MASKS UNMASKED
Face masks are becoming a “thing”, and something must be done
I attended the “Unsilenced” Summit on 18 May 2024. Inflection Point New Zealand held the Summit at Wellington’s fancy new Tākina conference centre. I’m not quite sure why I decided to attend, but am delighted I did. The People Watching was particularly fun (and, BTW, the Summit wasn’t anti-trans people).
I arrived early. A strong northwest wind gusted across the forecourt in front of Te Papa where protesters against the Summit had gathered. Newshub described the protestors as a “pro-trans solidarity rally”. The wind blew the stench of human excrement throughout Tākina’s ground floor. A protester had scattered a bottle of excrement-laced fluid throughout the ground floor and tried to throw they’s vile concoction on Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki.
But this Substack is not about the merits of the protest or the “Unsilenced” Summit. It concerns face masks.
A large majority of the Te Papa anti-Summit protesters wore face masks. Given they were outdoors in strong wind, it’s impossible to imagine that the mask-wearing stopped anyone getting or giving any type of airborne disease. (No-one who attended the Summit, at the indoor Tākina venue, wore a mask.)
What’s with the masks?
So why did so many of the Unsilenced protesters wear masks?
Despite the blustery conditions, some of the mask wearing protesters would still have been genuinely, albeit irrationally, fearful of contracting COVID (or influenza, or a common cold, or some other bug). We live in fearful, discombobulating times. The departed Labour Government deliberately employed fear of a disease as a weapon to scare the populace into submission and rob New Zealand citizens of any sense of personal agency.
Overlapping with the disease paranoiacs, many of the protesting Te Papa mask wearers were - manifestly and unfortunately - mentally ill. Mask wearing enables unbalanced people to hide the outward expression of their emotions, to shun intimate, authentic social interactions and to avoid having to put on civilized “brave faces”. The flip side of the same coin is that autistic and otherwise neurodivergent individuals often struggle to “process” the facial expressions of others, so they’re generally happy with face-masking. Collective mask wearing by the psychologically challenged is therefore symmetrically reinforcing. The research indicates that over time madness-masking only worsens mental health, including suicidal thoughts. Resilience is ultimately fostered by facing our fellow humans, however difficult that may feel.
Virtue signaling is also commonly an element of mask wearing. The wearer is conspicuously displaying their ostensible concern not to infect fellow citizens, and especially the “vulnerable”, with an airborne disease. When most or all of a social group are mask wearing, the virtue signaling becomes a team pursuit.
Closely associated with virtue signaling is the face mask as a badge of group solidarity and collective self-styled Woke vulnerability. The LGBTQ+ Brigade are stereotypical of this motivation for mask wearing, which is now an almost compulsory part of an official LGBTQ+ uniform.
Then there’s the darkest, most obvious, motivation for donning a mask - to provide anonymity and avoid identification by the authorities for criminal activities. This includes the Antifa-types, known for physical violence and property damage in pursuit of their anti-democratic, ill-defined revolutionary goals. The balaclava is the archetypal face covering for the activist crim.
But we’re now seeing the pro-Palestinian headdress (the “Keffiyeh”) used as a face covering in unlawful protests.
Viva La France
The French haven’t mucked around in dealing with the shady and/or misguided motivations for covering one’s face in public. In 2010, the French Parliament banned the wearing of face-covering headgear. Islamists and non-Muslim Islamophiles predictably claimed that the ban discriminated against Muslim women who are forced or cowed into wearing burqas and niqabs (a burqa covers all the wearer woman’s whole body, including the eyes; a niqab is the same except it spares the eyes).
On the day the ban came into force, a French woman from Pakistan complained to the European Court of Human Rights that the ban unlawfully discriminated against her by preventing her from wearing her niqab in public. The European Court upheld France’s ban on face-covering headgear (including the head cover of a burqa/niqab). The Court concluded that the ban could legitimately be regarded as:
proportionate to the aim pursued, namely the preservation of the conditions of "living together" as an element of the "protection of the rights and freedoms of others"
necessary in a democratic society
France therefore mandates its citizens to show their faces in public, as laudably conducive to a harmonious, civil society. Those who violate the ban can be made to undergo “citizenship education”, which is basically telling face-coverers how to behave if they want to remain citizens of the French Republic. If you don’t like what it takes to be French, you can leave.
Ban Aotearoan Face Masking
In addition to being conducive to free, open, and harmonious societies, there’s a paternalistic aspect to bans on face coverings. In other words, a progressive nation state may justifiably proscribe pointless face covering because it’s a form of self-harm. You may want to be a germophobic, neurotic, evasive, virtue signaling, group thinking snowflake…but it’s bad for your wellbeing.
This mask wearing is getting out of hand and New Zealand’s Parliament should consider banning public face coverings for anyone who isn’t sick with a communicable disease, or immune compromised with a credible medical certificate. Being a New Zealand citizen includes fronting up and showing your face. It’s good for you and your country.
This is a fascinating topic of discussion.
I absolutely love the fact that we live in a country where we can protest (and I used that privilege as much as I could in recent years - even when that abomination of a Government tried to ban it). But I believe that the full extent of the damage caused by masking mania will take quite some time to reveal itself.
We now have a generation of scarred children. It sickened me to hear so many adults excuse the abuse of children over covid (masking them, shutting them out of school, cutting them off from their peers, terrorising them with made-up stories of disease severity) with the explanation that "children are resilient." Children are not that resilient. There a gazillion studies showing that childhood trauma translates into a plethora of adult harms. That's why a civilised society prioritises the protection of children.
My little girl started a big new school during the covid-years. She was the only child in the entire school not wearing a mask. It was hell. As a parent, I had to make the awful decision between muzzling my child and teaching them to conform against all reason, or making her do something insane in the interests of fitting in. Her heart condition made the choice easier (mask = oral microbiome changes = risk factor for heart valves), but I would have felt the same even without a medical excuse. She spent a big chunk of the first year excluded and without friends. She handled it like a champion, and I know that she has learned from it, but It was heartbreaking to watch. She never feared covid (except for one occasion where, during a scan, her cardiology sonographer told her that thousands of children were dying from covid). I spoke to lots of other parents who agreed that masking was bullshit and that they didn't want their kids in masks, but they didn't want their kid to be the odd one out. I kept telling them that the only way to change this is for parents to stick up for their kids; and that their decision meant that my girl was the ONLY one who stood out. But to no avail. I think possibly this, above all else, blew my mind. Parents could just say "no" to masking their kids. If you wanted an exemption, you could have it - you were under no obligation to explain it to anyone. What the hell were all these people thinking?
There is a lot yet to be examined and written about what children have learned from this awful time.
Thanks John. Your substack is probably my favourite. Articles like this, which carefully state what most rational people are thinking, but are often afraid to say, are the reason why. I thought you might mention the recent Cochrane review "Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of
respiratory viruses", which reviewed numerous mask studies and concluded "We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed."