Listened yesterday to an NPR reporter interview several voters in the Georgia district where an election will replace Marjorie Taylor Greene in Congress this year. Listened this morning to a different NPR reporter explain the popularity of Candace Owens' YouTube podcast and the schisms she represents within the MAGA voting bloc. In both cases, the reporters describe these popular women and their followers as political conservatives. I have a problem with that. When journalists and news reporters use the term conservative broadly, inclusive of the far right and extremists who now control the Republican party, they suggest that all political views right of center are conservative views. Although we traditionally and generally interpret political and social views as conservative, moderate, or liberal, these three terms are no longer sufficient. They do not describe today’s reality in American politics. In fact, the terms are deceptive, unreasonable, and prejudicial.
Both Marjorie Taylor Greene and Candace Owens belong in a category of politics and religion we can objectively describe as extremist, irrational, skewed to the far right, radical, and uncompromising. Within the same category are Christian Nationalists, antisemites, racists, bigots, white Christian male supremacists, insurrectionists, MAGA, Donald J Trump True Believers, and most Republican voters.
Conservatives once believed in human rights, voting rights, civil rights, and democracy. These women do not. They believe in limited rights – privileges that belong to Christians only, to the wealthy, to those who possess the power to subjugate others.
Conservatives once practiced empathy. These women do not. For all Greene’s dramatic efforts to force the release of the Epstein files, she has quickly and quietly dropped the project. Did she throughout 2025 pursue the files and thereby force a rift in MAGA because she empathized with the victims? No one can say for certain. But we can point to a pattern in her behaviors, repeatedly choosing drama and self-aggrandizing behaviors over truth and dignity. She was rarely a voice of Reason. More pointedly, she fully supported Donald J Trump knowing as we all have known since he became a celebrity in the 1980s – he is a sexual predator and a business fraud. She did not have empathy for all the women and girls who accused him before the 2016 election. Candace Owens also severely lacks empathy for The Other. She preaches anti-Jew ideas reminiscent of Nazi ideas in 1920s through 1940s Germany. While she rode to fame and fortune on the Trump MAGA tide, she is now wealthy and politically powerful in her own right. Her extremism is now a far-right extremism…ideas that caused the deaths of tens of millions of Jews, Black people, Slavs, the mentally and physically disabled, LGBTQ people, including children, the elderly, and the homeless.
Conservatives once practiced collaboration and unity. When America went to war in 1942, many men and women who believed in conservative values willingly assumed arms against German and Italian fascists, against Japanese empire-building assaults in the Pacific. Our nation’s conservatives, moderates, and liberals worked together to win a war that most had hoped we could remain neutral towards. Our leaders collaborated on policies and strategies; our neighbors and communities united under one banner: Victory and Freedom. Greene and Owens, their ambitions and behaviors almost unknown before Donald J Trump and MAGA politics empowered them, do not embrace the idea that collaboration and unity will build a safe, productive, free, happy, and just nation. In fact, Greene and Owens practice the opposite…divisiveness, extreme bias, obstruction, disinformation, misinformation, prejudice, self-serving bias, and infighting. They rode from obscurity and uselessness to fame on public power struggles and angry rhetoric. Unfortunately, a free society must tolerate these women and protect their right to free expression. However, the true conservatives of yesterday have disappeared from the Republican party, the Tea Party and MAGA having pushed them out, America’s billionaires and Putin himself having purchased what remains. The result is that right wing extremists now own most news, information, and internet-influencer media. I will be long dead if ever democracy, collaboration, and unity return to U.S. politics.
All this comes down to one important concern…people like Greene and Owens would not be powerful, wealthy, popular celebrities in U.S.A. politics and religion without support among millions of Americans. They influence voters. Worse, they influence the willfully ignorant, desperately lonely, unreasonably resentful, angry white supremacists, and anti-Jesus’ teachings Christians who live among us. Greene and Owens are dangerous because of their influence; they are cowards because as women they shun the fights for all women and children, for all the most vulnerable in our society.
In one hundred years, no one will remember me except as a name on a family tree. I can honestly and assuredly say the same for Greene and Owens. Cowards do not live long; their fame and fortune last only as long as they remain slaves to their cruel masters like Trump and Republican extremists.
Reporters, journalists, internet-influencer, writers, investigators, and documentaries must STOP calling these women, members in the MAGA movement, Republican party leaders, and Republican party voters Conservatives. When they do this, they are either joking or dishonest.