. One cannot think of the Proud Boys as representative of every American, nor should they, just as one should not think of every Afghan person as being part of or in cahoots with the Taliban. Those who seek to paint all Afghan people as “terrorists” too often have politically driven reasons to do so, and likely have never met a civilian from this nation or come close to setting foot on that war-torn soil.
Now that we have introduced a succinct but hopefully helpful perspective to this topic, let’s turn to the thoughts of someone who probably should be searching for more helpful perspectives instead of imparting her own.
“Stupid U.S. government” and its stupid help to stupid refugees
The U.S. government gives billions of dollars to the Taliban and millions to Afghan refugees.
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) January 2, 2025
Our stupid government funds terrorists with your hard earned tax dollars.
And gives Americans NOTHING. pic.twitter.com/xWETZCbLzl
Once again, Marjorie Taylor Greene is trying to make it seem like the “government” — which translates to “the Biden administration” — has done everything in its power to help this evil “other” instead of helping its own. Sure, the U.S. government — and we mean multiple administrations — could have done a better job ensuring and defending the rights of its citizens by, for instance, remodeling the insanely expensive healthcare system or offering better support to veterans of devastating wars like the Afghanistan War. That said, the claim that the government gives Americans “NOTHING” seems quite hyperbolic, which is unsurprising considering whom it’s coming from.
The American military withdrew from Afghanistan, effectively ending the war, in 2021. Twenty-first-century American people — the same applies to other privileged nations — do not empirically know what it’s like to be forced to survive in a truly war-ravaged country. The U.S.’s monetary aid to the Afghan essentially aimed to help lift the country from complete economic collapse as well as provide its citizens, many of whom were living in unthinkable conditions as a result of the decades-long strife, with elementary human necessities like food and shelter — the same necessities present in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
If having helped people, real human beings, out of a nightmare situation — even if just marginally — is a sign of “stupidity,” as Marjorie Taylor Green implies, then, as predicted, the congresswoman is not the best person to appraise intelligence of any kind. It may be true — and there is veracity to the claim — that some of the aid given to the country by the U.S. fell into the wrong hands, but this, Reuters reported, was due to a lack of established and enforced “vetting requirements” for aid groups. Not that the representative is aware of or seems to care for such nuances. Who cares about nuances when you have the power of the caps lock button?