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Notes -
Remember the "don't say gay" bill? If you were being very charitable, you could say that the so-called "don't say gay" bill in Florida did prohibit "saying gay" in certain contexts, so I suppose the reporting on it comported with Scott's ideas on bounded distrust, that the media rarely concts outright lies.
But the reporting on North Carolina's HB 237 looks to consist of outright lies. Background: the state already has a law on the books that prohibits concealing your identity when committing a crime, with a consequence that the class of misdemeanor or felony commited gets bumped up by one. During the pandemic they added an extemption to the law for thsoe wearing a mask for health reasons. HB 237 removes that exemption.
News media are reporting that North Carolina is banning mask wearing in public. Some examples of those spreading the idea that this is a general ban on public masking:
WaPo adds some more context, and describes the law as a prohibition on masking during a crime, but still lies in their headline by saying that the bill bans mask wearing at protests generally:
It's really just when concealing your identity in general.
12.7:
With this context, I think I'm actually wrong, and some of the media were right, but perhaps on accident.
Interesting to note that this section of the law, passed in 1953, appears to be designed to attack the KKK. The section is titled "Prohibited Secret Societies and Activities": https://www.ncleg.net/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/HTML/ByChapter/Chapter_14.html
Well you do still have to wear it "to conceal the identity of the wearer." Most facemasks don't do that. This law is broad enough that a power-hungry official could use it to criminalize covid masks, but most laws are similarly broad, and the left-leaning ones don't receive such scrutiny.
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