Change is in the air.
On Monday, Delaware Gov. John Carney announced that his state’s indoor mask mandate would end Friday and that school mask mandates would follow on March 31. The same day, Oregon health officials announced that the state’s indoor mask mandate would expire on March 31, and Ned Lamont, the governor of Connecticut, announced that the state’s school mask mandate would end on Feb. 28.
California’s indoor mask mandate will also expire on Feb. 15—for vaccinated people anyway—and New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced Wednesday that the state’s indoor mask mandate (which wasn’t being followed anyway) would end on Thursday.
COVID cases are down, but that hardly means that the pandemic is over, right? Cases were down last summer before they exploded again. So it’s actually quite shocking to see these blue states following the lead of red states that lifted various COVID restrictions many months ago.
Back then, we were told that these red states were irresponsible. In fact, Joe Biden claimed that the surge in COVID cases was the fault of Republican governors who refused to impose tighter COVID restrictions. “Look, we need leadership from everyone,” Biden said in August. “And if some governors aren’t willing to do the right thing to beat this pandemic, then they should allow businesses and universities who want to do the right thing to be able to do it.”
Biden continued, “I say to these governors, ‘Please, help.’ But if you aren’t going to help, at least get out of the way of the people who are trying to do the right thing. Use your power to save lives.”
How many times have you heard “masks save lives” in the past few months? Whether it’s from Joe Biden, other elected Democrats, or random people in the supermarket who object to you flouting government recommendations, you’ve likely heard it plenty of times.
Meanwhile, many of the Democrats who preached the loudest about the importance of masks are the same ones not wearing them. Stacey Abrams retweeted a photo of herself maskless with a bunch of elementary school kids, and the backlash prompted her to actually apologize—though not before accusing her critics of racism.
Between pandemic fatigue and the repeated hypocrisy of Democrats imposing COVID restrictions that they won’t follow themselves, we’re finally starting to see states you wouldn’t expect lifting mask mandates. Is it because of “the science” or the politics?
Spoiler alert: it’s the politics.
On Tuesday, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) chairman, said that Democrats need to “communicate a clear off-ramp” on the pandemic to their constituents before the midterm elections.
Maloney hilariously credits Biden’s “leadership and the Democratic plan to beat the virus” for putting us in a position to end pandemic restrictions but nevertheless acknowledged the real truth of the situation that “people are sick to death of this pandemic.”
Maloney clearly acknowledges that people are craving normalcy and that Democrats have to adjust their public positions to align with that.
But it goes deeper than that.
As PJM’s Stacey Lennox recently noted, Democrats have consistently supported the most draconian COVID restrictions in the nation and suddenly want us to forget that. Whether it was masking children, downplaying or ignoring natural immunity, or imposing vaccine mandates, Democrats have decided, instead of admitting that they’ve been wrong this whole time, that the science has changed.
Science hasn’t changed. Conservative media has pointed out the faults of various pandemic restrictions for nearly two years but were censored as misinformation. Even doctors who spoke out against the narrative were ridiculed as fringe. We could have returned to normal a long time ago if the police-state Democrats hadn’t wanted to flex their authoritarian muscles.
They can change the narrative all they want, but we won’t forget the truth.
