Democratic officials, joined by the Democratic-dominated Long Island press corps headed by Newsday, have been tearing Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman apart for promoting and passing a bill that bans the wearing of masks during protests.
They have been disingenuous in claiming that you can be arrested for wearing the mask to protect yourself from Covid.
The ban was put into effect after a number of pro-Hamas hoodlums took over a New York subway train, threatening supporters of Israel with violence if they didn’t leave the train.
Law enforcement agents expressed outrage that these thugs were able to hide their identities by wearing these masks. Even liberal governor Kathy Hochul expressed support for reinstating a mask ban.
Notice how we called it a “reinstatement.” Very few people realize that, for over a century, there were laws on the books prohibiting criminals from wearing masks during the commission of their crimes. Interestingly, these laws were passed after thugs dressed in Indian headwear to hide their identities. Mask bans were later used to deal with the intimidation tactics of the Ku Klux Klan against African-Americans and and Jews. https://www.politico.com/newsletters/new-york-playbook-pm/2024/06/27/exactly-like-the-kkk-lawmakers-say-mask-ban-needs-to-happen-asap-00165423
Yes, these thugs had a right to march and protest and spew their evil hate speech. But they were not going to be able to do so by hiding their faces. If crimes were going to be committed, we wanted to see who the perpetrators were.
Very few folks had a problem with these mask bans because they were put in effect to fight the KKK and to protect vulnerable Americans, usually Blacks, Jews, and other minorities. New York courts even upheld the bans. https://www.nyclu.org/court-cases/church-american-knights-kkk-v-city-new-york-challenging-restriction-assembling-while-wearing
But then Covid came along and wearing masks became commonplace and, in many cases, mandatory.
So these anti-KKK mask bans were pushed to the side. But now Covid mandates have subsided and many law enforcement officials thought it wise to go back to the days where we could identify criminals who were intimidating innocent residents. Yet we have the op-eds submitted by Democratic legislators as appeared in our Long Island Life & Politics, as well as the overwhelmingly Democratic letters published in Newsday bashing the Republican-sponsored anti-masking law.
But few of these critics have answered why the ban was good enough for the KKK but not for the pro-Hamas terrorist who are assaulting and impeding the freedom of movement of Jewish Americans.
Certainly, we don’t want a law that prohibits people from wearing masks for medical purposes. There’s an exemption within the law to do just that, but unfortunately, it’s rarely mentioned by the letter writers who are promoted by the mainstream media.
There might be legitimate reasons for thinking the bill could be drafted in a better way. That’s fine to have that discussion, but stop acting as though this is a new law imposed by a bunch of fascists when the original law banning mask wearing by criminals was put in place to actually stop fascists from intimidating innocent civilians.