Face mask

Remember three years ago this month when shoppers were emptying supermarket shelves and locking themselves down inside? The masking of America was beginning — and for some it has never ended. On March 4, California’s governor Gavin Newsom terminated a three-year Covid state of emergency. His Department of Public Health will end mask requirements in medical facilities, prisons and homeless shelters beginning April 3. The nation’s official public health emergency will end on May 11. Blue-state and federal authorities are having a hard time letting go of the crisis. With the end of California’s rules, the city of San Francisco — bless its heart — has instated its own mandatory masking.

It’s tough to rank the discriminatory pandemic practices of the last three years. We were divided into essential and inessential workers; in blue states and cities, private school students were permitted to attend school while public school students remained shuttered at home for eighteen months; children were barred from essential developmental activities like school and sports while adults went to bars and concerts and professional sporting events in venues with more than 50,000 people; and those unable to wear masks or function when others wear them (the deaf and hearing impaired, for instance) were disregarded entirely.

“Are you anti-mask?” “Are you anti-vax?” “Are you anti-science?” Employees of Levi Strauss & Co repeatedly pummeled me with these questions during 2020-2022, when I was the company’s brand president. Why? I advocated in defense of children: against the masking of toddlers, against closed playgrounds and youth sports, for open public schools. I’m not exactly sure what an anti-science person is. But that’s not me. I’m pro-science. And that’s why I’m anti-mask. Given the findings from the recent Cochrane study, a meta-analysis summarizing seventy-eight studies including a million people, the science is now clear: “Face coverings make little to no difference” in Covid infection and fatality rates. Even when the hallowed N95 is worn.

A great scourge has descended upon the land, leaving in its wake a path of misery and girlfriends shivering under blankets. Crops have been destroyed, and there are times when (after 5 p.m.) it can seem like we might never see the sun again. Yet the greatest terror ushered in by this darkness is its plague, a relentless onslaught of mild coughs and sniffly noses that seems to have left just about everyone feeling marginally annoyed. The ancients had a word for it, winter, and it's eliciting trembles of horror from the Cassandras over at the New York Times. New Yorkers, the Times recently croaked, "are living not just among the coronavirus and its seemingly endless variants, but a bunch of other viruses too." This "bunch" includes such baffling ailments as the common cold and the flu.

Don't call it a comeback. Prior to the 2022 midterm elections, there were signs that if Republicans had success, Covid would be roaring back with all its former aspects of fearmongering from the Democratic media complex, requiring more spending, more regulation and the return of rules Americans previously found anathema. This would serve the purpose of said complex in numerous ways: helping them push back against Republican efforts to end those supposedly "emergency" authorities and bureaucratic programs that now must find ways to sustain themselves. Everything from proxy voting to government vaccine requirements to the handwaving justification for the student loan bailout would be at risk, if the fiction that we are in the midst of constant emergency could not be maintained.

They walk among us. The last of the Covidians. We see them every day, masked while walking their dog in the park, or alone in their car. We have that friend or loved one who badgers us about vaccines and boosters like a mid-level PR executive at Pfizer. There is also the social media warrior who will never admit they got anything wrong about lockdowns, that even with our economy and education system in shambles, we should be grateful. Let’s not forget the public health officials like Holy Saint Fauci, who we recently learned had a mega-millions windfall while Americans’ purchasing power plummeted into the poorhouse. “Oh no,” they warn, “don’t get complacent now! Winter is coming!

Fulfilling family obligations in 2022 means long haul flights of long hours. By “long hours,” I mean because everything has already been on Netflix, each in-air hour is longer than others. The only thing that makes in-air time tolerable is Inflight Fight Club. The first rule of Inflight Fight Club is you can talk about it; what else is there to do for seven hours? Yet as much fun as it is to watch someone combat it out with a flight attendant, all this is unnecessary. And for the lawyers, this article in no way condones violence in the air, whether it is the 800th passive aggressive reference to seats being in the upright and locked position with the deadly tray table closed, or something criminal.

The city of Philadelphia appears to be following China, if only in small steps, toward the delusional goal of Zero Covid. A new indoor-mask order, announced last week by Cheryl Bettigole, Philadelphia’s health commissioner, takes effect today, April 18. It’s the first resumption of such a mandate by any large city in the United States. President Xi Jinping, the well-meaning Dr. Bettigole most definitely is not. Yet is Philly, like China, again being seduced by the notion that the virus can be made to go puff? In Shanghai, a brutal push for Zero Covid is imprisoning millions in their homes and tearing infected children from their parents for quarantine.

This is a public service announcement from Cockburn: the mask mandates have got to go — for everyone’s health. Even America’s most progressive cities have lifted their face mask restrictions after the cresting of the first Omicron wave — but some of their denizens are hooked on the taste of government boot, and are going mad at the prospect of being weaned off it. Cockburn was sent a video by his nephew earlier this week showcasing this phenomenon: a masked Washington local cussing out unmasked teens at a DC Metro station. Masks are, for some unscientific reason, still required on public transport in the nation’s capital — despite not being needed in schools, gyms, stores, bars, restaurants…you get the picture.

Officials at the Transportation Security Administration are telling media outlets that their agency is poised to extend mask wearing on airplanes for another month while they await guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Like everything else, through the length of the pandemic, this move lacks logic. The idea that a piece of cloth will protect you while you sit sandwiched between 200 other passengers inches away from you is an idea only our incompetent and compromised CDC could invent. Then, a short while into your flight, all of the passengers remove their magic cloth covering and eat and drink, spitting their particles into the air to travel about the cabin.

Joy Behar made a predictable announcement last week on ABC’s The View. While discussing how the CDC may ease mask guidance in the near future, she explained the depths of her neurosis to her co-hosts. "So if I go on the subway, if I go in a bus, if I go into the theater... a crowded place, I would wear a mask, and I might do that indefinitely," she added. "Why do I need the flu or a cold even? And so I'm listening to myself right now. I don't think it's 100 percent safe yet.” A few hours later, a photo emerged on Twitter of Behar sitting in a booth with two friends at a restaurant. She was sans mask. Worse yet, journalist Libby Emmons, who posted the photos, added, “I hear that she also walked out of the restaurant unmasked, though her companions dutifully donned theirs.

The nation’s capital is finally dropping its vaccine and mask mandates…mostly. DC mayor Muriel Bowser reluctantly followed the science and ended the vaccine requirement for the district’s businesses effective Tuesday — rendering the city’s “get the vax to see the acts” campaign null and void. The decision to require proof of vaccination now falls to individual businesses in the city — a civil rights victory, surely, given that just under a quarter of DC’s black residents remain unvaccinated. Bowser’s move comes after a lengthy battle with venues such as The Big Board on H Street, which had its license suspended by the ABC Board earlier this month for refusing to enforce the mandate.

After two years of nonsense messaging on masks, some liberal politicians are ready to hang up their KN95s. Numerous blue states such as California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Oregon have announced wind-down plans for their mask mandates this week. All this comes on the tail of a spate of Democratic politicians being pictured unmasked with masked schoolchildren or workers. A complete coincidence, I am sure. Some of the recent images seem tailored to piss voters off. Last week, Stacey Abrams tweeted out a photo with a group of masked school children in Georgia. The Democratic candidate for governor posed proudly without a mask. The image was so blatantly callous, it almost made you wonder if she was trying to rub her hypocrisy in people’s faces.

I was dress shopping for a wedding at Tyson's Corner in Virginia last Thursday when I saw two security guards and a man wearing a "Let's Go Brandon" sweatshirt having a heated discussion. Usually I would assume shoplifting was involved and move on, but considering the left's freakout over the "Let's Go Brandon" chants sweeping the country and their insistence on punishing those who use the phrase, I stopped to listen to the exchange. I soon gathered that the man, who later identified himself to me as Alex Caballero, was kicked out of the nearby Apple Store for allegedly violating their mask mandate. Caballero told the security guards that he entered the store because he had a service appointment.

Face masks are forever. If you blinked, or weren’t paying attention, you might have missed it. If you weren’t tuning into CDC director Rochelle Walensky, then you didn’t hear it at all. Several media outlets picked up on something Walensky subtly added to a statement about mask efficacy. You probably weren’t paying attention to them either, which is what they are counting on. The CDC director endorsed the idea of permanent masking, during seasonal communicable diseases, including the seasonal flu or common cold. In an HHS statement on YouTube, Walensky sneakily slips “protection from the flu, or coronavirus” into her statement. “Whether it’s an infection from the flu, coronavirus, or even just the common cold.

Visitors to New York tell me how surprised they are to see so few masked up people on the streets. But a sizable portion of the NYC population isn’t letting go of the disgusting, soggy, disease vectors strapped to their faces — and they never will. This set aren’t true-believers in the still-unproven effectiveness of masks; for them, it’s both an identity and psychological disorder. On the streets of any city, the forever-masked are broadcasting their allegiance to authoritarianism, letting you know they’re most comfortable somewhere on a hierarchy of coercion, whether among the hopelessly obedient, or tyrants themselves. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You now have a visual cue letting you know exactly who you’re dealing with and who to avoid.