Marjorie Taylor Greene wants to be judged by her own words? Challenge accepted.

Marjorie Taylor Greene wants to be judged by her own words? Challenge accepted.

Catherine Rampell — Read time: 4 minutes

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) doesn’t want to be held accountable for the white supremacists she pals around with. Judge her instead by her own words, she pleads.

Sure thing, congresswoman. Challenge accepted.

On Friday, Greene spoke at the America First Political Action Conference, a white-nationalist rival to the much larger Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) she addressed across town in Orlando the next day. Her fellow Republicans Rep. Paul A. Gosar (Ariz.), Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin and Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, among others, participated in the “groyper” gathering as well.

Not long ago, appearing in such company would have been anathema for elected officials.

To understand why, consider some of the remarks uttered by the event’s organizer, Nicholas Fuentes, an unabashed antisemite previously expelled from CPAC. The FBI has referred to him in court documents as a white supremacist.

Minutes before Greene addressed the crowd, Fuentes crowed that “our secret sauce here, it’s these young White men.” He declared that the Jan. 6 insurrection was “awesome.” He solicited a “round of applause for Russia,” to which the crowd chanted “Putin! Putin!” And he seemed to suggest that attempts to compare Russian President Vladimir Putin to Hitler are flattering.

And that was just at this event.

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Fuentes’s reputation and comments can be found with a quick Google search. But when criticized for appearing at his event, alongside other speakers mocking “QueerPAC” next door, Greene pleaded ignorance.

“I do not know Nick Fuentes,” Greene told reporters the following day, despite video and photos of their appearance together. “I’ve never heard him speak. I’ve never seen a video. I don’t know what his views are, so I’m not aligned with anything that may be controversial.”

She then tweeted several defenses of her participation. She acknowledged that some speakers offered “a few off-color remarks” (an inventive euphemism, apparently, for “openly bigoted”). But she defiantly proclaimed, “I am not going to play the guilt by association game in which you demand every conservative should justify anything ever said by anyone they’ve ever shared a room with.” She added: “I’m only responsible for what I say.”

Well, we at least agree on that last part. Greene should be held responsible for what she says, at a neo-Nazi confab or elsewhere.

For instance, Greene should be held accountable for continuing to compare every Democratic policy she opposes — whether mask mandates, vaccination requirements or Jan. 6 responses — to the Holocaust. This includes her more colorful misfires on the subject, such as when she denounced Democratic colleagues investigating Jan. 6 as the “gazpacho police.” (Perhaps she fears the gazpacho police will send innocent patriots to the goulash for their attempted soup d’état.)

She has shared other antisemitic garbage over the years.

These include claims about Jewish space lasers supposedly sparking California wildfires. And how “Zionist supremacists” are conspiring to replace the West’s White Christian population with non-White Muslim immigrants, an endorsement of the “Great Replacement” theory that was also voiced by other speakers in Orlando.

Add to the list her remarks that Muslims do not belong in government. Her claim that 9/11 was an inside job, with no plane ever crashing into the Pentagon. Her assertion that the shooting massacres in Newtown, Conn., Las Vegas and Parkland, Fla., were all staged.

And that leading Democratic officials should be executed. And so on.

Over the weekend, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo condemned Greene for “playing footsie” with “anti-Semitic neo-Nazis.” But given Greene’s record, it might be more accurate to say the neo-Nazis wish to play footsie with her, perhaps in hopes that she can lend their once-shunned organization political legitimacy.

One might be tempted to forgive Greene for not realizing how embarrassed she should be to “share a room with” these speakers and pro-Putin attendees. After all, it’s usually Greene who’s the most embarrassing person to share a room with. When Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) was asked Sunday what he thought of Greene’s (and Gosar’s) participation at a white-nationalist event, he replied: “I don’t know them, but I’m reminded of that old line from the ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ movie, where one character says: ‘Morons. I have got morons on my team.’”

Greene, like Gosar, has already been stripped of her committee assignments for comments endorsing conspiracy theories and encouraging violence against fellow lawmakers. She has been denounced by some of the few Republicans who still have principles. She has even been disavowed by her gym!

Yet the House has so far refused to expel this tinfoil-hat-wearer from its ranks, an action that would require a two-thirds vote of her peers.

Most Republicans, it seems, would prefer to keep the morons on their team.