CNN reports:

House Republican leaders have condemned incendiary remarks from GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene five days after she first publicly compared Capitol Hill mask rules to the Holocaust, amid a wave of criticism from Republican and conservative critics as well as Jewish groups aimed at the Georgia congresswoman and the party leaders’ silence.

“Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling,” House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy said in a statement five days after Greene’s original comments and after she made similar comparisons Tuesday. “Let me be clear: the House Republican Conference condemns this language.”

The No. 2 House Republican, Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, also responded to Greene’s comments for the first time on Tuesday.
“Rep. Scalise does not agree with these comments and condemns these comparisons to the Holocaust,” Scalise spokesperson Lauren Fine said in a written statement that also attacked Democrats.

Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the newly elected No. 3 House Republican, also responded to the controversy in a tweet that didn’t include Greene’s name. [Continue reading…]

Jonathan Chait writes:

[W]hile Marjorie Taylor-Greene is in some ways an outlier within her party, the peculiar form of her anti-Semitism is not unique to her. Modern right-wing anti-Semitism is often twisted around as a kind of extreme philo-Semitism, retaining all the contours of the old anti-Semitic theories while repurposing them for a program that is at least superficially committed to protecting and even venerating the Jews.

One version of this thought system was espoused by Donald Trump, who frequently praised Jews for their shrewdness at negotiating while asserting that their primary loyalty is either to Israel or to themselves. Trump’s allies often expressed indignation at any suggestion that Trump’s rhetoric and political style had a whiff of anti-Semitism. How could this be, when Trump was constantly denouncing anti-Semitism (on the left, anyway) and standing behind Israel?

One reason is that anti-Semitism is associated with a style of political thought that retains its form even when explicit references to Jews are omitted. Trump’s rhetoric against “globalists” blamed a shadowy cabal of international financiers who secretly directed a series of catastrophic events for their own benefit. Not surprisingly, explicit anti-Semites who had previously sat out partisan politics thrilled to Trump. It didn’t bother them that he omitted the Jew parts. The music was the same, and they could fill in the lyrics themselves. [Continue reading…]