McDonald: Petty tyrants
A few days before a principled and courageous young federal judge in Florida struck down the Brandon administration’s indefensible federal transportation mask mandate, I flew from the state of Florida back to my hometown of Los Angeles. As I walked to the gate at the Ft. Myers airport, I realized I had forgotten to bring water with me. When I entered the plane, I asked a stewardess if she had any water. “I’m dehydrated, and I really can’t wait for two hours for the drink service.” Her reply? “Put your mask over your nose.” Needless to say, the five-and-a-half-hour flight was exquisitely unpleasant, all due to her. The man sitting next to me was banned from future flights on Alaska Air because his mask had dropped below his nose while he was sleeping, and the Karen stewardess caught him in the act. I would not be surprised if this middle-aged woman had volunteered to be the hall pass monitor in elementary school. “Mrs. Johnson, Steven doesn’t have a pass. I’m sending him to the principal for detention.” Petty tyrants, when given power, will invariably abuse those around them, sadistically, if we do not constrain them.
The mask mandate on commercial aircraft and ground transportation has ended. Many are rejoicing. As word spread that unelected bureaucrats at the CDC had been kneecapped by the Florida judge, stewardesses were filmed dancing in the aisles as they walked up and down the cabin holding out trash bags for passengers eager to ditch their face diapers. “We’re free! We can all show our faces now!” One pilot announced over the loudspeaker, “Toss them. Burn them. Do whatever you want with your masks. You can all take them off your faces now.” Jubilant airline employees and passengers celebrated the return of their freedom with applause and smiles from coast to coast.
Not everyone was happy, though. The uninformed, the fearful, and the sociopathic erupted with shrieks of outrage and anger over the reality that they would no longer be able to foist their intellectual, emotional, and character deficits onto everyone around them. One ER physician posted a Tweet decrying the removal of the mask mandate, writing, “My pregnant wife and four-year-old (who is not eligible for the vaccine) bought their tickets with the promise that everyone in the plane would be masked, and now they’ll have to fly unprotected. United Airlines has put their lives in grave danger. We demand a return to mandatory masking on all flights.” Aside from the terrifying reality that this man is a physician treating critically ill patients in an emergency room, his comment reveals a broader truth about a small but influential segment of the American population. These people simultaneously insists that masks (and “vaccines”) work while tacitly acknowledging their utter ineffectiveness, unless everyone else is forced to to use them, too. They have revealed that the basis for the mask crusade is emotional, and that the motivation is nothing other than control.
This cannot be disputed. Those who continue to wear masks are fools, but those who continue to insist that others wear them are nothing but petty tyrants. They suffer from deficits of character that have been revealed and encouraged through the efforts of local and national government. Although our government bodies are largely corrupt, the greatest threat today is not those we elect or those they appoint to do their bidding, but rather our fellow Americans. It is the sick emergency room physician who uses his position to control others and punish them for insisting on making rational decisions in the face of utter madness. These people must not be given power. Just as we do not allow children to drive, we cannot authorize adults with a penchant for narcissistic authoritarianism to dictate how we live. And the only way to do this is to curtail the rapidly expanding power of government.
When we do not check the power of government, we grant to our neighbors, by extension, the power to control us. It may be an attractive proposition to invite government to take care of us, but this experiment has generally ended badly. Granting broad power to government has led to Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, the Soviet Union, China. Neighbor informs on neighbor, son upon father, student upon teacher. Those who refuse to comply with government orders are reported, threatened, arrested, punished, and ultimately imprisoned or executed. Their persecution is always defended and justified as aiding the public good. Those who witness these campaigns of terror are then cowed into conformity and obeisance, acutely aware that the petty tyrant citizen could end their lives at any time. Where the people used to rule, now unaccountable and deranged sociopaths have taken charge and turned what was once a noble experiment into a nightmare and a hellhole. We created this monster by arming the petty tyrants through our bovine support for bigger and bigger government. It is our obligation to slay it.
Appeasement and collusion have only fed the beast. It’s now time to aggressively push back against overtly unhealthy and virulent behavior that continues to threaten our survival. With rare exceptions, I now refuse to acknowledge, much less converse with, anyone who covers his face. That behavior should be reserved for criminals. I inform anyone who approaches me with a diaper covering his mouth that the practice is degrading to him and disrespectful to me, and I walk away. Just as the rational and emotionally healthy were threatened and excluded during the mask crusade, those who continue to insist on this sick ritual deserve to be shamed and ostracized from society. The cancer must be removed, or the body will perish.
We are in a war right now, a war for our very survival. We can never again allow our government to empower strangers to usurp our basic rights—to speak, to worship, to move about freely. To breathe. I’m done being nice.
You have had two years to inform yourself. If you haven’t made the right choice by now, you are either a fool or a petty tyrant. And neither is welcome on my side of this war.
Mark McDonald, M.D.
Psychiatrist and author of United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis
