Marjorie Taylor Greene essentially started gunning for Congress by writing about wanting to impeach Nancy Pelosi.

She had logged a petition on January 18, 2019, on whitehouse.gov—“Nancy Pelosi is a TRAITOR to the American People!”—and now, eight days later, she took to LawEnforcementToday.com. “Nancy Pelosi needs to be arrested for treason!” she said. “Nancy Pelosi is a criminal …”

Her bio at the bottom was a new declaration of identity, with a more expressly political tint: “Marjorie Taylor Greene,” it said, “is a proud Whiskey Patriot, entrepreneur, business owner, writer, commentator, speaker, defender of the Second Amendment, shooting enthusiast, CrossFit athlete, wife, and mother redeemed through grace. She states: ‘Our life is a sum total of our decisions. Every day I have the gift to choose to make it an amazing life.’”

“A Southern mom with something to say,” said Kyle Reyes, the national spokesman for Law Enforcement Today. Greene had been writing as a periodic and unpaid contributor to the site for roughly a year. This, though, was the first time Reyes really took note of her name. The Pelosi piece, he said, hit like gangbusters.

“We had so much engagement on that piece from so many people who were emailing us after and saying, ‘She said what I wanted to say and can’t,’” Reyes told me. “It was tapping into a feeling and emotion that people had who were filled with anger, frustration, resentment.”

Greene started sharing the piece more and more on Twitter. “I don’t even remember her having much of an online presence when she first submitted something,” Reyes added. “She definitely grew one, no doubt about that—but if you think about it, listen, love him or hate him, it’s sort of the Trump effect, right? A guy who everybody laughed at, this jackass is never going to have a shot, you know, he’s not serious about running for office—and then he didn’t run a political campaign. The guy ran a marketing campaign. And it was a genius marketing campaign. And he did it utilizing social media.”

Emboldened online, Greene, too, now switched to a drastic increase in activity—actually out and about, an avatar come to life, practicing what she would begin to talk about as “confrontational politics.”

In February 2019, in addition to donating $50 to Trump’s Make America Great Again Committee and $37.50 to his campaign, she went to Washington, where she filmed (now taken down) Facebook Live videos from inside the Capitol. She promoted her Pelosi impeachment push, saying the speaker could be executed for her policies “serving illegals and not United States citizens.” She said fellow California Rep. Maxine Waters was “just as guilty of treason” for “inciting violence against MAGA patriots.” And she went to the office of Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who is Muslim, and confronted her and her staff, accusing her and Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan of supporting Sharia, or Islamic law. She said they were illegitimate because they took their oaths of office on the Quran and not the Bible. “They really should go back to the Middle East,” she said. The “hate-mongering stunts,” as the Southern Poverty Law Center put it, made her viewership spike as well as searches on Google for her name.

In March, back in D.C. to protest a Senate hearing about “red flag” gun laws, she chased down David Hogg on a sidewalk on the Hill. “Coward,” she called the Parkland shooting survivor and gun control activist. “How’d you get over 30 appointments with senators?” she hollered at him. “How did you get major press coverage on this issue?” She said into her phone to her audience that “he had media coverage all over the place” and she “had zero.” She made the shape of a zero with her hand. (“Despicable,” Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter was murdered in the shooting, told me when I called him to ask about Greene and this interaction.)

“I was live filming on my Facebook page,” she wrote of her efforts to get to talk to senators about gun control, “only to be told that they don’t allow live filming in the office. I replied every time, ‘Well as a taxpayer and owner of this building and since I pay your salary, I DO ALLOW live filming here.’”

“Every time I do this, I’m very nice. I’m not at all angry. I don’t yell. No. You want to be very professional. You don’t want to cuss. You wanna talk in a very educated manner,” Greene said in April in a Facebook conversation about (among other things) “confrontational politics” with Patrick Parsons, the executive director of the group called Georgia Gun Owners (who’s now her chief of staff). Parsons introduced her to his audience as “a grassroots activist” who “has a pretty good following on social media.” Greene told Parsons she considered women who support gun control “my enemies.” She said they “should just move out of our country.”

Later in April, two weeks after surgery to repair a ruptured Achilles, Greene flew from Atlanta to El Paso to meet up with right-wing activist Anthony Aguero. She chronicled the trip for Law Enforcement Today. “The media doesn’t want you to see it. The politicians don’t want to face it. But I wanted to see it for myself. So I went to the border,” she wrote. “Where’s the outrage?” She joined a college student on his little-watched YouTube page. “Not having a wall increases Democrat votes,” she said. “I think I can sum myself up as an American woman, and an American woman is really the most amazing thing a woman can be,” she added. “And I feel like I’m fully living that role.”

Days later, she was at the library in Alpharetta. “I’m filming myself, and I have all the permission I want,” she said when the woman asked her to turn off her phone and also for her name.

“My name’s Marjorie Taylor Greene.”

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