WASHINGTON (JTA) — If Marjorie Taylor Greene sets out for another repentant trip to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, she might want to stop by a Spanish restaurant on the way.
That way the Georgia Republican congresswoman can figure out the difference between the Gestapo, Hitler’s atrocity-committing shock troops, and gazpacho, the yummy Spanish cold soup.
In an interview on the pro-Trump One America News Network, Taylor Greene laced into investigations by a special House committee into the violent Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol using the mangled kind of Nazi comparisons that Jewish groups have implored her to avoid.
“Not only do we have the D.C. jail, which is the D.C. Gulag, but now we have Nancy Pelosi’s gazpacho police, spying on members of Congress, spying on the legislative work that we do, spying on our staff and spying on American citizens who want to come talk to their representatives,” Taylor Greene said.
The Republican Accountability Project, a Twitter feed run by Republicans seeking to purge their party of acolytes of former President Donald Trump, on Wednesday posted a snippet of the interview.
Sarah Longwell, a founder of the group, saw the tweet going viral and seized an opportunity. “Our team is covering the GOP from soup to nuts,” she said.
Jewish liberals shared Taylor Greene’s statement with puns, some more digestible than others.
“I join her in her fight against both the Gazpacho police and their collaborationist allies in the Vichyssoise,” said lawyer Akiva Cohen, punning on the French collaborationist Vichy regime and another continental cold soup.
“The things the gazpacho police would do to the juice!” said Eric Muller, a Holocaust scholar at the University of North Carolina. “In their tortilla chambers!”
There were plenty of obvious references to a certain Seinfeld episode. “MTG thinks Pelosi is a soup Nazi,” said Andy Levy, a podcaster. There were also plenty of regrets that Taylor Greene did not confuse “gulag,” the Soviet prison system, with “goulash” — a soup that can be served hot and cold.
On a more serious note, some observers were dismayed that Taylor Greene, despite her visit to the Holocaust Museum and apologizing for using Holocaust analogies, continued the habit.
“Folks, I’m beginning to get the sense that Marjorie Taylor Greene’s trip to the Holocaust Museum didn’t actually take,” tweeted Yair Rosenberg of The Atlantic.
By the end of the evening, Taylor Greene was joining in the fun. “No soup for those who illegally spy on Members of Congress, but they will be thrown in the goulash,” she said on her congressional Twitter account, adding the hashtags “#Gazpacho #Gestapo”
Here are some more highlights from Wednesday night:
https://twitter.com/AdamBlickstein/status/1491534992685649921
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