“State of the Union” host Jake Tapper opened a Sunday segment with “a sentence I never thought I would say”: “It has been a good few weeks for antisemites and those who support Nazism.”
Diving into the Kanye “Ye” West, Nick Fuentes and Donald Trump-led subject that’s been making headlines over the last weeks, Tapper took particular aim at the Republican Party representatives who refuse to condemn Trump for hosting the former two antisemites at Mar-a-Lago – and others, still, for not admitting their own culpability for supporting their platforms in the past.
After showing clips of Ye’s now-infamous interview with Alex Jones in which he praised Hitler and of Fuentes siding with the Nazi dictator while speaking at a white supremacist rally earlier this year, Tapper first targeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for lying about her familiarity with Fuentes, a noted white supremacist and Holocaust denier.
“The GOP response to this debacle has been a lot of play-acting, sadly,” Tapper said. “Congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance, acting as if she did not know who Fuentes was.”
The CNN host then cut to a clip of Taylor Greene criticizing Fuentes as an “immature young man saying hateful things” and that she doesn’t know why Ye would affiliate himself with him.
Tapper then said that these comments “might make more sense, Congressman Taylor Greene, if you had not stood onstage with Fuentes at that very same white supremacist conference earlier this year. She, of course, remains a member in good standing of the House Republican Conference.”
Tapper also criticized Minority Leader of the House and House Speaker hopeful Kevin McCarthy for refusing to make “even the most tepid” criticism of Trump for not himself denouncing Ye and Fuentes’ rhetoric after their dinner.
“I confess, I’m finding all these contortions to defend Nazism and the tolerance of Nazism rather difficult to stomach,” Tapper said.
The segment ended with a personal plea in which Tapper introduced his great uncle who was part of the Royal Canadian Air Force and killed in combat fighting Germany at age 22. He also showcased a brief history lesson of the Holocaust complete with textbook, black-and-white images that anyone should find distressing and abhorrent.
“This and the tolerance of the evil ideology behind it, is what apparently too many politicians in the United States are unable to muster the courage to condemn and clear in unequivocal ways,” Tapper concluded. “Whom are afraid of alienating?”
Watch the full segment in the video above.
