Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) became the first Republican in Congress on Wednesday to condemn Marjorie Taylor Greene’s support of the QAnon conspiracy theory after Greene won her Republican House primary in a deep-red Georgia district.
“Qanon is a fabrication,” Kinzinger tweeted. “This ‘insider’ has predicted so much incorrectly (but people don’t remember PAST predictions) so now has switched to vague generalities.”
“Could be Russian propaganda or a basement dweller,” he continued. “Regardless, no place in Congress for these conspiracies.”
Greene won the GOP primary in Georgia’s 14th District on Tuesday night to replace outgoing Rep. Tom Graves (R). She defeated neurosurgeon John Cowan in a runoff after neither candidate received more than 50 percent of the vote in the June 9 primary. Greene won with 60 percent of the vote on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.
She is expected to win the general election in the fall after Graves won the district by 53 points in 2018.
Greene has received national attention over recordings unearthed by Politico of her comparing Democratic donor George Soros to a Nazi, saying the 2018 midterms were like an “Islamic invasion of our government” and asserting that African Americans “are held slaves to the Democratic Party.”
She is also one of the dozens of Republican candidates who have expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory, which posits that President Trump and his allies are working together to expose a shadowy cabal of figures in media, entertainment and politics who currently control the world.
She said the unidentified Q is a “patriot” in a YouTube video from 2017.
“He is someone that very much loves his country, and he’s on the same page as us, and he is very pro-Trump,” Greene said in the video. “I’m very excited about that now there’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it.”
While some Republican figures have called out Greene for her racist comments, they have not done the same about her QAnon support, outside of Kinzinger.
Trump offered his full-throated support for Greene in a tweet Wednesday.
A spokesperson for Trump’s reelection campaign hit Kinzinger over the tweet hours later, calling on him to condemn “conspiracy theories pushed by Democrats” as well.
Trump has retweeted QAnon-affiliated accounts dozens of times, while former members of his administration have publicly embraced the theory.
The community supporting the theory has grown massively in the last few years, enough for the FBI to label the loose group as a domestic terrorism threat.
—Updated at 4:13 p.m.