You may remember a fellow I wrote about last week — a GOP candidate in Pennsylvania who threatened to take “twenty strong men” into a school board meeting and physically remove the board for mandating masks for kids.
He then launched into a sort of free association game based on the word “men.”
“Men where are you?” he asked the crowd at the “freedom rally” he was speaking to.
Men wake up smell the coffee. Let’s go make men great again, right, make men men again. Let’s go men, I need you.
Well, it turns out he’s not the only anti-vaxxer who wants to solve all the world’s problems — at least insofar as they involve schoolchildren and COVID masks — by assembling a group of big tough burly guys to maybe beat some school board members up.
Earlier this week, in Manatee County in Florida, a pro-Trump group put out its own request for a “manly presence” at a school board meeting.
Never mind that masks were already optional; these people are mad that they have to fill out a form. Because, like most anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, they are huge babies with a grossly overgrown sense of entitlement.
Anyway, in this case the group’s cyber-bark was worse than its IRL bite. According to the Bradenton Herald, the Tuesday meeting (which was actually about the school budget, not masks) was relatively free of disruption.
“[T]hough the message caused a brief stir,” the paper reported,
Tuesday’s meeting carried on with few disruptions. …
Just over two dozen maskless men and women attended the meeting in downtown Bradenton, quietly waiting for public comment and watching as the board reviewed this year’s finances.
Still, the manly (and womanly) brigade treated the board to a bunch of off-topic “public comments.”
One after the other, about a dozen people took to the podium and opposed the mask mandate before quietly returning to their seats.
Still, with so much talk of violence in the air, it’s really only a matter of time until some “manly” men actually physically assault local school board members or some other low-level politicos who dare to stand up to the anti-mask, anti-vax mob. And that is pretty alarming.
Follow me on Twitter.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!
A question/challenge to anti-maskers that I’m testing out. “Do I have a second amendment right to defend myself from plague rat behavior?”
@Brony, Social Justice Cenobite
Ha. I wonder how loudly they’d whine if someone put up a sign in their shop window reading “No mask, no service, and this is an open-carry establishment.”
But Pelosi says the US “needs a big, strong Republican Party”!
@Big Titty Demon: I’m sorry you and your mom have to deal with that. Two of my aunts are healthcare workers in the Black Hills in South Dakota (the site of the stupid fucking rally…)
One is a PA in her fifties so she herself doesn’t have as much risk, but her husband is older and she has a young kid. The other aunt is a nurse and she’s in her 60s. Both are with COVID patients all the time. They sent us pictures of when they were told to use shoe coverings as masks because they couldn’t get PPE.
rabid rabbit
“We can’t breath” with a mask logo was graffitied in our town the week after George Flood died
*spelling mistakes theirs
Men men men
It’s a ship all full of men!
You never have to lift the seat!!
There’s no-one here but men
As they say, dom service isn’t free.
@lkeke35 –
*raises hand* Yup. It’s exhausting. And people seem to have fixated on masks as some sort of horrible oppression, which suggests they don’t have much experience of oppression if that’s what they think it is.
Just unlurking to thank you for the link to the Tom Martin column from 2012. I’ve had a lousy week and doing a deep dive into the 1600+ comments diverted and cheered me immensely. The community here is generally well educated and witty, and I appreciate you all!