It seems the Republican Party believes it needs Greene’s anti-Semites to win. What else could explain its muted response to her garbage? What a disgrace.
After the freshman congresswoman from Georgia recently lit a firestorm comparing mask mandates to the persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust, she came out with a fresh batch of crazy. In the early morning hours on Tuesday, Marjorie Taylor Greene took to Twitter to double down on the obscene remarks she made to Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody.
Her first tweet to greet the day: ”Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s forced Jewish people to wear a gold star. Vaccine passports & mask mandates create discrimination against unvaxxed people who trust their immune systems to a virus that is 99% survivable.”
Her next tweets after that weren’t much better.
In response to a report that the University of Virginia is requiring vaccines for all in-person learning next year — students can request medical and religious exemptions — Greene tweeted: “Well hate freedom media would you look at this story. It appears Nazi practices have already begun on our youth. Show your VAX papers or no in person class for you. This is exactly what I was saying about the gold star. This is disgusting!”
Having insufficiently insulted the world’s Jewish population, apparently, Greene decided it was a good idea to target two prominent Jewish members of the media for disagreeing with her vulgar comparisons.
To Ben Shapiro, founder of the Daily Wire, she tweeted, “I never compared [mask and vaccine mandates] to the Holocaust, only to the discrimination against Jews in early Nazi years. Stop feeding into the left wing media attacks on me.” And to Jake Sherman, a reporter at MSNBC: “You are a liar. Stop twisting my words.”
To quote Shapiro, Greene’s thinking is indeed “demented nonsense.” It’s also so obviously out of bounds, it should be easily and roundly condemned by Republican leadership.
Yet there were crickets from Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy after her initial comments. Finally, in the wake of these new ones, McCarthy released a statement and a tweet, which read in part: “Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling. Let me be clear: the House Republican Conference condemns this language.”
Good. Now what? Will it call for her censure? Better yet, her expulsion?
Jewish groups and leaders immediately condemned the initial remarks that McCarthy couldn’t bother to.
“Such comparisons demean the Holocaust and contaminate American political speech,” said the American Jewish Congress, demanding an apology.
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, also reminded CNN viewers that Greene has trafficked in anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories before.
“This is a woman who thinks there are Jewish space lasers starting forest fires. She’s a QAnon enthusiast. She is offensive in almost everything that she does.”
To which Greene’s ever-impolitic and loyal goose stepper Nick Dyer responded, with another tinge of anti-Semitism: “The people of Northwest Georgia aren’t interested in the opinions of a radical leftist.”
How long will Republican leadership allow this horror show to play out?
While Democrats forced McCarthy to strip Greene of her House committee assignments the first time around, after threats of violence against Democratic members of Congress surfaced, the party has otherwise left her alone to keep peddling this kind of filth — and raise a whopping $3.2 million in her first three months in office.
Just like the party decided in 2016 that it needed the white supremacists and bigots Donald Trump was courting to win an election, it seems to believe it needs Marjorie Taylor Greene’s anti-Semites to win again. What else could explain its muted response to Greene’s garbage?
What a disgrace.
As anti-Semitic attacks rise all over America, a U.S. member of Congress is loudly and repeatedly comparing mask and vaccine mandates — meant to keep every American safe from COVID-19 — to the tactics used by Adolph Hitler to persecute the millions of Jews sent to their deaths in the Holocaust.
She’s doing it for three discrete reasons, all of which are despicable. First, because she’s an anti-Semite, an undeniable fact she’s proven over and over again. Second, merely to own the libs with anti-science, culture-war red meat. And third, to become famous, the only way she knows how.
Those of us in the media are regularly scolded for columns like these giving her oxygen. But the idea of not covering a rabid lunatic with a seat in Congress and obvious fundraising power wouldn’t just be pointless, it would be malfeasance.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a scourge and a cancer on the Republican Party. That much is obvious. But as long as the Republican Party tacitly accepts her for her voters and her money, the Republican Party is also a scourge and a cancer on America.
S.E. Cupp is the host of “S.E. Cupp Unfiltered” on CNN.
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