California Governor Gavin Newsom Traded Barbs With Marjorie Taylor Greene, Calling Her Anti-Vaccine Stance ‘Murderous’

California Governor Gavin Newsom is in trouble. There’s a recall election coming for him in mid-September, with Republicans furious about how he handled the pandemic. (Maybe he’ll be replaced by…Randy Quaid?) Newsom’s response has come under scrutiny by many, but the majority of his critics on the right aren’t so mad much about the cases. They’re mad that he closed down much of the state in the first place, in an attempt to save lives. But the backlash hasn’t quelled Newsom’s passion in fighting the virus, as evidenced by his next-level Twitter fight with vaxx skeptic Marjorie Taylor Greene.

On Monday, Greene — who appears to spend most of her time yelling at people online or in real life, but now on the tax payers’ dime — came for Newsom, reminding him about why conservatives hate him. “you know what is exhausting to the people of California? Your communist dictatorship,” she wrote on Twitter. Greene has a history of making ill-fitting comparisons between America and things that happened during World War II, so he equated a dictatorship with what happened most places around the country: “Shutting down businesses, closing churches, schools, and beaches is disgraceful.”

But Newsom wasn’t having it. “Disgraceful? Here’s a word – murderous,” he wrote back, stepping it up a few rungs. “Your anti-vaccine lies are literally killing Americans. Your own supporters are following you off a cliff and into the ICU. Come clean about vaccines — they save lives.”

A portion of the Republican world has done a 180 on the vaccines. Once they either shrugged them as unimportant or treated them with outright hostility. Now even Fox News is begging their viewers — who now make up the vast majority of COVID-related deaths — to get one. Greene, like Tucker Carlson, has stuck to her guns. And while a governor calling out someone on Twitter doesn’t pack the visceral punch of, say, a Montana man quietly telling Carlson what he thinks about him to his face, it’s not nothing.