Republican leaders Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell condemned Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene Tuesday for comparing COVID restrictions to the persecution of Jews during 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 added.
McCarthy’s statement was issued hours after Greene sent a tweet comparing a Tennessee grocery store’s rule requiring employees to display their vaccination status to the Third Reich’s star-wearing requirement for Jews.
Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.
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
— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) May 25, 2021
The tweet was sent just four days after Greene lashed out at Speaker Nancy Pelosi during an appearance on The Water Cooler with Dave Brody podcast for requiring masks on the House floor.
“This woman is mentally ill,” Greene said on the podcast, referring to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. “You know, 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, and this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also lambasted the congresswoman for her remarks, calling them “outrageous” and “reprehensible.” McConnell’s spokesman wrote on Twitter that the Senate Leader recently called out Greene’s “Loony lies and conspiracy theories” as a “cancer for the Republican Party and our country.”
McCarthy also took the opportunity to condemn Democrats’ recent criticisms of Israel, arguing that drawing a false moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas has contributed to a recent surge in anti-Semitic hate crimes.
“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.