I can’t imagine what she thought she was accomplishing by posting this.

If she wanted to make the point that one should be exempt from vaccine mandates if vaccination violates one’s religion (which is never true of major religions), she could have just … made that point. Instead she chose to associate her own beliefs about vaccines with Louis Farrakhan’s, which will do nothing to persuade skeptics that anti-vaxxism isn’t a movement of cranks and might alienate some righties who are otherwise open-minded about opposing the vaccine but will no longer be once they find out they’re allied with the NOI.

I suspect she imagined this as some clever bipartisan outreach play to African-Americans, aiming to make vaccination a wedge issue on the left by encouraging religious objections among black Muslims. In reality it’ll just make both wings of the anti-vax coalition, left and right, look even fringier to the vaccinated majority on each side.

She stumbled across the Nation of Islam’s newspaper while visiting a D.C. jail recently to cheer up the January 6 insurrectionists who are locked up there. She didn’t care for their story with the headline “White hate, white fear fueling white rage” but brightened up when she turned the page to find a piece about the wonders of ivermectin.

6. The Nation of Islam is also strongly against the #COVID19 vaccines. pic.twitter.com/5KtFfJdtWw

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) November 8, 2021

8.“Stop Leading Black People to #COVID19 vaccine slaughter!”
This is problematic for party of identity politics.
Extremely high amounts of deaths are reported on VAERS, but there are no investigations into those deaths.
Just Biden EO’s that fine companies for #NoJabNoJob. pic.twitter.com/wXUGjB2e8F

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) November 8, 2021

10. Louis Farrakhan says that forcing the vaccine is a “declaration of war.”

That is how strongly the Nation of Islam opposes @JoeBiden’s vaccine mandates that force unvaccinated people to lose their jobs. pic.twitter.com/UAvnlwjxG6

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) November 8, 2021

12. Learning how opposed the Nation of Islam is to the #COVID19 vaccines, & already knowing how many Christians oppose the vaccines, we MUST ensure that Religious Exemptions are allowed for Vaccine Mandates.

All vaccine mandates must end & children shouldn’t be vaxxed.

Cont’d

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) November 8, 2021

She should meet with Farrakhan. I’m sure the vaccine and ivermectin aren’t the only subjects on which they’d have a meeting of the minds. “Imagine if the thing that ends Sharia Law-baiting once and for all as a right-wing rabble-rousing technique is the realization that Muslims too have a rump of antivax iconoclasts,” Andrew Egger tweeted upon reading the thread.

I’m curious to see if her newfound appreciation for the NOI catches on more broadly among populists. In some ways, Farrakhan is as far away politically as one can get from white identity politics; in other ways, like his immersion in conspiracy theories and disdain for liberal norms, there’s more of a “horseshoe effect” happening. Do Greene and her ilk hate vaccines so much that they’d be willing to put aside their other differences with the NOI and make common cause against basic public-health tactics to end the pandemic?

Maybe he’ll give her some pointers on forming her own right-wing version of the Fruit of Islam. I’m sure she’ll find some willing recruits the next time she visits the D.C. jail.

Meanwhile, as she busies herself poring through Nation of Islam propaganda looking for new COVID folk remedies, the gap in the death rate between red states and blue states continues to grow:

The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.

In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened.

Some conservative writers have tried to claim that the gap may stem from regional differences in weather or age, but those arguments fall apart under scrutiny. (If weather or age were a major reason, the pattern would have begun to appear last year.) The true explanation is straightforward: The vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing severe Covid, and almost 40 percent of Republican adults remain unvaccinated, compared with about 10 percent of Democratic adults.

It looks like this on a graph:

The vaccines proved so powerful, and the partisan attitudes toward them so different, that a gap in Covid’s death toll quickly emerged.

It has grown over the course of this year and is now at its widest point. pic.twitter.com/pyWKHl4Ann

— David Leonhardt (@DLeonhardt) November 8, 2021

Per the data, the Trumpier a county is, the higher the death rate is. Counties where Trump got 70 percent of more of the vote have higher rates than counties where he got 60 percent of the vote. The Nation of Islam/populist approach to the pandemic has taken a lot of red-state grandmas and grandpas from us too soon.

And it probably won’t change:

This is a good point —> pic.twitter.com/iAnIJHQvAh

— David Leonhardt (@DLeonhardt) November 8, 2021

That’s the point of Greene’s tweet series, I suppose, to redefine who “us” and “them” are. From her standpoint, Louis Farrakhan is more of an “us” than Anthony Fauci is. What a world.

I’ll leave you with Scott Gottlieb once again pleading with the feds to ease off on their COVID vaccine mandate, fearing that it’ll fuel precisely the sort of full-spectrum anti-vax movement that’s hinted at in Greene warming up to the Nation of Islam.

VACCINE MANDATES: @ScottGottliebMD tells @margbrennan he's concerned about the public health implications when it comes to opposition to COVID mandates "bleeding into opposition of vaccine mandates" like childhood immunizations pic.twitter.com/3X76SicHUc

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) November 7, 2021