Madam Speaker, she of the $12/pint gourmet ice cream in $25,000 worth of freezers is featured as a leading fashionista of 2020 what with her coordinating her masks with outfits. Hell, no.

First Lady Melania Trump is summarily ignored by all the style mavens, but Nancy Pelosi is gushingly touted as a fashion leader of 2020 for masks.

Pelosi regularly matches her masks to her outfits, often choosing face coverings in punchy colors and prints. Her mask-clad ensembles are not only a way of showing that the cloth accessories can be both fashionable and functional, but they also make a political statement.

[snip]

Pelosi’s bold masks show that she stands in line with expert guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

I don’t know what line Pelosi is standing in, but she only cares about masks when she knows the cameras are actually on. Let’s ignore that the cloth masks may not live up to the current hype (and let’s ignore how St. Fauci poo-pooed them early-on), but this puff-piece has a more than safety in mind. This is about normalizing mask wearing. Even the exclusive Washington, D.C., boutique where Pelosi has scored many of her masks lists them not as medically sound but as an ode to safetyism

“A Safe Life Reimagined”?? Well, that sounds like the upscale D.C. crowd considers the masking of Americans as the new normal. It’s not as if we haven’t been bombarded for months by media with article after article on how our LIFE HAS CHANGED FOREVAH!! but this idea of safety-at-all-costs is dangerous. In a free society where we interact with fellow citizens in the public square, this move to make people anonymous has real-life consequences.

As San Francisco is finding out, no one can begin to figure out who is a customer and who is a criminal. Just like anonymity has increased rude and obnoxious behavior in social media, so the same kind of behavior is on the increase in public settings. Go ahead, Ms. Leftwing Fashionista, scream at the 80 year-old granny who isn’t fast enough to get out of your way in the supermarket’s chips-and-crackers aisle. She won’t recognize you if you bump into her again.

Bonus, granny is now going to think twice about going out in public if she can be harassed at will with no consequences for the harasser. What politicians like Nancy Pelosi want is a compliant populace, a fearful citizenry and if it gives license to the worst impulses of some? Hey, Leftists have got to make that socialist omelet any way they can.

And I cannot begin to fathom what a year or more of such mandates are going to do to children. How much damage are we doing to youngsters still figuring out how to successfully navigate human interaction by depriving them of human facial expressions? What long term physical harm are we doing by restricting oxygen content to developing brains, especially during strenuous play?

I certainly don’t blame people for wearing masks of any design. However, we should never allow them to be mere fashion or something we’ve settle on as the new normal.

In the meantime, I’ll make my own political statement on how I feel about masks-as-fashion. That’s me in the lead picture and, yes, I’ve even worn that mask on an airplane.

Pelosi as fashionista? Sorry, Business Insider spelled fascist wrong.