The Rhetorics of Masking

The covid “pandemic” was an elaborate hoax, and one of the goofiest things I’ve ever witnessed during my existence on Earth was the universal requirement to wear a mask for no discernable reason. Well, let me walk that back. Reasons existed, but those reasons had nothing to do with filtering a virus out of air with cloth, but I’ll get to that. First, let’s start with the first part, the filtering part, that cloth cannot filter a virus out of the air. Am I crazy? Does everybody on Earth just not understand filtration at all? It sure seems that way.

During the school year of 2020-2021, I took my daughters to the school board meeting and when they opened the microphone to the public I went up there and gave a short Ted talk about filtration, using Ant-Man as my analogy, I shit you not. I’m talking to these college-educated educational beurocrats about Ant-Man and how that guy can shrink down, because those guys were forcing my daughters to wear useless breating restrictions on their faces, even on the school bus, for a reason I could not discern. So, you see Ant-Man, you know from the Marvel movies, he can shrink himself. It’s his super power. So, let’s imagine that I’m Ant-Man, and I shrink myself down. First I shrink myself to the size of a cat. Everyone got that? I’m a cat now. Okay. If I am cat-size, that mask works to filter me out. Can anyone here breath cats? Didn’t think so. If I shrink down again, I’m the size of a quarter. The mask still works. A quarter can’t pass through. If I shrink again, and I’m the size of a particle of dust. Here, we’ve reached the end of what we can reasonably expect our masks to do for us. You’ve seen guys on their lawnmowers with masks on? That’s because they want to filter out the dust they’re making from mowing. It helps, but probably not much. The air still follows the path of least resistance and can come around the edges. Here you really need a seal to stop that. Think a gas mask, like that thing Walter White wore in Breaking Bad. We’re at the end of what our masks can do for us. If I shrink down again, I’ve gone microscopic, and I’m the size of a bacterium. If I shrink down again about 100 times smaller, I’m now the size of a virus, and I can pass through your mask was easily as a mosquito can fly through a basketball net.

Suffice it to say, filtering a virus out of the air with a cloth mask, or with a medical mask, is impossible. It is impossible because for filtration to work, the filtration medium must be smaller than that which is being filtered. I employ that principle every morning when I make coffee. Do regular people really fail to grasp that?

Well, ostensibly smart people apparently couldn’t grasp it, either. I attended the most silly college departmental meetings you can imagine during the covid hoax, meetings that were held of course on Zoom . Straight up Ph.D’d professors absolutely clueless about how filtration works. Just absolutely clueless. I listened to a Dean instruct us all to send out any student who refused to comply with the masks and report them to her. I listened to a colleague state that she spent all weekend sewing cloth masks and that they were free and available in a box on the door of her office. She seemed absolutely convinced, and I mean most sincerely convinced, that a cloth mask sewed up on her Singer could filter a virus out of the air, as if by magic. I listened to another colleague while she asked if we had the authority to report non-compliant students to the campus police. Students just weren’t taking these mask seriously, and it seriously pissed her off.

The dude who was some kind of admistrator at the branch campus where I taught was the biggest stooge I have ever encountered in my professional life, and let me tell you, I’ve encountered my fair share of stooges, but this guy was absolutely the king of the stooges. This fat little dude would do anything he was told to do by the higher ups, and I mean that if they had told him to come to work only in his underwear for a week, he would have done that, and I’m not exaggerating, either. He would have totally done it. We all know people like that. We’ve had to work with them. I admit I especially despise stooges.

This fat little dude policed students for their masks, making sure they had them over their noses. My students would let their masks slip off their noses during my lectures, and I didn’t give a shit. I never chastised anyone for their mask-wearing abilities. But King Stooge knocked on my door and pulled me out into the hallway and told me, “Several of your students aren’t wearing their masks correctly.” Dude literally interrupted me mid-lecture to enforce the uselfess mask rule.

He reported me to the higher ups because I was wearing a plastic face shield instead of a cloth mask. I got a box of them for my daughter to wear to her school because the teachers there didn’t care. I was loopholing everything I could. I got an email from the university’s covid czar stating that the face shields are not recommended by the CDC, which requires a cloth mask, and so I couldn’t wear them.

It was the Twilight Zone, because obviously a cloth mask cannot filter a virus out the air. A plastic face shield can’t, either, but that was kind of the point. I’m just an observer. I want to observe people and how they act and react to things, so I went to Wal-Mart and bought some Chiffon, you know, the see-through cloth wedding veils are made from, and I broke out my sewing machine and sewed up some see-through Chiffon masks and started wearing them instead of the face shields, and would you believe that the stooge didn’t say a word? I still really get a laugh out of that. Chiffon is cloth, so I was adhering to the rule, you see, and I observed that that is what mattered to him, that I followed the rule.

Now we are getting somewhere.

I’m not sure about the percentages, but that’s when I understood that a significant number of people were just pretending, just going along with the rule, that they know how filtration works, but they’re not going to rock the boat. Then, there’s another percentage of people who knew how filtration worked, but were doing it for political branding, to signify his or her allegiance to the political apparatus. That was the stooge’s reason. Then there was a number of people who wore them because they didn’t understand filtration and they didn’t want to get sick. This almost certainly follows an IQ bell curve. Then there were people like me, who knew how filtration worked and didn’t want to join anyone’s poltical club, and in fact wanted to signal the opposite.

In other words, the reasons for the masks were rhetorical and political.

Rhetorically, the masks were one of the most shrewd moves I’ve ever seen. You want to pull an elaborate hoax on a population? Make them wear the symbol of fear on their faces so that everyone they encounter is reflecting that fear right back at them, that everywhere they go the reminder is right there, reinforcing the hoax. I’d really love to know where this idea was hatched, because it was genius. If you want to sell a “pandemic” hoax to people, masks were a brilliant rhetorical strategy because people are walking around wearing them. No one can see a virus, but they can see a mask. That’s because the actual markers of the realness of the pandemic, such as people dropping dead, etc., just weren’t there.

The political reason for masks was to signal one’s conformity and compliance to the party. That’s what was going on at the University for which I worked at the time. He’s wearing a mask, so he’s one of us. He isn’t wearing a mask, so he’s one of the bad people.

I’d lived my entire life to that point without a concrete example of how people assemble into a mass formation. Nazi Germany was theoretical to that point, but now I completely understand what happened there. The low-IQ people buy in and get swept away. The middle managers go along to get along, and the true believers go along willingly with anything the party wants. The top-level elites just do what they want, anyway. Dissenters are handled using some form of exile.

So much just clicked into place, and in that sense, I’m grateful for it. I taught my daughters, babies, don’t ever forget this time. Remember it well. This is what mass formation actually looks like. You will almost certainly encounter this again, and you probably ought to be able to recognize it so you can make smart moves and avoid obvious pitfalls, because as far as mass formations go, this one wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. They can be so much worse. Chilling. True.