During a ground speech within the House on Wednesday evening, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene used a Scooby-Doo meme for example her claims that Democrats had been secretly hiding parts of the Green New Deal within the bipartisan infrastructure invoice. Which will, she claimed, bind the U.S. in servitude to China. Which… OK?

‘This is a simple meme you would find on the internet, but this meme is very real,” Taylor Greene said. “The Green New Deal is, surprise, serves China and China only.”

The meme is the most viral part of Taylor Greene’s presentation as a result of it’s utterly absurd to see a member of Congress standing subsequent to a bottom-tier meme you’re prone to see on boomer Facebook, the place Taylor Greene presumably spends numerous time. But her entire 30-minute speech was equally off-the-wall kooky. In the speech, Greene claimed that “the Green New Deal” is “written in the infrastructure bill, and written in the $3.5 trillion budget.” In this mild, the Scooby-Doo meme isn’t only a enjoyable visible help, however somewhat a literal illustration of her “thesis.” (I exploit that time period very loosely.)

“The Green New Deal is rapidly becoming a very real reality for America—which is tragic,” Greene mentioned. Agree to disagree, I suppose.

Unsurprisingly, there’s not numerous precise proof or details in Greene’s speech to again up her claims that the deeply watered-down infrastructure invoice is definitely the dastardly, socialist Green New Deal in disguise. Nor is there any actual signal that Americans shall be chained to China by spending somewhat (much-needed) cash to repair our roads and bridges. During her speech, Greene painted Democrats as eager to make the U.S. “dependent on China just to drive a car or a truck.” She displayed a meme of Chinese President Xi Jinping with the catchy caption in Impact font “I OWN JOE BIDEN / AND NOW I OWN AFGHANISTANS [sic] LITHIUM DEPOSITS” as she claimed that Biden was beholden to Sen. Bernie Sanders and that “vaccine police and climate justice troops to track your every single move.”

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And, after all, she sprinkled a wholesome quantity of really flabbergastingly silly local weather denial all through the entire thing. “The climate has changed in the entire history of the Earth, and no amount of taxes that anyone can pay is going to change the climate,” she mentioned. “That’s just the truth, that’s not made up, like climate change, and climate justice.” Cool, thanks Marjorie.

Watching her speech made my mind soften. As a fast reminder, Greene as soon as floated the concept wildfires had been attributable to Democrat-controlled area lasers, so we’re probably not coping with somebody with a agency scientific background right here. And it’s fairly clear that numerous this phrase salad is simply junk thrown collectively to rile up her Q-loving base.

But it’s one factor to giggle at memes pulled off the depths of 8chan once they’re offered within the House as visible aids—it’s additionally very scary to know that an elected official is, primarily, utilizing the sources of these memes to form her precise arguments and coverage. It was particularly telling when Taylor Greene learn straight parts of Green New Deal laws speaking about guarantees for local weather justice and jobs as if these phrases alone had been worthy of scorn. Doing so actually suits a sample with different extremist GOP members of Congress, equivalent to Rep. Lauren Boebert, who peddled the dumb hamburger conspiracy that received the proper riled up earlier this yr in addition to attacking a Biden nominee. (In unusual and certainly completely unrelated information, Boebert did not disclose the practically $1 million in fuel consulting contracts her husband had on her marketing campaign finance types.)

The proper’s obsession with even the mere existence of the Green New Deal is affirmation that ideas and phrases the local weather motion makes use of repeatedly have morphed into fake bogeymen somewhat than very actual issues that have to occur if the U.S. and the world wish to avert additional local weather breakdown and defend fossil gasoline employees and frontline communities within the transition to scrub vitality. None of this, in case it wasn’t clear, has to do with China or creating “climate justice troops.”

Amazingly, Taylor Greene mentioned the half-hour she received to speak final evening solely represents half of what she has to say on this matter: Her deliberate speech was a whopping hour lengthy. “[E]xpect part 2 of why the Green New Deal serves China, coming soon,” she wrote in a tweet.

Will there be boomer memes? Almost actually.