The violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement: “Vaccine Holocaust” and potential impending attacks on journalists

After yesterday’s post about how antivaxers were utterly losing their mind about an ill-chosen idiom that appeared in a Boston Herald editorial last week. In it, the editor concluded by saying that how antivaxers have been preying on the Somali immigrant population in Minnesota, feeding them antivaccine misinformation that has resulted in two measles outbreaks, one in 2011 and one this year, which is up to 58 victims, a number that continues to climb, should be a “hanging offense.” In my post, I emphasized the hypocrisy and disingenuousness of the response of antivaxers, who took an offhand use of a questionable idiom and turned it into headlines blaring that the Boston Herald is advocating death squads to undertake the mass murder of antivaxers. Basically, antivaxers routinely use imagery on a daily basis far more violent than an offhand quip about a “hanging offense,” such as photos in which antivaccine mothers brandish large caliber weapons to defend their children against depraved pro-vaxers, idiots like Del Bigtree say that antivaxers should take up arms to resist the new California law eliminating nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine requirements (which he hilariously walked back when called on it), and all manner of antivaxers liken the vaccination program to rape, the Holocaust, Nazis, the Titanic, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and a tsunami.

In fact, I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw a particularly odious antivaxer, Ginger Taylor practically beg her fellow antivaxers not to threaten violence or use antisemitic language criticizing the Herald‘s editorial page editor Rachelle Cohen. Cohen, not surprisingly, has gotten a lot of hate mail, including (predictably, given her name) antisemitic hate mail, complete with a large volume of antisemitic calls and e-mails, leading her to observe drolly (and quite correctly), “Discussions that begin with how sorry folks are I’m not headed for ‘the ovens’ [are] not likely to be fruitful.” (prominently featured was a comment about how disappointed an antivaxer was that she wasn’t being sent to the ovens). It amuses me to no end how antivaxers so gleefully make my points for me. Ginger basically has to beg her readers to knock it off with violent imagery far worse than the poorly chosen quip about a “hanging” offense that she now finds oh-so-offensive, coupled with Nazi level antisemitism. Hilarity indeed. I’d almost feel sorry for Ms. Taylor, but she brings it on herself—with gusto—and her Dunning-Kruger arrogance of ignorance is off the charts. However, compared to what’s going on now, Ms. Taylor is merely an amusing sideline, as you will see. I realize that some of this will be a little repetitive of yesterday’s post, but I consider this important enough to cover again, but from a different angle.

While it was fun to focus on the hypocrisy, what was less fun was what I learned later in the day and only mentioned in addendums. Specifically, it’s a very conscious campaign on the part of antivaxers, led by Mike Adams, to threaten and intimidate journalists criticizing the antivaxers who have been spreading misinformation among the Somali community. To give you an idea where he’s coming from, he’s recently set up a website that he calls Vaccine Holocaust. (Obviously, anything resembling subtlety or good taste was never Adams’ strong suit.) At the top of the headlines last night when I perused the website was More children harmed by VACCINES than from GUNSHOTS, government statistics reveal. It’s a truly hilariously dumb article in which someone named Lance D. Johnson (who deserves all the ridicule he can get for writing this) takes a look at the horrific statistics on gunshot injuries and deaths among children in the US and compares them to the number of adverse events reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database, the vast majority of which are minor and many of the rest not even related to vaccines because lawyers have been encouraging parents to report “vaccine injury” for a long time. Basically, it’s comparing data from a verified database (the National Database of Inpatient Stays for Children) to that of a database where the reports are not verified (VAERS) and parents can report that vaccines turned someone into the Incredible Hulk and have the report entered.

The stupid, it burns.

But Vaccine Holocaust is about more than just flaming stupidity. It’s about naked intimidation; that is, if Adams actually goes through with his threats. As is his wont, Adams claims to have reported the editorial staff of the Boston Herald to the FBI, the Massachusetts Attorney General, the Boston Police, and more. Not surprisingly, the Attorney General didn’t take him seriously (as well he shouldn’t have, given the First Amendment). I’m sure there were many chuckles in the Attorney General’s office though, likely coupled with a whole lot of facepalming. From this Adams, again, as is his wont, concludes that it’s the beginning of a huge conspiracy to murder antivaxers based on the raving of an equally deluded antivaxer, Jeffery Jaxen:

Beta testing, sometimes referred to user acceptance testing, is defined in the computer world as a technique in which hardware is subjected to small trial environment before full implementation. Establishment media outlets and government health agencies have ramped up the pressure and targeting of families, parents, and children over the past few years. Vaccination, once a choice after careful deliberation over the dangers by way of full informed consent, has been painted as an authoritarian demand by the state. The removal of full informed consent, public health debates and medical choice has been superseded to make way for the ever-expanding profit margins of pharmaceutical corporations.

Media outlets now regularly attack and dehumanize anyone who does not subscribe to what can only be described as a religious-like dogma of the failing tenets of the medical-industrial complex. Humanity has witnessed governments and their mouthpieces, often with corporate collusion, attempt to divide and conquer their populations for the purpose of greater control and, in extreme cases, extermination. The slippery slope practice of painting innocent subgroups of society, often used as scapegoats for failed government policy, as a danger to the collective is well-documented and extremely dangerous.

To pave the way for California Senate Bill 277, marinated in Big Pharma money and political corruption, The LA Times ran the article titled “Rich, educated and stupid parents are driving the vaccination crisis.” Such a headline now seems tame in today’s accepted media landscape ever since the Boston Herald labeled public debate about questionable health practices and parents talking about their children’s vaccine injuries “a hanging offense.”

You can guess what’s coming next. Jaxen cites Anthony respectfulinsolence.com’s terrible study that was retracted from not just one, but two, bottom-feeding predatory pay-to-publish “open access” journals without mentioning the little bit about the retraction, and concludes that more fascism in the service of “forced vaccination” is on the way. Not surprisingly, Adams eats this up. Unfortunately, though, he takes it in a truly ugly direction. Based on the Attorney General’s recognizing a crank when he sees one (or, quite possibly, a bunch of cranks if several more antivaxers complained), Adams thinks himself justified to do this:

In other words, the Massachusetts government has just told anti-vaxxers that you must now take up your own self-defense against journo-terrorists, since the “authorities” in government refuse to apply the law to those who work at the Boston Herald. Your lives are now in danger. You are being targeted by the Boston Herald and any number of psychopaths who may be motivated by the Herald’s call for mass murder. The government has now declared it will do nothing to stop the calls for murder by “journalists” as long as they are targeting people who oppose toxic vaccine ingredients.

It’s time to start publishing the home addresses of journo-terrorists who escalate violence against concerned parents and independent scientists

This all explains why I plan to publish the home addresses of the journo-terrorists working at the Boston Herald, in order to warn local Bostonians that they might be living next to murderous, sociopathic mental health miscreants who are a danger to society. Since the Massachusetts government refuses to take any action to protect the public from these dangerous psychopaths, it’s obvious that we must take action to protect ourselves. The right to self-defense, after all, is one of the most sacred rights we possess.

Our non-profit division is also launching the public education site VaccineHolocaust.org where journo-terrorists who deny that vaccines harm children will be named and shamed, providing a permanent record of their crimes against children and humanity.

There is a “protest” planned for tomorrow at the Boston Herald being publicized by a local antivaccine group, Health Choice Massachusetts. As of last night there were 23 saying they were going, a whole five up from the night before. In any case, at this “rally,” Adams is urging people to do this:

Bring your cameras to the protest! Natural News plans to publish photos of Boston Herald staff members walking to and from the building, their vehicle license plate numbers and other details, to the extent allowed by law. If you attend this rally, be sure to take photos and send them to Natural News for publication.

If anyone attending the rally can bring an audio recorder, attempt to interview Boston Herald staffers and ask if they support government-run execution squads of so-called “anti-vaxxers.” If they answer yes, ask them if they plan to do the killing themselves, or if they want government to do the killing for them. Find out if they plan to use lethal injection, hanging, machetes or guns. After all, history has shown there are all sorts of ways for genocidal factions of society to run mass murder campaigns against the people they don’t like. We’re wondering which method the Boston Herald favors.

You might also ask them whether they think killing children with toxic vaccine ingredients is also ethically justifiable, since they’re also advocating the mass murder of naturopaths, scientists and journalists who oppose mercury in vaccines. Find out if there’s any other group they also think should be murdered, such as “climate denialists” or people who grow herbs. Maybe they hate “man boobs” and want to murder men with breasts.

You know, whenever I think Adams can’t sink any lower or become any more ridiculous, he always proves me wrong. As much as I like to laugh at his ridiculousness in urging antivaxers to pretend they’re Michael Moore or Geraldo Rivera asking “gotcha” questions, his threat to the journalists of the Boston Herald is anything but funny. For one thing, a lot more people work at a newspaper than just journalists, and only a relatively small number of people put together most editorial pages. Even fewer still actually write the editorials. Neither is this the least bit amusing:

The sheer cynicism is breathtaking. Here you have a group of people, nearly all white, latching on to one of the most shameful parts of American history, the lynchings of black people, mostly men, that took place over many decades after the Civil War and claiming to be on the side of the Somali immigrants, who are also black. The condescending racism is beyond belief. So is the obsessive use of hanging imagery, be it Ms. Taylor’s use of an illustration of women being hung after the Salem witch trials or Adams’ use of an old photo of the lynching of a black man to try to claim he’s on the side of the Somalis, or the many photos of nooses obsessively included in posts and articles on various antivax blogs and websites. It’s almost as though they really, really like (or are fascinated) by the imagery of hanging.

I also can’t help but point out here that, first of all, the press is not attacking the Somalis. Racist xenophobes (but I repeat myself) are attacking them, using the measles outbreak as a convenient excuse and ignoring how it was American antivaxers who fed them misinformation that vaccines cause autism, who frightened the Somalis into not vaccinating. If there were no measles outbreak, the same people would just continuing to demonize the Somalis as a fertile recruiting ground for ISIS. Rather, most journalists in the mainstream press realize that the Somalis are victims of American antivaxers and, of course, the British fraud who inspired them, Andrew Wakefield, and that’s at whom their ire is being directed, not the Somalis—and appropriately so. Again, the Somalis are the victims, and antivaxers are the perpetrators. Meanwhile, the public health officials trying to combat the antivaccine misinformation being spread by the antivaxers are the heros, and the journalists are documenting it all.

These are the reasons why I scoff when antivaxers claim not to be antivaccine. I mean, seriously. Think about it. Not only do they liken vaccination programs to all those horrible things I discussed above, but they think nothing of using obvious intimidation tactics to attempt to frighten critics who have the temerity to call them out into silence. I first noticed that 12 years ago when I was a new blogger and my true identity was actually not one of the worst-kept secrets on the Internet. Antivaxers and other cranks were obsessed with finding out who I was. That’s because they have no science and therefore can’t win when science is the basis of the discussion. Instead, they seek ways to attack their critics, either through ad hominems or through the threat of actual physical attacks (and, let’s face it, that’s the undertext of Adams’ plans). Discovering who their critics are, digging for every bit of dirt they can on them, publicizing anything negative they can find, and harassing critics at their jobs or schools are the first preferred techniques of dealing with criticism, not the use of evidence, science, and reason to persuade. Adams’ plan to dox employees of the Boston Herald and other provaccine advocates who criticize antivaxers is nothing new. It’s how antivaxers operate. It’s how they’ve always operated since I first discovered that there are people clueless enough to view vaccines as dangerous.