After weeks of intense criticism regarding her embrace of conspiracy theories about 9/11, school shootings, Jewish laser beams, and Democrats being members of a Satan-worshipping cabal of pedophiles who eat children, Marjorie Taylor Greene took to the floor of the House of Representatives on Thursday to set the record straight. One, she knows she messed up by amplifying these unhinged, ludicrous, and, in many cases, dangerous claims. And two, she basically still believes all of them. Particularly the batshit craziest ones!
In a speech disguised as a mea culpa, Greene explained that she had been “upset about things”—namely, the Russia collusion investigation—and believed the media wasn‘t telling her the truth. So she “started looking at things on the internet, asking questions like most people do every day, us[ing] Google.” And from there, she “stumbled across something…called QAnon.” That piqued her interest, so she “posted about it on Facebook, I read about it, I talked about it, I asked questions about it, and then more information came from it.” The problem, though, is that she was “allowed to believe things that weren’t true”—note, how she suggests her decision to buy into delusional, crackpot conspiracy theories wasn‘t her own fault but someone else’s—and helped spread those untruths via her own social media musings. And she feels really bad about that! Not because she got God knows how many other people to believe Democrats and other elites, again, are members of a Satan-worshipping cabal of pedophiles who eat children, but because by doing it on Facebook, she made it much easier to get caught. “That is absolutely what I regret,” Green said, “because if it weren’t for the Facebook post 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 is proud of, my husband is proud of, my children are proud of, and that’s what my district elected me for.”
But here’s the thing: Greene still clearly believes some of the entirely baseless QAnon claims, and we know this because she effectively admitted it in the midst of her speech. Claiming in the same breath that when she “started finding misinformation, lies, things that were not true in these QAnon posts” she “stopped believing it,” Greene also added that “any source of information that is a mix of truth and a mix of lies is dangerous, no matter what it is saying, what party it is helping, anything or any country it is about, it’s dangerous.” Which might be a helpful PSA except for the fact that literally none of what QAnon claims has any truth to it.
Elsewhere in her speech, Greene said she hadn’t promoted QAnon since being elected, despite the fact that she praised an article about it on December 4, calling it an “accurate” and “objective flow of information” that’s “uniting Christians”; described calls for her to face disciplinary action for her behavior being “crucified in the public square”; and claimed “the media” is “just as guilty as QAnon, of presenting truth and lies [that] divide us.”
Speaking of divisions, Greene did not address her previous comments about how Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to serve in government, her love for Confederate statues, her endorsement of a conspiracy theory that Israel killed JFK, her belief that “the Rothschilds” (read: Jews) started the California wildfires, or her calls for Nancy Pelosi to be executed. Or this:
Shortly after Greene’s speech, Democrats voted to deny her a seat on the House’s Budget and Education and Labor committees, a move that came roughly 24 hours after Republicans decided to officially give her a pass on it all.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has big plans for this newfound time on her hands