Monday, February 7, 2022

Stacey Abrams’s Outrageous Mask Hypocrisy

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 NewsomRalph NorthamMuriel BowserJoe BidenLondon BreedJamaal 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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