Representative Kevin Kiley (R-Ca.) successfully passed an amendment that would ban toddler mask mandates in federal programs like Head Start.
CLIP: Kevin Kiley passes toddler mask ban amendment over opposition (8:08).
Wacky, bright-blue-haired Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) challenged the amendment. (She begins speaking around the 3:20 mark in the clip.) DeLauro cited “evidence-based science” and demanded “options” for “our scientists” to help protect everybody during pandemics. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. She argued we should “follow the science,” not follow Republicans’ politics or worse, their religious beliefs. She allowed that we all endured “a traumatic experience during covid,” but “we were all trying to find our way forward.” Mistakes were made.
Representative Kiley smartly tore into DeLauro’s hand-waving about “evidence-based science,” demanding that she produce her evidence, or just cite a single study, noting that even the WHO recommended against toddler masking. Unsurprisingly, DeLauro couldn’t do any of that, and she let Kiley’s amendment pass without demanding a recorded vote.
It was terrific progress. Please don’t buy into the cynical complaint that Kiley’s amendment was too little. In online comments, hard-skeptics asked, why only toddlers? Why just masks?
The answer is: politics.
At one point, a majority — including most democrats and many republicans — favored mask mandates. That’s a hard fact that is easy to overlook these days. At the height of pandemic mania, over 50% of Americans wanted everyone breathing through spit collectors. So the path to killing masks is not straightforward. Sure, a dictator could ban masks with the stroke of a pen. But in a democratic republic, reversing course requires an incremental and consensus-building approach.
A toddler mask ban is the most easily-justified type of mask ban: toddlers need to see faces to learn language skills. Only bizarre blue-haired people try arguing with that logic. And after passing the first, most obvious mask ban, the ban can be incrementally expanded. The game is afoot. You just need a place to start.
The democrats have successfully used this incrementalist technique against conservatives for decades. It is how we will beat all jab mandates.
One line to a federal ban on vaccine mandates is drawn directly through mask mandate bans. Of the two, the mask mandate ban is the easier ban for most people to accept. And the logic supporting a ban on mask mandates is ultimately rooted in bodily integrity and personal freedom — just like for vaccines. The one leads to the other.
Think about it this way: back in 2020, when I was fighting mask mandates in court, the communitarian argument I most often faced was masking is not for the wearer, it’s to protect everyone else. I recognized even then, in the late summer of 2020, that the communitarian mask argument was also an argument for mandatory vaccines. The jab is not for the injected, it’s to protect everyone else. So once we beat mask
mandates, the foundation will be laid for beating vaccine mandates.
Unlike some of the other proposed legislation in today’s update, the federal toddler mask ban has a good chance of passing. Let’s take the W.
