What were House Republican leaders thinking in assigning Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, to the House Education and Labor Committee, of all places? It's bad enough that Greene, a newly seated representative from Georgia, has been a proponent of QAnon and has supported calls for violence against Democrats. But Greene's relationship to education is especially disturbing as someone who has spread the cruel and dangerous lie that the Sandy Hook and Parkland school shootings were "false flags" staged by gun-control advocates.

GOP leaders would be within their rights to deny Greene any committee assignments at all. She's especially unfit for this one.

Greene's extremism goes far beyond policy issues. In the recent past, she has promoted QAnon, the online right-wing conspiracy hub that believes mainstream Democrats are Satan-worshipping pedophiles, and which the FBI has identified as a potential domestic terrorist threat. She has peddled racist and Islamophobic garbage and has "liked" Facebook comments from others calling for the hanging of former President Barack Obama and "a bullet to the head" for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

As recently as September, Greene posted a Facebook picture of herself holding a gun next to images of Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

Greene also has a history of embracing the outrageous trend among right-wing conspiracy nuts of claiming that school shootings had been faked by the government as a way of promoting gun control. No amount of photos depicting terrorized children and grieving parents will convince them these are real tragedies. The whole concept is so deranged and heartless that false-flag belief should be viewed as a form of sociopathy.

Greene agreed with the Facebook commenter who claimed that the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which took 17 lives, was a false-flag event. Greene herself claimed in a post at the time: "I am told that Nancy Pelosi tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that 'we need another school shooting' in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control." Also in 2018, Greene agreed with a commenter who claimed the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut, in which 20 young children died, was a hoax.

GOP leaders could deny Greene any committee assignments at all as a message to the public about just how unfit she is to serve. Indeed, they did exactly that in 2019 to then-Rep. Steve King of Iowa in response to white-supremacist comments he'd made. Yet those same leaders have decided that a congresswoman who, in addition to being a racist, has defiled the memories of dead children and mocked the emotional torment of their families should have a say in setting U.S. education policy. She shouldn't.

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