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The Conspirituality Report
The New-Age Shame of Anti-Maskers
They breathe in Spirit. How dare you suggest they are sick?
At the rallies, the placards tell a story of victimization and political oppression:
I will not wear others’ fear. Oxygen is essential. Keep your laws off my face.
Some conspiritualists describe real or imagined terror when masked. QAnon-boosting holistic coach Bernhard Guenther offers this snowflake-y account about having to wear a mask while taking his puppy to the vet:
I feel tremendous compassion for any workers in the public who “have to” wear a mask. Wearing a mask for longer periods is completely restricting O2 flow to the brain and the entire body. Even after only 5 minutes, I felt a bit dizzy and nauseous. I also felt my fight & flight nervous system getting activated, sensing a slight panic response in my entire body, my muscles tightening up and I even started hyperventilating from my upper chest since I wasn’t able to take deep breaths due to lack of clean air and not an efficient amount of O2. It also started to get me out of body.
Guenther also fantasizes that masks are doing the opposite of what’s intended: “Let’s not even get into the bacteria and microbes people keep breathing in that are accumulated on the mask they’re wearing,” he writes, adding to the genre of masks equal “face diapers.” This inversion is similar to the flip now made by anti-vax activists who claim that the COVID vaccines are poisoning them, even though they are not taking them.
Children are routinely used as pawns in the anti-masking argument. The signs go from the sentimental: Let the children smile, to the excessive: Masks are child abuse.
When the #savethechildren rallies boiled over in the summer of 2020, bringing QAnon fever dreams into the mainstream, protestors asserted that masks were part of a conspiracy to facilitate child trafficking. No-one would recognize or care about a masked child, they said, and no-one would be able to track a masked predator.
Ominously, some influencers infantilized their peers with an adjacent argument: that grown adults donned masks to “fawn to their abusers.”
