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, as well as calling for Greene’s resignation.
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.
“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 where we are told our friends dying doesn’t matter, “ Hogg wrote.
“Take her Committee assignments away,” Hogg 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.
Hillary Clinton said she should be “on a a watch list”, not in Congress.
March for Our Lives, the youth gun violence prevention advocacy group founded by students from Parkland, is collecting signatures on a petition calling for Greene to resign, with the message: “Conspiracy theorists have no place in 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 on 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
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
