Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican congresswoman from the U.S. state of Georgia, has been mouthing her usual nonsense again.
Last week, she stirred understandable outrage when she likened public health regulations enacted since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic to the Nazi treatment of European Jews during the Holocaust.
Several months ago, shortly after being elected to the House of Representatives, she was stripped of committee assignments after posting a series of inflammatory social media posts. Incredibly enough, she endorsed the assassination of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, and suggested that a wildfire in California had been started by “a laser” beamed from outer space and controlled by the Rothschild banking family.
Greene’s implicitly antisemitic gibberish is rooted in a wild conspiracy theory promoted by followers of the bizarre QAnon cult, which ridiculously claims that the American government is under the sway of an evil cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
Greene’s wacky ideas represent the tip of a dangerous iceberg. According to a new poll released by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core, 15 percent of Americans, particularly Republicans and Americans who listen to far-right newscasts, buy into QAnon’s outlandish claims and believe they may have to resort to violence to depose of these so-called pedophiles and restore the country’s rightful order.
A QAnon acolyte, Greene went off on her latest tangent after Pelosi recommended that members of Congress should continue wearing masks in the chamber until they are fully vaccinated. The vaccination will most likely keep them safe from contracting the deadly virus, which has killed nearly 600,000 Americans since 2020.
Rather than abiding by Pelosi’s sensible recommendation, Greene compared it to Nazi Germany’s malevolent edicts forcing Jews to wear the dreaded yellow star and consigning them to gas chambers in extermination camps.
What a grotesque comparison! Only an ignoramus of the first order could have dredged up such inanity.
It should also be noted that Greene mistakenly referred to the yellow star as “a gold star” and incorrectly placed the gas chambers in Germany rather than in Nazi-occupied Poland.
It took the Republican leadership quite a time to reprimand Greene, who remains impervious to constructive criticism. But at least the Republicans summoned up the resolve to condemn her tasteless comments.
“Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust to wearing masks is appalling,” said the minority leader, Kevin McCarthy. “The Holocaust is the greatest atrocity committed in human history. The fact that this needs to be stated today is deeply troubling.”
Greene’s knee-jerk reaction was discouraging. She retweeted, and then deleted, a post labelling McCarthy a “moron.” This woman’s lack of judgment is boundless.
The Republican minority leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, called her remarks “outrageous” and “reprehensible,” while the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Matt Brooks, described Greene as “an embarrassment” to herself and the party.
“Please educate yourself so that you can realize how absolutely wrong and inappropriate it is to compare (the) vaccination with the six million Jews who were exterminated by the Nazis,” Brooks wrote on Twitter.
Pelosi, calling Greene’s remarks “beyond reprehensible,” put it best when she said, “I think she should stop talking.”
It’s clear that Greene has a responsibility to herself, and her party, to think before she speaks. As a duly elected official, she has a constitutional right to express her opinions, but the Republican Party has an obligation to ensure that they are aligned with truth, reality and common sense.
If Greene is unable to observe this basic and universally accepted rule of conduct, the Republicans should seriously consider expelling her from the party.
She is definitely a liability to the grand old party.