#2935: Mark Green

Mark Edward Green was a U.S. representative for Tennessee’s 7th congressional district from 2019 until his resignation in 2025, who chaired the Committee on Homeland Security from 2023 to 2025 and represented, in general, religious fundamentalism and wingnuttery. Prior to Congress, Green served in the Tennesse Senate from 2013 to 2018, representing the 22nd district. He was also a 2017 Trump nominee for the position of US Secretary of the Army, but withdrew his nomination after his persona and opinions became better known to the public – he is not a good person. Nevertheless, his withdrawal predictably led to claims of persecution and martyrdom from the usual crowd.

 

Green is notoriously negative toward science and scientific findings, at least when such findings don’t support what he wants them to support, which is precisely the hallmark attitude of someone being anti-science. So Green is, for instance, a global warming denialist, and has stated that “I’m not yet convinced that the science is proving that we’re warming” (though he did admittedly voice some concerns about deforestation). 

 

He is also a staunch creationist. In a 2015 speech, Green dedicated nearly an hour to explaining why his work as a medical doctor taught him to reject the theory of evolution, employing a range of standard creationist PRATTs, including “irreducible complexity” (the Kitzmiller-famous blood-clotting example) and even appealing to the second law of thermodynamics – what he called “thermo-fluid dynamics” – to claim that “over time things break down, they don’t assemble themselves together”.

 

And though he is himself a physician, Green has more than toyed with anti-vaccine ideas, e.g. when telling his constituents in 2018 that “there is some concern that the rise in autism is the result of the preservatives that are in our vaccines”, neglecting to emphasize that the suggestion is demonstrably false. Indeed, since the data unequivocally shows that he is wrong, Green thinks that the federal health agency has “fraudulently managed” the data – otherwise, how could they contradict what Green just knows to be the case? To his constituents, he promsied that “as a physician, […] I can look at it academically and make the argument against the CDC”; of course, being an MD is a profession, and not the same as being a medical researcher, but his constituent is probably not aware of the distinction; it would be scary if Green wasn’t, but things tend to be scary these days. And in response to subsequent criticism, Green did not retreat, but rather emphasized that “There appears to be some evidence that as vaccine numbers increase, rates of autism increase,” and that we should “look closely at the correlation for any causation”. In reality, of course, we have looked closely, and there is no causation; indeed, there is no correlation either.

 

Green has also toyed with birtherism and refused to answer questions about whether former President Obama is really a Muslim. In 2016, he also provided his own theories on why there was a putatively mysterious rise in Latinos registering to vote in Tennessee: said Latinos were “being bussed here probably.” No wonder the first Trump administration tapped him for a powerful role.

 

Diagnosis: Fundie conspiracy theorist who hates – among other things – science and reason almost as much as his constituents hate science and reason. That characterization may sound daft, but it fits well enough.