House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on Wednesday claimed that he didn’t know what the QAnon conspiracy theory was — but as CNN showed, that claim is flatly untrue.
CNN on Thursday morning played a clip of McCarthy claiming that he didn’t know what QAnon was, and then played a clip from last August of McCarthy telling Fox News, “There’s no place for QAnon in the Republican Party.”
“So in August he didn’t support it, and last night he didn’t know what it was,” quipped host Alisyn Camerota.
“It’s absurd,” agreed political analyst Ryan Lizza. “He probably noticed the mob vandalizing and sacking the Capitol on January 6th, that half of them had giant Qs on their chests. And last night, he spent a couple of hours in a conference meeting where one of the big issues was one of his members’ conspiratorial views that were mostly about this QAnon conspiracy.”
Lizza went on to say that it’s “ridiculous” to think that McCarthy has never learned about QAnon, given that the conspiracy theory is “tearing his party apart and leading to violence in the Capitol.”
Watch the video below.