Podcast #23:

Welcome back friends to In My Right Mind. I am Russ Andrews and as always, I am joined by the producer of In My Right Mind, Mr PJ Jaycox. How about them Av’s PJ??

So PJ, critics…like me… are arguing that masking has become a form of virtue signaling. Uncle Joe Biden, the Delaware Destroyer, reinforced that claim with his appeals to patriotism, which began during last year’s campaign as a rebuttal to the mask-resistant President Trump.

But if wearing a mask conveys a political message, mandating it is constitutionally suspect. “No official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein,” Justice Robert Jackson wrote in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), which held that forcing schoolchildren to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance violated their freedom of speech.

To wear a mask in public is to affirm a viewpoint no less powerful than the Pledge of Allegiance: that Covid poses a crisis so dire as to demand unprecedented government control of our lives and a transformation of the norms of interpersonal behavior. Ubiquitous mask mandates make assent impossible to avoid except by breaking the law or staying home.

“The pandemic has receded rapidly, with the number of daily U.S. infections down 88% since its January peak and still declining. Since mid-April vaccines have been available free of charge to any adult in America. Almost 124 million Americans—including more than 47% of adults and nearly 73% of the vulnerable 65-and-over population—have been vaccinated fully. The CDC acknowledges implicitly with its latest guidance that vaccinated people are at trivial risk of contracting the virus or transmitting it to others.”

The WSJ claims “All this would be relevant to a court considering a First Amendment challenge to a mask mandate. To defend content-based limits on speech, the government must satisfy a standard known as strict scrutiny. It has three elements, all of which must be met: The government has to demonstrate that the restriction furthers a “compelling interest,” that it is “narrowly tailored” to fulfill its objective, and that it is the “least restrictive means” of doing so.

The government undoubtedly has a compelling interest in preventing infectious disease. But that doesn’t necessarily imply a compelling need for mask mandates. If it did, they could be justified in perpetuity. Universal masking would reduce spread of the flu, the common cold and other infections, but that has never been thought to justify mandating it except during a pandemic.

Widespread vaccination makes mask mandates far too broad to be a properly tailored remedy. Selective enforcement against the unvaccinated is impracticably cumbersome, so authorities have to rely on what CDC Director Rochelle Walensky calls “the honor system”—which presumably is why the CDC hasn’t relaxed its own order requiring universal masking in transportation facilities.

Many of the relaxed mandates arbitrarily apply to the 32 million Americans with natural immunity from prior infection unless they are also vaccinated. And if selective enforcement were possible, it would compound the First Amendment violation with an intrusion into medical privacy by effectively requiring the disclosure of vaccination status as a condition of going out in public.

All of which is to say PHOCK the face mask!

Consumers Reasearch ads, FIGHTING BACK! Wsj:

“Some of America’s most prominent CEOs have been getting political, as in woke political, and perhaps they figured it was cost-free. They are now learning the hard way that it isn’t, as a national advertising campaign targets their brands and...