Subject: Johnathan Last on MTG
For a couple years now I’ve said that Marjorie Taylor Greene is the kind of person I could connect with. Now that everyone else is falling in love with Marjorie, I should probably unpack this idea.

Remember that insufferable Elizabeth Gilbert memoir, Eat, Pray Love? In the book the author, a fantastically lucky, successful woman looks up one day and realizes she’s deeply unhappy. So she divorces her husband and goes on a journey of self-discovery to Italy, India, and then Bali.

I think you can read MTG’s life a little bit like that—except that her journey of self-discovery went from Crossfit, to Facebook, to MAGA.

No, really. We’re going to do this. So strap in. I promise you’re going to hate it.

Marjorie Taylor was born to a wealthy Catholic family and got married in 1995, a year before she graduated from college. She had three kids. She went to work for the family business. And at some point in the mid-2010s she seems to have realized that she was unhappy. She wanted to change her life.
She got really into Crossfit. Then she started getting really into politics, via Facebook. Then she ran for office. Then she and her husband got divorced.
Along the way, MTG seems to have been disappointed by many of the traditional pillars she had expected to rely on in life. She left the Catholic Church out of disgust for the way it handled child sexual abuse by priests. Her career and marriage weren’t fulfilling. She was in the grind of her thirties and wondering, Isn’t there more?
Maybe if MTG had lived in Manhattan in the mid-2000s she would have gone to Italy and luxuriated in food. And then to India searching for spirituality. And then Bali looking to get laid. Like Elizabeth Gilbert.
But it was 2011 and MTG lived in exurban Atlanta. So she quit her corporate job to open a Crossfit gym. Then she got sucked into the Facebook algorithm. And then, when Donald Trump happened and started wrecking all the same institutions that had disappointed her, she jumped into MAGA.

Am I saying that MTG becoming the first QAnon member of Congress is just like the moment in Eat, Pray, Love where Gilbert marries the Brazilian businessman she meets in Bali because she thinks she’s finally found happiness?
Yes? I think that’s exactly what I’m saying?
Especially because, in real life, after Eat, Pray, Love was published, Elizabeth Gilbert realized that the Brazilian guy didn’t deliver happiness either. And she divorced him, too.

I’m sure you don’t need me to spell it out, but…….

https://open.substack.com/pub/...