Unhinged Anti-Vaxxer Who Wore Star of David to Mandate Hearing: ‘It’s Not Meant to Be Offensive’
In a Friday hearing on vaccine mandates in Topeka, former Kansas City, Kansas mayoral candidate Daran Duffy wore a yellow Star of David he said was meant to evoke the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust. It is just the latest such comparison to be made in the state capitol.
At a hearing with the Special Committee on Government Overreach and the Impact of COVID-19 Mandates, Daran said of the Star of David emblem on his chest, “It’s not meant to be offensive. It’s not meant to be controversial.”
“It’s meant rather to be a reminder (that) everything Hitler did, every single thing that Hitler did, he did in accordance with the laws of his country,” he told state legislators, the Kansas Star reports.
Video from the hearing was trending on social media Saturday, showing Daran’s answer to committee members pressing him about why he, his wife, and his daughter were wearing the stars.
“The reason I’m wearing the star is, as I said it’s not to be offensive, but it’s to remember, and for everybody else to call to remembrance World War II. The Jewish people were forced to wear a yellow star to identify them as Jews. And they were ushered off to the death camps in accordance with that,” he said. “There were medical tests, there were experimentations done on human people. And while this hasn’t reached that deprivation, we are definitely moving in that direction.”
Just weeks ago, health committee chair Rep. Brenda Landwehr, a Republican, similarly invoked the holocaust when referring to restrictions on non-vaccinated individuals. “This is racism against the modern day Jew,” she said, “Which is anyone who disagrees.”
Like Daran’s comment about moving in “that direction”, Landwehr in her comparison of mandates to the slaughter of six million people said she “hopes” that America isn’t going to “go down a path” toward the same.
State Senate Republicans denounced Daran’s comparison on Friday.
“Senate Republicans reject, in the strongest possible terms, any analogies to the Holocaust. Such comparisons are inappropriate and bear no resemblance to the issues we are debating today,” wrote the state’s senate president Ty Masterson in a comment retweet of a story about the incident.
Kansas House speaker Ron Ryckman said in his tweet: “Let me be clear: the issues being debated today are important to KS, but they are in no way comparable to what millions of Jews endured who were ripped from their families, & marked for death by the Nazis.”
These comparisons have been made by some Republicans in other states, as well, including in Oklahoma and, many times, at the national level like in the case of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who specifically invoked the wearing of Stars.
