House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday condemned a member of his own party, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for her recent comments comparing Covid-related safety measures with the Holocaust.
“Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling,” McCarthy said in a statement.
“The Holocaust is the greatest atrocity committed in history. The fact that this needs to be stated today is deeply troubling,” he said.
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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., also blasted Greene, calling her comments “outrageous” and “reprehensible.”
McConnell’s spokesman pointed out on Twitter that the Senate leader had previously slammed Greene’s “loony lies and conspiracy theories” as a “cancer for the Republican Party and our country.”
CNBC has reached out to Taylor Greene’s spokesman for a response.
Over the weekend, Greene had compared the mask mandate on the floor of the House chamber to the Holocaust. “We can look back in a time in history where 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,” Greene said, according to NBC News.
Greene on Tuesday morning tweeted, “Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.”
She was responding to a report from a local Tennessee outlet on a decision by supermarket chain Food City to have fully vaccinated employees display a logo on their name badge.
Greene is a freshman lawmaker from Georgia who in February had been stripped of her committee assignments as punishment for pushing an array of extremist conspiracy theories. Reportedly among them was her claim in 2018 that wildfires had possibly been caused by space lasers funded by the Rothschild family, the target of many anti-Semitic conspiracies.
But the statement Tuesday from McCarthy, who had previously declined to censure Greene, also tried to cast blame on his Democratic colleagues for rising anti-Semitism.
“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,” McCarthy said.
“Americans must stand together to defeat anti-Semitism and any attempt to diminish the history of the Holocaust,” he said. “Let me be clear: the House Republican Conference condemns this language.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called Greene’s recent comments “sickening and reprehensible.”
“She should stop this vile language immediately,” Schumer said.
