Fact checking Marjorie Taylor Greene’s conspiracy claims at the Wake GOP gala

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a controversial Republican representative from Georgia, was the special guest speaker last week at a “Roaring 20s” gala hosted by the Wake GOP.

Among other comments captured on video obtained by The News & Observer, Greene said the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol was “meaningless,” that COVID-19 was developed in a lab with funds from Dr. Anthony Fauci and that former President Donald Trump won his reelection bid in 2020.

Here are the facts.

Jan. 6 insurrection

Claim: “In all of our regular lives, it’s meaningless, because it was one day with like a three-hour riot,” Greene said at the gala. “But in Washington, D.C., it is everything, because they are riding that train, Jan. 6, all the way as far as they can.”

What you should know: The U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, was unprecedented in American history. Not since 1814, when the British burned the complex, had a coordinated group of attackers breached the Capitol. Instead of foreign forces, though, the aggressors on Jan. 6 were mostly Americans.

Five people died during or because of the Jan. 6 attack, and 140 police officers were assaulted.

In its Pulitzer-prize winning coverage of Jan. 6 and its aftermath, The Washington Post identified the insurrection as “not a spontaneous act nor an isolated event. It was a battle in a broader war over the truth and over the future of American democracy.”

Claim: Greene described the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack as a Democratic attack on Republicans that forbade Republican involvement.

What you should know: While the nine-person committee is overwhelmingly made up of Democrats, two of its members are Republican. They are Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming who serves as the committee’s vice-chair, and Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois.

Claim: The Capitol riot “happened and that wasn’t right,” Greene said in her speech. But she suggested its culprits were not Republicans.

“A lot of us were like, ‘Hold on, our people don’t riot,’” Greene said. “We aren’t the rioters. That’s the antifa and BLM.’”

What you should know: Conspiracy theories casting Democrats and left-leaning movements as the attackers on Jan. 6 have persisted without evidence since the insurrection.

“A mountain of evidence shows that the rioters were supporters of Mr. Trump, but that has not stopped the cascade of specious claims seeking to pin responsibility on others,” a New York Times fact check said.

Of more than 900 people arrested and charged with crimes related to Jan. 6, none show connections to antifa, the Times reported.

Antifa represents a group of antifascist activists without a clear, central set of principles.

In the days following Jan. 6, some rioters objected to claims that antifa andthe Black Lives Matter movement that grew out of police brutality protests had organized the insurrection.

“Don’t you dare try to tell me that people are blaming this on antifa and BLM,” one participant wrote on his Facebook page, according to the New York Times. “We proudly take responsibility for storming the Castle.”

2020 presidential election

Claim: That Trump won the 2020 election. “I’m never shy to say President Trump is the greatest president of my lifetime,” Greene said. “And I’ll say it again: His America First policies were the best policies ever put forward for the Republican Party. And I’ll tell you this — I say it everywhere I go, whether it’s a little bitty group of people meeting, whether it’s on Jan. 6 on the House floor, whether it’s at a great big Trump rally just last weekend that I spoke at — I say every single time, Trump won the 2020 election. That’s not complicated. We all know it.”

What you should know: No evidence exists to support the oft-repeated claim that Donald Trump won his reelection bid for president in 2020.

Greene and other Trump loyalists maintain that widespread voter fraud and election-machine tampering skewed results in then-candidate Joe Biden’s favor. Both claims are contrived.

As The Associated Press pointed out in a fact check, “Biden earned 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, the same margin that Trump had when he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, which he repeatedly described as a ‘landslide.’”

Even Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, could uncover no evidence of voter fraud that would have changed the 2020 election result.

COVID-19 origins

Claim: COVID-19 was artificially developed in a lab, Greene said, and Dr. Anthony Fauci funded it.

She called it “fact” that “COVID-19 got created” in Wuhan, China, where the disease first spread.

“All of us understand what COVID came from,” Greene said. “We are not too stupid to think that some bat bit some pangolin, or whatever that’s called, that bit a cat and then it spread to somebody else and somebody magically got something called COVID.”

She added another unfounded theory: “We fully understand that Dr. Fauci funded the gain-of-function research and that gain-of-function research was used in a lab in Wuhan, China, and that’s where the virus COVID-19 got created.”

What you should know: Neither claim carries weight.

Exhaustive investigations into COVID-19’s origins have not uncovered a connection to coronavirus lab testing. Greene’s claim about Fauci includes a kernel of truth, but it’s misleading.

Since 1984, Fauci has been director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the U.S. health department.

The NIH granted $3.4 million to a nonprofit organization called EcoHealth Alliance Inc. to fund research into understanding bat coronavirus emergence, Reuters reported.

“The non-profit then awarded that money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, alongside East China Normal University (Shanghai), the Institute of Pathogen Biology (Beijing), and Duke-NUS Medical School (Singapore),” Reuters reported.

Again, no evidence has been uncovered suggesting COVID-19 came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or other Chinese facilities. And granting funds to such research centers is common practice for the NIH.

Most virologists and infectious disease experts suspect the COVID-19 virus evolved naturally.

Gender and children

Claim: A multi-million dollar medical industry is promoting child abuse and gratuitous gender reassignment surgeries.

Many of Greene’s assertions surrounded unfounded theories of “child abuse.” She described the medical industry as promoting gender-changing procedures among children.

“I mean, we talk about foreign countries like China that have child labor,” Greene said. “I’m sorry, this is worse than child labor. This is child abuse.”

What you should know: While some exceptions exist, medical guidelines generally do not recommend genital gender-affirming surgeries for people younger than 18, The Washington Post reported.

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