Marjorie Taylor Greene has said that her 2018 Facebook post was not antisemitic as she didn’t know the Rothschilds were Jewish and never used the phrase “Jewish space lasers”, a conspiracy theory for which the Georgia Republican was widely mocked.
Ms Greene appeared on an episode of Donald Trump Jr’s podcast “Triggered with Don Jr”, and the two discussed her controversial Facebook post which was later deleted.
“Some reporter had written an article about the post I had made in 2018 and he titled it “Jewish space later”. That’s how I got labelled with it. But I have never... never even said Jewish,” Ms Greene said.
The comments referred to her lengthy Facebook post five years ago in which she said that deadly wildfires in California at that time were not natural and claimed people have seen “lasers or blue beams of light causing the fire” from space.
She said the blazes could have been started by a natural gas company and the Rothschilds, a wealthy Jewish banking family that often features in such conspiracy theories.
However, Ms Greene said in the podcast that she “didn’t know anything about the religion” or the people she named in the post.
“The names I mentioned I didn’t know about the people. I just knew their names. But I didn’t know anything about their religion or anything like that,” she said.
In his apparent attempt to defend the Georgia Republican, former president Donald Trump’s eldest son said her post was “actually about a real technology” after she read a scientific magazine about harnessing solar energy in space.
Don Jr said that the article was about how Americans could save bills on China-built solar panels with the technology that harnesses the energy in space and beams it down to a receptor placed in the US.
The post was another in a long line of conspiracies about the Rothschilds, a Jewish banking family that has featured heavily in antisemitic conspiracy theories since the 19th century.
Ms Greene, who is no stranger to controversies, has a long list of problematic statements, including one in which she claimed 9/11 was an inside job. Recently she drew a baseless comparison between the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon and United Airlines Flight 93, the hijacked plane that crashed into Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on 11 September 2001.
She compared the size of the balloon, which was roughly the size of three buses, to the United Airlines jetliner, which was one of four aircraft hijacked on 9/11.
