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Sometimes I wonder if there's something appealing to them about the mask in and of itself and the COVID stuff is motivated reasoning by this point. The mask now soothes their social anxiety somehow and they're stuck with it. Trannies like masks; it covers up their off/masculine facial features. (The last time I went to a North Chicago game store, the entire staff was trans, and masked). A lot of queer leftists have low self-esteem or are just ugly; maybe the mask is a Harrison Bergeron leveler.
I remember these people expressing a sense of betrayal and anger when the CDC officially ended the pandemic. COVID era messaging asked people to suddenly care way more about something they only kinda cared about before: not getting someone else sick. If you take that to heart, it's hard to dial that back down even after the all-clear signal was given (years later then it should have been). Caring about COVID also made way more sense if you live in a dense urban area, as the archetypical queer leftist does. But the people in the article live in a small town, yet somehow are more mask-nazi than the ones I run into. (Proof of the Hicklib concept, I guess)
That Socialist convention the other week (the Fitness=Fascism one) was also masks-mandatory.
One thing I find heartening is that outside this specific subculture, everyone else, even progressives, seems to find the continued mask-wearing strange and cringe when they encounter it or are informed of it. When I mention still seeing maskies to my (literal socialist) friends in non-megacities, they're taken aback. The more exposure all this gets, the crazier they look to normies.
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