Marjorie Taylor Greene has been a threat since long before she was elected to the House of Representatives earlier this year, but she recently went to the next level of badness. She has been a vocal opponent of public safety policies centered on the extremely infectious COVID-19 pandemic, and she recently compared those enforcing mask mandates to the Holocaust. Of course, she doubled, tripled, and possibly quadrupled her insulting remarks, but after nearly a week, she was eventually condemned by senior members of her own group. Ben Shapiro was among those who came after her.
Wolf Blitzer was another guy who chastised her. The CNN anchor maintains a professional demeanor, rarely allowing his personal life to interfere with his work. But he made an exception on Tuesday night. Both he and Dana Bash have relatives who escaped Nazi Germany, were detained or died in concentration camps. They also drew on personal experience, asking how someone like her could use unprecedented tragedy to enrage her foundation.
“None of this should be political,” Bash said to Blitzer. “My grandparents were Nazi refugees. My great-grandparents perished at Auschwitz, you know. Maybe a yellow star was something that was, you know — a yellow star was horrible, being gassed, which is what my great grandparents were, is a whole different thing, and to compare that to the notion of public health and wearing a mask is just beyond the pale. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you, Wolf. Your parents were in slave labor camps.”
“And I’m the son of Holocaust survivors, and all four of my grandparents were murdered during the Holocaust, and two of them at Auschwitz,” Blitzer replied. “I never knew any of my grandparents. My parents did survive. They were young and strong and came to the United States and started a new life after World War II in beautiful Buffalo, New York, and had this great opportunity.”
He then reflected on the Jan. 6 insurrection, which saw some rioters dressed in Nazi wear:
“But I’ve often said, especially since we saw on that January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol that guy raring that ‘Camp Auschwitz’ shirt,” he said. “My parents had passed away, but if they would have seen that, they would have said, ‘How is that possible here in the United States of America to see something like that going on.’ And if they would have heard the words this so-called congresswoman uttered, these ugly, ugly comparisons between wearing masks to save yourself and to save others, they would have — they wouldn’t have believed that this was possible in our country.”
Can all of this put Greene in a bad light? Considering the Auschwitz Museum itself blamed her for her ahistorical and insensitive false equivalency, perhaps not.
That isn’t to say that people shouldn’t rat her out when she crosses the line, and then some.
