On the menu today: On Friday, Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams visited an elementary school in the Atlanta suburbs and apparently didn’t wear a mask at all, even though all the children and staff around her wore masks. Her campaign now declares that if you object to that absurdity, you are “shameful” and “pitiful and predictable.” Elsewhere, the CEO of Delta Airlines wants the Department of Justice to create a new, second “no-fly list” for disruptive passengers.
Stacey Abrams Doesn’t Believe in Wearing Masks in Schools . . . at Least for Herself
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.
Do We Need a Second, Separate Federal No-Fly List for Unruly Passengers?
I hope we can all agree that getting into physical altercations on airplanes is bad, and if convicted of a crime, perpetrators should serve their full sentences. But should getting into a fight on a plane bar someone from ever getting onto an airplane again?
Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta, wrote a letter to U.S. attorney general Merrick Garland last week urging the U.S. Justice Department to create a national no-fly list of passengers who have been convicted of violating federal law by disrupting a flight.
Every couple of years we get into another argument about the “No Fly List,” which started out as a seemingly commonsense step — keep people the U.S. government suspects are terrorists from getting onto an airplane — and morphed into a massive list of Americans who cannot get on an airplane — sometimes on serious suspicions of terrorism, and sometimes just because they have a name that is similar to that of a terrorist. For many years, Democrats have argued that a person’s name appearing on the no-fly list means they should be barred from purchasing a gun — an abrogation of their constitutional rights without any conviction in a court of law.
There were 1.6 million people on the no-fly list as of February 2017; U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents account for approximately 16,000 of the total. The Department of Homeland Security explains that “the [Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment] and many downstream screening systems are name-based, meaning that people with names similar to those in the database may be stopped for additional screening by TSA or at a port of entry.” In other words, if a terrorist has the same name as you, you can end up on the list.
The late senator Ted Kennedy was selected for the TSA list for additional screening. As he lamented in a 2004 interview, “It happened three more times and finally Secretary Ridge called to apologize on it. It happened even after he called to apologize because they couldn’t — my name was on the list at the airports and with the airlines and the Homeland Security. He couldn’t get my name off the list for a period of weeks.”
If one of the most powerful senators in the country, with access to the DHS Secretary himself, can end up on this list and have great difficulty getting off of it, imagine what it’s like for a Paterson father or a fired airport-shuttle employee.
The existing no-fly list and additional screening lists are not like convictions in court or being declared mentally impaired by the government. There is no independent or third-party review, no equivalent of a defense attorney to argue on your behalf that you don’t belong on the list. Oftentimes, people are added to the list and never know it until they show up at the airport. The government is rarely willing to say why a person is on the list, citing national security. For a long time, there was no appeals process; now, there is a slow and arduous one.
You know who didn’t end up on the no-fly list? The San Bernardino shooters, Boston bombers, the Fort Hood shooter, or the Chattanooga shooter. Omar Mateen, the Pulse nightclub shooter, wasn’t on the no-fly list but had been on a separate FBI terrorist watch list . . . and then the bureau took him off that list.
The proposed “unruly passenger no-fly list” includes one key improvement over the terrorist no-fly list, as it requires a conviction in a court of law. But I still think it gets into shaky legal and constitutional ground.
There is nothing wrong with an airline permanently barring a passenger. I also don’t think there’s a legal issue with airlines sharing their lists with each other, as Delta has done with several other airlines since September. But a national “unruly passenger no-fly list,” created and updated by the U.S. Department of Justice, would use the executive branch of the federal government to enact another punishment upon the perpetrator, beyond the sentence enacted by the judicial branch in the court of law. Unless the felon’s criminal sentence included, “and you can never get on a passenger airliner again,” this would represent the state coming back and declaring, “Oh, and we didn’t seek this consequence during your trial, but we’ve thought of another punishment we’re going to enact.”
One of the animating spirits behind the push for criminal-justice reform was the idea that once a convicted criminal has served his sentence, he has paid his debt to society. The point is not to pile on additional punishments and difficulties in his life; the aim is to get that person back on the right track in life and steer them away from the choices that lead to criminal behavior.
ADDENDUM: Thank you to everyone who has checked out my cover piece on the lab-leak theory. The few objections I’ve encountered so far are “You’re not a scientist!” — never said I was! — or that I’m not a “science reporter.” We could fix the job-title issue with a phone call to Rich, but really, how long do you have to write about a topic like the pandemic before that stops being a legitimate objection? And then there are folks who contended that I was “two years late” to the story. (Show me you know nothing about me without saying you know nothing about me.)
I notice no one is getting around to actually arguing, disputing, or countering anything that’s written in the farshtunken article!