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Los Angeles mayor wants ban on masks at protests [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2024-06-26  

Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass announced Tuesday the city was exploring ways it could prohibit wearing masks at public demonstrations. Covid infections are surging in the city, but that hardly matters when there are protestors to identify.

The move represents a stark reversal from 2020, when public health officials urged protesters to wear masks, and Democratic politicians embraced mask-wearing, while Donald Trump and many Republicans rejected masks and other public health measures. Bass's exploration of a mask ban comes as data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that tracks Covid levels in wastewater also found that California's Covid levels are sharply higher than the rest of the country. Viral levels in California wastewater crossed a point of "high activity" in June, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The about-face on public masking echoes that of Democrats in New York, where governor Kathy Hochul recently condemned public masking as a way to "evade responsibility for criminal or threatening behavior." The context: demonstrations in support of Palestine, where 35,000 people, mostly women and children, have been killed in an ongoing Israeli invasion. The invasion was a response to the October 2023 raid by Hamas militants, who murdered some 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped hundreds more. Though most demonstrations in the U.S. have been peaceful, the participation of antisemites offers Dems an off-ramp from Covid-era pro-mask rhetoric and cause to condemn the protests outright.

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/26/los-angeles-mayor-wants-ban-on-masks-at-protests.html

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