Have you ever heard two unfamiliar words, and assumed they’re different pronunciations of the same word? It has happened to all of us at some point. For most of us, though, it has not happened with a word like “Gestapo,” which is a very well-known term in politics and history.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, in the midst of a rant against Nancy Pelosi, accused the House Speaker of having a “gazpacho police.”
Gazpacho, of course, is a chilled Spanish soup, made most frequently, though not exclusively, with tomatoes. The Gestapo was the notorious Nazi secret police.
Taylor Greene no doubt meant to compare the Capitol Hill police to the murderous Nazi secret police, and not to the refreshing soup, though in truth the organization bears little resemblance to either.
And while it pales beside her confusion of Gestapo and gazpacho, I’d note that “Gestapo police” is redundant, like “Luftwaffe Air Force” or “Red Army Army.”
After I wrote about Taylor Greene’s claim that the Rothschild family used space lasers to start forest fires so they could buy the land to build a rail project, she replied that she didn’t know the Rothschilds were Jewish. I found it implausible that she would not have heard of possibly the most famous Jewish family in the world and the centerpiece of a century’s worth of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. But now I think maybe it’s possible she actually didn’t know.
