I need not tell you that this comparison is offensive—it is obviously and staggeringly offensive to anyone with half a brain, let alone anyone, like me, still living in the epigenetic shadow of a genocide that killed more than a third of the entire global Jewish population. This isn’t even the first time the yellow star has been implemented by the American right—it’s been adopted by gun owners, right-wing pundits suspended from Twitter, et cetera, although the covid-19 vaccine fracas is certainly the most widespread and wholesale embrace of this particular brand of specious and self-imposed victimhood.

I’ve been trying to parse out why, precisely, this analogy is so compelling to the legions of anti-vaxxers who feel compelled to wear it proudly on their bodies: is it simply a flair for the dramatic? A fault in an education system that, seeking to emphasize American heroics in World War II and in general, fails to look inward towards the myriad examples of systemic oppression within this country, instead forcing those with a paucity of imagination to cast their gazes many decades back in time and across an ocean? Is the donning of yellow stars during lockdown protests the result of a victim complex nurtured tenderly in the bosom of Christian, conservative America? Certainly the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor and vocal anti-Nazi dissident hung by the Reich in 1945, has an outsize imprint on evangelical education. Or is it, in a primarily white-led movement, a compulsive need to seek historical exemplars, thin on the ground, in which the oppressed are perceived, currently, to be white? It’s not just cheap, though; it’s, as one commenter on the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer noted, a dilution, if perhaps unintentional, of a symbol of genocide. It is the crudest way of slapping an interlocutor in the face with a fountain of bad facts—did you know?—and through sheer outrage conveying the message: Wake up!