Ten seconds into her speech on the House floor Thursday night, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was already spewing QAnon talking points.
“I haven’t gotten to know any of my Democrat colleagues and I haven’t had to have any conversations with any of you to tell you who I am and what I’m about. You only know me by how Media Matters, CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the mainstream media is portraying me. “
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The rejection of mainstream media has been one of the core pillars of QAnon from the beginning.
By the end of the speech, she wasn’t even trying to hide it anymore.
“We allow the media that is just as guilty as QAnon of presenting truth and lies to divide us,” Greene said.
The freshman Georgia lawmaker was defending her embrace of multiple baseless conspiracy theories on Wednesday night, but moments after she sat down, the House voted to strip her of her committee assignments, with 11 Republicans voting against her.
Just like the “Q drops” that have become like scripture to QAnon adherents, Greene’s speech made very little sense, unless you knew how to decode it.
But thanks to our long history of tracking Q drops and how they’re interpreted, VICE News has been able to translate what Greene said on the House floor last night about why she promoted QAnon. Here’s what she said, more or less:
She was bored in 2017 after Trump won the election and didn’t like some things she saw on TV, and didn’t think the government was doing what she thought it should be doing, so she found random posts on a fringe website normally home to white supremacists and anti-Semites and decided, as a 43-year-old mother of three who previously ran a multimillion-dollar construction company, to totally believe that then-President Donald Trump was a God-savior figure who was about to expose a cannibalistic, satanic, pedophilic sex-trafficking ring run by the Democrats and Hollywood elites.
But she couldn’t even own that. Apparently, it was someone else’s fault for “allowing” her to believe it:
“I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true and I would ask questions about them and talk about them,” Greene told her congressional colleagues without a hint of irony.
Eventually, someone must have given her permission to stop believing in QAnon, because:
“Later in 2018, when I started finding misinformation, lies, things that were not true in these QAnon posts, I stopped believing it,” adding that since beginning her campaign and entering Congress, she had never mentioned or boosted QAnon.
But, of course, this isn’t true either.
In December 2018, Greene appeared at an American Priority conference where she spewed QAnon conspiracy theories. And just two months ago, in December 2020, she described an article that said QAnon was the “objective flow of information… uniting Christians” as “accurate.”
Greene has had multiple opportunities to disavow QAnon, but both before and after being elected, she has failed to do so, preferring to fall back on stereotypes that she’s just a regular citizen like everyone else.
At the beginning of her speech, Greene pleaded with her constituents: “What you need to know about me is I’m a very regular American, just like the people I represent in my district.”
But of course, that’s not true.
Greene represents one of the poorest districts in the U.S., with a median household income of just over $56,000.
On the other hand, she’s a very wealthy woman who donated $450,000 of her own money to her election campaign.
She inherited part of Taylor Commercial, a construction business that operates in 11 states, from her father, and in 2002 bought him out completely. After being baptized as an evangelical Christian in 2011, Greene stepped down from her role as chief financial officer. At the time, the company was turning over $24 million in revenue per year. Her husband, Perry, still runs the company.
But of course, such lies and deception are perfectly normal in QAnon world, and QAnon believers were able to twist Greene’s comments and see them not as a rejection of the movement — which they certainly were not — but as another sign that everything is going according to plan.
Supporters on the QAnon forum GreatAwakening.win quickly seized on the fact that Greene had denounced QAnon but not Q. They pointed to a previous drop from the cult anonymous leader in which he said “there is no QAnon,” there is only Q and “anons.”
The theory goes that QAnon is a construct of the mainstream media to denigrate the cult, and so by only referring to QAnon, Greene was in fact simply rejecting the media’s framing of the movement.
“Right. At this point, ‘Qanon’ is a weapon being used against her. She’s awake, let her fight the battle in the arena she’s in,” reads one under the post. “Q isn’t Jesus, she can deny him as many times as she wants before the cock crows and it changes nothing.”
This theory was also picked up by some of the major influencers in QAnon world, including Jordan Sather, who told his followers there is no “QAnon,” before praising Greene, whom he sees as the perfect person to replace Donald Trump as QAnon’s flag bearer on Twitter.
“With Trump gone, she has filled that role of calling out all the government idiots in the swamp,” Sather said, adding: “Let’s hope Marjorie remains strong.”
Based on the comments posted on Gab and Telegram in the wake of Greene’s speech, her favorable position among QAnon supporters remains undiminished. With Trump gone, Greene is now the highest-profile public QAnon figure, and could easily and quickly help reduce the threat the movement poses by categorically denouncing it as dangerous and entirely false.
But she has repeatedly failed to do that, and based on Thursday night’s speech, she has no plans to do so in the future.
