Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been heavily criticized for embracing a number of conspiracy theories. She’s promoted QAnon and Pizzagate theories. She’s claimed that the California wildfires were ignited by space lasers.
And on Jan. 19, Media Matters reported that in a 2018 Facebook comment, Greene agreed with the conspiracy theory that the Parkland shooting was a planned event done to crack down on gun rights. Just after her social media remarks resurfaced, so did a video of her supposedly confronting Parkland survivor David Hogg just weeks after the shooting.
But is this really a video of Greene before she went on to become a congresswoman? And did this confrontation happen just weeks after the shooting? Here’s how we fact-checked it.
Try a keyword search
Since the video has been shared so widely, we did a keyword search within YouTube to find some other instances of it being shared. As it turns out, Greene posted the video to her own YouTube channel on Jan. 21, 2020. Still, there seems to be a lot of conflicting information out there about when this took place.
See what multiple sources are reporting
A keyword search of “Marjorie Taylor Greene confronts David Hogg” brought up this fact check from Snopes. According to the article, the woman in the video is Greene, and the person she is confronting is Hogg. However, this video was filmed during Greene’s visit to Washington, D.C., in March 2019. The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School took place on Feb. 14, 2018. So while this video is real, and this did happen while Greene was a private citizen, posts that state that this happened just weeks after the shooting are not entirely accurate.
Another keyword search brought up an article from CNN. They also reported that the video is real and, again, verified that it was filmed in March 2019. According to CNN, during the video Greene calls Hogg a “coward” and can be heard making baseless claims, including the false claim that billionaire George Soros is bankrolling Parkland students’ gun control fight.
According to CBS News, Greene has since apologized for her previous comments, but has not apologized for confronting Hogg. While there were calls for Greene to be expelled from Congress as well as calls for her to resign, ultimately, the House voted to remove the congresswoman from her committee assignments on Feb. 4 — with 11 Republicans voting to back the resolution.
Rating
Mostly Legit. While this video does show Greene confronting Hogg after the Parkland shooting, claims that the video was recorded “just after” or “weeks after” the shooting are not entirely accurate, since this happened about a year later.
