Ohio Republican Senate candidate JD Vance vehemently defended Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene’s speaking engagement at a white nationalist conference last month, noting that the congresswoman “is my friend and did nothing wrong”.
Ms Greene spoke in-person at the fringe-right America First Political Action Conference earlier this year, but after controversy broke about her attendance at an event, where the organiser claimed “young white men” are being forgotten, she began downplaying her involvement.
“I do not know Nick Fuentes; I’ve never heard him speak, I’ve never seen a video, I don’t know what his views are, so I’m not aligned with anything that may be controversial,” she said on Twitter in February.
Nick Fuentes, the aforementioned organiser of the event, is a well-known figure in the far-right universe having notoriously attended the “Unite the Right” rally that saw neo-Nazis and counterprotestors descend on Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.
The Hillbilly Elegy author’s support of the freshman Republican congresswoman attending the self-styled CPAC-alternative in Florida last month breaks away from the assessment of others in their party.
Republican Sen Mitt Romney, when asked on CNN’s State of the Union about Ms Greene’s showing at the far-right event, began by first saying he didn’t “know” the fellow GOP politician.
“I’m reminded of the old line from the Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid movie where one character says, ‘Morons, I have morons on my team,’” he added.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell took a similar view, remarking on Ms Greene’s attendance that “there’s no place in the Republican Party for white supremacists or anti-Semitism”.
Mr Vance, however, saw these comments from within the GOP party on his “friend” as attacks, and digging his heels even further into the ground for the Georgia lawmaker, added that he was not “going to throw her under the bus”.
“They play this guilt by association game, where they get us to stab our friends in the back,” the Ohio candidate began.“The accusation against Marjorie is pretty simple: that she appeared at a conference where somebody said something bad. And I ask, did she say something bad at the conference?”
In response to his own question, Mr Vance added that he agreed with “nearly every word that she said”.
“There’s no business in the world that asks you to stab your friends in the back like politics, I absolutely refuse to do it to Marjorie Taylor Greene,” he closed.
This isn’t the first time that Mr Vance has stuck his neck out for the Georgia lawmaker, much to his own detriment.
Back in January, the senate candidate was forced to find a new venue for a meet and greet after he’d announced that the conspiracy-peddling Georgia congresswoman would be joining him at his campaign stop in Loveland, Ohio.
