In a monologue on a recent episode of his top-rated show on the Fox News Channel, Tucker Carlson notes that within the last six or seven months, America has become a “different country.”
Whether America has become a different country or current events have simply revealed what has always been, the bottom line is that 2020 has been one hell of a year.
And not for the better.
In this monologue of his, Tucker was referring primarily to the Virus Internment: the transformation, under the pretext of waging “war” to prevent citizens from catching a cold virus, of America’s states, cities, and homes by power-obsessed politicians into what essentially amounts to an internment camp.
There is no more ominous symbol of the present state of the union than that of… The Mask.
If America can be said to have become a different country, as Tucker claims, then, judging from appearances, the most appropriate name for that country would be something like “Mask Nation,” or, say, “The Mask Union.” Its residents, therefore, we can refer to as “Masqueraders.”
The Masqueraders are not everyone and anyone who ever dons a mask. Medical workers have always sported masks while working with their patients, and many of us will wear a mask as the price of admission into the businesses that we have to frequent. In contrast, the Masquerader is the being, the cog in the great collective machine of Mask Nation, whose zeal for masks translates into a tireless quest to mandate the Mask to the four corners of the Earth.
The Mask is gospel for the Masqueraders. Indeed, it would be more accurate to refer to Mask Nation instead as Mask Empire.
Masqueraders have dehumanized themselves, for masks are dehumanizing. Infinitely worse, however, is that by virtue of their invincible intolerance for any and all who would dare to question Mask orthodoxy, they also dehumanize others. Nor is this name-calling on my part:
Masks, by virtue of concealing our faces, deny the expression of just those features that reveal to a greater extent than all others our humanity. The face, in its entirety, discloses the spark of the divine that resides within the human being and which makes him or her a person. Nor need one be a conscious believer in God in order to concede that the facial countenance, more so than any other aspect of the body, affirms the person’s standing as a moral agent, a being with an inviolable dignity, possessing rights and duties.
The Mask, in veiling the face, then, dehumanizes the human being who wears it. It divests the Masquerader of his or her humanity. As such, it undercuts the inherent dignity that belongs to human beings as human beings, i.e. bearers of the image of the God in whose likeness they were made. Consequently, Masqueraders are Corona Walkers, zombies not as dissimilar as we’d like think they’d be from the zombies on The Walking Dead.
Yet the Mask also undercuts the unique identity of the individual wearer.
To be sure, “systemic racism”—the doctrine that all whites are subconsciously “racist” by virtue of the fact that all of Western civilization’s institutions and practices are themselves incorrigibly “racist”—is an ideologically and politically useful fiction. Still, if those who never tire of bemoaning it were sincere or consistent, then they would be the first to reject Mask imperialism (and all of the Social Distancing orders that accompany it).
Instead, what we find is just the opposite. Those who most loudly and incessantly decry “systemic racism” (and all other forms of “exclusion”) are also—surprise, surprise—the most fanatical zealots of Mask Empire.
Presumably, “racism” is immoral because it consists in a denial of the individual, specifically, the repudiation of all of those characteristics that individuate a person as the unique person that he or she is. The Mask, though, does exactly this as it dissolves the individual into a sea of uniformity, reducing him or her to an anonymous unit in a collective comprised of millions of other such indistinguishable units.
The Mask, far from encouraging inclusion and tolerance, promotes with far greater efficacy than any other contemporary device exclusion and intolerance. In fact, the Mask, particularly given its use as a tool to “Flatten the Curve!” and “Save Lives!” is radically exclusionary, for it expresses fear, a paralyzing fear, of—to borrow a term from the lexicon of contemporary leftist cant—“the Other.”
Only here, the Other is treated not just as undesirable. Given the Masquerader’s view of every person as the very embodiment of a dreaded disease, the Other is treated, literally, as an Untouchable. In other words, the very essence of “racism” and that of Mask Empire—the objectification of the subject, the reduction of the person to a thing—are one and the same.
There is, however, another respect in which, if the Masquerader—who, recall, is usually as well a self-proclaimed “anti-racist”—was consistent, he or she would see that Mask Empire advances “systemic racism”:
The Mask has historically been associated with outlawry, criminality. So too, as the self-styled champions of “racial justice” are the first to tell us, have blacks been so associated. Therefore, “Mask Up!”—the Masquerader’s categorical imperative that flashes in bright lights on some interstate highways—leads to two problems:
First, requiring black Americans to wear masks reflects a lack of sensitivity to their unique history as an oppressed people by reinforcing traditional stereotypes regarding their criminality. The Mask and their skin complexion doubly stigmatizes blacks.
Second, while Masqueraders will undoubtedly object that, insofar as their Mask Mandate extends to all indiscriminately, it is the very antithesis of “racism,” by their own rhetoric they refute themselves:
According to those who insist upon the reality of “systemic racism,” the persistent, seemingly intractable existence of the latter is made possible by none other than the idea of color-blindness is itself! Color-blindness, we are told, is actually a nefarious concept, for it supplies racial opportunists with a veneer behind which to advance their interests while encouraging the reasonably well-intentioned but naïve to neglect those socio-racial realities that need to be addressed before an era of true Racial Equality can materialize.
So, when Masqueraders assure us that the systematizing of the Mask hasn’t anything to do with the promotion of “systemic racism” because the Mandate is, well, color-blind, they hoist themselves on their own petards, convicting themselves of the very thing which they themselves proclaim makes the perpetuation of “systemic racism” possible!
Thus, those who are genuinely interested in combatting “systemic racism” must combat Mask Empire. The abolition of the former requires the abolition of the latter. Hell, if we really wanted to lay on the leftist-style rhetoric, we could even go so far as to say that Masqueraders are fundamentally Klansmen who have traded in their sheets and hoods for masks.
Whether severally or conjoined with all other Social Distancing impositions, the Mask flagrantly, violently, and systematically affirms just those things that “anti-racists” decry: fear, distrust, alienation, and exclusion.
With all of this in mind, the next time that you’re confronted by a Masquerader who asks you as to why you’re not adhering to the Mandate, consider, if you’re so inclined to have a little fun, giving the imperialist a quick response that is sure to discombobulate her:
“I’m not wearing a mask because I’m not a racist.”
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