Marjorie Taylor Greene Says Media Is ‘Just as Guilty’ as QAnon

School shootings are “absolutely real,” 9/11 “absolutely happened,” and there is “misinformation” in QAnon posts, said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on the House floor Thursday. But her carefully worded mea culpa was destroyed when she added that “media is just as guilty as QAnon of presenting truth and lies to divide us.” 

The first-term congresswoman from Georgia delivered a “sorry, not sorry” speech that appeared to walk back several of her previous conspiracy claims, as her colleagues weighed whether to strip her of her committee assignments as punishment for her extensive track record peddling disturbing and racist lies online. 

Greene insisted that her affinity with the pro-Trump conspiracy theory QAnon was a thing of the past. She said she got into it around 2017, when she was frustrated with mainstream news network coverage of former President Donald Trump. 

“I realized just watching CNN and Fox News, I may not find the truth,” she said. “So I started looking up things on the internet. Asking questions, like most people do every day. Used Google. Then I stumbled across something—and this was at the end of 2017—called QAnon.” 

Greene said she stopped believing in QAnon sometime in 2018, when she started finding “misinformation, lies, things that were not true, in these QAnon posts.” However, despite her claims, she continued to share and promote prominent QAnon accounts in December 2018. When asked to condemn QAnon during her campaign, she repeatedly hedged. And even as recently as December 2020, Greene shared a pro-QAnon blog post, written by a QAnon believer, that claimed the conspiracy theory was about “millions of people waking up to the lies.” Greene described it as the ”first accurate article about people following Q.” Finally, her statement about “misinformation” in QAnon closely echoes language used in an oft-repeated “Q-Drop” (a riddle-like statement posted by the eponymous leader of the movement), which talks about the necessity of disinformation to advance its own goals and confuse opponents. 

The congresswoman also appeared to walk back several other conspiracy claims she’d made over the years. 

She said on the House floor Thursday that “9/11 absolutely happened.” In a 40-minute video posted to YouTube in 2018, she had raised questions about whether a plane really flew into the Twin Towers in 2001. She also did an interview with far-right commentator Dinesh D’Souza earlier this week, in which he made her verbally acknowledge that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11. After that acknowledgement, she added that there was “nothing wrong with asking questions.”  

She is also now saying that “school shootings are absolutely real,” but last week a video surfaced of her berating Parkland shooting survivor and gun control activist David Hogg on the streets of Washington, D.C., in 2018, the year she said she started becoming interested in politics. That was the same year she “liked” a Facebook post that called Parkland a “false flag” event, which is a conspiracy theory promoted by the likes of Infowars and Alex Jones. She walked back that claim recently after meeting with a mother who lost her son in the attack. Another video surfaced earlier this week of her mocking Hogg while meeting with a Georgia gun rights group in 2019, calling him an “idiot.” 

“Every child that is lost, those families mourn it,” said Greene on Thursday.  

Although a growing number of her colleagues have denounced the Georgia congresswoman, Greene has been raking in serious cash, in part through her high-profile and stalwart support of Trump. She said she raised well over $300,000 in small donations through a torrent of fundraising emails. But even though “cancel culture” is lining her pockets, Greene still found time to rail against it—as well as pornography and trans rights, in the same breath. 

“When I say that I absolutely believe with all my heart that God's creation created male and female, when I am censured for saying those types of things, that is wrong.”

Rules Committee Chair Jim McGovern took to the floor after Greene. 

"To equate the media to QAnon,” said McGovern, “is beyond the pale."