by Travis Mateer
I wanted the guest I was interviewing yesterday to have some water, so I ran to a cafe downtown to purchase a bottle. Halfway there I realized I didn’t have my mask, so instead I took my zip-off hood and placed against my face with my hand.
When I entered the store the barista immediately told me I needed a mask. I gave a muffled reply, saying I just needed a bottle of water and that I was doing my best to cover my face. She was clearly frustrated, but allowed me to toss two crumpled dollar bills on the counter.
I don’t have ANY animosity toward the hourly wage slave who was put in the position of enforcing a ridiculous, ineffective and counterproductive mask requirement. The people who deserve the animosity are the ones who claim SCIENCE is driving this instead of what’s really happening: psychologically conditioned passivity for their new strain of totalitarianism.
Since mask true believers don’t understand the primacy of the political symbolism (and the worthlessness of the stated purpose of wearing masks), they think Montana’s Republican Governor is out to harm them and our community. So, to show Governor Gianforte the power of Missoula’s virtue-signaling beliefs, Missoula County is keeping their precious mask mandate:
In anticipation of the potential rollback of a statewide mask mandate with a change in state leadership, the Missoula City-County Board of Health adopted a rule in December that extended statewide directives put in place by former Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock and local orders.
Gianforte was sworn in Jan. 4. Montana has been under a statewide mask mandate since July for counties with four or more active cases of COVID-19, and Bullock extended the requirement to all counties regardless of active case counts in November.
The local rule will remain in effect until revoked or revised by the Missoula City-County Health Board. Missoula City-County Health Officer and Board of Health director Ellen Leahy said some of the newer restrictions — such as the requirement for bars, restaurants and casinos to operate at 50% capacity and close at 10 p.m. — may be lifted if Missoula County’s seven-day average of new case incidence rate lowers to 25 cases per 100,000 population for a period of at least two weeks.
This is ALL political. If it was about the science then we would have had a ROBUST conversation about the PCR test and the need to standardize the cycle threshold in order to minimize the chances of false positives.
But that didn’t happen. Why? Because you need to just STFU and take your poke. Don’t think about false positives and cycle thresholds and pathogenic priming and messenger RNA and your immune system and the great disappearing act of influenza. Thinking could lead to questions and questions could lead to hesitancy and hesitancy means you don’t take an experimental vaccine produced at warp speed while skipping animal trials.
The good news is thinking hasn’t been declared illegal yet by our illuminated braintrust, so until I am banned from using my brain I am going to continue exercising my critical thinking skills in assessing what the actual risk is.
I suggest you do the same. Thanks for reading.