Pro-Death Rally

Yesterday, an anti-vaccine rally took place in Washington DC, in which perhaps ten thousand anti-vaccine activists descended upon our nation's capital for a superspreader-event-cum-hate-rally.  Much of the hype for this event can be laid at the feet of inexplicably popular meathead and podcaster Joe Rogan, who has made a career about JAQing off about politics and policy.   Boy, howdy, was this one a doozy, a heady farrago of persecution fantasy, Nazi imagery, and calls for violence.

I've been catching up on coverage by Time's Vera Bergengruen, The Daily Beast's Zachary Petrizzo, and NBC's Ben Collins, supplemented by coverage by activists who were present at the event.

I'm particularly disgusted by RFK, Jr's comparison of vaccine mandates to the Holocaust... this was a guy who had a stellar environmental record for decades, who is now a crank reduced to trivializing the real horrors of the Nazi regime:

At the antivaxx rally in DC, RFK Jr. says that in the future "none of us can run and none of us can hide" because of Bill Gates' satellites and also 5G, unlike... the Holocaust.

"Even in Hitler's Germany, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did." pic.twitter.com/bRtmDBTxZl

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) January 23, 2022

There were also farcical, hypocritical denunciations of the politicization of the pandemic:

“COVID should never have been politicized” says Dr. Robert Malone, surrounded by “Fuck Joe Biden” and “Trump 2024” and “Fascist Fauci”
flags, at a rally that included “Lock them up” chants and “A little cold? Communism’s colder so deal with it.” pic.twitter.com/V1PC9spRdK

— Vera Bergengruen (@VeraMBergen) January 23, 2022

No mainly right-wing (again, WTF, RFK JR?) action would be complete without calls for violence:

One of the things that struck me from the anti-vax march in DC today was the appeal to violence. pic.twitter.com/wzXHlLbtgA

— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) January 23, 2022

Activist Anthony Walker captured a nutter explicitly threatening violence against the press:

At today's Defeat the Mandates rally in DC, a man wearing an ARMY VETERAN hat says:

"When the war starts, I will put a bullet in your ass. Just for the press...I will kill anybody that has PRESS on them, because they started this shit."

He wants to be famous. Let's oblige. pic.twitter.com/Kx57jJ3QtB

— 🇺🇸 Anthony Walker, Lord of Sarcasm (Hot Medic) (@anthonycwalker) January 23, 2022

MAGA infiltrator Amanda Moore also covered the event, and provided some appalling imagery:

Hey @AlKapDC I think I found some of that Qanon/anti vaccine phenomenon you wrote about. https://t.co/JLGpTCS3jv pic.twitter.com/hwm001DfuB

— amanda aka frank 🐢 (@noturtlesoup17) January 23, 2022

All told, the anti-vax rally was an appalling spectacle as well as a superspreader event, and is sure to have ripple effects as the attendees return to their homes.  It was a freak show, to be sure, and the horrors won't be confined to one weekend in DC.