"What I'm concerned about is the Republican leadership
in the House of Representatives, who is willing to overlook, ignore those
statements," Pelosi said at her weekly news conference, days after CNN
reported Greene repeatedly indicated support for executing prominent Democratic
politicians -- including Pelosi -- in 2018 and 2019 before being elected to
Congress. The statements were part a CNN KFile review of hundreds of posts and
comments from Greene's Facebook page.
Greene is also facing criticism for a video of her
confronting Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg before she was elected to
Congress went viral Wednesday. And last week, other students who survived the
Parkland, Florida, school shooting and families of the victims are calling for
Greene's resignation, after comments surfaced that showed her agreeing with
people who said the 2018 shooting was a "false flag" operation,
remarks Pelosi called special attention to Thursday. The California Democrat
also criticized Greene's placement on the House Committee on Education and
Labor.
"Assigning her to the Education Committee when she has
mocked the killing of little children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, when she
has mocked the killing of teenagers in high school at the Marjory Stoneman
Douglas high school -- what could they be thinking?" Pelosi asked
Thursday. "Or is thinking too generous a word for what they might be
doing? It's absolutely appalling, and I think the focus has to be on the
Republican leadership of this House of Representatives for the disregard they
have for the death of those children."
Parkland survivors call for GOP extremist
Marjorie Taylor Greene's censure
Congresswoman known for supporting QAnon was filmed
following David Hogg, 18, and claiming mass shooting was a ‘false flag’
Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia claimed survivors of
the Parkland school shooting were ‘crisis actors’.
Lois
Beckett
@loisbeckett
Thu 28 Jan
2021 18.32 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/28/marjorie-taylor-greene-parkland-david-hogg
Survivors
of the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, are asking congressional
Republicans to publicly censure Marjorie Taylor Greene for suggesting the school
shooting was a “false flag” and for harassing a teenage survivor on Capitol
Hill in 2019.
Greene, the
newly elected Georgia congresswoman who is known for her support of the
pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory, was filmed in March 2019 as she followed 18-year-old
David Hogg, one of the students who survived the shooting at Marjorie Stoneman
Douglas high school, outside Capitol Hill.
In the clip
from 25 March, Greene can be heard calling Hogg a “coward”, demanding that he
explain how the students were able to set up meetings with so many lawmakers,
and telling him that she herself was a gun owner. Greene tells Hogg that gun
control will not work, and that his classmates would not have been killed if
one of the law enforcement officers assigned to guard the school had “done his
job”.
She later
addresses her viewers, echoing false yet frequently spread conspiracy claims
that mass shooting survivors and family members of victims are “crisis actors”
and the attacks that killed their loved ones were staged as a plot to pass gun
control laws.
.@GOPLeader
you need to something about @mtgreenee she basically has threatened to kill and
intimidated the survivors of Gun violence trying to trigger our PTSD.
pic.twitter.com/G8KaNSEBcT
— David
Hogg (He / Him) (@davidhogg111) January 27, 2021
“She hasn’t
disowned any of it,” Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was
among the 17 students and staff killed in the shooting, told the Guardian on
Wednesday. “She hasn’t said, ‘I was wrong.’ She hasn’t said, ‘I’m sorry to the
families I’ve hurt.’ She hasn’t said, ‘I accept the truth around Parkland,
Sandy Hook, and 9/11.’ She has let the lie live. That makes her incapable of
serving as a representative in Congress.”
Guttenberg
said he had told Greene publicly via Twitter that he would be “more than happy
to share proof with her” that his daughter’s murder was real, but that he
received no response.
Guttenberg
called on the top Republican in the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy,
to take a public stand against Greene. “McCarthy loses any ability to talk
about integrity, about unity, about service to the country if he refuses to
deal with this,” Guttenberg said.
Hogg
himself wrote to McCarthy on Twitter, arguing Greene “basically has threatened
to kill” gun violence survivors, “trying to trigger our PTSD”.
“In that
video you see a group of people most of whom are 18 or 19 acting calm cool and
collected – what you don’t see are the sleepless nights, the flashbacks, the
hyper vigilance and deep pitch black numbness so many of us feel living in a
society were we are told our friends dying doesn’t matter, “ Hogg wrote.
“Take her
Committee assignments away,” he pleaded. Greene’s committee assignments have
not yet been announced, but the congresswoman has said she will sit on the
education panel.
The House
speaker, Nancy Pelosi protested on Thursday.
“Assigning
her to the education committee when she has mocked the killing of little
children at Sandy Hook, when she mocked the killing of teenagers at Marjory
Stoneman Douglas - what could they be thinking?” she said, referring to the
2012 elementary school shooting in Connecticut and the school at Parkland.
The
committee chair, Democrat Bobby Scott, said in a strongly-worded statement that
House Republicans must explain why they appointed Greene to the committee,
after her documented history of promoting conspiracy theories.
On
Wednesday, the California representative Jimmy Gomez said he would be
introducing a resolution to expel Greene from Congress.
Greene in
recent days has faced renewed scrutiny of her past social media comments, with
CNN reporting that past posts indicated support for executing Nancy Pelosi,
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Responding
to those revelations, McCarthy has said that he “planned to have a
conversation” with Greene.
Greene’s
office did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
On the day
of the incident, Hogg was on Capitol Hill along with other student activists to
mark the anniversary of the 2018 March for Our Lives, delivering letters from
constituents pushing senators to pass a law mandating criminal background
checks on every gun sale. Greene was a rightwing commentator at the time.
“I’m a gun
owner, I’m an American citizen and I have nothing. But this guy with his George
Soros funding and his major liberal funding has got everything. I want you to
think about that,” Greene told her viewers.
In reality,
said Eve Levenson, one of the college students who helped organize the advocacy
event, the advocacy event and the meetings with senators had been organized by
college kids, including herself, from the floor of her dorm room.
Another
student activist who was present that day said Greene’s behavior had been
“scary” and had left her shaken. Linnea Stanton, a college student and March
for Our Lives activist from Wisconsin, recalled that Greene had first
confronted the students as they delivered letters to lawmakers inside a Senate
office building.
“All of a
sudden, this blonde woman was yelling, and someone was recording us with an
iPhone,” Stanton said.
After the
students started chanting to get the Capitol police to intervene, Greene left,
but she waited for the group outside the building, where she continued to
harass and film them once they exited, Stanton said.
Stanton
said she had only learned on Wednesday that the woman who had harassed her
group in 2019 was now an elected member of Congress. “It’s just kind of
horrifying,” she said. “It’s bizarre to me that someone who can act like that
towards another human being, much less towards a teenager who survived a mass
shooting, is allowed to hold power.
“I would
love to see some accountability, or her acknowledging what she did, but it
feels like wishful thinking,” Stanton added. “The last four years have showed
time and again there will be no consequences.”
Additional
reporting by Amanda Holpuch in New York.
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