For months, CNSNews.com has been trying to mainstream extremist Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene by making sure nobody knows about her support for QAnon or other far-right views. But when those very views would become the subject of a controversy in the House — coming after the revelation of even more extreme views — would CNS finally tell its readers the truth?
The start of the controversy didn’t bode well. In a Jan. 28 article, Susan Jones highlighted Nancy Pelosi saying that the enemy was “in the House of Representatives”:
A reporter asked Pelosi, “What exactly did you mean that the enemy is within?”
“It means we have members of Congress who want to bring guns on the floor and have threatened violence on other members of Congress,” Pelosi said.
Earlier, Pelosi mentioned freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, by name, blasting Republican leaders for assigning her to the Education Committee, given some of Greene’s controversial and offensive social media posts.
Greene, a staunch Trump supporter, has been labeled a conspiracy theorist by the partisan media.
Nope, Jones wasn’t ready to admit that Greene’s views were extreme — or even exactly what those views were — given how quick she was to blame the “partisan media” and not, you know, common sense.
The same day, Craig Bannister complained that Bette Midler was “‘fantasizing’ about three Republican members of Congress getting lost at sea, and that she isn’t joking.” The list included Greene and Lauren Boebert — another extremist congresswoman whose extremism CNS won’t acknowledge. (CNS has a thing for repeating Midler’s thoughts, for some reason.)
It was not until House leaders threatened to remove Greene from her committees that Jones finally felt compelled to discuss Greene in detail in a Feb. 2 article, though she took a somewhat lazy way out and simply quoted Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell:
The House Rules Committee will meet on Wednesday to discuss “removing a certain member from certain standing committees of the House of Representatives.”
The member in question is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a freshman Republican from Georgia, who sits on the House Education and Budget Committees. Greene has been blasted as a “menace” by Democrats and as a “cancer” on the Republican Party by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.
In a statement released to the media on Monday, McConnell wrote:
Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country. Somebody who’s suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr.’s airplane is not living in reality. This has nothing to do with the challenges facing American families or the robust debates on substance that can strengthen our party.
Jones also added a few defiant tweets from Greene, such as a rant that “If Democrats remove me from my committees, I can assure them that the precedent they are setting will be used extensively against members on their side once we regain the majority after the 2022 elections.
The next day, however, Jones was serving up revisionist history, minimizing what she said as having been done before she was elected and engaging in more media-blaming:
Greene has come under fire for some of the comments and opinions she’s aired on social media before taking office — speech that Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell called “looney lies and conspiracy theories.”
She is a staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump, and partisan cable outlets are giving her plenty of unflattering coverage as a way to tarnish all conservative Republicans.
Jones was defending Greene again in a Feb. 4 article:
As Democrats in Congress and the media go all-out to make freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) the face of the Republican Party, today they’ll go beyond demonizing her (and her fellow Republicans) by stripping Greene of her House committee assignments.
Greene, who has espoused or endorsed a number of crackpot theories, nevertheless says 13,000 “America First Patriots” have raised $175,000 in the last 48 hours “to defend my seat in Congress.”
“The people have my back,” she tweeted on Wednesday.
Even Republicans who object to Greene’s remarks say her congressional service should be up to the voters in her district — not to Democrats:
“Tomorrow, they (Democrats) are going to take the unprecedented action of substituting the will of Washington for the will of people in this country,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) told Fox News’s Sean Hannity Wednesday night. “And when we get the majority back, we better apply the same standard.”
[…]With Thursday’s vote, House Democrats want to get Republican lawmakers on record as supporting Greene by voting not to strip her of her committee assignments. It’s always about the next political campaign, in other words.
Rep. Ted Lieu is among the Democrats – and there are many of them – who is using Greene to paint all Republicans as wacky conspiracy theorists: “Marjorie Taylor Greene has become the voice and face of the House @GOP Caucus,” Lieu tweeted on Wednesday.
Jones didn’t admit that CNS wouldn’t tell its readers the details of Greene’s “crackpot theories” until the issue was forced in the House. Curiously, CNS didn’t devote a story to Greene’s House floor speech the same day in which she claimed to express regret for the extreme views she espoused.
But on Feb. 8, Melanie Arter whitewashed Greene’s views even more, bizarrely claiming that she had merely made “years of misstatements.” She did, however, quote Republican Rep. Liz Cheney admitting that “The things that she has said don’t have any place in our public discourse, and we as a Republican conference should deal with that issue. We should have dealt with it.”
UPDATE: A Jan. 29 article by Jones didn’t mention Greene by name, but it gave Republican Rep. Steve Scalise a platform to complain that “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is playing a ‘dangerous kind of game’ by demonizing Republican lawmakers as the ‘enemy,'” going on to approvingly cite Fox News host Laura Ingraham declaring that “Democrats, by making an overwhelming show of security at the Capitol and demonizing colleagues who exercise their right to carry guns, ‘are setting the stage to make a run on the guns of law-abiding citizens…I think that is exactly right, whether it is going after ammo with obscene taxes on ammunition or other types of restrictions, I think you have just nailed it. I think that’s exactly what’s going on.'”