Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a conspiracy theorist who once claimed there’s no evidence a plane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, made a wild comparison between the terrorist attacks of that day and the suspected Chinese spy balloon shot down earlier this month.
The balloon crossed the country and was downed when it reached the Atlantic Ocean to prevent injuries on the ground ― a line of reasoning that Greene called “pathetic, absolutely pathetic” and “a bunch of bullshit” during a local GOP event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, on Saturday.
She compared the size of the balloon, which has been given as “three school buses,” to the size of a jetliner… specifically, the one that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 11, 2001.
“Remember that? It didn’t kill anybody on the ground. Killed everyone on board. But it didn’t kill anyone on the ground,” Greene said. “So they want to tell all of us that it was too risky to take down that Chinese spy balloon over rural Idaho or Montana, or any of these other states, or Alaska? They’re liars!”
Greene cooked up a whole new set of conspiracy theories.
“You can only see it two ways,” she said, then proceeded to offer three. “Either they’re liars or they’re cowards or our president is sold out to China. You know what? I’ll go with all three.”
The clip was posted on Twitter by PatriotTakes, which monitors right-wing media:
Greene, a close ally of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and who spoke at a white nationalist event last year, has in the past embraced conspiracy theories about 9/11.
In 2018, she claimed “there’s never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon.” She tried to walk that back somewhat in 2021 by saying “9/11 absolutely happened.”
Four planes were hijacked that day. Two were deliberately flown into the World Trade Center in Manhattan and one into the Pentagon. The fourth crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers realized what was happening and fought the hijackers, preventing it from reaching its intended target, the U.S. Capitol.
About 3,000 people were killed that day.
Greene’s critics on Twitter were left baffled by her comparison: