Those individualist anti-mask, anti-vax KC protesters sure read from the same script

“You f--ing tyrants!” one man in the crowd repeatedly yelled at Kansas City Council members at the end of Wednesday night’s hearing on extending the city’s mask mandate. “You suck!” yelled another.

The unmasked and unvaxxed? Nobody tells them what to do. Yet they do seem to be working from a shared script, and sticking to a standard choreography.

“Give me liberty or give me death!” another man who had come to berate the council committee yelled. When Patrick Henry said that in 1775, in the same speech in which he also called King George a puppet and a tool, he was opposing British military intervention in Virginia. But the KC protester who quoted Henry to decry the tyranny of lifesaving public health measures seemed to mean it just as literally as our fiery Founding Father did.

At hearing after hearing, mask and vaccine mandates are compared to the horrors of the Holocaust. No matter how many times the Anti-Defamation League explains how hurtful it is to hear a life-saving inconvenience compared to the murder of 6 million Jews, if there’s a hearing on COVID-19, well then here come the Nazi references.

Sure enough, at City Hall on Thursday, when the council voted to extend the mask mandate to Sept. 23, one protester wore a yellow Star of David on her shirt. “I don’t care your view,” tweeted Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, “wearing a yellow badge into a City Council meeting symbolizing Holocaust victimhood because you hate masks is despicable.” Yes, it is. Yet it keeps happening.

In keeping with the unwritten mandate that any imposition at all must be likened to outright extermination, a mask opponent at a hearing in Lawrence on Wednesday night said that public health measures to combat COVID are part of a “Nazi takeover … or whatever’s happening.”

We’ve already reported that at a last week’s Springfield City Council meeting, about 15 people showed up wearing big yellow Stars of David pinned to their shirts and dresses.

In St. Louis County last week, two speakers said COVID vaccination efforts were a violation of the 1947 Nuremberg Code intended to prevent a repeat of the inhumane medical experiments done on prisoners at Auschwitz.

“There’s a clear agenda to promote a dystopian techno-medical dictatorship, a one-world government … warned against by JFK shortly before his assassination,” one of them explained.

A third said, “There is no virus; it’s a scam. What did the Nazis say? The bigger the lie, the more will believe it.”

When did we lose all perspective, anyway?

I guess we can be glad that only a communist rather than a Nazi takeover was declared imminent in Kansas City on Wednesday night.

As interim Health Director Frank Thompson explained that data shows unvaccinated people are driving the current outbreak, the crowd laughed and yelled out that this amounted to “fascism” and “Marxism.”

COVID deaths here are up, and just on the day of the Wednesday hearing, five people died of it in the Kansas City metro. But opponents don’t seem to believe that.

“You’re provoking a civil war!” one woman yelled.

“This is not about science; this is about control,” Andrew Cole told council members. “You simply want to muzzle people.”

“Instead of public servants, you are acting like public dictators,” Shannon Santschi said.

One comment with which we completely agree: A Kansas Citian named David Garrett said he is “sick and tired” of COVID precautions. “The public has had it,” he said.

Yup, we have. And unfortunately, as long as so many are unwilling to do their part to slow the spread of COVID-19, we will keep right on having it.