UK

Nurse struck off for being an anti-vaxxer compares doctors to Nazi criminal

Elisa Menendez and Daniel Binns for MetroMonday 26 Jul 2021 

Anti-lockdown activist Kate Shemirani drew outrage for suggesting NHS workers should be hanged (Picture: Rex)

A disgraced ex-nurse struck off after spreading Covid misinformation, has been condemned for comparing NHS workers to Nazi war criminals.

Anti-vax activist Kate Shemirani faces a police investigation after she appeared to suggest health workers should be hanged during an anti-lockdown protest in London on Saturday.

Speaking to thousands in Trafalgar Square, she likened medical staff to those who took part in mass killings under Hitler’s regime.

She said: ‘Get their names. Email them to me. With a group of lawyers, we are collecting all that.

‘At the Nuremburg Trials the doctors and nurses stood trial and they hung.

‘If you are a doctor or a nurse, now is the time to get off that bus… and stand with us the people.’

The online clip, which has been viewed more than 4 million times, has sparked a fierce public backlash.

Campaigning group run by frontline staff, NHS Million, tweeted: ‘This is what NHS staff woke up to this morning. A rally talking about hanging doctors and nurses.

‘This has caused considerable distress amongst NHS staff.’ 

Anti-vaxxer Kate Shemirani compares NHS heroes to Nazi doctors

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Thousands of Covid-sceptics gathered in Trafalgar Square over the weekend for the protest (Picture: Andalou)

NHS worker Samantha Batt-Rawden, who regularly shares images of herself wearing PPE during gruelling frontline shifts, said staff are ‘heartbroken’.

She tweeted: ‘As an ICU doctor who has given everything trying to save lives this makes me want to cry.’

Ms Batt-Rawden and NHS Million urged the public to show healthcare workers they are ‘appreciated’ by tweeting #gotyourbackNHS.

It sparked a ‘tidal wave’ of hashtags in support of frontline staff, with NHS Million saying: ‘You don’t know how much it meant to all of us.’

London mayor Sadiq Khan also condemned the video, posting: ‘This is appalling. NHS staff are the heroes of this pandemic. Londoners roundly reject this hate.’

Ms Shemirani’s son Sebastian, who has long been critical of his mother and says they now only communicate via text messages, called out his mum’s latest behaviour.

He told the BBC: ‘It’s only a matter of time before a follower of my mum’s lies decides to hurt one of our NHS professionals.’

Ms Shemirani previously compared the pandemic to the holocaust (Picture: Mark Thomas/REX)

Many carried signs saying ‘no more lockdown’ – despite lockdown ending in England last week (Picture: Andalou)

Met Police confirmed that it is currently investigating the video.

A Scotland Yard spokesman told Metro: ‘We are aware of the video and are carrying out enquiries to establish whether any offences have been committed. No arrests have been made.’

Pictures from the ‘Worldwide Rally for Freedom’ protest showed many carrying signs saying ‘no more lockdown’ – despite almost all Covid resrictions being lifted in England on ‘Freedom Day’ last week.

Ms Shemirani, who was a nurse in East Sussex, was struck off earlier this year on the grounds her behaviour had fallen ‘seriously short of the standards expected’.

The Nursing and Midwifery Council heard she doubts the existence of Covid-19 and ‘discouraged people from wearing masks, adhering to social distancing, and taking vaccines’

The mum-of-four had used her status as a health care professional to spread ‘distorted propaganda’ and conspiracy theories about the pandemic, wrongly suggesting Covid symptoms were caused by 5G.

She said nurses were complicit in genocide, vaccination teams should be renamed ‘death squads’ and called the NHS the ‘new Auschwitz’, in reference to the holocaust.

As a result, she was sacked for misconduct, reported The Nursing Times.

Last week, Public Health England said vaccines have prevented at least 52,600 hospitalisations in England alone.

Other figures suggest 27,000 premature deaths and 7.2million infections have been avoided due to the effectiveness of jabs.

Son of nurse who compared doctors to Nazis says she’s ‘beyond help’

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Sean SeddonMonday 26 Jul 2021 4

Son of anti-vaxx nurse says she is dangerous and is putting lives at risk

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The son of a former nurse who compared NHS frontline workers to Nazi war criminals believes his mother is beyond help and should be prosecuted.

Kate Shemirani, a conspiracy theorist who has become the darling of the anti-vaxxer and anti-lockdown movement, is under police investigation for comments made during a rally in London on Saturday.

Speaking to a crowd of thousands in Trafalgar Square, she said: ‘At the Nuremberg Trials, the doctors and nurses stood trial and they hung.’

The Metropolitan Police has confirmed they are investigating her remarks but son Sebastian has heard enough.

The 21-yar-old has spoken out against his mother’s unhinged views in the past and now believes the authorities should act before someone gets hurt.

Asked what he believed should happen to her, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘Either be prosecuted under existing laws, or if there aren’t existing laws in place that say that what she is doing is illegal, then we should be having a national conversation about what laws we should be bringing in and drafting up legislation for that.

‘Because it’s only a matter of time before… somebody acts on the bad advice that she’s giving the country.’

Kate Shemirani has already been struck of as a nurse but could now face legal action (Picture: REX)

She appeared in front of a rally alongside other well known conspiracy theorists like David Icke and Piers Corbyn, the brother of ex-Labour leader Jeremy (above) (Picture: REX)

Ms Shemirani, 54, was struck off by the Council of Nursing and Midwifery last month for spreading disinformation about Covid-19.

Her son said he believed some conspiracy theorists can be helped to regain a grip on reality but believes his mother is too far down the rabbit hole. 

He said: ‘I wouldn’t say that most people are beyond [help], it might take a number of years but you eventually crawl down from the initial radical period and you start listening to people around you more.

‘But my mum is definitely beyond help. The problem is that she’s so arrogant in her world view and really, truly believes that she is a conduit for the truth on a spiritual level, not just a scientific level, that she’s been anointed by God or some other higher power, she thinks that she shouldn’t have to list to people like us.

Her son Sebastian has previously spoken out against his mother’s views and has now called for the police to step in (Picture: BBC)

Anti-lockdown protests have continued despite the vast majority of restrictions being lifted (Picture: LNP)

‘And everytime I’ve tried to argue with, even in a nice, calm, rational way where I just ask her questions and try and get her own argument into knots, or it might be straight up disagreeing and saying “you’re wrong”, either way she will end up getting irate at me and saying I’m arrogant and that I don’t list to her.

‘It’s impossible to talk to somebody when they’ve got that level of God complex.’

The Metropolitan Police said officers are working to establish whether the comments constitute a criminal offence.

A spokesperson said: ‘We are aware of video circulating online showing a speech that occurred during a rally in Trafalgar Square on Saturday July 24. 

‘Officers are carrying out inquiries to establish whether any offences have been committed. No arrests have been made.’

Strangers on a train: The dark bargain that destroyed the Republican Party

CNN screenshots

Kirk Swearingen,

 Salon
July 24, 2021

This article first appeared in Salon.

As the Republican Party continues on its march toward fascism, it's easy to find yourself making political connections — even when you are trying your best not to think about politics.

Recently I was reading about astrophysics (understanding only an infinitesimal amount) and saw the Republican Party's implosion into Trumpism as akin to the formation of a black hole in space, where truth (instead of light) is unable to escape the event horizon.

I found myself in the same frame of mind while watching Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 classic "Strangers on a Train," about a couple of men falling into a conversation and making an unholy bargain, which one of them thinks is a macabre intellectual exercise not to be taken seriously.

Falling back into the dream of the film, I could not help but see the conniving, unhinged Bruno Antony (brilliantly played by Robert Walker) as a precursor of Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson and their ilk, those who have managed to kill off the old Republican Party and who are hard at work to murder majority-rule democracy — both through voter suppression and by inciting actual violence. For me, Guy Haines (played by Farley Granger) represented Republicans I understood, at least to a degree: Nelson Rockefeller, George H.W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney. To me, those Republicans might have been willing to take advantage of others and perhaps stretch the law to avoid taxes or otherwise enrich themselves, but they would likely have ruminated over it and made sure to attend church service soon after banking the profits. In any case, they believed in the necessity of compromise, the work inherent in politics.

These are the so-called RINOs, or "Republicans in name only," a term which — now that I consider it — was always a form of gaslighting and projection. That term has been used to attack actual Republicans and make them seem like another group Trump voters could despise and blame for their failings and bad impulses — another "other." Newt Gingrich and his chortling crew sent the Republicans who understood that compromise was the way of politics (and who, it ought to be said, also took their oaths of office seriously) the way of the Oldsmobile. It was a Swift Boat operation done on their own people. We could all see they were Republicans, but we were told they were somehow not Republicans, or at least not real Republicans — they were RINOs. The fake Republicans pushed out the real ones.

And there it was: Gaslighting — the favored authoritarian manipulation of "don't believe what you see with your own eyes" — so named for the 1944 film "Gaslight" (directed by George Cukor with Hitchcockian flair), in which a criminal, played by Charles Boyer, purposively undermines the mental health of his wife (Ingrid Bergman, who won an Oscar for the role) by lying to her endlessly and saying that things she has seen with her own eyes are not true. You know, like Donald Trump has done to the public for years — indeed, for his entire adult life.

The overarching gaslighting that the modern Republican Party continues to perpetrate on the American public is that good old yarn about how lowering taxes for the wealthy and corporations will boost the economy — the so-called trickle-down theory, which George H.W. Bush memorably called "voodoo economics," before he was selected as Ronald Reagan's running mate, at least partly to shut him up. It always brings to mind something economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote:
The modern conservative is not even especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man's oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

The actual Republicans — who we are told by the likes of Matt Gaetz are not the actual Republicans — must have thought back in the Tea Party days that the Gingrich plan, the treat-the-opposition-as-your-enemy, shut-down-the-government, win-at-all-costs faction, would be a temporary thing, something to be countenanced for a short time. They clearly felt the same way about the antics of Donald Trump. It was all just kind of an unsettling joke, as Guy Haines thought of Bruno's proposed bargain to trade murders.

In the film, Bruno crashes a party and nearly strangles a woman while re-enacting the murder he has committed, which might remind anyone old enough both of Gingrich's crashing the GOP with his "Contract With America" (often referred to then as "Contract on America") and of the equally oddly named Grover Norquist, co-author of the "Contract," who often said he wanted a government small enough that he could drown it in the bathtub. (That phrasing seemed pretty personal — there's more than a hint of gruesome domestic violence in there.)

What Gingrich and Norquist brought to the party was the end of what used to be called "political comity" — seeing beyond different political positions and working together professionally to reach compromise. You know — pretty much the substance of politics.

There is a scene, both funny and unsettling, in "Strangers on a Train" in which Bruno and his mother (the memorable Marion Lorne, in her film debut) have a chance to catch up, and we learn a good deal about how Bruno became the person he is now. She fusses about his health and his attitude, remarking to her son that at least he had given up on his crazy earlier plan:

Mother: Now, you haven't been doing anything foolish?

[Bruno shakes his head while nuzzling her hand.]

Mother: Well, I do hope you've forgotten all about that silly little plan of yours.
Bruno: Which one?

Mother: About, um, blowing up the White House.

Bruno: Oh, ma, I was only fooling. Besides, what would the president say?

Mother [laughing with relief]: Oh, you're a naughty boy, Bruno! Well, you can always make me laugh.

When the film was made, the politics of the day were focused on the Cold War and distrust of anyone who might be sympathetic to the "other side." Looking at the film today, who could doubt that Bruno, like far too many Republicans, might be a QAnon believer, as well as a delighted supporter of Trump's Big Lie about the election, shrugging off the lack of any evidence while pointing to Chinese and Russian conspiracy websites. (In the film, Bruno works assiduously to plant evidence to tie Granger to the murder that Bruno actually committed.) Bruno would have been delighted to help with the planning for the insurrection of Jan. 6 and would have cheered others on from a discreet distance. And he would just as cheerfully deny everything he'd done. You can never pin down a psychopath. As we all know now, it is not possible to hold the shameless to account. They just cry persecution.

The images of the fight on the merry-go-round — sent into overdrive by a policeman who shoots indiscriminately, killing the carny operating the ride — are unforgettable. Granger's character, like, say, Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney, is trying desperately to hang on as Bruno kicks at his hands and the whole contraption seems about to break apart. It does, at least until a carnival employee crawls beneath the carousel to reach the controls, too late to save the ride and some of its passengers.

One story concerning the making of "Strangers on a Train," as told by Ben Mankiewicz on Turner Classic Movies, is that Hitchcock was haunted by his decision to allow the man to crawl under the frantically spinning merry-go-round. For years afterward, Hitchcock said, he got sweaty palms every time he thought about that day. If Donald Trump is directing this insurrectionist flick now in production from Mar-a-Lago Studios, he's more than happy to sacrifice anyone and everyone.

The old GOP is going the way of that merry-go-round, and even if someone were to try to get to the controls now (Who? The Lincoln Project? The Bulwark?) it seems too late to save anything worthy of a democratic republic. Conservatives who are not pro-white supremacy, pro-conspiracy, anti-science, and chock-full of grievances will need to create a new political party someday — and get themselves out of the carnival business, with its glaring lights, mesmerizing sounds and untrustworthy machinery.