Marjorie Taylor Greene, Who Also Pushed Mass Shooting Conspiracy Theories, Defends Alex Jones After Sandy Hook Verdict
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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) defended far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on Wednesday after a jury ordered him to pay nearly a $1 billion in compensatory damages to the families of victims of the Sandy Hook massacre.
Jones told his followers that the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, in which 19 children and 6 adults were murdered in an elementary school, was a hoax and that families and victims were crisis actors, which lead to harassment and threats directed at the grieving families.
“No matter what you think of Alex Jones all he did was speak words,” wrote Greene on Twitter, adding:
He was not the one who pulled the trigger.
Were his words wrong and did he apologize? Yes.
That’s what freedom of speech is. Freedom to speak words.
Political persecution must end.
Jones was not on trial for the words he spoke, but the campaign of harassment and fear that followed. Parents testified in court that their children’s graves were desecrated and they received threatening letters from Jones’s followers saying they would dig up the bodies of the murdered children.
Greene has previously claimed mass shootings were “false flag” attacks perpetrated to scare Americans into gun reform.
“I’ve got a question for you. How do you get avid gun owners, and people who support the Second Amendment, to give up their guns and go along with anti-gun legislation? How do you do that?” Greene said in a video she released on social media before becoming a member of Congress.
“Maybe you accomplish that by performing a mass shooting into a crowd that is very likely to be conservative, very likely to vote Republican, very likely to be Trump supporters, very likely to be pro-Second Amendment and very likely to own guns,” she continued in the clip.
“You make them scared, you make them victims, and you change their mindset. And then, possibly, you can pass anti-gun legislation,” Greene concluded referencing the mass shooting during a country music festival in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, 2017 which killed 60 people. Greene identified herself at the time “as being with an organization called American Truth Seekers,” reported the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
