Blue-State Officials Don't Even Believe Their Own BS
They're willing to sacrifice your kids anyway
Mask mandates are crumbling left and right. The ‘leaders’ are reading the political writing on the wall and know the battle is lost, but they’re determined to take credit for winning it anyway.
“We should see COVID-19 hospitalizations drop by the end of March because so many Oregonians are wearing masks and taking other steps to protect themselves and each other, such as getting a booster shot or vaccinating their children,” Sidelinger said. “At that point, it will be safer to lift mask rules.”
Like many states, Oregon isn’t actually lifting mask mandates immediately, they’re shooting for the end of March. California’s indoor mandates are lifted on Tuesday. (But how much do you want to bet the only people masked at the Super Bowl will be the help?) Nevada dropped all mask mandates immediately. Washington’s OUTDOOR mandate is the only thing slated to expire, on February 18. The Science sure is strange, isn’t it? (Especially when you live on a border and cross state lines all the time. What’s safe on one half of your trip isn’t safe on the other half! Science!)
But today I want to focus on a subset of people being affected by mask rules — students. Even in the rush to remove masks from adults, who are actually at-risk from covid, many states are leaving student mandates in place. The CDC is still ‘recommending’ universal masking in schools. In fact, out of the recent 11 mask-removing states, only Nevada has actually unmasked its students. Take a look at what that looked like:
I’ll say it again. Out of the 11 states that have announced mask removal, only one has actually taken the masks off children. Some will do it at the end of February. (Just two more weeks - honest!) Others take the step in early March. A couple don’t even have a plan to take the masks off students. The Science sure is strange, isn’t it?
Of course, millions of people already live with no mask mandates — including children going to school — and these places have the same covid outcomes as the masked states. The masks didn’t stop the winter wave in the first place, and removing the masks won’t stop spring from reducing virus levels in the community. Here’s virus activity for Oregon and its neighbors (Idaho, Washington, Nevada, California). Can you tell when mask mandates were implemented or removed? How about vaccine passes? Can you even tell which state is which?
So we all know what will happen when schools lift mask mandates, no matter if they do it now or in two weeks or four weeks: nothing at all. Not only do mask-if-you-want schools in the US prove this, much of Europe NEVER forcibly put masks on children. No deadly covid waves sweeping through the halls.
The only disruption to schools from covid was government-created. First they shut down schools and ‘went remote’, with disastrous results. Teachers’ unions drug their feet as long as possible to avoid getting back into the classroom. They demanded ridiculous covid rules that further disrupted education as students were forced to quarantine every time a ‘close contact’ tested positive. WE’RE MAKING CHILDREN WEAR MASKS TO PLAY BASKETBALL, FOR GOD’S SAKE. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK ARE WE DOING.
And now here we are. The winter wave is over (exactly when the seasonality theorists predicted — again), and even if we tried we couldn’t reverse the downward trend of the next couple months. Yet the ‘leaders’ are still willing to mask your children for a few more weeks to save a little political face. They can’t quite come out and say ‘it’s safe’ today when they were saying ‘it’s not safe’ yesterday. They need some sort of buffer to make it look like they know what they are doing. (For the first time in the last couple years)
These are the people who have been wrong about everything. They shut down your businesses. They literally killed grandma. They ruined your children’s education. They violated your civil rights. And they did it all while ignoring their own rules.
Yet these people have the nerve to stand up and demand students continue to wear masks that even the covid-crazy know don’t work. Even if they DID work in theory, it’s insane to think students are any better at mask protocol than adults, who seem to contaminate their masks every 30 seconds or so. Also, we can be sure that mask compliance during this lame-duck period will be low, just like mask compliance was much worse this year than last. Keeping the masks on won’t change the curve, they remain simply because the rules exist and the rulers can’t admit they were wrong.
This is what happens when government has too much control over your life. You have no say in the rules and are forced to act based on the whims of idiots. You know the rules don’t work, the ‘leaders’ know the rules don’t work, but everybody has to pretend so those ‘leaders’ don’t look bad in the next round of polls. It’s up to all of us to stand up for the students who are more or less powerless over their situation.
Of course, there exists another, much darker explanation: the ‘leaders’ want to be able to use masks as the stick to get kids to get a vaccine they don’t need. Promising a little bit of reward if you comply is a classic tactic, but it’s worked before!
Fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again.
Enjoy the game!
Answer key:
https://imgur.com/a/GXYZGAh
"FOR GOD’S SAKE. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK ARE WE DOING."
My new favorite quote to summarize this entire shitshow.