A hat shop owner in Nashville who came under fire for selling patches replicating the Jewish Star of David for those who have not received COVID-19 vaccines to wear has spoken out against her critics in a pair of Instagram posts where she blasted what she referred to as tyrannical behavior.

In a now-deleted post on Instagram, the store, HatWRKS, shared an image of the patches, which were yellow and appropriated the Star of David, which is a symbol used in the Jewish faith, with the words “not vaccinated” on them, indicating they planned to sell them for $5 each, in addition to a collection of trucker hats, in a response to CDC guidelines which stated that those who remained unvaccinated against COVID-19 would still need to use masks, while those who have been vaccinated against the virus could discontinue mask use.

The post was swiftly removed after backlash (and the patches do not appear for sale on the store’s website), after many quickly criticized the move, equating the patches to the ones Jews in Europe were forced to wear during the Holocaust to identify themselves as Jewish.

Others criticized the owner of the shop, noting she may have participated in the Jan. 6 Insurrection, and also criticized the fact that Republican Senators largely blocked a commission this week to investigate the events of that day.

Since the backlash, the shop then took to Instagram with a pair of posts further criticizing the new guidelines and criticizing those who expressed outrage over both the post and the merchandise.

“People are so outraged by my 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 & compliance. That is the worse crime. It was then & is now,” the first post read.

A second post bemoaned that people would have to “show their papers” to do various activities, stating “at the least, all unvaccinated people will be segregated from society, marked & must wear a mask” and that “there is a historical parallel to fascism to be drawn.”

“We can only fight back to not relive history,” the post concludes.

The patches also went on sale just days after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) referred to the guidelines and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s mask mandate remaining in place in a similar manner, referencing the stars that’s Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust as she bemoaned that she was reprimanded for not wearing a mask on the House floor.

“You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second-class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany. And this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about,” she said at the time.

Her own comments were also widely panned for comparing the masking mandates to the internationally known genocide, which led to the deaths of 6 million Jewish men, women and children during the Nazi regime.

A stylized hexagram, or Star of David, hanging in a room dedicated to Jewish Kurdish art teacher and painter Daniel Kassab, at the Museum of Education in Arbil's oldest primary school, in the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq
A stylized hexagram, or Star of David, hanging in a room dedicated to Jewish Kurdish art teacher and painter Daniel Kassab, at the Museum of Education in Arbil's oldest primary school, in the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq AFP / SAFIN HAMED
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