Ocasio-Cortez: McCarthy doesn’t want to ‘alienate his base’ of white supremacists

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) wrote Tuesday that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) “doesn’t want to alienate his base,” seemingly referring to white supremacists.

The video that Ocasio-Cortez retweeted along with her critique showed McCarthy declining to comment after a reporter asked him about Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) attendance at a “white nationalist convention” over the weekend.

In the video, McCarthy dismissed a reporter’s request for comment on Greene’s attendance at white supremacist Nick Fuentes’s Orlando World Center Marriott conference, saying that he had already responded to it and that “we’ve got a war in Europe that we have not since World War II,” adding, “You can take my statement that I said yesterday and play it one more time.” 

McCarthy declined to comment on Greene’s and Rep. Paul Gosar’s (R-Ariz.) attendance at Fuentes’s conference for several days, but on Monday, McCarthy said, “The party should not be associated, any time, any place, with somebody who is antisemitic” and added that there was no place in the Republican Party for “any of this.” 

Greene defended her attendance at the white nationalist conference Saturday, saying, “I don’t know what [Fuentes’s] views are, so I’m not aligned with anything that may be controversial. I went to his event last night to address his very large following because that is a young, very young, following and a generation I am extremely concerned about.”

Fuentes, who was subpoenaed by the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol last month, spoke at the Orlando conference and was photographed shaking Greene’s hand at the event.