Rome Police officers responded to the home of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene shortly after 1 a.m. Wednesday after receiving a false report of a shooting. Nobody was injured in the incident.
Officers are calling it an attempted swatting, a harassment technique where the perpetrator attempts to summon a large number of armed police to a victim’s home to frighten or intimidate them.
According to a police report, Rome-Floyd County 911 received a call from a veterans’ affairs crisis line about a male who had been shot multiple times. The caller said a woman was still in the home and may have had children with her.
Five officers responded, but were informed on the way that the house was owned by Greene.
“We then made the approach to the residence, still unsure of exactly what had transpired or what was still in progress,” the report reads. “We made a tactical approach to the residence and began ringing the doorbell.”
Greene described the ordeal from her perspective in an interview on the Charlie Kirk Show. She said she was awoken from a sound sleep by knocks on her door and lights outside of her window.
“I jumped out of bed, threw my clothes on, and I picked up my gun,” she said. “That was my instinct because I’m a gun owner, I’m a Second Amendment supporter and I believe in defending myself. Normally, I answer the door with a gun, especially if it’s someone that I don’t expect coming to my home, but for some reason, I had this weird gut instinct to not take my gun with me to the front door, which was very out of the norm for me.”
Greene said she was afraid the police had come to deliver bad news, but instead they simply asked if everything was alright in the home and explained the 911 call they had received.
Officers said Greene told them there was no issue, but she requested police keep an eye on her property.
After officers finished at Greene’s residence, the 911 dispatch received another call in which someone using a computer-generated voice to speak claimed responsibility, saying they were upset about Greene’s stance on “transgender youth rights,” according to the report. Police said the caller admitted to attempting to swat Greene and claimed a connection with a web forum called Kiwi Farms.
It’s not clear whether the suspect is actually a transgender activist or associated with Kiwi Farms. The site was down as of Wednesday afternoon, displaying a message that it has been under attack since Aug. 19. The forum has been connected with stalking and harassment campaigns, including against transgender people.
The caller provided a screen name they said they used on the forum, and the police said both calls were placed through a number with a 762 area code, which includes Floyd County and other parts of north Georgia.
Greene is known as a provocateur, and her antics have sometimes targeted the transgender community. Last year, CNN reported that Greene responded to a colleague whose child is transgender hanging up a transgender pride flag outside her office by posting a sign that says “There are two genders” outside her own.
Over the summer, Twitter flagged a Greene tweet mocking Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services Rachel Levine as violating its rules about hateful conduct.
At a spring Donald Trump rally in Commerce, Greene leveled a transphobic joke at Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is not transgender.
“Pete Buttigieg can take his electric vehicles and his bicycles and he and his husband can stay out of our girls’ bathrooms,” she said.
Greene has introduced a bill she says will prohibit gender affirming care for minors, and on the Charlie Kirk show Tuesday, she made it clear she sees the swat call as a political attack in response to her anti-transgender positions.
“There is no way I am backing down,” she said. “I introduced very important legislation called the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, and the whole reason I did that, my bill, if passed into law, it would become a federal law, and it makes it a felony to perform any time of so-called ‘gender affirming care,’ which is really just genital mutilation surgeries, hormone therapies, puberty blockers, and this is absolute child abuse, and it’s really interesting that this just happened a week after I introduced this critical legislation, and I’m building massive support among Republicans and growing cosponsors because everyone knows what a dangerous threat this is to our children and that generation, and then here it comes that my house gets swatted by some sort of youth trans activist. If this is the war the left wants to bring, they can bring it.”
Medical experts say characterizations of gender-affirming care like Greene’s are grossly deceptive. Last year, the American Medical Association sent a letter to the National Governors Association urging state leaders not to impose restrictions on gender-affirming care.
The threat on Greene comes as political tensions continue to heighten. In 2021, the U.S. Capitol Police reported a 107% increase in threats made against members of Congress over the year before.
Failed gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor, a conservative firebrand in Greene’s mold best known for crusading against the recently-destroyed Georgia Guidestones, said last month that her home in south Georgia had also been swatted. No injuries were reported in that incident.
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