Stephen Colbert made it clear Thursday night that he didn’t really want to spend most of his Late Show monologue talking about QAnon Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. But he didn’t really feel like he had a choice.
After touching on the absurdly petty letter that Donald Trump sent to the Screen Actors Guild earlier in the day, the host said, “Speaking of acting, I can’t wait to talk about Georgia representative and woman waving ‘Heil, neighbor,’ Marjorie Taylor Greene.”
Colbert spent the next several minutes tearing apart the speech that Greene gave to her colleagues before the House voted to strip her of her committee assignments. In response to her sudden denunciation of “dangerous” misinformation, he said, “You’re right, it’s dangerous to mix a truth, like you saying, ‘I used to believe in QAnon’ and you lying, like, ‘Now I don’t anymore.’”
Nor was the host impressed with Greene’s assertion that “9/11 happened,” adding, “I believe we as a nation promised to always remember that it happened. What’s your bumper sticker say, ‘9/11. Oops, I forgot?’”
“This is the modern GOP. They want credit for recognizing reality,” Colbert said, joking that with those standards President Ronald Reagan would have been praised for declaring, “Mr. Gorbachev, this is a wall!”
But more than anything, the host was disgusted by Greene’s excuse that her racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic conspiracy nonsense, much of which she posted online within the past two years, were merely “words of the past.”
“All words are words of the past!” Colbert exclaimed. “These words I’m saying right now? They’re in the past, he said, seconds ago! And what do you mean, since you’ve been elected for Congress? That’s less than three months ago!”
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