Erin Schaff/The New York Times via AP, Pool, File
- Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene gave a speech before the House voted to strip her of committee assignments.
- She claimed she expressed support for assassinating Democrats because of the QAnon conspiracy.
- Greene also acknowledged that school shootings and the 9/11 terrorist attacks actually happened.
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Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said Thursday that she promoted and expressed support for social media posts calling for violence against Democrats because of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Speaking on the House floor ahead of a vote to strip her of her committee assignments, Greene said she “stumbled across” the conspiracy in late 2017 and “got very interested in it.”
“So I posted about it on Facebook,” she said. “I read about it, I talked about it, I asked questions about it. The problem with that, though, is that I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true, and I would ask questions about them and talk about them.”
“That is absolutely what I regret,” Greene added. “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 … and that’s what my district elected me for.”
The freshman congresswoman went on to say that “later in 2018, when I started finding misinformation, lies, things that were not true in these QAnon posts, I stopped believing it.” She continued: “I walked away from those things and I decided … I’m going to work hard and try to solve the problems that I’m upset about.”
However, Politifact reported that Greene expressed support for some aspects of the QAnon conspiracy theory - like the bogus claim that the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a body double - as late as February 2019.
CNN also reported last week that in January 2019, Greene liked a Facebook comment saying Pelosi, who had just become House speaker, should get a "bullet to the head." The following month, Greene broadcast on Facebook Live from Pelosi's office and said the California Democrat would "suffer death or she'll be in prison" for "treason."
During her floor speech on Thursday, Greene also addressed other controversies, including her belief that the September 11 terrorist attacks were a hoax and that the 2018 Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, was a false-flag operation.
"School shootings are absolutely real," she said. "I know the fear that David Hogg had that day," she added, referring to the Parkland school shooting survivor who she was videotaped publicly harassing in January 2020. Greene also mocked Hogg in a 2019 interview, calling him an "idiot" who was "trained like a dog."
Greene did not offer an apology to Hogg during her House floor speech.
In a 2018 speech to the American Priority Conference, Greene also promoted a conspiracy about the terrorist attacks.
"Barack Obama becomes president in 2008, OK?" she said. "By that time in our American history ... we had witnessed 9/11, the terrorist attack in New York and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania and the so-called plane that crashed into the Pentagon. It's odd there's never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon, but anyways, I won't - I'm not going to dive into the 9/11 conspiracy."
She walked back her remarks on Thursday, saying, "I also want to tell you 9/11 absolutely happened. And it's a tragedy for anyone to say that it did not happen. I do not believe that it is fake."
Near the end of her speech, Greene said she "never once said during my entire campaign, 'QAnon.' I never once said any of the things that I am being accused of today during my campaign."
She wrapped up by equating the mainstream news media with the QAnon conspiracy, which posits that the world is run by a global cabal of Satanic, child-eating, pedophilic Democrats.