GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene: Mainstream Media Is ‘Addicting Our Nation to Hate’

Freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) called out the mainstream media for “addicting our nation to hate” in a press conference on Friday, one day after the U.S. House voted to remove her from her committee assignments.

Greene has recently come under fire for controversial past remarks she made on social media, which included the discussion of Q-anon conspiracy theories and a photo she shared holding an AR-15 next to a collage photo of Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), most of which she attempted to provide context for in a speech on the House floor yesterday as she apologized for her past statements.

Green said as she welcomed members of the media outside of the U.S. Capitol:

I truly support freedom of press. I think it’s one of the things that makes our country so great. I really hope that you’ll be able to tell my story a little bit better instead of just reporting and repeating some things that maybe you don’t like about me or things that were on social media in 2018.

Greene insisted that the reason she ran for Congress because she does not “respect what our government has become.” She went on:

Our government is failing us. We’re approaching nearly 30 trillion dollars in debt. As a successful business owner for over 20 years, if I ran my company the way this government runs and spends and wastes and puts us in debt with our own hard-earned tax dollars, I’d been out of business a long time ago.

Greene insisted that U.S. government has “sold out our American worker” and “sent our jobs overseas to foreign countries.”

Greene also noted the deaths of American citizens committed by illegal aliens in America, referring to those murders as “things that shouldn’t happen” and placing great blame on “policies that are allowed and continued.” She said:

Free speech matters and yesterday when the Democrats and 11 of my Republican colleagues decided to strip me of my committee assignments … you know what they did? They actually stripped my district of their voice. They stripped my voters of having representation to work for them.

Greene went on to recount her experience with a school shooter, saying “I know that fear that David Hogg felt. It’s terrifying. It’s terrifying when the only person in the building with a gun is very upset and there to do evil and there’s no good guy with a gun to protect us.”

“We need our Second Amendment rights,” Greene said. “We need to be able to protect our children with good guys with guns, just like the people up here protected themselves with 30,000 National Guard troops.”

“These are the policies that disgust me,” Greene added. “These are the policies that disgust the American people.”

In the conference, Greene also claimed the Republican Party is the party of Donald Trump, saying, “The Party is his. It doesn’t belong to anyone else.” Greene also cited the Senate impeachment of Donald Trump as a “circus,” adding that he, nor any member of Congress, is to blame for the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

The newly-elected Georgia Congresswoman also called out “fake outrage” from Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO).

Greene then targeted the members of the media, referring to their motives, on both sides of the aisle, as “terrible and shameful”:

You know what the media does, and you guys are good at it? … You’re doing a really good job at addicting our nation to hate, teaching people to hate people like me, President Trump, and on the right it’s the same way. Teaching people to hate AOC, Ilhan Omar, Nancy Pelosi, see it goes both ways, doesn’t it? But teaching people to hate and then addicting them to it is killing our country. It’s causing people to no longer be friends, families to no longer talk to each other, even husbands and wives getting a divorce, parents not talking to their children and the other way around. I think that’s terrible and it’s shameful.

Greene said she has been “freed” after being removed from her committee assignments:

Going forward, I’ve been freed. I do, I feel freed, because you know what’s happening on these committees, you see, is basically we have a tyrannically controlled government right now. The Democrats. We’ve got Joe Biden signing executive order after executive order. … Doing whatever he wants in the White House. … They don’t care what Republicans have to say.

“If I was on a committee, I’d be wasting my time because my views wouldn’t be heard and neither would my district’s,” she added, insisting that “Americans won’t forget” the many violent protests that have occurred over the last four years.

‘Things have got to change and I’ll tell you again I am fine with being kicked off of the committees because it would be a waste of time,” she said, telling those in attendance that she plans to spend her time now meeting and growing connections with those who want to “put America first and don’t care about party lines.”

After the conclusion of her speech, Greene took questions from reporters, one of which was from CNN, who questioned Greene on a 2019 social media post.

“Did you watch my speech yesterday,” Greene quipped. “How many stories did you report on Russian conspiracy lies? No, I wanna know have you apologized for Russian collusion conspiracy lies?”

The reporter continued questioning Greene before the she was cut off. “I think you owe the people an apology,” Greene said. “You lied about President Trump. You owe the people an apology.”

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) applauded Greene for her press conference on Friday, saying as a result of the Democrats’ ousting Greene from her committees, they had made her “possibly one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress.”

House Democrats voted on Thursday to strip Greene of her committee assignments, a drastic and historic escalation that turned criticisms of Greene partisan, as a majority party has never before stripped a minority member of committee assignments. The move came after a tumultuous week for House Republicans, where GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy offered to Democrats to remove Greene from one committee assignment but not all. House Democrats rejected that offer.

McCarthy has sought to unify the House GOP conference as the party steers its way through this crisis and a different one surrounding conference chairwoman Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) over her decision to vote to impeach now former President Donald Trump. The infighting culminated in a lengthy and emotional House GOP conference meeting on Wednesday where members from the conference addressed their concerns on both crises, and Republicans say they emerged united and focused on the threat of the Democrats’ agenda and retaking the majority in the upcoming 2022 midterm elections.