Weapons of Mask Distraction
If you don’t wear three masks, you’re killing people.
By Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
After running on a promise to fix the pandemic, Biden admitted, “there’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.”
Except wear two masks.
“To Prevent COVID, wear 2 masks,” The Los Angeles Times declares. “Time to double,” The Washington Post urges. “Health authority recommends Laredoans limit leaving their homes, or wear two masks if they must,” The Laredo Morning Times warns.
But, unlike Doublemint gum, no one thinks that two masks will double the fun.
Well maybe one man does.
“It just makes common sense,” Dr. Fauci said on NBC in one of the innumerable television appearances that have made him the country’s highest-paid federal employee.
That upgrades Fauci’s masking recommendations from zero to one to two.
“There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” Fauci had told CBS in March of last year. “When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is.”
It’s just common sense.
Fauci has since explained that he said that then because there was a mask shortage, but we can trust him to tell the truth now. Unless there’s a good reason for us not to know about it.
So we’ve gone from “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask” to wear two of them.
“So if you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on, it just makes common sense that it would likely be more effective,” Fauci told NBC.
“Likely” is exactly the sort of evidence-based assertion you like to hear from the science party.
But if two masks are good, then three should be even better. And CNBC, getting ahead of the curve, has begun urging viewers to start wearing three masks. And then, before long, in an echo of Animal Farm, it’ll be “Two Masks Good, Four Masks Better” until we’re up to infinite masks.
The weapons of mask distraction being deployed just after Biden took office is no coincidence.
Biden’s takeover has seen states and cities from California to D.C. begin lowering their lockdowns. Something else needs to take its place. When Biden ran for office with a pandemic plan that consisted of telling everyone to wear masks, it was a culture war issue. Between 66% and 70% of Americans now wear masks. And those numbers are even higher in affected areas.
People are least likely to wear masks in rural areas and most likely to wear them in urban areas.
A New York Times street survey found 75% of city residents wearing masks. In many areas the numbers went as high as 100%. The exceptions, despite media culture war narratives about white people being less likely to wear masks (actually a rural vs urban split), were black men.
And the New York Times took the lead in pushing double masking.
Cargo cults and culture wars only work when there’s a sharp split. When more people began to wear masks, the proprietors of the mask wars had to up the virtue signaling ante by doubling it.
Double masking offers the opportunity to restart the mask wars, shaming and berating people for not wearing two masks, and blaming them for the pandemic.
If you don’t wear two masks, you’re killing people.
And then it’s on to three masks.
The moment the suburban mom rushing three unruly kids on break from learning nothing over Zoom to pick up organic groceries at the supermarket thinks she has mastered the new social mask code, it gets switched up to make her feel like a bad person if she doesn’t compensate.
The mask goal posts have to keep moving to maintain the division and preserve the illusion.
If two masks were more effective than one, why weren’t Fauci and the experts recommending them during the worst of the surge? The current pretext that double masking might be needed because of more infectious strains makes very little sense because the virus isn’t airborne.
Whether a mutant strain might be more infectious or not doesn’t have anything to do with whether it’s more likely to get through a mask by piggybacking on someone’s saliva droplets.
Even if the virus has become more infectious, saliva droplets haven’t gotten any smaller.
Fauci was right the first time. Mask mandates haven’t actually worked. There’s no real evidence that implementing them has changed anything. Masks may at best offer some limited benefits in individual cases, but they’re a cultural statement of values, not a viable defense against a virus.
Masks conceal and reveal. What a mask shows most clearly is the need to hide something.
The establishment put on masks to hide its incompetence as the same experts and elites who want to run our lives proved unable to manage an actual crisis. The dirty little secret of the expert class is that, like Fauci, it excels at television appearances, at talking points, and wielding power, but it’s utterly incapable of solving any problems that can’t be spun on television.
A virus is objective reality. You can’t make it go away by reciting talking points about equity at it.
Vaccination showed the competence gap between California and New York elites, who had binders full of racial equity quotas but couldn’t manage to vaccinate anyone except Democrat politicians, and the ‘rubes’ in West Virginia and North Dakota holding the top two spots.
West Virginians and North Dakotans are a lot less likely to wear masks, but give them something to actually do and they get it done. New Yorkers and Californians won’t notice though because they’ll be worried over whether two masks are enough and go looking for three.
What we tend to forget is that the Soviet Union wasn’t just a murderous Communist dictatorship, its leaders kept killing people because they couldn’t accomplish even the most basic tasks. The Communists were bailed out early on with American wheat after a famine and they ended their corrupt regime by going deep into debt buying American wheat because whether they killed people or just kept them poor and miserable, socialist collective farming still didn’t work.
Socialists are corrupt, abusive, and fanatical. They’re also incompetent at real life tasks.
A program of political repression, complete with scapegoats, is how corrupt socialist elites divert attention from their mishandling of the economy, war, and any other crisis that comes along.
America’s elites are fantastic at playing games with imaginary money and building narratives out of thin air to excuse their latest power grab. America isn’t coming apart at the seams because 2020 was an extraordinarily bad year. It was a bad year because the ruling class took a manageable crisis, botched it, exploited it, added race riots and a culture war on top, divided the country, destroyed public trust and social stability. And plans to double down on all that in 2021.
Telling everyone to wear two masks is almost a game in which the expert class, giggling off-camera, sees if it can convince Americans to double mask and then triple mask.
It’s a victory only in the sense that Madoff bilking another investor was a big win.
Democrats keep insisting that they’re on the right side of history, but history ruthlessly punishes incompetence and rewards competence. That’s why America became a winning proposition.
The world is filled with backward dictatorships run by inept elites who spend all day partying and broadcasting propaganda at an angry populace. The Obama generation of lefty political elites have done little more original than combine mass propaganda with totalitarianism. Destroying the social fabric and institutional credibility of the country to take power is a very short-term win.
Countries don’t just run into political problems that can be countered with political repression. Politics is the debate about who gets to steer the ship and in which direction. Outside there are icebergs, tsunamis, and subtler dangers that can’t be overcome as easily as political opponents.
Deploying another round of the weapons of mask distraction is meant to distract the public from the fact that there wouldn’t be a virus if the elites hadn’t opened the borders and outsourced the economy to China. President Trump’s policies were exactly the thing that would have saved us from the pandemic and then we wouldn’t need one mask, two masks, or two hundred masks.
When your borders are wide open, drugs, terrorists, and viruses will pour through.
The Left opposed travel bans and walls for our borders, but is enthusiastic about sticking a mask on the face of every single American because that’s who it really wants to repress.
The pandemic may have masked Americans, but it unmasked their ruling class.