Nick Fuentes, the 23-year-old virgin famous for denying the Holocaust and admiring the way the Taliban treats women, is not allowed at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Contrary to the Borat fever dream that the American Conservative Union tolerates Ku Klux Klan members and Nazis attending the annual conservative conference, CPAC has gone to great lengths in recent years to ban alt-right agitators such as Fuentes, neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, and loony Laura Loomer. For the third year in a row, Fuentes has held a rival “America First” Political Action Conference in a concurrent competition with CPAC, but for the first time, a sitting member of Congress has headlined both of them.
CPAC may be able to ban Fuentes, but what to do about Marjorie Taylor Greene, the conspiracy theorist-cum-congresswoman whose own Republican colleagues stripped her of her committee assignments for (among many, many other things) denying the veracity of 9/11 and the Parkland, Florida, shooting and blaming “Zionists” for enacting de facto white genocide? The organization may be able to ban Fuentes and his fellow basement dwellers, but on Friday night, Greene elected to embrace Fuentes onstage just moments after he applauded Russian President Vladimir Putin for invading the sovereign nation of Ukraine and a mere night before she was scheduled to speak at CPAC.
Greene has gotten away with her dollar-store brand of buddying up to antisemites, white supremacists, and incels for nigh on two years now, but if her day after of damage control is any indication, she knows she soiled the bed.
After her Saturday morning panel on the CPAC main stage, Greene made a beeline for the VIP green room, storming away from a handful of reporters (yours truly included) who asked whether the Georgia Republican had any thoughts about Fuentes’s Holocaust denialism. Greene disappeared for a time, only to emerge in full Monday morning quarterback mode.
“I do not know Nick Fuentes. I have never heard him speak. I have never seen a video. I do not know what his views are, so I am not aligned with anything that is controversial,” she said to CBS’s Robert Costa. “I went to his event last night to address his very large following because it’s a very young following and it’s a generation I’m extremely concerned about.”
So either Greene is an idiot, a racist liar, or, as her entire excuse of a career would indicate, both. Greene, who also offered an eleventh-hour condemnation of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, earned a blistering condemnation from the Republican Jewish Coalition. Her secondary attempt to sweep her AFPAC appearance under the rug on Twitter evidently failed to neutralize the blowback, with Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel condemning “white supremacy, neo-Nazism, hate speech, and bigotry” in response.
It took decades for Rep. Steve King to out himself as a bigot and years for the GOP to gain the stones to oust him from Congress. Greene may have more gall, but she’s also a vacuum of a charisma all too thirsty for viral moments to fulfill her vanity. Fuentes may have given CPAC and the rest of a movement weary of prematurely “canceling” insiders the ultimate gift: just enough rope for Greene to hang what remained of her reputation and thus the ultimate excuse to purge her from polite polity.
