Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) has revealed how she fact-checked Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) “in real time,” after she found herself seated next to the far-right lawmaker during President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.
Moore, during an interview on MSNBC’s “The Weekend,” said she ended up in an aisle seat beside Greene because she’d arrived late and an unidentified colleague said they had “the perfect seat” for her.
“Nobody wanted to sit next to MTG,” said Moore, who clashed with Greene in 2021 after Greene accused her of spreading COVID.
Moore said she gave herself a pep talk before taking her seat for Biden’s speech.
“I just said, ‘Gwen, you don’t want to stand up for two and a half hours.’ As I pointed out to her, Joe Biden is long-winded, so I knew I was going to be there for a minute. So, ‘You don’t have to say anything to her, Gwen. Remember your ethics training. You don’t have to agree with people.’
“I thought I would just ignore her, but I couldn’t, you know?” Moore continued. “I was fact-checking her in real time, sitting next to her and responding to some of the things she said quietly and to some of her outbursts.”
“And really, she is a human being,” she added. “I was trying to draw, bring out some empathy and to see if she had any, and to recognize that instead of spending all of our time being surprised and shocked at Donald Trump having these supporters, to try to listen to them.”
Moore remembered two of her fact checks for Greene.
The first was: “When [Biden] talked about Bettie Mae Fikes, who I have met, on the march to Selma to the Edmund Pettus Bridge ― when he talked about her being there and voting rights and John Lewis, [Greene] said, ‘1965?’ She was really, truly surprised, I think. ‘Nobody is having their, being prevented from voting now, that was 1965.’ I said, ‘No, girl, they tried to take my vote from me,’ because I voted and used a drop box in the last election.”
On another occasion, Greene was “muttering about how [Biden] shuttered businesses and so forth during COVID,” said Moore. “And I said, ‘Well, girl, COVID was a real thing. My eldest son almost died from COVID and was in the hospital on a ventilator for a week.’”
Watch the video here: