Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Justification for Appearing at a White-Nationalist Conference Is Preposterous

R epresentative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a freshman Republican from Georgia, spoke at a conference of white nationalists on Friday.

Accusations of bigotry are often casually and unfairly hurled about by the media and the Left, but Nick Fuentes, the organizer of the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) that Greene addressed, is an open and unapologetic racist and antisemite.

Fuentes once called a writer a “race traitor” because he “work[s] for Jews.” He opposes interracial marriage and has praised segregation. “Enough with the Jim Crow stuff. Who cares? Oh, they had to drink out of a different water fountain, big f***ing deal. Oh no, they had to go to a different school,” he said in one video. “It’s better for them; it’s better for us.” In another video, he joyfully promoted grotesque claims denying that millions of Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

After Greene drew flak for speaking at Fuentes’s white-nationalist conference, she told CBS News’s Robert Costa on Saturday that “I do not know Nick Fuentes. I’ve never seen him speak. I’ve never seen a video. I don’t know what his views are.”

But that answer was transparently preposterous. When Greene spoke to Fuentes’s conference on Friday, she told attendees that the very reason she’d decided to do so was because “you know what it’s like to be canceled. That’s why I’m here to talk to you tonight: I don’t believe anyone should be canceled.” She had to have known what she was doing.

Of course, there is an enormous moral difference between speaking at a white-nationalist convention as a member of Congress — an act that lends the gravitas of elected office to vile bigotry — and believing that people have a legal right to vile speech or even that social-media companies shouldn’t ban openly racist accounts.

“I won’t abandon these young men and women, because I believe we need to do better by them,” Greene wrote later on Twitter. “I won’t cancel others in the conservative movement, even if I find some of their statements tasteless, misguided or even repulsive at times.”

Greene has found herself in hot water for promoting conspiracy theories and vile speech in the past. When the House GOP conference previously decided not to strip her of her committee assignments over those comments — as it had done to former Iowa congressman Steve King over his seemingly sympathetic comments about white nationalism — Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy indicated that she’d only been spared because the comments were made before she was elected.

“Now that you’re a member of Congress, now it’s the responsibility of our conference to hold people accountable,” McCarthy said at a press conference last February. “We removed Steve King when he made comments [about white nationalism] as a member of Congress.”

The Republican Jewish Coalition, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, Utah senator Mitt Romney, and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell have all roundly condemned Greene and Arizona GOP congressman Paul Gosar, who addressed Fuentes’s group via video, for speaking at AFPAC. McCarthy has condemned Greene as well. On Monday night, McCarthy called Greene’s appearance “appalling” and “wrong,” but thus far he’s stopped short of committing to any kind of concrete punishment for her, promising only that he’ll meet with her and express his disappointment.

Earlier this month, McCarthy endorsed the GOP primary challenger to Wyoming representative Liz Cheney because of Cheney’s role in serving on the committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol. A McCarthy campaign aide has not yet responded to an inquiry from National Review on Monday evening asking whether McCarthy will be endorsing Greene’s primary challenger.