Nashville Hat Shop Facing Backlash for ‘Not Vaccinated’ Star of David Patch
Written by SOURCE on May 30, 2021
A Nashville, Tennessee hat shop is facing backlash for selling “Not Vaccinated” stick-on patches that resemble the yellow Star of David.
Earlier this week, the hatWRKS store advertised the badges in a since-deleted Instagram post showing the shop’s owner, Gigi Gaskins, smiling and wearing a bright yellow star sticker with the words: “Not Vaccinated.” The post also mentioned that the stars were $5 apiece and featured a “strong adhesive back.”
The advertisement was met with outrage on Twitter, with users calling for the store to be boycotted.
Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder was one of many people who responded to the post, recalling the racism his mother faced as a young child: “As a young school girl in Holland, my mother was forced to wear a yellow star by the Nazis to identify her as a Jew. It’s beyond grotesque to sell this evil symbol to proclaim one’s not vaccinated. Where does this end?”
Feeling the heat from social media, hatWRKS deleted the controversial post, only to then defend the move in a subsequent Instagram statement.
“People are so outraged by my post?” the store’s account wrote in a post. “But are you outraged with the tyranny the world is experiencing? If you don’t understand what is happening, that is on you not me. I pay much more respect to history by standing up with the fallen than offering silence and compliance.”
