There is an ongoing debate in the media about how to deal with outlandish false allegations that come from the political fringe. Some argue that you only amplify ridiculous opinions by refuting them, allowing them to reach a wider audience. But ignoring extremism is also dangerous.

On Sunday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine extremist, told a small crowd from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that the public health interventions used to fight COVID were more oppressive than the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis.

“Even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did,” Kennedy told the crowd. “Today the mechanisms are in place so that none of us can run, none of us can hide.”

Coming from a member of a famous political family, the remarks of President John F. Kennedy’s nephew and Attorney General and Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s son were reported internationally and quickly condemned as blatant political expediency. According to the Auschwitz Memorial Museum, they were “a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decay”.

This isn’t the first time Kennedy has used the specter of the Holocaust to fight vaccines, and he’s not the only one to do so.

It has become popular on the far right to claim that pandemic public health measures are as bad or worse than Nazi Germany’s genocidal policies.

Speakers absurdly compare supermarket mask policies or vaccine requirements for people working in healthcare facilities with the systematic murder of 6 million Jews, along with millions of other Slavs, Roma, homosexuals, communists and other “undesirables”.

It was on display right here in Maine last summer, when speakers at a rally against Governor Mills’ healthcare workers’ vaccine demand compared themselves to anti-Nazi resisters.

Deputy House Republican Leader Joel Stetkis offered a crude parody of “First They Came,” a famous Holocaust poem by theologian Martin Niemöller.

“They came after my gun, but I didn’t own a gun, so I didn’t do anything,” the Canaan lawmaker recited. “Then they came after my work…”

The rhetoric from State Representative Heidi Sampson, R-Alfred, was even more direct. She made the bizarre claim that officials who bar unvaccinated people from working with the sick would violate the post-war Nuremberg Code and could be executed under international law.

“Need I remind you of the late 1930s and 1940s in Germany. And the experiences with Josef Mengele? Samson said. “And what came out of it? The Nuremberg Code… Informed consent is at the top and violation is punishable by death.

Sampson doesn’t know what she’s talking about. We have had vaccine mandate laws in this country for over a century and no official has ever been charged with a crime, let alone hanged for implementing them. But it is not enough to say that these people are bad at history or that they insult the memory of the millions who died.

These extremists harbor a sense of victimhood that can galvanize a group and prepare it for action. Leaders may think they’re using metaphors, but who’s to say when violent rhetoric turns into actual violence?

What we should have learned on January 6, 2021 is that this is not a normal political debate. Whether it comes from Republican state lawmakers or a Democratic celebrity, we need to take it seriously and literally.

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