Loading ...AN EPIC KARMIC “ABOUT FACE”
From the brilliant and Now Vindicated Jeff Childers
Finally, my favorite piece of the year. I PROMISE YOU that I am not making this up. Last week, Local ABC 7 in New York ran a story headlined, “NYPD’s Latest Guidance On Crime Fighting Efforts Put NYC Shop Owners In Tight Spot.”
In other words, Bronx cops are trying to wrestle down an outbreak of violent daylight robberies, and have asked for help from the public — particular from local business people:
Police say they’re having trouble identifying suspects who target stores because they’re wearing masks. They are now urging store owners to be proactive in the crime fighting effort.
“We are asking the businesses to make this a condition of entry, that people when they come in, they show their face, they should identify themselves,” NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey said.
Hahaha! A no-mask rule?? First they tell us we have to make customers wear masks, then they tell us to make customers NOT wear masks. This ridiculous but totally-predictable and completely foreseeable development still caught everyone off guard. Store owners in the Bodega aren’t exactly sure how they can safely enforce such a rule, given how … um … “passionate” mask-wearers are.
“We don’t have a weapon to defend ourselves,” Marte said. “That would be great, everyone come with their face up so the camera can see, we all can see. But we cannot force them to take off the mask.”
Marte says that would lead to confrontation with customers who still want to mask up because of COVID.
This story is wonderful on one level — the hypocritical about-face that is already in New York and I’m sure will be coming to a location near you soon. But I’m sorry, but this is an irresistible “I told them so” moment. Let me show you how from the very beginning I knew for SURE — as a lawyer — that masks were a horrible idea.
I filed my appellate brief in my winning mask lawsuit back in June of 2020 — after all the trial litigation over the injunction was complete. I’d lost at the trial court and was headed into an emergency appeal. I worked harder on that brief than just about anything in my career.
First, I cited several developing 2020 news items in my Appellate index, which show that a lot of people were ALREADY noticing about the emerging, mask-related violent crime problem; at least, before they weren’t allowed to report it anymore:
That was THREE YEARS AGO! But even before that, we had clues much, much earlier. Far beyond the basic fact that dozens or hundred of pre-pandemic scientific studies had found masks failed to mitigate influenza, the law had long been aware of the social risks posed by public face masking.
For example, on page 31 of my brief, I cited a 1990 case where Georgia’s Supreme Court — upholding a law BANNING public mask wearing — observed masks have been criminals’ trademarks FROM THE BEGINNING OF TIME:
My arguments were met by lazy, scoffing lawyers who didn’t bother doing any research of their own — who mostly dismissed my cases as just being about awful Ku Klux Klan behavior. Wrong! Not one single case cited in my brief was a Klan case. I left all the many Klan mask cases out of my brief, on purpose, knowing my opponents would get too distracted by the racial issue to wrestle with the underlying logic, even though the reason Klan members shouldn’t mask in public is exactly the same reason nobody else should either.
When I pointed out that to my opponents there were TONS of mask cases having nothing to do with the Klan, it was like their brains suddenly malfunctioned, sparked out, and everyone just moved on to their next arguments. It was vexing.
In another example cited in my brief, the 11th Circuit overturned Georgia’s ban on public masking on First Amendment grounds, but observed that the Georgia Supremes found the practice of wearing masks in public was intimately associated with violence:
It wasn’t a brand-new idea that the Georgia Supreme Court suddenly knitted together out of conspiracy theories. In 1995 — the same year the 11th Circuit struck down Georgia’s ban on public face masks — the well-respected Seventh Circuit held the most irresponsible thing a court could possibly do would be to allow people to wear face masks inside a courtroom:
In other words, the well-respected 7th Circuit Court of Appeals thought letting someone get away with wearing a mask inside would be the dumbest thing a court could ever do. It never occurred to the 7th Circuit judges, not in their wildest, extra-spicy-hot-wing-fueled nightmares, that a court might actually ORDER people to wear masks in the courtroom.
They’d have laughed you right out of court.
But twenty-five years later, every court in the land shot past what the 7th Circuit had already decided was the MOST irresponsible thing possible, by REQUIRING masks in courtrooms. And nobody even bothered trying to say WHY they were ignoring all that case law.
Some people wonder why I’ve always been so scornful of mask wearing. It’s because I started researching all this case law in May of 2020. I could not find one single case — anywhere — that found mask wearing was a good idea. To the contrary, a lot of really smart judges had found mask wearing was a terrible idea.
This legal “switcheroo” on masking is one of the things that absolutely convinced me in 2020 that we were riding out a worldwide mass delusion. It’s not like the experts didn’t KNOW about all these problems, problems that EVERYONE has known about SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME.
In 2020, they already knew public masking would lead to violence and crime. They KNEW it. But they did it anyway. And — never EVER let someone tell you that mask wearing is harmless. Tell them to try arguing that to the shop owner in the ABC 7 article who said he’s been shot THREE TIMES.
The good news is that, to my knowledge, my case is the only mask case that made it to an appellate court. And my appellate court found that mask mandates were presumptively unconstitutional and tore execrable Alachua county a new orifice. So the law stands undisturbed: masks are bad news.
If you’ve never read my wonderful appellate opinion, which still stands as good law, never overturned, here’s a link. You’re welcome.