People should laugh at and mock monkeypox because "it's not a threat to most of the population," according to far-right Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Greene made the remark at a recent conservative conference, the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Tampa, Fla. The Georgia representative is well known for her anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and embrace of conspiracy theories.
She has already spread much false information about monkeypox, or MPV. Its current outbreak has primarily affected men who have sex with men, but anyone is vulnerable. She recently tweeted, "If Monkeypox is a sexually transmitted disease, why are kids getting it?"
MPV is not a sexually transmitted infection, although it can be transmitted during the close physical contact that comes with sex. But it can be spread through any type of close contact with the infectious rash that comes with the disease, through respiratory secretions from an infected person, or through touching items, such as clothing or linens, that previously touched the infectious rash.
Greene's mockery of the outbreak came when journalist Allison Royal spoke to her at the Turning Point conference. Royal mentioned that the World Health Organization has declared MPV a global health threat, and she asked Greene how Congress could keep this from turning into "another COVID 'pandemic' that steals two years of our lives." Royal's caption on her video, posted to the right-wing site Rumble,has "pandemic" in quotes, indicating she doesn't think it really is one.
"I think we just have to reject it," Greene said. "Of course, monkeypox is a threat to some people in our population, but we know what causes it. ... It's basically a sexually transmitted disease, so it doesn't affect most of the population."
"People just have to laugh at it, mock it, and reject it ... it's another scam," she added.
Greene is also getting critiqued for declaring herself a "Christian nationalist," something she did at the conference and has done on several other occasions. Rachel Maddow, on her eponymous MSNBC show's Monday edition, pointed out that so-called Christian nationalism is associated with racism and anti-Semitism. She gave a history of the movement, including one of its mid-20th-century proponents, Gerald L.K. Smith, who founded the Christian Nationalist Crusade and ran against President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the candidate of the America First Party in 1944. Smith frequently claimed there was a sinister Jewish cabal working against Christians and railed against the mixing of races.
Now Greene is calling Maddow part of the "godless lying left." "Rachel Maddow is smearing me with lies about my faith and love for America and trying to connect me to someone I've never heard of or know anything about," Greene tweeted Tuesday. Farther down on the thread, she added, "The godless lying left has been lying about me from day one and calling me anti-semitic, racist, fascist, and even a Nazi, which are all absolutely disgusting lies about me."
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