On Tuesday, Republican leaders in the House and Senate condemned comments by GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene comparing the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany to mask mandates and vaccine passports in the United States.
Taylor Greene (Ga.) made the comments on a podcast last week and then doubled down Monday and Tuesday, refusing to apologize. Her original comments criticized a mask mandate in the House of Representatives.
“You know, we can look back in a time and history where people were told to wear a gold star,” she said on the podcast. “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. This is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.”
Taylor Greene made similar comments in a Tuesday morning tweet.
“Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazis forced Jewish people to wear a gold star,” she tweeted.
Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.
— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) May 25, 2021
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
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) criticized Taylor Greene.
“Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling,” McCarthy said. “The Holocaust is the greatest atrocity committed in history. The fact that this needs to be stated today is deeply troubling. At a time when the Jewish people face increased violence and threats, anti-Semitism is on the rise in the Democrat Party and is completely ignored by Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“Americans must stand together to defeat anti-Semitism and any attempt to diminish the history of the Holocaust. Let me be clear: the House Republican Conference condemns this language.”
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the third-ranking House GOP member, said, “equating mask-wearing and vaccines to the Holocaust” minimized “the most significant human atrocities ever committed,” according to the Associated Press.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called her comments “outrageous and reprehensible.”
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who is Jewish, called her comments “demented nonsense.”
“It is nothing like the Holocaust, and any comparison thereto is both insulting and insane,” Shapiro tweeted.
This is demented nonsense. It is nothing like the Holocaust, and any comparison thereto is both insulting and insane. https://t.co/LORlcBdyw1
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) May 25, 2021
Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Pool
Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.