Liberals’ Bizarre Fear of an Unmasked Nation

Wearing masks inside cars now mandatory in Bengaluru, even if you're  driving alone | The News Minute

            During last year’s campaign Joe Biden promised to “listen to the scientists.” He repeatedly said his coronavirus-response policy would be “informed by science and by experts.”

On issues from the environment to teaching evolution in public schools to the public health response to the COVID pandemic, liberals often accuse conservatives of putting emotions ahead of facts. While recognizing that the scientific process of acquiring knowledge and putting hypotheses to an empirical test can and often does lead to shifts in consensus, we on the left claim to trust scientists like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease specialist and unlikely media icon.

            After Dr. Fauci and other authorities like the Centers for Disease Control told us to wear masks, Blue America listened. As of late June 2020, 86% of Democrats wore a facemask whenever they left home, compared to 48% of Republicans.

Now scientific consensus has changed. But lefties are choosing to ignore the new reality—not that it’s new. Beginning nearly a year ago in July 2020 the CDC stated that wearing a mask outdoors was unnecessary unless one is less than six feet away from someone else. Aside from crowded events like rallies, sports and concerts, risk of outdoor transmission is lower than a rounding error; there has only been one documented case of COVID transmission outdoors, between two Chinese villagers.

Clarifying its long-held stance, the CDC said on May 13th that people need not wear a mask outdoors unless we are in a crowd of strangers, or inside with our “pod” of friends and family members. Masking outside is “optional,” Paul Sax, clinical director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, told The Washington Post. Optional, as in unnecessary.

Let’s pivot toward hope. Nearly half of American adults have been fully vaccinated and Pfizer is vaccinating children ages 12 to 15. We can go outside, have fun and socialize within the new liberalized guidelines yet too many people remain traumatized and grimly coasting on paranoid inertia. “It’s the return of freedom,” said Dr. Mike Saag, an infectious disease expert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Weeks after the latest CDC guidelines were issued, however, normalcy and freedom are still in short supply in liberal bastions like my neighborhood in Manhattan, where Biden won 91% of the vote. In compliance with the CDC, I walk outside without a mask because it’s unnecessary. Moreover, I’m fully vaccinated. Rules require that I put one on when I go into a store or ride the subway.

Furrowed brows, glares and general stink-eyes still abound. My neighbors are ignoring the CDC as much as right-wingers in West Virginia did last summer.

One would expect attitudes to evolve with the passage of time but that hasn’t been the case so far. When a fellow tenant confronted me recently about my masklessness in the lobby—where I’d been alone prior to her arrival—I informed her that I’d been fully vaccinated. “Everyone in the building has probably been vaccinated,” she said, “but here we still wear them.” I asked why. “It’s just the right thing to do,” she replied.

At a full-serve gas station in Manhattan the attendant demanded that I put on my mask before giving me a fill-up. “We’re outside,” I pointed out. It was windy to boot. “The CDC says you don’t need a mask.” “I don’t care what the CDC says,” he told me. “I’m going to keep wearing a mask forever, like in Asia.”

Half-empty streets in majority-Democratic areas—where people are far more likely to get vaxxed—are still, CDC be damned, dotted with people wearing one or two masks on sidewalks where no one can be seen for hundreds of feet. Many of the bemasked will tell you that they been fully vaccinated. You’ll see people jogging down lonely country roads, riding bikes and driving cars while wearing masks.

“You can understand that when people have been following a certain trend for a considerable period of time that it may take time for them to adjust [to the new mask rules],” Fauci said May 21st. “So I would not say that that’s irrational. I’d say that’s understandable.”

Go ahead, wear a mask indoors if you want to despite being vaccinated. Wear one outside if you feel like it. However, you are—sorry, Dr. Fauci—acting irrationally. What’s the point of the jab if you behave the same way as a year ago when we wiped down our groceries, bleached our counters and wore plastic gloves out of since-debunked worries over surface transmission?

Masks have devolved from medical imperative to virtue signaling. According to a May 5th Ipsos poll 63% of even vaccinated Americans were still wearing masks, outdoors down from 74% in April but still a surprisingly high number. That number ticked up to 65% the following week on May 11th. President Biden has begun appearing in public with his face fully exposed yet his supporters are not following his example.

What’s the harm in a fashion accessory that, as the vaxxed-yet-masked crowd informs you, merely tries to make other people feel more comfortable while also sending a subtle anti-MAGA message? It’s about thinking straight. Democrats can’t credibly claim the scientific high ground unless they adapt to the latest medical consensus.

You have the right to be anxious and illogical, not the right to be catered to. No one should wear a mask outside. Vaxxed Americans shouldn’t wear them at all.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Now available to order. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

4 Comments.

  • alex_the_tired
    June 1, 2021 9:44 AM

    “liberals often accuse conservatives of putting emotions ahead of facts.” Conservatives believe some crazy-ass shit, but liberals more than hold their own in full-blown delusion. Reiki, past-life regression, astrology, feng-shui, “being centered,” etc.
    Also, when you look at “critical race theory” one of the key elements of it is that it relies on the emotional leverage of storytelling. Scholarship is based on evidence. Storytelling is not. Example: Just yesterday on “Antiques Roadshow,” some guy was showing a treasured family heirloom. The family story was that this flag, damaged, had been retrieved floating near the U.S.S. Arizona at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The evidence (the date of manufacture stamped on the flag and its too-small size) showed that it was made in 1944. Facts first. Then stories. Stories without facts? There’s a technical term for that: stories.
    The ugly truth? Liberals are just as scientifically ignorant as conservatives. Whether it’s Karen Specialbody taking a plane trip to the spa retreat for “holistic cleansing” and chakra realignment before returning home to sort the recycling because she loves the planet (heart hands), or some beta cuck lovingly fondling his signed copies of Rush Limbaugh’s books, a terrifying proportion of people in this country either are “uncomfortable” around science, completely clueless to even basic science premises, or actively despise it. (Six feet from the next person? Six feet, five feet, seven feet, it’s just a marketing concept. It gives people a sense of control. But really? If you’re in a subway car, all the air is circulating in the same confined space. Standing outside? Factor in windspeed, temperature, humidity. Six feet is just like how in “Star Trek” the computer announces that fatal radiation levels will occur in EXACTLY eight minutes 31 seconds. It’s sci-fi.)

  • Re bizarre Liberal fear: My current definition of a Liberal is someone who thinks that engineering “the end of welfare as we know it” proved that the Kute Kuddly Klintons cared about poor black women and children.

    Liberals created and madly lapped up “RTP©-gate”*** ….. and nominated and vote-in Joe Biden in record numbers.

    I think it is more bizarre to expect much rationality at all from Liberals. We are clearly quite luck that they, at least, don’t hoard guns.
    ……………………………………………………………………
    *** Rootin’ Tootin’ Putin

  • DaniilAdamov
    June 1, 2021 4:14 PM

    That is a bit incredible to read. I live in one of the most liberal cities in Russia. Liberal here means something different from what it does in America, but there is some convergence with regards to taking pandemics somewhat seriously and sort of believing what widely accepted experts have to say. Nevertheless, scenes like you describe are impossible to imagine here. Likely-unvaccinated (as the vaccination campaign only recently reached here in the earnest and has hit some snags) people wandering through malls without masks are much more common than people outdoors without masks – even here.

  • suetonius17
    June 4, 2021 1:16 PM

    This is honestly weird. My wife, a very smart, very cool, truly wonderful person, is still wearing a mask and insisting I wear one when I go out. I think it’s PTSD really. She’s in charge of HR for her companies, spent a year of hell dealing with all this, and it’s very hard to let go of. I tried explaining the science, that now that we’re vaccinated we won’t get sick, we won’t spread covid, we’re fine, makes no difference. It’s not even like we know anyone who had it bad, we do know a few people who had it (before the lockdown even started) but everyone is fine now. Her companies are fine, because of the forgiven loans. I somehow put this with climate change science, which basically no one on either side actually understands. The green warriors are just as clueless as the clueless right wing nuts, they don’t understand what it means, and they don’t understand what reasonable responses are.

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