If there’s one thing a wide swath of the modern Republican Party loves to do, it’s disregard simple public health advice during a devastating global pandemic. But if there’s a second thing an alarmingly large number of GOP adherents love, it’s then comparing those same public health efforts to Nazi Germany’s capital-H Holocaust against the Jews.
Here’s Ohio Rep. Warren Davidson, a relatively low-profile — albeit characteristically extreme — Republican congressman, with a real scorcher of a Tweet on Wednesday:
It’s worth pointing out that Davidson’s “innoculations are literally Nazis!” message is in response to a fairly innocuous tweet from Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, reminding constituents of her community’s upcoming COVID mitigation measures. Is there a sizeable number of Davidson’s fellow Ohioans who are deeply concerned with what people 500 miles away need to bring with them to a movie theater? I doubt it.
In any case, Davidson’s equating of COVID vaccinations with Nazi Germany’s industrialized genocide against European Jewry, Roma, and LGBTQ+ communities (among others) is not simply absurdly offensive and stupid on its face, it’s also historical bullshit, as writer and researcher Talia Lavin noted this past November. What’s more, Davidson’s invocation of the Holocaust is already the sort of thing that his more enthusiastically psychotic fellow Republicans have publicly denounced. For instance, here’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has repeatedly made similar comparisons, admitting there is “nothing comparable” between the COVID pandemic and Nazi Germany.
To be clear, the sincerity (or lack thereof) of Taylor Greene’s apology isn’t what’s important here. It’s the fact that she publicly did so at all — a sign, if nothing else, that the GOP knows that these sorts of comparisons are politically radioactive among the majority of the country, at the very least. And yet, Davidson not only went ahead and did it anyway, but he also doubled down in a subsequent tweet, insisting that “the Nazis dehumanized Jewish people before segregating them, segregated them before imprisoning them, imprisoned them before enslaving them, and enslaved them before massacring them.”
That’s technically true, Warren, but it doesn’t mean you’re right. It just means you’re yet another Republican figure who sees an effort to literally keep people alive and assumes it means you personally are a persecuted minority akin to the millions of people murdered less than a century ago. That’s not discrimination, my guy. That’s just an inflated sense of ego and victimhood — which, it just so happens, is what it takes to get ahead in the GOP these days.
