Stephen Colbert has been dedicating a lot of his Late Show monologue time recently to the ongoing “GOP civil war.” On one side, you have establishment figures like Mitch McConnell, who are awful in a more traditional sense. On the other side are people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Trump devotees who are attempting to drag the party not even necessarily farther right, just farther down. It’s “like the first civil war, but this time both sides use the Confederate flag,” Colbert said Wednesday.
During his show Thursday, Colbert slammed House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy for trying to play both sides of that civil war. McCarthy is trying to distance his party from QAnon—even pretending like he didn’t know what it is or how to pronounce it—but he also refused to take action against the biggest QAnon believer in Congress, forcing Democrats to initiate a vote to remove Greene from her committee positions. (In the end, 11 Republicans joined them in that decision.)
McCarthy decided to support Greene instead of censuring her because, as he put it, “If they come after her, they’ll come after someone else next.” Which … yes! If someone else also pushed dangerous conspiracy theories, harassed teenage survivors of school shootings, made constant antisemitic and Islamaphobic comments, and called for violence against their Democratic colleagues, then I hope “they” would come after that person.
Greene took to the House floor to defend herself ahead of the vote to remove her from committees, and Colbert rightly tore her speech to shreds. In her speech, Greene “came very close to denouncing QAnon.” She spoke of the dangers of information that mixes truth and lies but doesn’t expand on which parts of the conspiracy theories she got from Facebook were truth.
Greene seemed to want a pat on the back for doing the bare minimum like not pushing conspiracy theories or calling for violence since being elected a whole three months ago. She called those words–most of which she posted to Facebook in the last two years–”words of the past.”
As Colbert notes, “All words are words of the past! These words I’m saying right now? They’re in the past, he said, seconds ago!”
Greene also took the brave stance of acknowledging school shootings are real and that “9/11 absolutely happened.”
“I believe we as a nation promised to always remember that it happened. What’s your bumper sticker say, ‘9/11. Oops, I forgot?’” Colbert said. “This is the modern GOP. They want credit for recognizing reality.”
Colbert wasn’t the only late-night host to tackle Greene and her terrible speech. Trevor Noah congratulated the congresswoman for having “come around to the standard Republican belief that school shootings are real … and that nothing should be done to stop them.”
After watching Greene blame the mainstream news for pushing her to seek information on Facebook and blaming Facebook for “allowing” her to believe dangerous lies, Noah sums up why “her defense isn’t really reassuring.”
“Basically, what she’s saying is ‘Yes, up until now, I believed that school shootings were fake, 9/11 didn’t happen, and that Jewish space lasers blew up California,'” Noah says, imitating Greene. “‘But that’s only because I’m incapable of separating fantasy from reality. So let’s do the right thing and let me go back to making laws.'”
Noah also noted that kicking Greene off of her committees “could backfire” because “the last thing you want to do with a crazy person is give them time to be crazy.” Which Greene herself actually kind of echoed on Twitter Friday.
I woke up early this morning literally laughing thinking about what a bunch of morons the Democrats (+11) are for giving some one like me free time.
In this Democrat tyrannical government, Conservative Republicans have no say on committees anyway.
Oh this is going to be fun!
— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) February 5, 2021
Greene also held a press conference Friday during which she said (when asked) that she is “sorry for saying all those things that are wrong and offensive” but specifically said she was not sorry for harassing Parkland survivor David Hogg. She also refused to apologize for encouraging violence against Nancy Pelosi. When asked about like a Facebook comment saying Pelosi should get a “bullet to the head,” Greene replied that when reporters “want to keep telling the same story over and over but don’t want to tell the truth, that’s your problem,” adding “And that’s how we end press conferences, OK” and walked away.
— Charlotte Clymer 🏳️🌈 (@cmclymer) February 5, 2021
(image: YouTube)
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