Fox News Mocks Marjorie Taylor Greene

Marjorie Taylor Greene was mocked by Fox News host Laura Ingraham after speaking in opposition to a House bill that would force TikTok's Chinese parent company to sell its controlling stake or face the popular social media app being banned in the United States.

The Context

The House voted on Wednesday to back legislation calling for TikTok to be sold by its parent company, ByteDance, or risk a ban by 352-65, with 197 Republicans backing the legislation, despite it being opposed by the party's presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump. To become law, the bill must also be approved by the Senate and President Joe Biden.

Critics argue that ByteDance's ownership of TikTok could allow the Chinese state to access American users private data, though the company insists this information is secure and "stored on American soil by an American company, overseen by American personnel."

What We Know

On her Fox News show, Ingraham mockingly said the arguments against the TikTok legislation in the House got "creative," following this with a clip of Greene saying: "If we wanted to be serious about stopping China we would stop China from buying our U.S. farmland. We would raise up our energy independence.

"And if we cared about American's data then we would stop the sale of American's data universally, not just with China."

Ingraham then responded: "Ok farmland? I'm losing that caboose of thought there God bless her.

"Why is it so hard for some to grasp that China is a unique threat to the United States?"

A clip of Ingraham's comments was shared on X, formerly Twitter, by the Acyn account, where it received over 67,000 views.

Newsweek contacted Greene's congressional office for comment by email at 3:45 a.m. ET on Thursday.

Views

Representative Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, also spoke out against the legislation in the House. She said: "I've been against this from the very beginning before anyone else weighed in. It's the libertarian in me.

"It's not the role of government to ban apps from the App Store. Nowhere in our Constitution does it say that."

TikTok strongly opposed the bill, which it claims would amount to a de facto U.S. ban on its app, and sent users a notification urging them to "call your representative now" and urge them to oppose the measure.

Speaking to the BBC, the office of Florida Representative Neal Dunn, a Republican and co-sponsor of the bill, claimed it had received more than 900 calls, "many of which were vulnerable school-aged children."

In a surprise U-turn Trump spoke out against the ban in a post on his Truth Social website.

Referring to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg Trump wrote: "If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don't want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!"

In August 2020, Trump issued an executive order ordering ByteDance to sell its U.S. assets and destroy all user data within 90 days, but this was blocked following a legal challenge.