Anti Mandate Protestors Are Not Freedom Fighters
It would appear, at least for the moment, that the Omicron wave has crested.
There’s plenty of evidence that “long-COVID” will continue to disrupt the social fabric and the economy of the country. According to MarketPlace, an estimated 300,000 full time employees died from COVID, and 1.6 million have long-term disability from the aftereffects of the disease.
Long-term anti-anti-anti activism is also a thing. The people who are newly convinced the New World Order abolished liberty and have staked their entire identity and Facebook feed upon it are not just going to fade into the dustbin of history.
They’re anti-mandate on Sunday, anti-mask on Monday, and anti-vaxx on Tuesday. Next week it will be anti-critical race theory, anti-climate change, and anti-LGBTQ.
The actual impact of these groups has fallen way short of their promises, but their vitriol will continue to poison the well of American democracy.
Vaccination deadlines set by government organizations tell part of the story. San Diego Unified has sent termination notices to 73 workers, out of its roughly 15,000 employees, for failing to comply with the school district’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate. A total of 99% of SDUSD’s employees have complied.
Despite the public rallies built around the claim that hundreds of City of San Diego employees would be terminated, only 86 advanced notices of termination have been issued, including 19 workers in the Public Utilities Department, 15 in the Police Department, and 13 in Parks and Recreation. So I’m guessing the expected wave of murder and mayhem will be put on hold for another fearmongering campaign.
Over the past weekend the part of the movement posing as simply being anti-mandate hosted smaller than expected rallies around the country. The marquee event was in Washington DC on Sunday, with about half of the expected 24,000 people in attendance. Music from recent COVID victim Meatloaf was unironically played through loudspeakers.
Here are the Washington Post flavor-of-the-crowd paragraphs:
Some were white-haired; others were being pushed in strollers. Most were White and many wore gear with slogans supporting former president Donald Trump. A group of men in front of a cart with a Don’t Tread on Me flag started chants of “Let’s go Brandon” and “F--- Joe Biden” to cheers. The few who wore masks risked the tirades of a man screaming “Take those masks off!” and “It’s all a lie!”
Later, about 10 men wearing the insignia of the Proud Boys, an extremist group involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol, lingered on the Lincoln side of the Reflecting Pool. They briefly engaged in a shouting match with a small group of counterprotesters at the edge of the rally, then walked away.
The marchers carried posters and flags that included false statements such as “Vaccines are mass kill bio weapons” and “Trump won.” A bus was parked beside the Washington Monument, wrapped in “Arrest or Exile” signs and displaying pictures of Anthony S. Fauci, Bill Gates and Jacob Rothschild — the last an echo of antisemitic conspiracy theories involving the Rothschild family. A speaker blared Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You).”
It goes without saying that speakers continuously compared mask and vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany and/or the holocaust.
Robert F. Kennedy’s remarks drew condemnation from the Holocaust Museum:
Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was “reckless” and “outrageous” when he suggested things are worse for people today than they were for Anne Frank, the teenager who died in a Nazi concentration camp after hiding with her family in a secret annex in an Amsterdam house for two years, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum said.
“Making reckless comparisons to the Holocaust, the murder of six million Jews, for a political agenda is outrageous and deeply offensive. Those who carelessly invoke Anne Frank, the star badge, and the Nuremberg Trials exploit history and the consequences of hate,” the museum said Monday in a statement posted to Twitter.
The rhetoric involving comparisons to totalitarian states used by anti–anti-anti speakers serves the purpose of instilling a sense of being freedom fighters in audiences and is a way of suggesting approval for extreme measures.
Being a freedom fighter for the anti crowd builds on the misinformation prevalent on social media:
Freedom on this day meant freedom from fact checks, too. There was no one there to challenge the false claims about the dangers of the vaccine. No one, for example, told the crowd that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has received only 11,468 reports of death among people who received a Covid-19 vaccine after more than 529 million doses (0.0022 per cent) — and that not all of those cases will be due to the vaccine. Or that a body of scientific evidence shows that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks.
The only challenge to the vaccine scepticism, in fact, came from a tiny group of counter protesters who set themselves up to the side of the mall, and who could be heard from the other side of it, shouting a modified version of a popular slogan beloved by supporters of the former president Donald Trump: “Let’s go Darwin.”
USA Today featured an article by Will Carless explaining the increasing overlap between far right extremists and the anti crowd.
In its modern form, the anti-vaccine movement emerged in the late-1990s and early 2000s, primarily in opposition to the Measles Mumps and Rubella vaccine, which conspiracy theorists claimed had led to an increase in autism. This disproved claim persisted throughout the 2000s, attracting a considerable following but remaining largely apolitical until 2010, said Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and an outspoken critic of anti-vaccine protesters.
By 2010, the anti-vaccine movement had begun to get political and had aligned itself with the tea party and other far-right politicians. Opponents of vaccines formed political action committees that pushed for religious exemptions and other legislation to hamper the spread of vaccines.
He goes on to quote Hotez:
Hotez describes the current threat from anti-vaccine activists as a “triple-headed monster,” consisting of anti-science disinformation promoters, particularly in conservative media, nongovernmental anti-science nonprofits that provide false statistics and talking points to pundits and state actors such as the Russian government, which has flooded America with disinformation about vaccines.
I can’t stress enough the violence potential just beneath the surface of this movement.
In California, Senate Bill 871, introduced this week by Senator Richard Pan, would add COVID-19 vaccines to California’s list of required inoculations for attending K-12 schools, which can be skipped only if a student receives a rare medical exemption.
Along with Sen. Scott Wiener’s Senate Bill 866, which would permit children 12 and older to choose to be vaccinated, including against COVID-19, without a parent’s consent or knowledge, expect a furious response from West coast anti types.
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