On Thursday, the House gathered to vote on a measure to remove Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) from her committee seats in the wake of revelations of her previous repeated expressions of apparent support for executing prominent Democrats. Among other issues, she also repeatedly expressed apparent agreement with Facebook commenters who characterized school shootings as faked, and she also previously expressed apparent support for the QAnon conspiracy theory, which insists that top Democrats are secretly cannibals and Satan-worshipers. Before the House voted on removing her from committees, Greene took the floor and went on a sprawling rant in which she distanced herself from QAnon and tried to draw a totally false equivalency between right-wing extremism and left-wing viewpoints.
Greene complained that observers “only know” her “by how Media Matters, CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the mainstream media is portraying” her — but these media outlets have presented screenshots and videos of her own comments!
Subsequently, Greene added as follows:
‘When we elected President Trump, and then I started seeing things in the news that didn’t make sense to me, like Russian collusion — which are conspiracy theories also, and have been proven so — these things bothered me deeply, and I realized, just watching CNN or Fox News, I may not find the truth. And so what I did is I started looking up things on the internet, asking questions, like most people do every day… and I stumbled across something… called QAnon… I got very interested in it. So I posted about it on Facebook. I wrote about it. I talked about it. I asked questions about it.’
Bizarrely, although she distanced herself from QAnon, she tried to deflect responsibility for her belief in the ridiculous conspiracy theory. Should someone who faltered on basic critical thinking to the point that they ever believed in any of QAnon at all really serve in Congress?
Greene self-confidently added as follows:
‘I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true, and I would ask questions about them and talk about them, and that is absolutely what I regret, because if it weren’t for the Facebook posts and comments that I liked in 2018, I wouldn’t be standing here today, and you couldn’t point a finger and accuse me of anything wrong, because I’ve lived a very good life that I’m proud of, my family’s proud of, my husband’s proud of.’
Greene subsequently said that she stopped believing in the QAnon conspiracy theory after she began discovering obvious lies in the posts associated with the movement. She added as follows:
‘School shootings are absolutely real… I believe that children at school should never be left unprotected. I believe they should be just as protected as we were, with 30,000 National Guardsmen… I also wanna tell you: 9/11 absolutely happened.’
Her acknowledgement of the reality of school shootings isn’t exactly a profile in courage. The fact that she was ever in a place where such an acknowledgement was even called for is ridiculous.
“I never said” these things after becoming a member of Congress. “These are words of the past,” Greene said. “None of us are perfect.”
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) February 4, 2021
Subsequently, Greene characterized her past remarks as “words of the past,” insisting that the comments do “not represent” her in the present. Strangely, she then launched into a laundry list of her personal political views, talking about “America First,” abortion, and more. She claimed that “members” of Congress have condoned violent rioting, which is a ridiculous and tired trope — top Democrats expressed unequivocal public condemnation for violence in all its forms over and over again. Greene didn’t even get through a retraction of her QAnon support without deceptively complaining about Democrats!
The unstated thing about Marjorie Taylor Greene is she is a byproduct of the InfoWars-style far-right centipede content mill, where saying the most outrageous, vicious thing could boost you to Facebook superstardom. She was simply performing for that audience. Then it got real.
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) January 28, 2021
Check out Greene’s comments below:
