An Idaho Republican lawmaker says stay-at-home orders are ‘no different’ to sending Jews to concentration camps.
State representative Heather Scott also compared Idaho’s Republican Governor Brad Little to Adolf Hitler after he extended the statewide lockdowns until the end of April.
In a radio interview Scott said: “When you have government telling you that your business is essential or non-essential, yours is non-essential and someone else’s is essential, we have a problem there. I mean, that’s no different than Nazi Germany where you had government telling people either you were an essential worker or a non-essential worker, and non-essential workers got put on a train”, Scott said referencing the Holocaust.
Scott said the Great Fire of 1910 – which killed 86 people – would have been an emergency worthy of the shut down order.
She added: ‘You can’t take away people’s lives and property without compensation, and that’s exactly what he would be doing. I mean, they are already calling him Little Hitler — Gov. Little Hitler.’
Scott also compared COVID-19 to the number of people killed by flu each year.
She noted around 34,000 people are estimated to have died in the US from the flu across the whole of last year.
COVID-19 has killed more than 40,000 Americans in around two months, and there is no vaccine.
Little announced last week that the order would extend to the end of April in the effort to slow the spread of coronavirus, although he lightened some restrictions so nonessential businesses could begin providing curbside service.
Still, the news was met with derision by some members of the far-right in Idaho, and some libertarian, gun-rights and anti-vaccine organizations began directing members to defy the order.
Scott added: ‘I think people will start educating others, and people will be more and more vocal until they will say, ‘Enough of this’, and put the pressure – hopefully political pressure – on him. That’s what I would hope for. We have real men in Idaho. We have some real men…we’ve got real men that know their rights and God-fearing men.’
Most at the Idaho protest were standing shoulder-to-shoulder and not wearing masks.
Some carried signs supporting President Trump, others claimed the coronavirus is a hoax.
The effect of the coronavirus on the economy has been dire. In Idaho, nearly 96,000 people have filed for unemployment since Little first declared a state of emergency on March 13.
That’s far more than the number of claims filed in Idaho during all of 2019.
Local human rights advocates called Scott’s remarks offensive.
‘Mass murder and genocide is not the same thing as deciding which businesses should essentially stay open and which should stay closed,’ Rabbi Tamar Malino of Spokane’s Temple Beth Shalom said.
Scott had earlier called the governmental response to the virus ‘a way to chip away at the foundations of our Constitution to push a global, socialistic agenda while in the midst of a national emergency.’
Similar protests have been held across the country, with groups pushing back against stay-at-home orders in places like Michigan, Texas, North Carolina and Virginia.