Idaho state lawmaker faces criticism after comparing stay-at-home order to Nazi Germany

A Republican state representative from Idaho is facing criticism after she blasted Gov. Brad Little’s (R) stay-at-home order in a recent interview and compared the mandates categorizing certain workers as nonessential to those of Nazi Germany.

“I mean, that’s no different than Nazi Germany, where you had government telling people, ‘You are an essential worker or a nonessential worker,’ and the nonessential workers got put on a train,” Idaho state Rep. Heather Scott said last Thursday during an appearance on a podcast called “The Jess Fields Show.”

Later in the interview, Scott also claimed that some Idaho residents upset with the stay-at-home order had begun calling the state’s governor “Little Hitler.”

“I mean, they’re already calling him ‘Little Hitler, Governor Little Hitler,'” Scott said.

Her remarks, which came several days before the Jewish holiday Yom Hashoah on Monday, has prompted backlash from a number of local human rights advocates, according to The Spokesman-Review.

Brenda Hammond, who serves as president of the Bonner County Human Rights Task Force, told the paper that it “makes my heart heavy to hear a comment from an elected official that shows such deep disregard and lack of respect for what the Jewish people experienced during the time of the Holocaust.” 

“It also shows an extreme ignorance of history,” she added. “Her words will be especially hard for members of our community whose own relatives were put on those trains. Not to mention the few Holocaust survivors we are still privileged to have living among us.”

Rabbi Tamar Malino of Temple Beth Shalom in Spokane, Wash., told the paper that “mass murder and genocide is not the same thing as deciding which businesses should essentially stay open and which should stay closed.”

The Hill reached out to both Little’s and Scott’s offices for comment on Monday.

The Spokesman-Review said Scott did not return a request for comment from the paper last week but instead accused the paper of planning to run a “hit piece” on her in a Facebook post on Thursday night. 

“My videos and interviews are generating a lot of positive responses and people are waking up. My recent analogies are poignant and relative to our times,” she wrote in the post. “While human lives are certainly more valuable than a business, we cannot underestimate nor ignore that our businesses are the life blood of the citizens who own them, the communities they are in and to the customers they serve. Losing the former destroys the latter.”

According to the paper, this is not the first time Scott has drawn attention for making controversial remarks.

Back in August 2017, the Idaho Republican also raised eyebrows for remarks she made about white nationalists.

“The way the media has set this up, the mention of white nationalist, which is no more than a Caucasian who for the Constitution and making America great again, and confusing it with term, ‘white supremacist’ which is extreme racism,” she wrote in the post then. “Therefore, if one is ‘guilty’ of being white, one is clearly racist. And if one is white AND loves America, they are a white supremacist capable of carrying out violent acts against nonwhites.”