It appears Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene — known for harassing school-shooting survivors, her colleagues, and her colleagues’ children — has learned a few facts about the Holocaust. On Monday, Greene, 47, took a field trip to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and afterwards gave a press conference apologizing for past comments in which she compared mask mandates to the genocide of over 6 million Jewish people.
“I’m very much a normal person,” she said. “I have made a mistake, and it has really bothered me for a couple weeks now, and so I definitely want to own it.” The “mistake” she’s referring to includes these comments made during a May interview with a conservative podcast, in which she compared being made to wear a mask to Nazi gas chambers:
“You know, we can look back at a time in history when people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second-class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany. And this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.”
Later, she doubled-down in a tweet saying, “Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.” (Jewish people were made to wear a yellow star, not a gold star, further obscuring this deranged analogy and underscoring Greene’s dubious understanding of history.) Greene added that mask mandates and vaccination passports “create discrimination against unvaxxed people who trust their immune systems to a virus that is 99% survivable.” (While that statistic is technically true, calling COVID-19 — a disease which has to date killed nearly 600,000 Americans — “99% survivable” is incredibly misleading. As Dr. Anthony Fauci testified to Congress in March 2020, a one percent mortality rate “means it is ten-times more lethal than the seasonal flu.”)
Now, after learning a few basic facts about the Holocaust, it appears Greene sees her comments differently. “This afternoon, I visited the Holocaust Museum,” Greene said on Monday. “The Holocaust is — there’s nothing comparable to it. It’s — it happened, and, you know, over 6 million Jewish people were murdered. More than that, there were not just Jewish people — Black people, Christians, all kinds of groups. Children. People that the Nazis didn’t believe were good enough or perfect enough.”
Greene added that “the horrors of the Holocaust are something that some people don’t even believe happened, that some people deny.” Among those deniers are some people who believe QAnon conspiracy theories, a demographic Greene initially courted and only recently apologized for supporting. “There is no comparison to the Holocaust,” she continued, “and there are words that I have said, remarks that I’ve made that I know are offensive, and I want to apologize.”
However, she later doubled-down yet again on her confusing comparisons of democrats, socialists, the Nazi Party, and COVID restrictions. During the press conference, Greene insisted “that forced masks and forced vaccines and vaccines passports are a type of discrimination, and I’m very much against that type of discrimination.” Ironic given her history of racism and transphobia. When asked by journalist Ben Jacobs whether she stood by her initial comments comparing the Democratic party to Nazis, she gave a baffling response that mentioned socialism, communism, critical race theory, and censorship on social media. “So you still stand by that analogy?” Jacobs asked in clarification. Greene responded, “That’s the important thing to remember.” (Though Greene has repeatedly referred to both Nazis and Democrats as “socialist” parties, the Nazi party was a right-wing, ultranationalist party — not a socialist party.)
Greene’s habit of making inflammatory remarks and then walking them back has already cost her congressional responsibilities. Earlier this year, the House ousted Greene from her committee assignments for absurdist comments (e.g., Hillary Clinton was filmed “filleting” a child’s face), promoting conspiracy theories (e.g., claiming a plane didn’t hit the Pentagon on 9/11), and general bigotry. Before being stripped of her assignments, Greene said these past comments “do not represent” her. Just hours before her most recent apology outside the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Illinois representative Brad Schneider, alongside other democratic congresspeople, announced he’d be issuing a resolution to censure her for previous offensive comments.
“When [Greene] repeatedly compared the US Covid-response to Hitler and the Holocaust, she dishonored the millions of lives lost in WWII and the Shoah,” Schneider tweeted. “She has forgotten America’s fight against the Nazi menace.” He said the resolution to censure her would be introduced on Wednesday.