April 2024 Ignominious Absurdity of the Month: the IGGY

1. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga). A mild earthquake struck New York and parts of the Northeast this month. The most notable thing about the tremor was the rarity of any sort of perceivable seismic activity in the tri-state area. Marjorie Taylor Greene had an explanation, writing on X that the quake was evidence of God's displeasure with America.

"God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent. Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens," the Republican from Georgia warned.

Greene also referenced the total solar eclipse that will be visible in some parts of the United States on Monday. While eclipses are natural phenomena that scientists can predict with precision, certain far-right figures have pushing bazaar conspiracies around the event. Masonic rituals, satanic rights, and even the arrival of the New World Order have all been floated as possible happenings during the brief darkening of the sky. Greene seems to at least agree that the moon blocking the sun is more than just another machination of the cosmos.

Earthquakes are also well-documented natural phenomena, of course, explained not by a deity's feelings about the people in a certain area but by the shifting of the tectonic plates that comprise Earth's crust. While we're sure Greene, like most Americans, learned this in an elementary school science class, her read on the earthquake that hit New York City on Friday seems to be informed more by her long history of conspiratorial thinking.

Who could forget when the congresswoman blamed 2018's California wildfires on Jewish space lasers? Or when she suggested that Democrats were intentionally setting fires to food processing plants? Or the various times she's suggested mass shootings were intentionally orchestrated false flags? Or when she said flooding at the 2023 Burning Man festival was God's "way of making sure everyone knows who God is."