#2889: Greg Gianforte

Gregory Gianforte is the governor of Montana since 2021 and much of what is currently wrong with America. Gianforte is a religious fundie, conspiracy theorist, promoter of pseudoscience, and a violent criminal. He previously served as U.S. representative for Montana’s at-large congressional district from 2017 to 2021, and was then for a while the wealthiest member of Congress.

 

Gianforte is a relentless young-earth creationist and has spent significant efforts to promote creationism in the public sphere. Gianforte has donated at least $290,000 to the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum, a local creationist sideshow attraction that teaches its visitors that the Earth is some 6000 years old, that humans and dinosaurs coexisted, and that Noah brought the dinosaurs on his Ark; the Gianforte Family Foundation apparently also donated a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton replica to the ‘museum’. Officially, Gianforte claims that  “I believe young people should be taught how to think, not what to think”, which is silly but also a lie: Gianforte very much wants to tell kids what to think (and has donated millions of dollars to fundie private schools that have very clear views on science and what kids should think), and definitely doesn’t want them to learn how to think (i.e. to be able to assess reasons and evidence). And during his tenure as governor, the Montana legislature, led by Gianforte fans like hardcore science denialist Daniel Emrich, has made several efforts to cripple science education in public schools.

 

Much of his efforts to promote creationism are made through the aforementioned Gianforte Family Foundation, which is officially dedicated to supporting “the work of faith-based organizations engaged in outreach work, strengthening families, and helping the needy”, and which has promoted substantial funds to wingnut fundie organizations like the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family, as well as the Montana Family Foundation (“the state’s primary advocate against LGBT policies”), dangerous and deceitful ‘crisis pregnancy’ centers, Doug “the black family has never been stronger than it was under slavery” Wilson, and organizations working on legal efforts to dismantle federal campaign finance regulations. Gianforte and his wife, Susan, are themselves longtime anti-LGBT campaigners, of course.

 

Though initially skeptical of Trump, Gianforte was a relatively early convert, and has since 2016 promoted and attempted to emulate everything associated with Trump, including attempts to market himself as a political outsider and lambasting the nebulously delineated “liberal elite”. But the admiration became mutual after Gianforte assaulted (and lied to investigators about assaulting) a journalist in 2017; the event was widely praised in wingnut circles and by wingnut candidates like Jody Hice, and even Trump himself congratulated Gianforte on the assault, thereby becoming the first sitting president that has “openly and directly praised a violent act against a journalist on American soil”. In 2020, Gianforte predictably supported various efforts to overturn the election results, and was for instance a signatory to an amicus brief in support of the famously insane Texas v. Pennsylvania lawsuit.

 

Politically (and personally), Gianforte is mostly your usual hardline wingnut, though his reasoning is sometimes unusual. His opposition to retirement, for instance, is backed up by the idea that “the concept of retirement is unbiblical”. As Gianforte points out, “[t]here’s nothing in the Bible that talks about retirement. And yet it's been an accepted concept in our culture today. Nowhere does it say, ‘Well, he was a good and faithful servant, so he went to the beach’.” Indeed, there isn’t. And to really hammer down his point, Gianforte reminds us that “How old was Noah when he built the ark? 600. He wasn’t, like, cashing Social Security checks. He wasn't hanging out. He was working.” One imagines that reasoning with Greg Gianforte might run into some tricky obstacles.

 

As a sort of stopped-clock exception to his otherwise consistent stance of being wrong, Gianforte has acknowledged human-caused climate change … though he followed up by pointing out that he “did not have specific ideas on how to address climate change”, that “climate is always changing” and that closing coal-fired power plants would not help mitigate climate change.

 

Diagnosis: Wrong. Consistently, comprehensively and in all possible ways.