I wish I was making this news story up - partially because it’s getting a little bit tiresome writing about US politics. However, the recently elected Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who likes to ride on the QAnon conspiracy carriage of the Trump Train, has been put through the wringer in the last week. Journalists have been poring over her social media history and documenting her words, shares and likes - some of which are so weird and wonderful it doesn’t take much to debunk them.

There’s a lot to unpack in what Marjorie has said in recent years, including that 9/11 was a hoax, Obama is a Muslim, the Clintons killed JFK Jr, and recent school shootings in the US were "false flag" operations. However, the most out there of them all has to be the idea that has made headlines around the world - that the 2018 California wildfires were caused by a satellite mounted laser which is controlled by the Rothschild family. This has now been dubbed the Jewish Space Laser.

Thankfully many in the Jewish community in the US have given this outlandish, evidence-free, racist idea the level of response I believe it deserves - ridicule. Twitter has many funny comments and images, making light of the idea and turning it into something very kitsch. However, I think that the conspiratorial undertones of making Jewish people out to be an evil conniving race cannot be ignored, and I hope that the House of Representatives, and the Republican Party in particular, are able to do something to tackle those within their ranks - not just Greene - who harbour these kinds of dangerously wrong-headed ideas.

This whole incident reminds me that we had a very similar thing happen here in NZ last year, but at a much smaller scale. Advance NZ’s Wairarapa candidate, Nigel Anthony Gray (a Scientologist), claimed (opens new window) that a Directed Energy Weapon was used to start the Lake Ohau fire. Thankfully the media pounced on the claim pretty quickly, and Jamie Lee Ross was just as quick to distance himself from Gray’s theory - while still being happy to keep him on as a candidate.