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Two years after BLM rioters picked up $6 million in damages because the police officers trying to stop their rampage didn’t wear face masks, Democrats are trying to ban law enforcement from wearing face masks. California state senators are introducing a bill to make local, state and federal law enforcement personnel, especially ICE, wearing face masks into a crime.
In two years, the Left has gone from demanding face masks to trying to outlaw them.
Last year, the media promoted opposition to a proposed ban on face masks at rallies in Los Angeles after Hamas supporters assaulted a synagogue and local community members. Now the media is just as vocally denouncing people for wearing face masks as it used to attack them for not wearing face masks. But with masks, as with all else, it’s about who’s wearing them.
During the pandemic it became all too clear that enforced masking also created the privilege of being exempted from it as photos and videos leaked out of prominent politicians who had imposed the mandate unilaterally exempting themselves and their friends from it in social settings. Politicians who had preached the virtues of masking posed for pictures, unmasked, with forcibly masked children or at dinners with masked waiters in the background.
Last year, they insisted that their rioters had the right to wear masks while attacking police officers. Now they insist that law enforcement officers don’t have a right to wear masks while arresting criminals and illegal aliens. Last year, they claimed that rioters needed masks because of a “COVID surge”. Violet Affleck, a celebrity nepo baby who had pushed anti-Israel messages, whined that masks had to remain legal because she suffers from health issues. Now it turns out that having masks at political protests was never about COVID or Affleck’s health issues.
During the pandemic after warnings, fines and police intervention over any groups gathering in public, especially when unmasked, Democrats allowed the BLM riots to go forward. It didn’t matter how many masks were worn or weren’t worn. The ‘public health emergency’ applied to everyone except the rioters because, we were told, racism was a ‘public health emergency’.
Stopping immigration enforcement is probably a ‘public health emergency’ too.
The real purpose of masks at public events is to conceal the wearer’s identity and to intimidate the public. That is why rioters and Hamas supporters wear them. Especially while committing crimes. ICE personnel wear masks because of a rise in doxxing and attacks against them. The Left is trying to ban masks now to enable the stalking and threats aimed at ICE employees.
Masks are another form of power. And the Left seeks to preserve any and all forms of power as its exclusive privilege under the pretext of various forms of victimhood and identity politics. When the Left set out to protect mask wearing by rioters, it claimed that regulations, first imposed to fight the KKK, banning mask wearing in public discriminated against the disabled.
Only last year, the pro-crime activists at the Marshall Project claimed that antisemitic rioters should be able to wear masks to protect their privacy against the police and Jewish groups. The pro-crime organization cited the example of the participants in the Boston Tea Party. But while rioters and terrorist supporters deserve the right to be protected from “harassment”, law enforcement officers putting their lives on the line to stop gangs, terrorists and cartels don’t.
The Left has no actual principle on masks that applies to everyone across the board. No such principles exist when it comes to masks, political protests, free speech or anything else. What it actually believes is that it should be able to do anything and that its opponents should be allowed to do nothing except lay down and die, or be cancelled and go to prison.
The double standard on masks already played out with online censorship, election denial and riots. To paraphrase what David Horowitz would often remind us of, masks are not the issue, the issue is the revolution. Masks are just a means to an end. The Left wants to be able to wield anonymity at public protests and to deny it to others as a form of political intimidation.
“Take Off the Mask, ICE,” The Atlantic recently demanded. This comes from the same publication which just two months ago profiled “The People Who May Never Stop Masking”, and previously promoted “The Masks We’ll Wear in the Next Pandemic” and claimed that “The Masks Were Working All Along.” The masks always work, except when they don’t, and in the future we’ll wear much better masks, but for now, no one with the wrong politics should wear them.
The Louisville Courier ran an article complaining that white nationalists had not been charged after marching around while wearing masks. It however admits that “masks have not been an uncommon sight at a number of other recent protests in Louisville, including the city’s June 14 ‘No Kings’ rally.” But those are not the ones they want arrested for violating the mask ordinance.
Democrats and the media claim that ICE personnel wearing masks is “lawlessness” and an “attack on democracy”. They had no such complaints when masked radical thugs attacked police officers, set fires, vandalized communities and held college campuses hostage.
Those are actual states of “lawlessness” in which the masked offenders enjoy the political protection and sanction of political interests in their party. The actual “attack on democracy” happens when there are different rules for different people based on their proximity to power.
During the pandemic, we witnessed plenty of cases of “masks for them, not for us.” Since then, the formula for who has to wear a mask and who doesn’t has been reversed several times based on whether masks enable or obstruct the tactics and strategies of the Left. But the one thing that holds true five years later is that masks and their rules are still not for everyone.
There are either masks for them, but not for us, or masks for us, but not for them.