There is no evidence that masks slow the spread of respiratory viruses.
In 2023, the British medical research organization Cochrane closely analyzed all the randomized controlled studies it could find regarding the use of masks. The result was clear. Time and again, there was no discernible difference in viral spread between a community that masked and a community that did not mask.
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Cochrane concluded on the basis of 15 combined studies following 290,000 people that masking “may make little or no difference” in viral spread.
Yes, we were forced to cover up our faces for years — totally disrupting social interaction and stunting development for children — just to please a public health apparatus that had a hunch that this would be a good idea. (RELATED: Hannah Arendt’s Resonant Warning About Public Lying in the Age of Anthony Fauci)
A few weeks, or maybe months, of masking in 2020 would perhaps be understandable. But mask requirements stretched on for years and years despite the absence of any evidence in their favor. The Biden administration maintained a mask mandate for public transportation until it was struck down by a federal judge in April 2022. New York state kept on going even after that, keeping its mask mandate in place until September 2022.
Today, mask mandates live on in places run by the most ideologically crazed.
The Boston Globe highlighted one of those places Tuesday when it published a viral article on a Massachusetts lesbian bar’s decision to drop its KN-95 mask requirement — for one day out of the week. The bar’s decision led to a leftist meltdown of epic proportions.
The bar, Last Ditch, announced Aug. 31 on its Instagram page: “It is with love we inform our immunocompromised disabled divas we will be opening Saturday nights as mask optional.” The post was flooded with 442 comments, many of them furious that the lesbian bar would dare allow people to enter its premises unmasked even one day a week.
“I hope your venue gets firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ablists,” said one person.
Another said, “people like you kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience.”
The Boston Globe went on to describe the comical Sept. 11 “community meeting” turned grievance session that followed. All 10 attendees — including some bar patrons, a few volunteers, one of the bar’s founders, and two “designated mediators” — sat in a circle with their faces covered with masks. Another dozen joined via Zoom.
The session started with a “calming breathing session.” People then began ranting about how evil it is that the mask mandate had been removed. The Zoom chat was flooded with “irate messages” that were “dutifully read aloud to the group.”
One of the “mediators,” who is a licensed therapist, asked the participants if they could remove themselves from “places of righteousness.”
Then someone called Soe Noire, a “performer and artist” who is “the head of another queer COVID-conscious collective in Western Massachusetts,” unleashed a torrent.
“A lot of people are calling for an acknowledgment of harm and I’m hearing a WHITE therapist … center[ing] the feelings of a majority white and white adjacent staff,” said Noire, who is black and follows the tenets of “Afromysticism,” a “cultural practice that honors the intersections between Queerness and West African ancestral practices and identity.”
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Noire had no sympathy for one of the bar’s founders, Jackie Matellian, who admits that she was homeless for six months because of the money she was pouring into the lesbian bar and the debt she took out to open it. Matellian explained, amid tears, that she is working four jobs to keep herself afloat. “I never really wanted to do this,” she said. “I don’t think I’m doing a very good job.”
Noire’s response? “[Y]ou chose to use your time to spill tears and center your feelings…. This is incredibly racist and deflecting behavior.”
Three and a half hours after it began, the meeting ended. Someone told Noire, “who identifies as a gender-expansive lesbian and uses he/him pronouns,” that perhaps he/she (I’m not really sure which is true) should attend the next meeting in person.
Noire responded, “There’s a lot of emotional and physical labor that goes into this, so for you as a white person that asks for me to stay for another meeting for free is incredibly disingenuous and racist. I’m not doing that.”
The Boston Globe reporter caught up with the oh-so-pleasant Noire after the event. Noire melted down over the fact that the lesbian bar’s Instagram account had liked several messages that supported its decision to make masks optional on Saturdays, describing this as “spreading rhetoric that can and will get people hurt.” The lesbian bar, Noire said on Instagram, is not “a safe environment nor interested in revolutionary praxis.”
Noire is joined in this insanity by Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck’s daughter, Violet, who attends Yale University and goes everywhere with her face covered by an N-95 mask. Last year, she spoke at a U.N. event to advocate for continuing mask mandates. “It is neglect of the highest order to look children in the eyes and say, ‘We knew how to protect you, and we didn’t do it,’” she said at the event.
In an article published by Yale University’s undergraduate health journal last year, Violet also demanded that we treat COVID like an ongoing crisis in need of severe interventions. “Those of us who have never stopped ‘following the science,’” she said, “know that even mild COVID infections are dangerous.” (RELATED: Fifth Amendment Fauci’s Narcissism Destroyed Faith in Scientific Methodology)
She fretted that long COVID will cause America to reach a point where “no one can remember what it feels like not to be sick all of the time” and “millions of people are unable to work.” This is because “some half (half!) of Long COVID cases trigger myalgic encephalomyelitis.”
Affleck became even more hysterical as her article went on.
She claimed that stringent COVID precautions “melted away as it became known that Black and disabled people were most vulnerable to serious illness and death.” She also described it as “eugenicist logic” for institutions to move past pandemic restrictions.
The mask-mandate-enforcing lesbian bar, the “Afromystic,” and Violet Affleck are all crazed (one of the bar’s original founders even left to go to clown school), but the only real difference between them and our nation’s public health apparatus is that they have just been more stubborn in keeping up their insane demands. Our public health bureaucrats were able to keep America’s schools shuttered for up to two years; these people have kept up the jig for six years.
If there’s a lesson from this Massachusetts lesbian bar, it’s that crazed people walk among us — with the Afromystic Noire as example No. 1 — and we can’t let them control America again.
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