She compared COVID restrictions to the Holocaust. Now Heidi Hall is on the school board

Heidi Hall, one of Roseville Joint Union High School District’s newest board members, drew the ire of students and staff alike in January after a number of controversial Facebook posts were discovered on her personal page, including one that questioned the role of masks in stopping the spread of COVID-19 as well as two comments comparing COVID-restrictions to the Holocaust.

The blatantly anti-science nonsense Hall has publicly posted on Facebook received widespread attention after they trended on Reddit, another popular social media site.

In response, dozens of rightfully angry Facebook users — including RJUHSD staff and students — confronted Hall in the comments of her RJUHSD Facebook page. Hall responded to each with a deflection, inviting them to email her on her official district account.

Hall has, for example, outrightly claimed that masks don’t work and that lockdowns are ineffective. She has shared statistics that have been flagged by Facebook as false information. Like former President Donald Trump, she also pushed the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a remedy for COVID-19, even though the FDA has said it is not an effective treatment.

“If you don’t believe the doctors that say hydroxychloroquine can work as an effective COVID treatment, would you be willing to hear from the thousands of patients whose lives have been saved?” Hall wrote on her personal Facebook back in July.

In a flagrant display of willful ignorance, Hall also expressed agreement with a Facebook post that compared COVID-19 restrictions to the restrictions imposed by Nazis during the Holocaust. Hall appeared to agree with one post that made a hateful and offensive analogy between fascism and COVID-19 restrictions, featuring an image of Nazis loading Jews into cattle cars with the caption “Do NOT be subservient to tyrants.”

“It’s the comparison of government tactics; fear, shame, control, bullying, oppressing your neighbor, marking and singling people out…” Hall commented. “To not see and understand the resemblance is to be in complete denial of what is going on.”

On her personal Facebook page, Hall made a second Holocaust comparison comment.

“I’ve struggled my whole life to understand how the Holocaust happened. Now I get it. Now we see it,” Hall wrote. “People will oppress an entire segment of society out of fear, bullying and mind control/manipulation … a vaccine doesn’t fix this. The vaccine is simply a carrot being dangled right now to buy obedience.”

Following her comments, Hall, Board President Andrew Tagg and RJUHSD Superintendent Jess Borjon had a meeting with the Sacramento Jewish Federation and their CEO Willie Recht. In an interview, Recht said he feels confident that the group from RJUHSD understood the “gravity and seriousness” of the comments Hall made and why they were “uninformed and inappropriate.”

“I find that it is so hyperbolic to make such an outlandish comparison,” said Roseville High School English teacher Jamie Quint Handling, who is of Russian Jewish descent. “During the Holocaust people were hiding in attics. We are locked in our homes with Doordash and Netflix.”

At the Jan. 26 board meeting, several students in the district shamed her for her uneducated and ill-conceived posts during public discussion. Emilee Rosenbaum, a sophomore at Woodcreek High School who spoke at the meeting, brought up Hall’s Holocaust comments.

“As a Jewish person, it’s honestly disgusting,” said Rosenbaum, who also condemned Hall’s uninformed online COVID commentary.

In response to the criticism, Hall apologized “for confusion or fear” that her posts had caused and said she felt “bad” they had “created diversion and distraction.”

But she also defended her posts by saying they were posted in private. Hall apparently fails to understand that as an elected official, anything she has ever posted online is now fair game.

Hall appears to have deleted her RJUHSD Facebook page, and she announced she would be taking “a three week social media fast” on her personal page.

Hall, who did not respond to interview requests, never lied about who she was on the campaign trail. She was happily endorsed by who I consider to be the worst of Placer County: anti-COVID Facebook crusader Kirk Uhler; vocal Newsom critic Kevin Kiley and the truly reprehensible Trump lackey Tom McClintock.

Hall is also a Placer County coordinator for the Recall Gavin Newsom campaign and voted at the Jan. 26 school board meeting to defy the state’s new classroom distancing guidelines.

It is both urgent and necessary for Hall to apologize to the community for the harmful, dangerous and ignorant comments she has made online. I don’t doubt that Hall genuinely believes what she posts is true. But that just makes her all the more dangerous and ill-suited to serve as a member of a school board.

When high school students seem to have a better grip on history, facts and reality than a member of their school board, something is definitely wrong.

This story was originally published February 19, 2021 at 5:30 AM.