Florida’s Republican national committeeman, Peter Feaman of Palm Beach County, has compared Biden administration vaccine efforts to Nazi-era “brown shirts,” according to CNN, and called vaccines “the mark of the beast.”
With COVID-19 surging in Florida, CNN reported Monday night that Feaman was spreading anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.
Feaman denied the report. “Fake news,” he said in a text message to the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Feaman, who is a lawyer in Boynton Beach, is one of three Florida representatives on the Republican National Committee, which runs the national Republican Party. He was first elected to the job in 2012. An outspoken conservative, he’s long been active in Republican politics in Palm Beach County and the state.
In 2016 and in 2020, Feaman was one of the state’s presidential electors, who cast one of the state’s 29 electoral voters for former President Donald Trump, who won the state as he lost the election.
CNN’s report comes as Florida leads the nation in COVID-19 cases and hospitalization.
Feaman’s reported denigration of vaccines runs counter to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ stand. Though Democrats have criticized DeSantis for not doing enough to promote vaccines, he has been vaccinated himself and was an early champion of getting vaccines into the arms of older Floridians once they became available.
According to CNN, Feaman:
Wrote on July 20 that “The Biden brown shirts are beginning to show up at private homes questioning vaccine papers.”
Referred in May to COVID-19 vaccines “as a ‘mark of the beast’ — a reference to a symbol from the biblical Book of Revelations showing allegiance to Satan — and called Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer ‘diabolical’ for encouraging vaccines.”
“Now the Michigan Democrat has announced that she is going to prolong the state’s suffering until residents submit to getting ‘the jab’ and if enough of them comply with her demands, then she and Joe Biden might permit them to celebrate Fourth of July,” CNN quoted Feaman as writing, adding: “Hey Whitmer, we will not bow to your false god.”
Wrote on Thursday that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines calling for vaccinated people to wear masks indoors in areas with high transmission of the Delta variant show that, “The wolves want control and power,” and pledged to “fight them.”
CNN reported that Feaman made his anti-vax comments on his blog “The Backhoe Chronicles.” It’s published in a private group on MeWe, which CNN described as a social media platform that calls itself the “anti-Facebook” app.
Michael Barnett, chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Party, said Monday night that he had seen the CNN report and that Feaman is passionate and principled.
“Peter is a friend of mine of almost 24 years,” Barnett said via text message. “He is a man of principle and communicates his deeply held convictions with fierce passion. While I am not as creative with my language as Peter, I agree that Americans should be concerned with the current administration’s potential for intruding into our private lives in general and regarding whether we are vaccinated or not.”
The Lincoln Project, a super PAC formed by never-Trump Republicans and former Republicans, wrote on Twitter that Feaman’s comments as reported by CNN demonstrate that “This is today’s GOP.”
Feaman has always espoused strongly conservative views.
In 2013, during a speech to the Broward Republican Party, he asserted that then-President Barack Obama committed treason and said his administration was “drunk with power.”
“You’re outraged if you’re like me because you love this country,” he said, explaining that it was so bad that he couldn’t talk about Obama in front of his son, a Marine captain, because the president is the younger Feaman’s commander in chief.
“I can’t talk about his commander in chief in front of him. I can’t talk about how I think my personal opinion is how our commander in chief commits treason. I can’t talk in front of him because it’s his commander in chief. And I have to respect that. I can’t talk in front of him about how I think his commander in chief is violating his oath of office regularly in the White House. He took an oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and I see him blowing up the Constitution everywhere he goes,” Feaman said.
“And so, where does that leave us? It leaves us as Republicans to take a high moral ground once again as the premier party of the United States, the party of freedom. It’s the party of individualism. It’s the party of encouraging people to depend not on government but on who they are as God-given, God-made individuals,” he said in the 2013 speech.
Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com or on Twitter @browardpolitics
