Tucker slams outdoor mask mandates, questions justification
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host breaks down the harmful impacts of strict coronavirus restrictions, mandates.
In May of last year, the mayor of Los Angeles, a man called Eric Garcetti, issued this order to America’s second-largest city. "Bring your mask with you whenever you leave your home. That will help us get more freedoms." Garcetti isn’t much of an orator, to put it mildly, but it was a memorable quote, mostly because of the questions it left unanswered. For example, is it really possible to spread the coronavirus outdoors? That’s the first and more obvious. And then more fundamentally, since when is a mayor in charge of doling out America’s freedoms? Aren’t those freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution that created the country? That’s what they’ve been telling us.
So, it would have been nice to hear the answers to those questions. Unfortunately, at the time, a lot of the country was so terrified of the new pandemic that no one thought to ask those questions. People just obeyed. It was a big change. Other politicians watched it happen. They saw a smarmy nonentity like Eric Garcetti, a guy you wouldn’t trust to clean your pool, suddenly assume unprecedented, god-like new powers, simply by asserting them. "Cover your face!" "OK, boss." Not a bad trick. So, naturally, other politicians wanted some of that power too. That’s why they’re in the business, for power. So they did the same thing that Garcetti did. And once again, no one pushed back.
In San Francisco, the authorities demanded that citizens wear masks while running outside. In the city of Boston, the mayor extended that requirement to all outdoor activities. "You need to be wearing a face-covering when you’re out exercising." In a functioning democracy, like we had just a few years ago, demands like these would be impossible to make. A politician might prefer that you wear a mask outdoors, but he couldn’t make you do it. At best, he’d have to ask nicely. He’d have to show you the science, and try to convince you to follow his advice, one adult to another. The onus would be on him to make his case, not on you to obey the command. But over the course of the coronavirus pandemic, the opposite happened, it was inverted. And it happened because large groups of people failed to resist it. It kept happening, becoming more unreasonable and disconnected from science day by day.
As of tonight, for example, more than 15 months after we first told you about the spread of this weird new virus in China, the state of Michigan now requires children as young as 2 to wear face masks while in "public spaces and places like camps or daycare centers." This is not a suggestion. It’s an order. They all are. A pregnant mother and her 2-year-old were thrown off a Spirit Airlines flight because the 2-year-old was not wearing a mask.
It’s the law! Right, we’ve heard. But why is it the law? There's no scientific justification for any of it. Children are not at meaningful risk from COVID. They never have been. Adults who’ve been vaccinated or naturally infected — and that’s a huge percentage of the American population — aren’t either. If you’ve got high levels of antibodies in your system, you’re almost certainly safe. Those who don’t have antibodies can get the shot. Every American who wants the vaccine can get one. At this point, there is no scientific justification for any mask mandate, anywhere. It’s that simple. The idea that people are being told, being forced, to wear masks outside should shock us. There was never any risk of mass transmission outdoors. We’ve known that for at least a year. Last spring, researchers in China traced 318 separate coronavirus outbreaks to find out where they originated, and how. Of those 318 outbreaks, only a single one could plausibly be connected to a person who was outside. All the rest were indoors. Last November, a review of all existing peer-reviewed research on this subject appeared in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. That review found that the odds of contracting the virus outdoors were about 19 times lower than the risk of contracting it inside. In April, researchers in Japan came to the same conclusion.
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Finally, last week, the New York Times admitted all this. According to the paper, scientists have discovered, "few if any documented cases of brief outdoor interactions leading to COVID transmission." So people running in the park are safe. They always were safe. And, in fact, the evidence is so overwhelming that even America’s leading purveyor of lockdown porn has been forced to concede it.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Let's talk about masks. I mean, you're seeing more and more talk about it. And I know the CDC is looking at perhaps revising their guidance about wearing masks outdoors at this time. What's your best guidance on that at this point?
ANTHONY FAUCI: You know, I don't want to get ahead of them, George. But I think it's pretty common sense now that outdoor risk is really, really quite low, particularly -- I mean, if you are a vaccinated person, wearing a mask outdoors, I mean, obviously, the risk is minuscule.
"It's pretty common sense now that outdoor risk is really, really, quite low," says Dr. Fauci. Really? So why didn’t Dr. Fauci tell us this? Fauci himself clearly knew this was true. You saw him at a baseball game without a mask. He wasn’t worried. And for good reason.
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Kamala Harris clearly knows the truth as well. She’s had the vaccine, two doses of it. So she’s not concerned about getting the virus. Yet she wears the mask anyway, and ostentatiously socially distances. Why? Well, it’s all a charade, maintained for reasons that have nothing to do with science or public health. That’s all very obvious now. The question is, why have we put up with it?
We’ve known this for a long time. We’ve known it for certain for almost a year, since that day last June when America’s so-called public health community united as one to remind us that corona restrictions don’t apply to BLM rioters. They’re exempt from the virus. You’re not allowed to get married or go to church or see your elderly parents as they die alone. But if you break things on behalf of the Democratic Party’s power structure, you can loot the Dollar Store and no one gets sick. That’s science. That’s not an exaggeration, that’s literally what they told us. And the second they told us that, we knew for certain they weren’t serious. So, why did we keep playing along? That is a sincere question. We should ponder that question. We acquiesced to the power grab. We let it happen. And because we let it happen, a lot of people got hurt, and many of those people were children.
Schools around the country shut down, and those that remained open forced students to comply with mandates that in the end damaged them, maybe permanently. At a school board meeting recently in Colorado Springs, an elementary school teacher called Stacy Adair showed a photograph of what a kindergartner's face looks like just an hour into the school day. The mask the kindergartner was covered to wear was covered in dirt around the mouth and nose.
"I don’t need to tell you it is very unhealthy for a student to breathe through this mask," Adair told the board. Of course it is. But officials ignored her and then they doubled down. "Masks will be worn whenever and wherever possible," the district announced. Worn by everyone, including kindergartners.
Colorado’s governor weighed in. No more complaining, he said. If you keep whining about mask mandates, he warned, we’ll close the schools again. So the mandates remain. Most children in Colorado are required to wear masks in schools statewide, even when they play sports.
So, how many kids are being hurt by this? That’s a question that no one asked, and we should all be troubled by, a lot. A physician called Dr. Mary Harrow told the Colorado Springs school board that, "the data [are] overwhelming" on this topic.
Masks, she said, can, "cause low oxygen and high carbon dioxide levels, shortness of breath, toxicity, inflammation, increased stress hormones and sugar in the body, and create fear, anxiety, headaches, compromised cognitive performance and other problems." Did you really need a medical degree to know that? People need fresh air, especially children. Deprive them of fresh air, and you hurt them. You knew that, we all knew that, it is obvious.
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Perhaps because it is so obvious, anyone who says it out loud is at risk of being fired for saying it out loud. Earlier this month, we spoke to a high school track coach in New Hampshire who was fired for it:
BRADLEY KEYES, FORMER TRACK AND FIELD COACH, PEMBROKE ACADEMY: My goal is to get these mandates removed. And it's not just track and field. It's tennis. It is baseball. It's every outdoor sport. Masks will be worn at all times: practices and competitions. Tennis, wonderful example. Singles tennis. You go watch practices, everyone is wearing masks. Competitions, they will be wearing masks, even though they're 30 to 60 feet apart on the courts.
Masks on a tennis court. Future generations will mock us for this, but we allowed it. We let power-drunk politicians wreck our country in exchange for promising to protect us from a virus that 99% of us would have survived anyway. What were we thinking? Masks have always been incompatible with a free society. We used to know that. Masks strip people of their identity as individuals. Mask transform people from citizens into drones. They isolate us. They alienate us. They shut us off from one another. They prevent intimacy and human contact. If I can’t see your face, I can’t know you. Masks are for the guilty. They’re signifiers of shame and submission. Until recently, many jurisdictions had laws against wearing masks in public. Only Klansmen and armed robbers wore masks. The rest of us showed our faces. We were free people.
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But then we gave in to the demands of people like Eric Garcetti, and because we did give in, this grotesque version of Halloween went on for more than a year. It’s still going on.
But not even Tony Fauci pretends that masks are medically necessary. Instead, they’re now purely a sign of political obedience, like Kim Il Sung pins in Pyongyang. We wear them because we have to. The only people who wear masks voluntarily outside are zealots and neurotics. How neurotic are they?
Well, we know. A Pew survey from last March found that 64% of White Americans who classify themselves as "liberal" or "very liberal" have been diagnosed with an actual mental health condition.
And you see them everywhere when you walk down the street of any major city. Dare to go on foot from Union Station to the Capitol, for example, in Washington without a mask, and angry Biden voters will snort at you in judgment. "How could you?" they’re saying from behind the gauze. "How could you?" That’s what we should be asking in return. The rest of us should be snorting at them first. They’re the aggressors. It’s our job to brush them back and restore the society we were born in.
The next time you see someone in a mask on the sidewalk or the bike path, don’t hesitate. Ask politely but firmly: "would you please take off your mask? Science shows there is no reason to wear it. Your mask is making me uncomfortable." We should do that, and we should keep doing it, until wearing a mask outdoors is roughly as socially accepted as lighting a Marlboro in an elevator. It’s repulsive. Don’t do it around other people. That’s the message we should send because it’s true.
As for forcing children to wear masks outside – it should be illegal. Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different than your response to seeing someone beat a child in Walmart: call the police immediately. Contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re seeing is abuse. It’s child abuse, and you’re morally obligated to try to prevent it. If it’s your own children being abused, act accordingly. Let’s say your kids’ school emailed to announce that every day after lunch, your sixth-grader was going to be punched in the face by a teacher. How would you respond to that? That’s precisely how you should respond. Think about it. That’s precisely how you should respond when they tell you that your children have to wear masks on the soccer field. That is unacceptable, it’s dangerous, and we should act like it. Because it is.
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But too few of us have responded like that. We’ve been shamefully passive. In the face of all of this, as our cities get crazier and harder to live in, so many of us have just decided to run away: avoid conflict. Move to the suburbs. Flee to Florida. Get as far away as possible from the hyper-aggressive zealots changing everything for the worse overnight. You don’t want to deal with them. So you’ve decided to start over somewhere else. But why? These people making these demands don’t own America. They didn’t build America. They didn’t build anything – they can’t. And they’re not allowed to wreck it. And if we let them wreck our cities, why do we think they’ll stop there? If they can turn Brooklyn and San Francisco into uninhabitable indoctrination camps, why can’t they can do it to Naples or Oklahoma City or Coeur d'Alene or wherever you’re planning to go? They can do it, and they will do it. Theirs is an evangelical faith. They will not stop until we make them stop. Fighting back is the only option. If we don’t resist, there’s no escape.
So how do you resist?
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The first step is to say the obvious, loudly and often: this is not about science. This is about political power. If it was about science, Fauci and Kamala Harris would be happy to hear Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis discuss the science behind mask mandates with a Harvard professor. They would welcome that. But they hated it, so they just pulled the whole thing off YouTube. Here’s part of what they refused to let you hear:
RON DESANTIS: Dr. Gupta mentioned not putting masks on kids – that it’s not effective, not necessary. Martin Kulldorff, do you agree that there’s no reason for them to be wearing face masks?
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR DR. MARTIN KULLDORFF: Children should not wear face masks, no. They don’t need it for their own protection and they don’t need it for protecting other people, either.
DESANTIS: Jay?
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PHYSICIAN AND EPIDEMIOLOGIST DR. JAY BHATTACHARYA: How do you teach a child to read with a face mask on zoom?
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That’s now banned. Scientists talking about science. Those aren’t scientists anymore, they’re dissidents. How is this happening? It happens because we allow it to happen. Because we buy into their demands because we internalize their standards.
If you decide to burn an American flag in a public park tomorrow, how would they respond to that? Well, of course, they would applaud. That’s your First Amendment right. You’d be fighting the tyranny of the people who created this horrifying country. How, by contrast, would they respond if you burned a pile of surgical masks in a public park tomorrow? They probably wouldn’t like it. But that’s your right too.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the April 26, 2021, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."