Extremist GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (Ga.) wondered in a weekend interview about why people are picking on gay white supremacists.
She said instead there are many other perpetrators to complain about – such as undocumented immigrants. She also said people should talk about the “Asian man” who killed a California church member last week, and the “black man” who drove his car into Wisconsin buyers last year.
She said, inconsistently, that it “shouldn’t be about the race.”
Greene made the remarks after he attacked Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D.N.Y.) for railing against a suspected white supremacist in the horrific attack at a Buffalo supermarket targeting black people last week, in which Ten people were killed.
Why is “targeting” at white supremacists? She asked in an interview with right-wing outlet Real America’s Voice from her car (below).
“White supremacy should not be the main goal,” argued the MP. “We should be more concerned about illegal border crossings, crime on our streets every day, especially in cities like Chicago. We should be chasing criminals who break the law and judge them on the basis of the color of their skin. But people should not be chased.”
But race is clearly critically important in hate crimes. The FBI reported last year that the number of hate crimes in the US in 2020 was the highest in two decades, driven largely by a rise in attacks by white people on black and Asian Americans, Hispanics and Jews.
There were 51 hate-crime murders in the US in 2019, the most since the FBI began tracking the toll in the 1990s. Most of the murder victims were black, Hispanic and Jewish.
“Stopping racial hate crimes means tackling white supremacist ideology,” said a position paper posted last week by the Brookings Institution. Over the past 20 years, the number of hate groups in the US has increased by 100%, it has been noted.
Nadler’s reference to the Buffalo shootings, which so angered Green, was part of his reasoning for passing the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act to crack down on the problem. Democrats support the bill, but Republicans are lukewarm.
Nadler also referred to the killing of more than 20 people at an El Paso store in 2019 and the shooting deaths of 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.
All of the murders involved white shooters inspired by the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which claims unfoundedly a conspiracy to replace whites with people of color, immigrants, and Jews. Green’s reference to an immigrant “invasion” was an obvious dog whistle to believers in the fabled conspiracy.
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