Toxic alliance: How anti-vaxxers and antisemites fuel each other's conspiracies
First, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., compared mask requirements to “gold stars” from the Holocaust. Then Gigi Gaskins, a store owner in Nashville, Tenn., advertised anti-vaccination patches modeled on the yellow Stars of David that Nazis forced Jews to wear. And then Washington State Rep. Jim Walsh wore a yellow star as an anti-vaxxer stunt just before Independence Day.
Now, just weeks after she visited the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Greene, a QAnon conspiracy theorist, has doubled down on the antisemitism by calling those leading the federal effort for COVID vaccinations “medical brown shirts,” a reference to the paramilitary operation that helped Adolf Hitler take power.
The cross-fertilization of conspiracy theories is fueling dangerous distrust and misinformation. Science-denial and identity-based hate first converge in digital spaces and then, inevitably, in the real world.
It means three things to evoke Nazi symbolism like brown shirts and yellow stars for political performance in 2021. First and foremost, it means you are deeply and offensively ignorant of the events and mechanisms surrounding the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/toxic-alliance-anti-vaxxers-antisemites-102011700.html