Greene Apologizes For Comparing COVID-19 Mandates To Holocaust

GEORGIA — Opening her news conference by saying “I just always want to remind everyone I’m very much a normal person,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene apologized Monday for comparing COVID-19 mask and vaccination mandates to the Nazi Holocaust.

“I know the words I stated were hurtful and for that I am very sorry,” Greene said at a news conference in Washington, as reported by Reuters and other news outlets.

“I should own it,” Greene said. “I made a mistake.”

Greene added that she still viewed mask and vaccine mandates as unfair.

“I believe that forced mask and forced vaccines or vaccine passports are a type of discrimination, and I’m very much against that type of discrimination,” Greene said. “What I would like to say is I’m removing that statement completely away from what I had said before. There is no comparison to the Holocaust, and there never should be, and that’s what I’m sorry for.”

Greene’s statement Monday evening followed a visit earlier that day to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. It also came after several weeks of blowback in reaction to Greene comparing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s order that representatives be vaccinated or wear masks to Jews being sent to gas chambers during World War II.

“We can look back at 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,” Greene said in a conservative podcast at the time.

On May 25, Greene also re-tweeted a news story about a grocery store that allowed employees to wear a tag instead of a mask if they were vaccinated, comparing it to Nazis forcing Jews to wear gold stars.

Greene’s public mea culpa will likely head off a planned resolution to censure her that also had been announced Monday by U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider, an Illinois Democrat.

At the same time, Greene has said nothing about the apology in her social-media feeds aimed at hardcore supporters. Earlier Monday, she wished former President Donald Trump a happy birthday. And on Tuesday she livestreamed a press conference in which she promoted a bill designed to essentially terminate Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor, by zeroing out his salary.

As of Tuesday, her May 25 grocery-store tweet comparing vaccination tags to gold stars remained posted on Twitter.

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

Read the story from Reuters.

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