By Jim Geraghty
Monday, February
07, 2022
On February 4, Stacy Abrams visited
Glennwood Elementary School in Decatur, Ga., participating in the school’s
third annual “African-American Read In,” as described
by the school’s principal Dr. Holly Brookins.
Abrams tweeted, “Spending time
with Glennwood’s amazing students, faculty and staff ranks as spectacular,
delightful and outstanding. Thank
you for having me.” She retweeted
a tweet from Brookins, which
featured three photos of Abrams with students and faculty.
Why are all the children masked, and she
is not? Why is everyone masked, and Abrams is not? On what
planet does that make sense?
What is amazing about this sequence of
events is that apparently it never crossed anyone’s mind that it was ludicrous
to have everyone in the room masked, except for Stacey Abrams. Or perhaps
teachers and other adults in attendance did recognize the
situation was ridiculous, but kept their objections to themselves, lest they be
accused of racism, sexism, or some other sin against progressive orthodoxy.
After those on Twitter called out this
insane double-standard, Abrams deleted the tweet, and Brookins appears to have deleted her
account. But deleting the tweets doesn’t
eliminate the photos from the archives, and attempting to hide what
happened does not change what happened. (Is an attempted coverup
really the lesson Abrams and the principal want to teach those kids?) The
school welcomed a celebrity guest and chose to suspend its masking policy for
her while keeping that rule in place for everyone else. If that is so
self-evidently indefensible that Abrams and the school won’t even try to defend
it, then why are those policies still in place?
There are two possible answers for what we
see in those pictures. Option one is yes, Abrams should have worn a
mask and refused to, defying the school’s policy, without any consequence.
Option two is that Abrams didn’t need to wear a mask because everyone there
concluded her wearing one wouldn’t make a significant difference in risk, which
means everyone else in the school should be allowed to decide for themselves,
too — or at minimum, parents should be able to decide for their children.
There is no way you can argue that the
kids in that school assembly are at a higher risk of serious consequences of a
Covid-19 infection than 48-year-old Stacey Abrams. As the New
York Times’ David Leonhardt aptly summarized, “Children face more risk from car rides than Covid.” If Abrams is
concerned about Covid-19, she should be masked herself. If she isn’t concerned
about Covid-19, why would she
expect or demand anyone else to wear a mask that she herself refuses to wear?
Instead, Abrams and the school are just
playing ostrich and waiting for the controversy to go away. We keep seeing this
over and over and over again — Gavin Newsom, Ralph Northam, Muriel Bowser, Joe Biden, London Breed, Jamaal Bowman — officials who enact masking rules, then ditch the masks as soon
as they think no one is looking and always insist that their not wearing masks
is different somehow.
On Sunday, the Abrams campaign felt
sufficiently pressured to issue a statement and offered a nonsense jumble of
words that contended the people criticizing Abrams for not wearing a mask were
endangering public health: “It is shameful
that our opponents are using a Black History Month reading event for Georgia
children as the impetus for a false political attack, and it is pitiful and predictable that our opponents continue to look
for opportunities to distract from their failed records when it comes to
protecting public health during the pandemic.”
What is the “false political attack,” that
Abrams didn’t wear a mask in the school? She did not wear a mask! There are
pictures and we all have eyes! Abrams herself retweeted those pictures out! She
clearly didn’t think she had done anything wrong until she saw the reaction on
social media.
By late yesterday, the campaign
had tweaked its messaging:
Her
campaign said she wore a mask to the event and only removed it so she could be
heard by students watching remotely and for a handful of photos on the
condition that everyone around her was wearing face-coverings.
Video
footage of the event reviewed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows Abrams
arrived at the podium wearing a mask, taking it off just before she began to
speak.
In other words, Abrams’s new spin is that
she’s being particularly responsible by requiring everyone
else to wear a mask when she does not.
The people who should be maddest at Abrams
shouldn’t be the anti-mask folks on the center and the right. Through her
actions, Abrams is effectively agreeing with them that school masking policies
are a joke. No, the people who should be maddest at Abrams are the pro-mask
progressives, the kinds of
people who yell at Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin for going into a
supermarket without a mask, even
though he’s in a store that doesn’t require them for customers.
As we’ve seen since the Met Gala, masks
are now an indicator of social class; if you’re rich and powerful enough,
you’re exempt. If you’re a child in public schools, you and your parents don’t
get to make that decision for yourselves.
The Abrams photo may already be
accelerating the demasking public-policy process. Governor Phil Murphy in New
Jersey is now “pulling a Youngkin” and leaving it
up to parents.
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