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After literally chasing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez through the halls of Congress with rants of antifa, Marjorie Taylor Greene appears hellbent on rounding out the month of May with her trademark conspiracy theories and vicious trolling. The latest, a sort of doubling down of earlier comments from the weekend, now compares so-called vaccination passports and mask mandates to elements of the Holocaust.
Of course, that’s not exactly surprising from a woman with a history of invoking anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, just one layer of an entire political brand built on hateful and deranged rhetoric. But Greene’s newest vitriol comes amid a sharp rise in hate crimes against Jewish communities—and calls for her removal are once again mounting.
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.https://t.co/6X6VNolcA7
— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) May 25, 2021
“Rep. Greene’s anti-Semitic language comparing the systematic murder of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust to wearing a mask is beyond disturbing,” Rep. Jim McGovern tweeted on Sunday. “She is a deeply troubled person who needs to apologize & resign. @GOPLeader needs to address her antisemitism.”
McGovern shouldn’t hold his breath. Should House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy deign to address Greene’s latest incendiary behavior, he and his Republican colleagues have made it clear that they intend to stand by the congresswoman from Georgia. (Update: McCarthy has responded with a brief statement,) That makes sense, as Greene isn’t exactly a freak aberration of the right, and her comments railing against mask mandates carry the same water as Tucker Carlson calling face masks for children “child abuse.”
So, while some in the GOP may insist that they’re different from the freshman congresswoman, as many have noted, Greene’s antics don’t happen in a vacuum. They are part of a decades-long drift toward conspiracy theories, unabashed racism, and anti-science. As I’ve said before, this is a crisis of their own making.
