Unmasking the truth about the conservative agenda in Raleigh

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The North Carolina legislature has enacted a lot of half-baked and destructive laws over the last 13-plus years of conservative rule.

There was the HB2 debacle in which lawmakers made the state a national pariah and laughingstock by promoting the preposterous notion that male sexual predators were diabolically masquerading as transgender women in order to gain access to women’s public restrooms.

There was the infamous “Monster Voting Law” that a federal court determined targeted Black voters for disenfranchisement “with surgical precision.”

There was the legislation that guaranteed thousands of premature deaths by forbidding the expansion of Medicaid, the bill that gutted the state unemployment insurance system, the bill that sought to proscribe discussion and consideration of sea-level rise in coastal planning and land use decisions, and of course, all manner of bills to defund and privatize public education, eviscerate the state tax code, rig elections through partisan gerrymandering, limit bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom, and abet the spread of deadly firearms into every nook and cranny of the state.

And while these measures were often cloaked by their defenders with buzzwords like “liberty” and “freedom,” when one takes a step back, it’s not hard to see another and more important overarching theme at work — one that has little to do with either word. As with Donald Trump’s “MAGA” appeals, what’s really at work here is a desire to preserve and enforce a slowly ebbing societal order that’s been so long dominated by wealthy, older, mostly male, white people.

This is not to say that the policy choices of recent years have raised the quality of life for wealthy, old, white men who comprise 10% or so of the North Carolina population. Most would actually be much better off in a state that, among other things, valued science, public education, access to healthcare, fair elections, a progressive tax code, and less gun violence.

But as with so many things in life, the perception of agency and control is often more important politically than the real-world impacts wrought by that control. It’s part of the reason people vote against their true best interests all the time.

And so it is that the state Senate took the remarkable step last week of approving legislation that would, quite absurdly, enhance criminal penalties for demonstrators and protesters who are arrested if they were wearing a mask at the time of their alleged offense — even if they were doing so for health reasons.

And so it is that the bill would also, astoundingly, make it illegal to wear a mask in public for virtually any reason.

Yes, you read that right. A vulnerable senior or other immunocompromised person trying to protect themselves at the grocery store would be guilty of a crime if the bill becomes law.

And it’s hard to overstate how ridiculous and dangerous this is.

Turning protesters and demonstrators engaged in civil disobedience into felons is bad enough, but the idea of criminalizing mask wearing – a practice that’s often essential to protecting public health – is, by any fair estimation, downright crazy. (And, as an aside, the notion that wearing a surgical mask bears a meaningful resemblance to wearing a Klan hood, as a 1950s era law sought to proscribe, is just silly).

But, as noted, the bill has very little, if anything, to do with public safety or any other legitimate public purpose.

As was made clear in the speeches delivered by the senators supporting the bill, what this legislation is really about is showing everyone who it is that’s still the boss in this state.

Indeed, if there’s anything that causes the blood of the modern conservative politician to boil, it’s seeing two things they really dislike in combination: the masks they grew to hate during the pandemic and protesters challenging their policies and priorities.

That’s why – when pressed by critics about the obvious irrationality of turning cancer patients making trips to Rite Aid and Harris Teeter into lawbreakers – the bill defenders blithely responded that police officers and sheriff’s deputies would use “discretion” in meting out enforcement.

Translation: As is so often the case with law enforcement in so many parts of America, seniors and middle-aged residents in affluent white neighborhoods (like those in which most GOP lawmakers reside) will have nothing to fear. Young people and people of color, however, – especially when they dare to venture outside of prescribed boundaries and timeframes – will be a different matter.

In other words, as so many thousands of North Carolinians have been reminded in countless incidents down through the decades during traffic stops for the “offense” of “driving while Black and brown,” the proposed mask law would – if it ever survived a gubernatorial veto and a court challenge – provide yet another set of grounds on which to show disfavored populations who’s boss.

And even if, as is likely, the proposal never does become an enforceable law, it helps remove another rather loose-fitting mask – the one that cloaks who it is conservative politicians aim to favor with the laws they pass, and who it is that they aim to keep in line.

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