He had shown himself at Christmas with his family photo brandishing a submachine gun in front of the tree. Thomas Massie, Kentucky’s controversial representative in the House, is again being talked about, after a tweet published on Sunday. Thinking of invoking Voltaire to denounce the single thought on the Covid, he in fact cited an American neo-Nazi convicted of possession of child pornography images.
You mustn’t question Fauci, for he is science. pic.twitter.com/KnqCcPXWSe
—Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) January 30, 2022
“You should not criticize Fauci because he is science,” quips the elected official, speaking of Dr. Fauci, White House adviser on the pandemic. But it was the quote accompanying a drawing representing people crushed by a giant hand that caused controversy. “To know who controls you, look at who you have no right to criticize”. Attributed to Voltaire, this quote actually comes from American neo-Nazi Kevin Strom. And the original drawing denounced, in 1910, child labor.
antisemitic tirade
In 2017, Strom explained on the website of the supremacist journal National Vanguard that he had pronounced an almost similar sentence in a radio program in 1993 and that Internet users had made a meme of it by attributing his quote to Voltaire. But it actually comes from a violently anti-Semitic tirade by Kevin Strom against the “tyranny of money” and “the forces behind the new world order” financed according to him by “Jewish capitalists”.
As pointed out by Guardian, this is not the first time that a personality has mistakenly taken up this meme. In 2019, actor John Cusack apologized after a retweet. Monday evening, those of Thomas Massie were still waiting.