Mask Mandates Crumbling

The CDC has finally bowed to reality, acknowledging that there is no reason for vaccinated people to wear masks indoors, let alone outdoors. Call me cynical, but my guess is the polling has gone South on mask mandates. People have had enough. Next thing you know, Joe Biden will take off his mask to celebrate his administration’s great victory over the coronavirus. Must have been those vaccines Biden was so instrumental in developing.

As Scott reported this morning, Minnesota’s proto-fascist governor, Tim Walz, has revoked his state’s mask mandate. His declared state of emergency remains in place, although no one can explain wherein the emergency lies. He just likes power.

Similarly, in South Carolina, where I am vacationing at the moment, the governor issued an executive order prohibiting county or local governments in the state from enforcing covid-related local mask mandates.

This leaves stores, bars, restaurants and other facilities in the position of deciding whether to stop requiring patrons to wear masks. I assume most of them will, soon. Today I had the happy experience of walking into a restaurant in Charleston and seeing that the people working there were not masked, nor were any of the customers. And one of my daughters reports having lunch today in a mask-free restaurant in Minnesota.

Competitive pressures will soon kick in. I will not frequent any restaurant, grocery store or other establishment that requires masks if there is a competitor within a one hour drive that does not do so. I am sure most others feel the same way. Let us leave the mask horror behind, as rapidly as possible. Let’s throw our masks into the fire and forget we ever wore them.

There are some people–I know this because of Twitter–who love wearing masks and are mortified to see the glorious masked era come to an end. These people have problems I would not undertake to diagnose, but my hope is that they soon will look very silly, a tiny remnant walking around incognito. Maybe someone will remember that it is actually illegal to wear a mask in public in Minnesota and some other states, the assumption being that you are on your way to rob a bank.

The hardest cases may be the airlines. For some reason, they are institutionally committed to covid. This may be the same perverse instinct that caused Delta to back the Democratic Party in Georgia. In any event, the airlines need to get their act together and tell their passengers to leave their masks at home. The tide of freedom is rising, and the airlines don’t want to be on the wrong side of history.

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