Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) went on a strange tangent after she was called out for lying about past comments suggesting the Parkland, Florida, school shooting was a demonstration.
During an interview with CBS News’ Lesley Stahl broadcast Sunday on “60 Minutes,” Greene was asked about his stance on the 2018 massacre, which left 17 students and staff dead. Two years before he was elected to Congress, Greene responded to comments on Facebook that called the shooting a “false flag” operation.
But when asked by Stahl, Greene tried to rewrite history.
“I never said Parkland was a false flag,” Greene said. “No, I never said that. School shootings are horrible. I don’t think anyone wants to joke.”
As he spoke, “60 Minutes” showed a screengrab of Greene’s now-deleted 2018 Facebook comment.
“We fact-checked,” replied Stahl. “Before I went into this interview.”
Greene offered back word-salad, derailing the discussion.
“Have you checked all my statements from Kindergarten to 12th grade and college? And since I’ve paid my taxes and never broken any laws, and for one thing, I got a few speeding tickets, should we talk about that too? she said . “Because I think that you will go down is the same attack that those who attacked me repeatedly.”
Stahl did not challenge Greene further.
Greene, a Trump-supporting firebrand who was the first proponent of the QAnon conspiracy theory to be elected to Congress, has repeatedly endorsed conspiracy nonsense about school shootings and was filmed in 2019 harassing the Parkland victims who supported gun control.
In another 2018 Facebook comment section found by the watchdog Media Matters for America, Greene responded “this is all true” to a user who said that “none of the School shootings were real or carried out by the people who were supposed to be shooting for them.”
Greene, during a “60 Minutes” interview, try to shift the blame for his past social media activity, suggesting that “other people also open my social media” when he liked the 2019 comments suggesting that Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) should get a bullet to the head. (Greene is not a member of Congress in 2019.)
Despite this, Greene has publicly expressed his belief that the school shooting was committed. Last year, Greene suggested in the video that the July 4 shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, was organized “to persuade Republicans to go along with more gun control.”
CBS News faced significant backlash over the weekend for interviewing Greene and giving him a platform for dangerous rhetoric. After the release of the sit-down, Stahl was criticized for allowing Greene to hijack the conversation, failing to mention the legislature’s false claims, and normalizing the extremist’s unhinged behavior.
“I’ve known Lesley Stahl for over 40 years, worked with her during the election weeks. She’s been a great reporter, but this was a disrespectful and disrespectful performance. Embarrassing to the max,” tweeted Norman Ornstein, scholar emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute.
“It’s even worse than I thought,” write Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols. “Imagine if there was no MTG, the answer was ‘what, are you going back to everything I’ve said and done since kindergarten’ and Stahl just took it.”