The far right is perverting First Amendment privileges

An anti-vaccination patch, evoking the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people, on Oct. 28 in New York. (David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)

Patriotic blood should boil over the vicious cynicism exposed in Waitman Wade Beorn’s finely reasoned essay “When the far right adopts the pose of victims” [Outlook, Nov. 7].

We should rage at the obscenity of heirs of Jim Crow racism, antisemitism and industrial abuse who now seek to pose as genuine Holocaust victims to defy inconvenient but justifiable government mandates. 

Their inhumanity insults all who have suffered under real supremacist persecution, including my own martyred Jewish forebears.

First Amendment privileges of our democracy are perverted by the reflexes of vaccine evaders, climate deniers and insensible parents who would refuse their children access to historical truths, as told, for instance, in Toni Morrison’s portrayal of the abominations of slavery. 

So cogent are the positive lessons that the existence of vast numbers of deniers warns of a social dementia nearly too ghastly to behold.  

Anti-American fascism needs to be denounced broadly and insistently.

Philip Allen, Annapolis