N ew York governor Kathy Hochul is not known for her bold leadership or willingness to court controversy. So, it must be painful necessity that has led the Empire State’s chief executive to conclude, however reluctantly, that the masks have to go.
“It’s time for a reset,” Hochul said at a Thursday press conference. “There’s obviously a problem here. This will be dealt with.” The “problem” to which the governor referred is the near ubiquity of identity-concealing face masks at what she called “vile and disgusting” antisemitic demonstrations in New York’s streets and on its college campuses. More than that, though, face masks have also become an accessory that facilitates petty criminality in cities across the country — a reality that convinced New York City mayor Eric Adams to advise local businesses against admitting masked patrons 16 months ago.
Hochul is belatedly catching on. This week, she previewed her intention to reinstate a state-level anti-masking law that was repealed in response to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. “Supporters of a mask ban contend that making protesters show their faces will help crack down on violent and hateful incidents,” the New York Post reported. “They argue that such anti-masking laws were effectively used in the past to combat the Ku Klux Klan’s hooded menace.”
It’s certainly fitting that a law designed to contain a mob of bigoted miscreants would be reinstated in response to the very same threat. The trajectory of masking as a social convention, from a talisman of the pandemic and symbol of progressive political affinities to a threat, is, however, head-spinning.
By late May of 2020, masking in New York evolved from a voluntary activity into a mandatory necessity. Businesses were authorized via executive order to “deny entrance to people who do not wear a mask or face covering,” then-governor Andrew Cuomo announced. Indeed, no such mandate should have been necessary, Cuomo and his liberal allies said. “It’s sad that our health has become a political issue,” the comedian Chris Rock lamented at the time. But within two weeks, mandatory-masking ordinances would be extended to include outdoor as well as indoor settings — an innovation that many Democrat-led states would soon adopt. Businesses that disregarded the order were subject to penalties or even forcible closure.
With declining Covid-case rates, widespread adherence to masking guidelines and mandates went by the wayside. But among anxious progressives, masking transformed from a stopgap intervention against a relatively poorly understood virus into an outward symbol of their political identity.
“There is no getting ‘back to normal,’ experts say,” one 2022 CNN headline blared. “The sooner we accept that, the better.” Indeed, as one progressive media outlet after another insisted, what was considered “normal” in pre-pandemic America was not good enough. “Normal” described intolerable racial inequities, income disparities, and wanton disregard for the particular needs of infinitesimally small segments of the population with particular disabilities or unique lifestyles. Those who masked did so in deference to social maladies as they perceived them. Those who did not displayed their ignorance of or selfish disregard for America’s imperfections.
Like the final Japanese Imperial holdouts dug-in on Tinian, some epidemiological experts were continuing to advocate in favor of the conditions that provided them with such outsize authority during the pandemic as late as last summer. “I don’t think so,” Anthony Fauci confessed when he was asked in late 2021 if mask mandates would ever disappear entirely. In certain settings, like airplanes, “I think that masks are still a prudent thing to do,” he insisted, “and we should be doing it.” “So, certainly at home it works, if you want to reduce household transmission,” University of Texas epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina told PBS NewsHour as late as last August when pressed about the virtues of masking. “This is what endemic means,” Dr. Jayne Morgan told CBS News at the same time. “It doesn’t go away.”
Their advice was heeded only in America’s bluest bastions — it’s bohemian urban enclaves and its universities — but almost nowhere else. Meanwhile, the masking mania that had overtaken the commanding heights of American culture was a giant gift to aspiring criminals. They could now hide their identities and conceal their nefarious intentions without raising any eyebrows. Rising rates of smash-and-grab robberies, vandalism, auto theft, and a variety of other offenses coincided with masking mandates, which security experts warned “are making it even harder to catch these criminals.”
Today, masks are the must-have accessory for the thugs who populate the archipelago of encampments in which the country’s most anti-social elements congregate. They provide aspiring antisemitic vandals the opportunity to terrorize their neighbors without having to worry about the consequences. The face mask, which evolved in the pandemic from an inconvenient imposition to a status symbol, has now become the hallmark of danger. Its wearers no longer fear for their safety and that of others. Rather, they seek to instill fear in you. New York isn’t the first state to consider doing away with what have become the instruments of fear, but the Empire State’s about-face is the most significant.