Marjorie Taylor Greene has been a menace since well before taking office in in the House earlier this year, but she recently went next level awful. An outspoken critic of public safety measures revolving around the highly contagious COVID-19 pandemic, she last week compared those issuing mask mandates in order to protect lives to the Holocaust. She of course doubled and tripled, maybe even quadrupled down on this offensive comments, but after nearly a week she was finally condemned by leading members of her own party. Even Ben Shapiro came for her.
Another person who rebuked her was Wolf Blitzer. The CNN anchor usually stays detached, rarely letting his personal life infringe upon reporting the news. But on Tuesday night he made an exception. He and Dana Bash both have family who fled Nazi Germany or were imprisoned, even died in concentration camps. And they brought personal history to bear while wondering how someone like her would use unimaginable tragedy simply to stir up her base.
“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.”
Will any of this shame Greene? Considering she was even condemned by the Auschwitz Museum itself for her ahistorical and insensitive false equivalency, probably not.
The instrumentalization of the tragedy of Jews who suffered, were humiliated, marked with a yellow star, isolated in ghettos & murdered during the Holocaust, in a debate on different systems that aim at protecting public health is a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline. https://t.co/FuPehwNv1o
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) May 25, 2021
But that doesn’t mean people should stop calling her out for crossing the line, and then some.
You can watch Bash and Blitzer speak about Greene in the video above.