John McLean: Masks unmasked

Face masks are becoming a “thing”, and something must be done

I attended the “Unsilenced” Summit on 18 May 2024. Inflection Point New Zealand held the Summit at Wellington’s fancy new Tākina conference centre. I’m not quite sure why I decided to attend, but am delighted I did. The People Watching was particularly fun (and, BTW, the Summit wasn’t anti-trans people).

I arrived early. A strong northwest wind gusted across the forecourt in front of Te Papa where protesters against the Summit had gathered. Newshub described the protestors as a “pro-trans solidarity rally”. The wind blew the stench of human excrement throughout Tākina’s ground floor. A protester had scattered a bottle of excrement-laced fluid throughout the ground floor and tried to throw they’s vile concoction on Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki.

But this Substack is not about the merits of the protest or the “Unsilenced” Summit. It concerns face masks.

A large majority of the Te Papa anti-Summit protesters wore face masks. Given they were outdoors in strong wind, it’s impossible to imagine that the mask-wearing stopped anyone getting or giving any type of airborne disease. (No-one who attended the Summit, at the indoor Tākina venue, wore a mask.)

What’s with the masks?

So why did so many of the Unsilenced protesters wear masks?

Despite the blustery conditions, some of the mask wearing protesters would still have been genuinely, albeit irrationally, fearful of contracting COVID (or influenza, or a common cold, or some other bug). We live in fearful, discombobulating times. The departed Labour Government deliberately employed fear of a disease as a weapon to scare the populace into submission and rob New Zealand citizens of any sense of personal agency.

Overlapping with the disease paranoiacs, many of the protesting Te Papa mask wearers were - manifestly and unfortunately - mentally ill. Mask wearing enables unbalanced people to hide the outward expression of their emotions, to shun intimate, authentic social interactions and to avoid having to put on civilized “brave faces”. The flip side of the same coin is that autistic and otherwise neurodivergent individuals often struggle to “process” the facial expressions of others, so they’re generally happy with face-masking. Collective mask wearing by the psychologically challenged is therefore symmetrically reinforcing. The research indicates that over time madness-masking only worsens mental health, including suicidal thoughts. Resilience is ultimately fostered by facing our fellow humans, however difficult that may feel.

Virtue signaling is also commonly an element of mask wearing. The wearer is conspicuously displaying their ostensible concern not to infect fellow citizens, and especially the “vulnerable”, with an airborne disease. When most or all of a social group are mask wearing, the virtue signaling becomes a team pursuit.

Closely associated with virtue signaling is the face mask as a badge of group solidarity and collective self-styled Woke vulnerability. The LGBTQ+ Brigade are stereotypical of this motivation for mask wearing, which is now an almost compulsory part of an official LGBTQ+ uniform.

Then there’s the darkest, most obvious, motivation for donning a mask - to provide anonymity and avoid identification by the authorities for criminal activities. This includes the Antifa-types, known for physical violence and property damage in pursuit of their anti-democratic, ill-defined revolutionary goals. The balaclava is the archetypal face covering for the activist crim.

But we’re now seeing the pro-Palestinian headdress (the “Keffiyeh”) used as a face covering in unlawful protests.

Viva La France

The French haven’t mucked around in dealing with the shady and/or misguided motivations for covering one’s face in public. In 2010, the French Parliament banned the wearing of face-covering headgear. Islamists and non-Muslim Islamophiles predictably claimed that the ban discriminated against Muslim women who are forced or cowed into wearing burqas and niqabs (a burqa covers all the wearer woman’s whole body, including the eyes; a niqab is the same except it spares the eyes).

On the day the ban came into force, a French woman from Pakistan complained to the European Court of Human Rights that the ban unlawfully discriminated against her by preventing her from wearing her niqab in public. The European Court upheld France’s ban on face-covering headgear (including the head cover of a burqa/niqab). The Court concluded that the ban could legitimately be regarded as:

proportionate to the aim pursued, namely the preservation of the conditions of "living together" as an element of the "protection of the rights and freedoms of others"

necessary in a democratic society

France therefore mandates its citizens to show their faces in public, as laudably conducive to a harmonious, civil society. Those who violate the ban can be made to undergo “citizenship education”, which is basically telling face-coverers how to behave if they want to remain citizens of the French Republic. If you don’t like what it takes to be French, you can leave.

Ban Aotearoan Face Masking

In addition to being conducive to free, open, and harmonious societies, there’s a paternalistic aspect to bans on face coverings. In other words, a progressive nation state may justifiably proscribe pointless face covering because it’s a form of self-harm. You may want to be a germophobic, neurotic, evasive, virtue signaling, group thinking snowflake…but it’s bad for your wellbeing.

This mask wearing is getting out of hand and New Zealand’s Parliament should consider banning public face coverings for anyone who isn’t sick with a communicable disease, or immune compromised with a credible medical certificate. Being a New Zealand citizen includes fronting up and showing your face. It’s good for you and your country.

John McLean is a citizen typist and enthusiastic amateur who blogs at John's Substack where this article was sourced.