How About Not Using the Holocaust to Spread Vaccine Disinformation?

Two ugly mindsets merge.

This article was originally published on Ethos. Since its publication, I’ve noticed even more of an uptick in Antisemitic posts, as well as a pivot toward using racism as a tool for anti-vax rhetoric. I’ll be covering that next week.

Science is under attack again, and so too is history as climate deniers and profiteers spread vaccine disinformation through Holocaust memes.

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. 

This ubiquitous safety warning applies equally to history. The more a tragedy or genocide recedes into the past, the more we’re likely to immortalize it rather than learn from its ugly appearance. 

Television champions Genghis Khan and Vikings as alpha males exploiting faraway riches rather than as brutal murderers bent on conquest. Their stain has faded from memory; bonus points when said tragedy didn’t happen to your family. 

American politicians call slavery our original sin (as if another didn’t predate it) while also claiming that every citizen is privileged with equal opportunities today, which of course is a lie. Just as wealth is generational, so is lack. Those same politicians can’t even own up to the insurrection, indicative of their media’s distortion of our sense of time and place. And so they both create and exploit their media to further hypnotize their constituents. 

Holocaust Memes

If we can’t get 2021 right, good luck rewinding the clock eight decades. This distortion of time affords an erasure of empathy, a phenomenon that allows a broad contingent of yogis and wellness practitioners to feel justified, and even emboldened, by tying Holocaust memes to the COVID vaccines they claim are leading us straight into an authoritarian slaughter. 

Holistic practitioners are not the only contingent guilty of this heinous act, though in a media environment predominantly focused on MAGA acolytes, they’re often underrepresented in terms of influence. They’re also a group unlikely to own up to errors in judgment.

Data reveal a string of failed prophecies trailing QAnon’s infection of the American electorate. The COVID vaccine scare will also be abandoned, forgotten really—history shows all anti-vax efforts fade over time, though a more powerful drug, in the form of an attentional narcotic, must replace it. 

Right now we’re stuck in a whirlpool of the relentless Memification of every past autocratic regime preparing the paperwork for vaccine passports, one that seems to spin faster by the day. The damage being done by the increasing crop of anti-Semitic memes is indicative of a selfish culture unconcerned with anything but their own feelings. 

The Holocaust, it should be noted, is the term given specifically to the genocide of predominantly Jews during World War II (alongside other European minority groups, such as the Roma, derogatorily known as Gypsies; Soviet prisoners of war; gay men; the disabled; dissidents; and ethnic Poles). The word “genocide” can be applied more broadly; the Holocaust demands specificity. Lately, Holocaust is being used as a verb or common noun instead of a proper noun. This bastardization lets some ignore its historical gravity. 

Fear Profiteering

Language evolves; ignorance does not. We’d expect such abhorrent behavior from Holocaust deniers and white nationalists. Now the Holocaust is being thoughtlessly applied to public health efforts during an evolving pandemic, such as this recent article on the pseudoscience propaganda site, NaturalNews.com, titled:

The vaccine holocaust is well underway with globalists at war with 7.8 billion people: They’ve used two main bioweapons on us, a lab engineered virus and often deadly ‘vaccines’

As with many conspiritualists, Mike Adams has a vested interest in inventing deadly vaccines while preaching the perfection of your immune system: he’s a supplements slinger. Adams goes further than many of his ilk in his pro-Trump, climate-change-is-a-hoax agenda, though they’re catching up. 

In this latest series of lies, Natural News writes, 

Those who carried out the ambush have easily and quickly overrun country after country, like Hitler’s blitzkrieg “lightning war”. Those who did the ambush—call them the Globalists, the Ruling Power Elite, the Global Deep State, the One Percent (actually an infinitesimal fraction of the world population)—are a handful of super-wealthy elitists, at war with 7.8 billion people.

So far they’ve used two main bioweapons—a lab-engineered virus, and the harmful, often deadly COVID-19 “vaccines” (genetic modification agents) backed by a relentless propaganda campaign to trick people into getting the jab.

COVID Cures

The page is filled with ads for antioxidants, electrolyte drops, EMF blockers, turmeric extracts, and a “glyphosate-tested organic brown rice mini-bucket” because Adams has no shame, nor does he need to in order to monetize his crowd. As with other Holocaust-themed fearmongering, the secret cabal “behind it all” wants to murder tens of millions of Americans with vaccines and the same cabal is also dependent on this proletariat to leverage their billions. Not exactly a great economic strategy, but how else are you going to sell a brown rice bucket if you don’t continue to uplevel the conspiracy? 

David “Avocado” Wolfe rose to minor fame on the 2004 reality show, “Mad Mad House,” and has since taken one too many colloidal silver drops—one of his supposed treatments for COVID-19. He’s always been out there—one evening about 15 years ago, I stood with him as he explained that chocolate vibrates with the energy of the sun—but he’s also called deer antler spray “levitational” and claimed that solar panels drain the sun’s power. 

Science is a hindrance to his online supplements shop, and he’s grown increasingly paranoid since the election of Trump. In one particularly frenzied video, he said Trump is the only man who can save America. Wolfe’s Telegram channel is filled with misogynistic and racist content, as well as the promotion of Tucker Carlson, Mike Lindell, Trump, and, of course, Holocaust-themed memes, such as one featuring a concentration camp entrance with the words “Vaccines Will Make You Free.” 

Continuing with the theme of thoughtful analysis, pseudoscience profiteer, Sayer Ji, wrote that the COVID vaccine rollout resembled “previous phases of human history marred by genocide.” Sure, he didn’t cite the Holocaust by name, though he included a yellow star with the words, “no Vax.” 

Inventing Oppression

Ironically, I went to high school with Douglas “Sayer” Ji, and I promise that our sleepy borough wasn’t under the purview of an oppressive authoritarian regime. We endured bored and racist cops pulling over teenagers on Route 18 because they could, but they always let you go after a bit of posturing; you didn’t end up in a gas chamber.

This is a common theme with many conspiritualists in their anti-vax fervor: void of any real oppression in their lives, they fantasize and then invent one, never realizing that people that have lived through the atrocities of war, famine, and genocide might have something to say on the topic. 

Ji isn’t the only one drawing a poor parallel between the infamous yellow star that identified Jews and modern American politics, i.e. “libs” or Democrats. Marjorie Taylor Greene did so on May 25, but to her credit, she apologized on June 14; it was the first time I ever saw evidence of humility in one of her speeches. 

The Highwire’s Del Bigtree rocked a yellow star at an anti-vax rally as well. Founder of the anti-vax Informed Consent Network, a hedge fund manager-funded disinformation service, Bigtree was paid $262,000 in 2019 by his Wall Street overlords to spread vaccine disinformation. Professing anti-Semitism is a great way to stay relevant and nothing seems beneath a man who has elite benefactors to answer to. 

Co-opting the Holocaust for an unrelated agenda-fueled “movement”—trace the money on any of these conspiritualists and you’ll discover a supplement grift, MLM, book, series of courses, and other holistic tchotchkes—is, at heart, anti-Semitic. While the CDC is guilty of unreliable communications, science is a dynamic and changing process; anti-vaxxers mercilessly pounce on any narrative change when research demands constant updating. None of the agency’s press release failures reflect the gravity of the greatest atrocity of the 20th century. Only a privileged population that’s either seriously deluded or sees serious financial potential—or both—would sink to such depths. 

As the Center for Countering Digital Hate noted in June, the merging of anti-Semitism and anti-vax sentiment can be understood as follows: 

Vaccinations are not the only touchpoint for anti-Semitism in the wellness industry. Anti-vax godfather, Robert F Kennedy Jr, shouted the quiet part when producing an anti-vax film with Tony Muhammed, a man that “has spent years ranting about ‘wicked Jews’ and ‘the Jewish controlled media,’ claiming Jews are plotting to ‘control’ African Americans.”

The Clown Prince of Wellness

Then there’s JP Sears, an Austin-based life coach and aspiring comedian who, as McGill’s Jonathan Jarry calls him, is the “clown prince of wellness.” Jarry continues,

JP Sears is part of a dangerous movement that has weaponized doubt under the cover of self-empowerment. He encourages his followers to be contrarians and to trust their intuition. He wants to feel what is “untrue,” his guiding principle being that he doesn’t have the truth but he knows “what bullshit tastes like.” This mistrustful streak leads him to entertain notions that this pandemic was planned by governments and Bill Gates in order to censor and track the populace. He and many other health gurus promote the “gut-feelification” of health. If it feels right to the primitive parts of our brain, it must be true, they tell us. This is a recipe for how not to think clearly.

As a recent Holocaust-themed Instagram post shows, however, Sears might monetize the wellness industry, but he himself is not well. After cutting his teeth in the yoga world by poking fun at green-juice-sipping holistic practitioners while selling supplements back to the same crowd, he realized his brand could scale. Exploiting yoga moms was a good grift. Then he got political and discovered a better one. 

Tragedy, as Naomi Klein wrote in The Shock Doctrine, brings opportunity. Real estate developers snatched up prime neighborhoods in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city. MAGA-leaning conspiritualists paid more attention to Sears than West Coast yogis ever did. They exhibited more spunk. When Sears started attacking the “woke,” Critical Race Theory, feminism, and transgenders, his social media numbers inflated quicker than his ego.

They smelled blood; he sniffed opportunity. 

Exploiting the Exploited

In a recent video, Sears pits Critical Race Theory, feminism, and gender identity against the voice of logic, which of course is him. In eight minutes—well, under seven, as he had to save the last minute for his supplement pitch—he attempts to give voice to a Critical Race Theorist (dressed, for some reason, as a Beatnik), a feminist, and a transgender person. It goes as well as you’d expect. 

As with many Critical Race Theory “critics,” Sears looked no further than the first Google hit of Martin Luther King Jr quotes—a common tendency for whites that want to absolve themselves of understanding the man in any capacity. If only Sears would have read King’s 1967 book, “Where Do We Go From Here,” he might have found this passage:

Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn. The reality of substantial investment to assist Negroes into the twentieth century, adjusting to Negro neighbors and genuine school integration, is still a nightmare for all too many white Americans…These are the deepest causes for contemporary abrasions between the races. Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear, but for the Negro there is a credibility gap he cannot overlook. He remembers that with each modest advance the white population promptly raises the argument that the Negro has come far enough. Each step  forward accents an ever-present tendency to backlash.

Sadly, that would have required nuanced thought, which Sears is incapable of producing. 

Empathy isn’t the ability to wrangle others into your mindset. Rather, it’s understanding and feeling what they’re going through. Sometimes, this requires abandoning what you think you know in order to open up to the possibility that others think differently than you. In Sears’s world, equanimity only occurs when everyone else comes around to him, a trait that will certainly handicap him when the solitude of his echo chamber eventually engulfs him. 

At the very least, Sears avoided sharing Holocaust tropes. 

Of course he didn’t. 

True, this is not an anti-vax video. In some ways, it’s even more insidious. This animated short film attempts to link Hitler’s rise with current American politics. Godwin’s Law be damned, propaganda isn’t subject to history when viewers are ignorant of the past.  

Here’s the thing: many American politicians are not to be trusted. In this country, being elected to public office predominantly involves catering to vested interests. While not always the case, it happens often enough to raise suspicion of the entire infrastructure. The concentration of wealth in an increasingly smaller population without governmental oversight is an issue we’ll continually have to face as the struggle for resources in an age of climate migration becomes reality. 

But that’s not really the point of this video. 

Suggesting that the Biden administration is ushering us into authoritarianism is absurd. This could only happen when a population is exempt from the atrocities of genocide, racial profiling, and misogyny: they confuse a stick for a snake. Even more strangely, they continue to support a snake. There was an administration that had the potential—and still has the potential in a few more years—to bludgeon democracy beyond repair. 

The Anti-Woke

As with Trump, Sears has been trumpeting his hero’s journey for some time. In the Holocaust video, he fancies himself as representing the resistance—the “woke” crowd that recognizes the tyranny of suggesting a highly efficacious vaccine is really a plot to murder the very sheeple necessary to keep the oiled machinery of capitalism churning. 

Sears is the anti-woke, the voice of reason, an ideal representative of perfect immunity, and the anti-capitalist champion of the people—who he’ll gladly offer 20% off on blue light blocking glasses to protect you from the twisted machinations of the social media platforms he shamelessly monetizes with videos of the Holocaust. 

Meanwhile, as a new report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate finds, 84 percent of all anti-Semitic posts on social media are never removed. Sears has been claiming he’ll be taken off of social media for months, another grift that keeps his downline sated.

Anti-Semitism is especially potent for those who never realize they’re committing it. Any totem will serve their feverish desire to cosplay the oppressed, regardless of who they harm in the process. They remain inoculated from the audacity of their depravity.

If only we were so lucky.