A Washington, D.C. City Council member, who last month espoused a conspiracy theory about Jews controlling the weather, visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum this week but left early.
City Council member Trayon White Sr. (D.) did not appear during the visit to have a working knowledge of the Holocaust, the Washington Post reports.
Though the visit was meant to rehabilitate his image, his lack of knowledge and desire to learn about the Holocaust confused his tour guides.
At one point during his visit on Wednesday, White was looking at a photo of a woman shuffling down a street in Norden, Germany. She had a sign hanging from her neck that read, "I am a German girl and allowed myself to be defiled by a Jew," and she was surrounded by Nazi stormtroopers.
White asked, "Are they protecting her?"
White's tour guide, Lynn Williams, said, "No. They're marching her through."
"Marching through is protecting," White said.
"I think they're humiliating her," Williams replied.
After seeing photos of German troops executing Catholic clergy in Poland by firing squad, White asked, "Were they actually manufacturing these weapons?"
He subsequently disappeared from the tour, which was only half over. Members of White's staff stayed on.
Rabbi Batya Glazer, who accompanied White on the tour, explained the walling in of Polish Jews at an exhibit on the Warsaw Ghetto.
One aide asked if it was similar to "a gated community."
"Yeah, I wouldn't call it a gated community," Glazer said. "More like a prison."
At the completion of the tour, White was found standing alone on a sidewalk outside the museum.
"I’ll be coming back to see more of the museum. I didn’t get a chance to see the whole thing," he said.
He didn't have an answer for why he left early and did not say whether he had reassessed his comments on the Rothschilds controlling the weather. White was criticized last month after he posted a video where he suggested the Rothschilds, a famous European business dynasty descended from 18th-century Jewish banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild, were responsible for "climate manipulation" and the snow that was falling in D.C.