Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly expressed regret for her past support for conspiracy theories like QAnon and addressed other statements from recent years in a floor speech before the House voted on a measure to strip her from her committee posts.
And in doing so, the freshman Georgia House member placed blame on the press for elevating claims of collusion between Russia and former President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and for how they portrayed her past comments.
The media, Greene said, are "just guilty as QAnon" of presenting disinformation and dividing people.
Greene explained her journey into conspiracy theory flirtation and support.
"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," Greene said. “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.”
That is when, she said, she stumbled upon QAnon, a theory that she wrote about in blog posts as recently as 2018.
"I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true, and I would ask questions about them and talk about it. And that is absolutely what I regret," Greene said. "Later in 2018, when I started finding misinformation, lies, things that were not true in these QAnon posts, I stopped believing it."
The move to strip Greene from committee assignments came after more than a week of vocal outrage from members of Congress over Greene’s past comments in support of conspiracy theories, such as QAnon, and social media posts that some took as threatening violence against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Greene, wearing a face mask that read "free speech," said on the House floor: "These were words of the past, and these things do not represent me, they do not represent my district, and they do not represent my values."
Greene addressed claims that she does not believe in 9/11, having said in 2018 that "there’s never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon." Green also refuted past statements that she does not believe that school shootings, such as the one in Parkland, Florida, happened. In 2018, she responded to an assertion the shootings were "false flag planned shooting" with "exactly."
"School shootings are real," she said. "I understand how terrible it is because when I was 16 years old and in 11th grade, my school was a gun-free school zone, and one of my schoolmates brought guns to school and took our entire school hostage."
She added: "9/11 absolutely happened. I remember that day, crying all day long, watching it on the news."
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"I never once said during my entire campaign, 'QAnon,'" Greene said, adding that the controversial statements were made before she started her campaign.
The press, she suggested, had misrepresented her comments and positions.
"We've got to do better. Big media companies can take teeny, tiny pieces of words that I've said, that you have said, any of us, and can portray us into someone that we're not. And that is wrong," Greene said. "None of us are perfect."
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Democrats swiftly rejected Greene's almost-mea culpa.
"I did not hear a disavowment or an apology," said Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern, chairman of the House Rules Committee. He also noted that she did not address the Facebook interactions that appeared to encourage violence against political opponents.
"Last night House Republicans gave a standing ovation to their GOP colleague who then went on the floor today to equate journalistic media outlets with QAnon," New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.
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