DeSantis, who has never imposed a mask mandate on his state, spoke out about events where hundreds of people will be gathered without masks enjoying themselves while making all of the staff around them wear masks.
He said: “And I’m just thinking to myself, hold on. You’re in a packed ballroom with 500 people and they’re not wearing masks — and first of all they shouldn’t be — that’s fine. But is it really going to make a difference to have 15 waiters wearing masks?”
The governor has accused some elites of creating a “two-tiered society” that contains a “servant class that has to always do all this, but yet the other class, they can lecture you about wearing masks, but then they don’t wear masks themselves.”
This type of hypocrisy was on full display at the 2021 Emmys, which was one of the first award shows to return to an in-person format this year. Very few stars who attended the event were seen wearing masks or practicing social distancing, with many maskless celebs embracing one another, yet those who were working at the event were clearly masked.
A similar scenario took place at the Met Gala, where photos taken at the event showed maskless celebrities being served by staffers who were wearing masks.
It’s perhaps even more insulting when it is the very politicians who are insisting that their constituents adhere to mask mandates who are seen out and about without them. For example, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has been outspoken in calling for the Capitol police to arrest people who defy the mask mandate there, has been seen on multiple occasions without a mask in the U.S. Capitol. She even had the nerve to call House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy a “moron” for opposing the same mandate that she is apparently incapable of following.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed was roundly criticized after being caught partying in the city’s Black Cat nightclub without a face covering throughout the venue despite local restrictions that require nearly everyone to wear face coverings in indoor public spaces, even those who are fully vaccinated. The mayor posed for photos and spent the evening dancing and singing without a mask.
Breed continued the hypocrisy by saying in an interview about the incident: “We don’t need the fun police to come in and micromanage and tell us what we should or shouldn’t be doing.”
Oregon Governor Kate Brown drew fire after being spotted maskless while attending a Washington, D.C. gala, happily posing without a mask in photos with others, while maintaining a controversial indoor mask mandate in her home state. She has tweeted in the past: “Wearing a mask is not a political statement. Wearing a mask is an act of kindness. Masks don’t just protect you, they protect everyone around you from COVID-19.”
Even our president is failing to lead by example. While shopping last month in Nantucket, where an indoor mask mandate is in effect, Joe Biden was photographed maskless inside a store with a sign on the front that read “Face covering required” just as concerns about the new omicron variant started ramping up.
It’s not the first time he’s been caught in this situation; past incidents saw him disobeying local mask mandates at an upscale restaurant, shaking hands with members of the public in Michigan before then putting a mask on to take a selfie with someone, and coughing into his hand after a New Jersey speech and then using the same hand to shake hands with members of the public while not wearing a mask. The president has urged Americans repeatedly to wear masks to stem the spread of the virus.
Sources for this article include: