Mask Bans Are Everyone’s Fight (08/22/24)

Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, and Jules Gill-Peterson discuss the mask ban passed in Nassau County last week, the latest in a dramatic rise in legislation criminalizing face masks and targeting the Palestine solidarity movement. We look at what happened in the overtly hostile public hearing over the ban, the history of the New York statute that ban proponents want back, and how the threat of mask bans goes far beyond public health: mask bans embolden racist policing; they’re anti-trans; and they target the whole of the left.

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Watch the full Nassau County mask ban hearing here: vimeo.com/994184432

Read the statement on the hearing by Jews for Mask Rights here: https://www.jewsformaskrights.com/resources/anti-mask-harassment-nassau-countys-mask-ban-hearing

Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)

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Death Panel 0:00
[intro music]

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:32
Welcome to the Death Panel. Patrons, thank you so much for supporting the show. We couldn't do any of this without you. To support the show and get access to the second weekly bonus episode and entire back catalog of bonus episodes, become a patron at Patreon.com/DeathPanelPod. And to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, hold listening or discussion groups, post about your favorite episodes, pick up copies of Health Communism and A Short History of Trans Misogyny at your local bookstore, or request them at your local library, and follow us @DeathPanel_. I'm Beatrice Adler-Bolton, and today I'm here with my co-hosts, Artie Vierkant.

Artie Vierkant 1:10
Hello.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:10
And Jules Gill-Peterson.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:12
Hello.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:13
And the three of us are going to be talking about the dramatic rise of mask bans and also why it's so important for all of us on the left to work together to do everything that we can to stop them. Last week, New York's Nassau County signed into law its Mask Transparency Act, which is just the latest in a wave of laws and amendments criminalizing masking in public that have been proposed by both Democrats and Republicans in the United States this year, including the mask ban in North Carolina passed in late June. And it's also important to note that on Monday, the University of California System, the entire UC system, announced a zero tolerance policy for both Palestine solidarity encampments and for masking to "conceal identity."

The Nassau mask ban in particular is a real piece of work. It was proposed by someone who is a former IDF member. It was signed into law on August 14th, and it makes it possible for police in Nassau County to stop you just for wearing a mask, and it sets a penalty of a $1,000 fine, one year in prison, or both, for wearing a mask. And the circumstances it was passed under are also a big part of the story here. On August 5th, Nassau County held a hearing on the ban. In the livestream of the hearing, which we're going to link to in the episode description, you can see individuals testifying against the ban be heckled and mocked, hassled and shoved by police at the hearing, while those testifying for the ban were given extra time and near total deference.

So we'll be talking about the hearing more in a minute. And the timing of these bans is also important to note. It's not so much ironic as it is tragic. COVID cases in the United States are up, with even Ashish Jha, of all people, recently telling NBC, "If you just talk about infections, this is probably going to end up becoming the largest summer wave we've had." Hospitalizations and deaths are up too, with NVSS data showing a recent doubling, up to 600 deaths per week. And these are recent weeks that typically show incomplete data this early.

And while we'll have plenty more to say on that soon, look forward to something very special next week on how we measure case counts, now that so much of pandemic data that we used to rely on has disappeared, but again, in today's episode, we're going to zero in on New York's mask ban in Nassau County that just passed this last week. We'll talk about what it does, the circumstances it was passed in, and why everyone on the left should stop and pay attention to what's happening here and also get involved in fighting against mask bans just like this, because as we're going to discuss, these bans target a lot more than you might think.

Mask bans aren't just a disaster for COVID and for health, they're a license for police racial profiling and an expansion of the carceral state. They're anti-trans, and they explicitly target our movements in solidarity with Palestine. And as a result, these mask bans are everyone's fight.

Artie Vierkant 3:59
Definitely. And I think as we work our way into all of that and explaining all of the connections that Bea is drawing there, I do think we should just begin by stating the obvious, also, which is that mask bans are, in and of themselves, obviously a public health threat. Banning masks will result in more illness, more Long COVID, they will result in deaths. There's no way around that.

As Bea mentioned, the ban in Nassau County was just passed into an ongoing summer COVID surge, and that's also why I want to call out, as we have in our past episodes about mask bans, that these bans are part of a wider push of anti-mask policy and sentiment that's really been spearheaded by liberals. It's part of what we've called the sociological production of the end of the pandemic, which is a process that we've done our best to describe in detail over the last few years, that tries to explain why COVID protections and COVID funding were so quickly dismantled and the public health emergency declared over, even though covid is still a threat, and even though we still have other state emergencies in place for other things that are just completely absurd now.

Like the 9/11 National Emergency declaration has still been ongoing for over 20 years now. But so, part of that sociological production that we've tried to call out is the construction or reification of ideas of risk and vulnerability. What the Biden administration has done first and foremost since 2021 is to progressively winnow down the scope of people who are considered to be vulnerable, right? This is one of the reasons why it's not enough to have -- like they say, we're putting forward this mask ban, but there's a health exemption or something, is part of why those health exemptions, they don't actually address the core issues with these mask bans is this is also just reinforcing this increasingly narrowed spectrum of "vulnerability," the people who are assumed to "still need to mask," when, in fact, COVID is still a threat.

Federal policy is basically to let working people get sick with COVID over and over again, even multiple times a year, no matter the long term health consequences, or even no matter how much lost work or lost wages from illness. And add to that that anyone can get Long COVID. I mean, it's -- again, to state the obvious, banning masks in the fifth year of a pandemic is itself a health threat.

Jules Gill-Peterson 6:27
Yeah. I'm so glad you put it that way, because the arrival of banning masks as a policy proposition, shared by both Democrats and Republicans, isn't the arrival of some new conspiratorial ideology. We've been very slowly laying the foundations for this. But also, there's another larger, deeper play going on here. And obviously, I think the main kind of catalyst is just actually a strict political assault on pro Palestine political movements and a wish to crush them, like actually just repressive state power. And that is certainly very evident in Nassau County, but it's also clearly very evident in the University of California policy, just like straight up says it, so thanks, thanks for making it so obvious. But there's something weaved into that that I think is really important. And it goes to this sort of fact that wearing a mask in public has largely been illegal in most places in the United States for hundreds of years, and the arrival of public masking in the spring of 2020 really was a legal state of exception, particularly from the perspective of legislators who -- and elected officials who were amending policies. And this sort of attempt to retrench back to a prior state of criminalization actually has really specific aims and purposes for state power.

There's this police function, which I know we'll get into and talk about, just the sheer role and the empowerment of the police now to move through public space and to be able to stop people and detain people based on what's around their face, just visually. But there's also just this longer, deeper history of state power regulating public space in order really to target, to confine, and in many cases, to just straight out try to outflank and crush working class political movements. And that's a history that actually goes back centuries. And so in that sense, I think part of what's illuminating there is it just helps put in perspective what this political fight is about and where it comes from. I think part of it, what I find really clarifying from the point of view of solidarity, is to understand why so many different groups of people who might mask for overlapping but sometimes different core reasons, why we all have something in common in this fight, and why it's important for the left to stand united around masking as an active expression of solidarity is because there is this history through which, strangely enough, it's things that seem to have absolutely nothing to do, and at the time, had nothing to do on their surface, with questions of public health, right, with questions of the spread of communicable viruses, right?

Those are the origins of the legal infrastructure and the state power and the policing power that we have to contend with today. And so yeah, like we've been saying, if you're masking as an expression of solidarity around COVID and the pandemic, that's fantastic, but that already has been joined to the struggle for a free Palestine, that is already joined for the struggle for working class movements and protest movements. That is just like they are knit together materially in the history of this country and its laws and the history of state violence. And so that's sort of where we find ourselves today. And that's not to over inflate and make this really grandiose. I think it's actually to to make it really concrete and clear.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 9:59
Yeah. Well, and as both of you point to, it's very important to note the fact that the clear focus -- this is not subtext, this is top line text -- the clear, clear focus and target of these laws is Palestine Solidarity movements. We can connect them to other laws that are happening at the federal and state level. I'm thinking of the conversation I had recently with Maryam Jamshidi, and she's starting a project where she's trying to look into all of the different things that are being proposed at the state level, not just at the federal level, that are just kind of different schemes for trying to make pro Palestine organizing, mutual aid, etc., just more difficult, illegal, to come with penalties, to come with jail time, right? So this is -- I think we should be always thinking of mask bans, first and foremost, existing in this context of a very broad legal regime that is attempting to silence and invisibilize pro Palestinian support within the United States, that is going on top of an existing, decades old legal regime that essentially hijacks US law in order to facilitate genocide, the ongoing genocide of Palestine, and these relationships that the mask bans have to the federal laws and the state laws that pre-existed, that do things like criminalize charity work or donations, that come after Americans who are in solidarity with Palestine through tax law, not just the kind of overt FBI shows up at your door, kind of conversations.

And what we're seeing is that ultimately, every time these mask bans are talked about, no matter where they are being proposed in the United States or where these older laws like the ones in Florida and Ohio were being used, the point is to target pro Palestine protesters. So ultimately, it's important that when we get into the hearing stuff in a minute, the audio that we're gonna play from that session, you get really obvious statements on the record about exactly where this is coming from, right? The kind of idea that everyone who's participating in the pro Palestine protest who is masked is doing so out of this kind of manipulative, exploitive position of trying to take advantage of public health measures in order to avoid surveillance and accountability, right?

We talked about this in the context of the North Carolina bill as well. Obviously, the pandemic is also tied up in this, but one of the ways they're trying to get away with them is by saying that these mask bans won't impose on the pandemic in some way. And as we've talked about over and over, the kind of separation of folks who care about COVID, folks who are trying to protect themselves, and folks who care about Palestine and are doing pro Palestine organizing, this is a kind of false separation that's being imposed on the group of people that, in many cases, overlaps, right? This is an important separation and siloing to resist, because this is part of how they're trying to get these things through, is to say, no, no, this isn't -- we're not targeting disabled people who want to protest. We are just shutting down these "thugs intimidating Jews."

Artie Vierkant 13:03
Yeah. I would add too, I think one reason that we wanted to have this conversation in the way that we're going to have it, is that, so far, I think a lot of the people who are most active in fighting against these mask bans are people who have been for a while active in COVID organizing. I think these are a lot of the people who are leading are leading this charge. Obviously, as Bea said, it's not 100% cut and dry.

A lot of people who are active in COVID organizing are also active in the Palestinian Liberation Movement. So I'm not saying that it's some sort of binary, but I will say that I think obviously we want to make this conversation a useful tool for those people, for the people out there fighting these bans as we speak. But I think this is also about trying to get more people involved in this, and recognizing that, wherever you're coming from, if you're on the left, it's not a case of, here are these laws that are targeting people who are other than me, or that are targeting people who -- like, it's not my problem, or something like that. This is, this is something that affects all of us.

Jules Gill-Peterson 14:05
Yeah. I think just to quickly underline that contrast again, the criminalized discourse, which we're about to get into with these kinds of bans that conjures the fantasy of a total out group of criminals, you know, a separate group of people who are bad, who have mysterious motives. They just like to cause trouble for no reason, because they have no political motives. They're just bad people. That kind of logic, which certainly liberals and Democratic politicians are happy to trade in, that kind of language, suggests that there is this out group, and our job is to police them, to lock them up and to get rid of them, to exclude them from the charm circle of society.

And that's the lie on which the fantasy that, oh, there's a medical exemption, oh no, if you're a good person, right, if you have good motives, if you're not a troublemaker, if you're just, if you're just trying to keep yourself safe, that'll be okay. That's the lie, right? But I also think, again, that's the contrast against which solidarity is so effective, to not believe in this kind of fantasy, in group, out group, kind of redrawing of circles over and over again, and instead to lock arms in that particular way and say, no, here's the majority, and we disagree, and we are not going to accept this.

Artie Vierkant 15:22
Absolutely. And I think that that, I mean, that move of, oh, don't worry. It's the attitude that is, well, if you're not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to fear here, right? Like, the only people who have to be concerned about mask bans, as the assertion goes, are people who are trying to commit, what have people called it - "vile acts," things like that. I think that this framing actually kind of perfectly sets up getting into talking about some of what happened at this Nassau County hearing that we wanted to get into.

Again, this is a hearing that happened to talk about the Mask Transparency Act, this law in Nassau County that we're talking about, that was just passed last week. And I think that what happened at this public hearing on August 5th is almost as important to talk about as the mask ban itself. And when I say that, I think everyone, if you can, should watch this or should listen to the audio for a couple of reasons.

First, I think that this hearing makes incredibly clear what we're talking about, that mask bans are a broader threat to the left in general, that no matter what you think about COVID, this is your fight, too. The hearing is long, though, so if you can't watch the whole hearing, we will be playing a couple of clips in just a moment, but also, there are more individual clips online that you can find.

There's a fantastic written account by Jews for Mask Rights, that we're going to link to in the episode description for this, that is an account of both the hearing itself and the harassment faced by people who testified against the mask ban on that day, people shouting at and threatening them, at least one person who was stalked on their way out of the building and had to run to the train station for safety, police grabbing and shoving and forcefully removing masked people who were there to testify, some of which you can see for yourself also in the full video of the hearing. And there's also a lot of other, I think, important first hand accounts of the hearing on Twitter, where it's very clear that there were kind of two big groups of people that came out to testify about this mask ban. One were a group of people in masks there to testify to defend themselves and others from persecution, and a white mob of Zionists who were there to do the persecution basically. So again, I'll put links to both the full hearing and the Jews for Mask Rights account of it in the show notes and in the transcript as well. And again, watch the hearing if you can.

But I think as we get into talking about this, I'd say my first thought about this, and maybe what I want to talk about through some of these clips that we're going to be playing, is that immediately, my first thought was, essentially, if you ever needed to see how white supremacy works in the United States in 2024, I think look no further than this video, because, I mean, even in the beginning of the hearing, long before they allowed masked people to speak, which they didn't allow for several hours, there's this long stretch where they start with about an hour of testimony from elected officials, other elected officials who are not sitting on the hearing committee, speaking ahead of the comments given by the general public. And these statements, some of the statements shared by elected officials there are just so incredibly blatant. There's something like I think seven elected officials or so testify. This is just -- this is not an official count of it. This is just my kind of vague recollection. It's like seven people, six are there in support of the mask ban, and one is there to speak against it. Six of those people are white. One of them is Black. And that six to one split is the same people. And we're going to be hearing some clips of this part of the hearing. There are many that we could use here, obviously, like this is -- this was an hours long hearing, and a lot of members of the public spoke.

But I think we're going to stick to the ones from the beginning part, from the elected officials. Because, for the most part, for most of the speakers who spoke out, we don't have their contact information, I would feel more comfortable being able to ask their permission for all of that stuff. But also, I think because the fact that these are elected officials speaking adds an extra layer of kind of public accountability for some of their statements.

But so again, we'll play a couple of these clips. Two of the three of these clips are sitting elected officials in New York speaking in favor of the mask ban. The final clip is a former mayor speaking against it. And as you'll hear, the level of vitriol in the first two speakers is just immense. We went back and forth on whether to even play these or not, because in each of these you'll hear a number of well-worn Zionist tropes, like that pro Palestine protesters are violent, or antisemitic or whatever. None of the statements that these people make are true. They're all dripping with ideology.

In the end, we think these clips capture something important, which is a bunch of elected officials in the state of New York, one of these "blue" states we're always hearing about as a bastion of tolerance or whatever, demonstrating how the language of carceral liberalism is the language of fascism. So this is all to say, this is all to set up. Let's get into the the first clip. Again, this is one of these people who's speaking out, an elected official speaking out in favor of the mask ban. So this is about two minutes. It is Congressman Anthony D'Esposito. Some of the others you'll hear from today are state or local officials. This is a federal representative from New York, currently sitting in the House of Representatives.

Congressman Anthony D'Esposito [clip] 20:58
"From October 7th, and obviously before then, not only this country, but our state and this county, has seen a startling rise in anti-Israel, anti-America and hate filled protests. We have seen these protests firsthand, not only here in Nassau County, but in New York City, in our nation's capital, most recently burning of American flags at Union Station, and of course, the absolute atrocities that have happened at educational institutions throughout this country. You see, these protesters are bad actors who have burned the American flag while proudly brandishing Hamas and Hezbollah banners, all while concealing their identity with masks. It is vital that these protesters remove the masks, come out of the darkness, and are shown in light, which I believe will deter them from [inaudible] [loud applause and cheering].Mr. You see, Mr. Presiding Officer, this bill is aimed at bad actors and does not apply for religious or cultural purposes or for those suffering from health ailments. The bill applies to gatherings of people "protesting in public spaces," protesters whose sole intent is to promote hate speech, violence, intimidation and harassment. This bill is about stopping people who intend to do harm. They don't intend to do harm to just Republicans or just Democrats, but they intend to do harm to American people. It's not for any elderly. It's not for the sick. It's about violent thugs. And I'll say to all of you that are going to be hearing from many today and eventually voting on this legislation, it will be enforced by one of the finest police departments in the country [loud applause and cheering]."

Jules Gill-Peterson 23:15
[laughing] Well, you -- you promised and delivered with that clip, Artie. That is -- wow.

But it really does have all of the beats, right? Even though it's a Republican, like he's making this kind of, what I would call muscly, kind of fascist centrist appeal, right, that, well, don't worry, this bill, which is very powerful and which we will use to absolutely target a group of people, but it's okay, because those are very bad people who are -- I mean, this is, frankly, it's implicitly a discourse of terrorism, right, that protests for Palestine solidarity actually have zero political content. They have been cast entirely out of the recognized field of political discourse or being treated as utterly irrational, if not like inhuman gatherings. I mean, it's just unbelievable, right? And there's that very careful sleight of hand going on that I think is really characteristic too, right?

Where all of the hedging, don't worry, this is for the bad people, da da da da, it's like kind of slipping in that this is very clearly an abridgement of the right to protest period, right? Like the idea of being, well, people can protest, but you can never cover your face while at a protest. That's terrible and bad and wrong.

Well, I mean, as we'll go on to talk about, there's a long history of trying to crack down on popular movements this way, but it's a really, I think, convenient alibi for kind of skirting around the deeper question, which is, why, wait, sorry, we're actually talking about the fact that people in Nassau County -- I mean, I'm not naive. I know the right to protest is certainly not guaranteed in the United States, but people sure do love to talk about it as that First old Amendment to the Constitution, right? So I might just be a naive Canadian here, but it's like, okay, yeah, really, I mean, there's a lot going on, and in many ways, so much of the way political discourse that floats itself as nonpartisan, which is -- that's why he's saying things like, all Americans, this attacks all Americans, it's an affront on America, they burned the flag, right?

That kind of nonpartisan appeal to muscular American Imperial values is very much war on terrorism, like post 2001 kind of language, which I think in a lot of ways, and we've talked about this before, since last October, it's just become really obvious the degree to which that kind of militaristic police state and that kind of counter terrorist, sort of muscular state violence rhetoric has just become so saturated and internalized by the political class period, that is now just like -- it is the baseline, and that's even before getting to the much longer history of this kind of talking about left movements as thugs, as irrational, as people with no real motives who are just out to cause trouble. And then, of course, the icing on the cake was just that, and don't you worry, boy, do we have a great police department here in Nassau County. I mean, so great, I'm pretty -- I have to, I'd have to double check, but isn't it so great that it has been even investigated by the Department of Justice? I'd have to go look that up.

Artie Vierkant 23:15
Oh yeah, we're talking about a department that -- so according to a 2022 report in Gothamist, "Even though Black and Hispanic people make up 29% of Nassau County's population, they make up 60% of the department's arrests," the Nassau County Police Department. Yeah. Just one other thing too has to be said about this, obviously, as you mentioned, Jules, this clip kind of has everything. He hits every beat from -- all the way from the very beginning, where he conflates anti-Israel with anti-US sentiment.

Jules Gill-Peterson 27:13
Yeah, that was fascinating.

Artie Vierkant 27:15
To the ending, where it's just textbook carceral liberalism, and with this triumphal, and it's going to be enforced, we're gonna have this fascist mask ban, and it's gonna be enforced by the best police department in the country, kind of shit. And obviously, I think it's just important to state too, because, again, this is quite hateful language, and the way that he's talking about this, he's painting quite the scary picture.

But I think it is just important to note, literally what we are talking about is a massive social movement, that is one of the biggest social movements in the US right now, that is clearly a focal point of the left in the US at the moment, and whose demand is to stop a genocide. So no matter how he kind of presents this, I think that just keeping that in mind, because we hear this stuff all the time, this is not -- in a way, this is helpful for us and useful to see within this context, because this is where, again, all of these issues are coming together within the context of this mask ban and people really saying what they mean here, as D'Esposito clearly is, not equivocating or anything, that the explicit goal here is to discriminate and target against this specific movement, right?

But also, this is language that we hear in a lot of contexts outside of hearings like this. And so it's just, I think, helpful to illustrate again just how overtly fascistic this rhetoric is, that is sort of the mainstream and singular kind of existing way that people speak out in defense of the genocide.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 29:00
And also, this is stating the obvious again, but I think it's just important to pay attention to the way that he treats the kind of consequences of this law, right? Because, as we were saying, these are being proposed as direct, overt, explicitly to target pro Palestinian protests, right, and to discourage and raise the stakes for pro Palestinian demonstrations, encampments, groups of people just doing something in public together, anyone that facilitates that, right, that that is what they're targeting. The consequences, right, are how this makes society inaccessible for disabled people and immunocompromised people, that's on one hand, and the other one is again, the racial justice, white supremacy and policing angle. And he addresses these two angles with a lot of disrespect, right? A ton of disrespect. But I just want to point out that he does give the disability -- well, he doesn't really name the disability angle. He does sort of name people who are suffering from illnesses and grandma or whatever.

Artie Vierkant 30:07
"It's not for an elderly."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 30:09
"An elderly," yes. Wow. [laughing]

Artie Vierkant 30:13
He says. "It's not for an elderly. It's not about the sick." [laughter]

Jules Gill-Peterson 30:18
Love that.

Artie Vierkant 30:19
Yeah [laughing].

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 30:19
Right. So he does address the disability angle, and I would like to point out that he does not address the disproportionate harm that this is going to have on communities of color, particularly Black people, indigenous people. He doesn't address the fact that they're providing law enforcement with a tool to surveil and criminalize marginalized people. He just uses this as an opportunity to pat the police on the back in Nassau County and talk about how great they are, and he won't even dignify the racial justice consequences of this law by acknowledging and mentioning the additional threat that this puts on people of color, right? Like the way that he is so fucking disrespectful about that, even if it's just a kind of small sleight of hand, right? Of not even completely dehumanizing that kind of concern about the consequences of this law, the way he did with the kind of sick, an elderly one, but not even dignifying it with the visibility of a mention, right?

Artie Vierkant 31:17
Yeah. Let's hear one more much shorter clip from another one of these ghouls. This is New York State Senator Patricia Canzoneri-Fitzpatrick.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 31:28
Oh god.

New York State Senator Patricia Canzoneri-Fitzpatrick [clip] 31:30
"This applies to gatherings of people to protest in public spaces, and we know what that means, let's be clear. It means protests whose sole intent is to promote hate speech, violence, intimidation and harassment. We have seen the protests with Hamas flags, with terrorist headbands, terror organization pictures, the final solution posters and more. These protests have been violent and promote violence and call for the death and the slaughter of people. These are facts. This is not my opinion."

Jules Gill-Peterson 32:10
Hmmm. Are they, though?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 32:14
I'm sorry, it's like “terrorist headband” still gets me every time I hear that clip.

Artie Vierkant 32:17
Also, "the final solution posters." Obviously, that's by the way, just a Zionist lie. That is not a thing. But again, this is -- these protests call for "the death of people," like, really, a movement trying to end a literal holocaust. Okay, sure.

Jules Gill-Peterson 32:35
Well, and just the sheer -- I mean, not me sounding like an aggrieved liberal who believes in the American project, but like this utter, utter contempt for the people, I mean the callous disregard and the snobbery of this political class that sees itself as entitled, to bring the populace -- to bring the whip upon the populace, because how dare people gather in public to protest. I mean, this is criminalized -- they're just saying, we're here to criminalize public gatherings and protest, okay? Like, I mean, it's just utter, utter, utter contempt for the public, even before, it's very clear ideologically it's motivated by disdain for the left, but just incredible, sheer contempt for the public.

And that's why I think it's so important for them to fantasize that actually it's not the public, even though it is. It's this secret other third thing that doesn't exist, these people who gather and they're pretending to protest, but really they're just there to cause violence and harass and try to kill people. Yeah, yeah, okay. Which could be a description of Nassau County Police Department, but you know, it's like, no, okay, no, it's the people. They should never gather. Okay, let's be really -- it's just incredible, it's like I don't know, this thing that I encounter a lot when I'm doing research, when I'm trying to uncover the practice of politics by people who wield disproportionate power within a system. They very rarely actually conceal what they think and what they're trying to do. They'll often just say it out loud, like that state senator just did. She's making it really clear: people do not have the right to gather and protest in Nassau County.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 34:16
Mhm. No, and I mean this mask ban essentially forces a dangerous norm. It is a tool of social control. It reinforces state power. It dictates who is allowed to be safe in public space and who is allowed to feel safe in public space. The ways that she is just so enthusiastic and the kind of energy behind the support for these bills is just very evocative of some of the most disgusting Zionist propaganda that you see.

It reminds me of those Tiktok videos that we saw early on of just absolutely heinous, ridiculous impressions, Islamophobic skits that folks were doing making fun of the water access crisis in Gaza, and this is like in October. And things have gotten clearly so much worse since then. And this is exactly why, because you can see in everyone, from the most casual Zionist, to the state senator, to the way this is talked about in federal legislative proposals right now, there is an entitlement to the death of Palestinians and the suppression of support for Palestine. I just again, I'm thinking back to the conversations I've had with Maryam Jamshidi this year, talking about the history of the US legal position on Palestine being one that essentially creates the legal basis for an entitlement to Palestinian death and to repression of solidarity with Palestine as a de facto, just rule of how the US is supposed to approach "foreign and domestic policy" with regard to Palestine and Palestinian Liberation.

And so what we're seeing now is just the absolute depravity and disgusting entitlement that so many people in America feel, to the kind of position and relationship that they feel like they have to both US "interest" in Palestine, in occupied Palestine, but also too, the kind of spectacular military control and to the capacity to be able to fund and support a genocide like this. You see the kind of entitlement that no one should be getting in the way of the billions of dollars and all of the fucking shit that we want to send them.

Artie Vierkant 36:34
Yeah, and again, these two things that we just listened to, again, about as fascist as anything you're likely to hear anywhere, to supporting a bill that is itself an expression of or that finds this expression of the sentiment that you're talking about, Bea, in a law that explicitly will be used to further police Black and brown people and will lead to further stigmatization of and public disregard for masking, which already is a huge, difficult, contentious issue that a lot of organizers are having a lot of difficulty with, even as we're in the middle of a giant COVID wave, right? It's just, it -- again, it's one of these things, it couldn't be worse, but also it's one of these situations where, in a way, this is broadly illustrative of why all of the kind of nexus of different things that we tend to talk about here on the Death Panel aren't really separate things at all.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 37:35
Yeah. I mean, also, I do think it's worth saying that obviously this mask ban is going to lead to more COVID spread in two particular ways. One, in the fact that it's going to enforce norms of just no mask wearing. But two, we are talking about sending people to jail, potentially for one year, holding people potentially in jail until they pay their fine, right? This is essentially forcing people who are masking up to protect themselves, who encounter criminalization as a result of that, to be sent to an institution that is a COVID making, death making, fucking machine, right?

Artie Vierkant 38:10
Yes. Absolutely.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 38:10
We know from years and years and years of data that jail cycling, jails, prisons, detention centers, these are major, major drivers and engines of COVID. I mean, Victoria Law's book that's coming out in September, it's called Corridors of Contagion for a reason, right? It's about how COVID might happen inside, but it doesn't stay inside a prison. What happens inside a prison, the violence in a prison, leaks out into the outside world and is part of the outside world. And what we're seeing here, of course, is the fact that this is going to reproduce the same kind of carceral violence, both in terms of criminalization directly, but also the carceral violence of COVID abandonment in the context of mass incarceration in the United States.

Artie Vierkant 38:53
Absolutely. I mean, couldn't have said it better myself. Also, spoiler alert, very excited to have Victoria on the show.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 38:59
Yes.

Jules Gill-Peterson 39:00
Yeah.

Artie Vierkant 39:00
So again, two awful clips, the white carceral liberals have had their say. Let's take a palate cleanser. We're gonna be hearing from someone who actually understands what's going on here, and the contrast could not be more stark. I will say this is probably one of the longer clips that I've probably ever played. It's like four minutes. It's worth it. So this is former Mayor of Hempstead, New York, Wayne Hall. And again, this is kind of from the very beginning of the hearing, when they're hearing from current and former elected officials before they hear from members of the public.

Former Mayor of Hempstead, New York, Wayne Hall [clip] 39:35
"I stand before you today to voice my strong opposition to the proposed Mask Transparency Act. This Act has the potential to disproportionately impact our Black and brown communities and could lead to increased racial profiling and [inaudible] [people interrupting and heckling]. My name [someone interrupting] -- my name is Wayne J. Hall, Sr., former mayor of the incorporated village of Hempstead, and I am 77 years old. And I am a Black man who served as a combat medic. I am deeply concerned about the implications of the Mask Transparency Act.

This legislation not only threatens to infringe on the rights of our communities, but also introduces a potential for harm that could worsen existing inequalities. It is vital that we prioritize our policies that force the inclusivity and understanding, rather than those that promise to promote division and distrust. Historically, laws targeting concealment of identities, such as those enacted against the KKK, were intended to address specific threats. However, our current context is vastly different. Implementing a law like this Mask Transparency Act today risks becoming a tool for racial profiling [applause] Black and brown individuals who already face disproportionate scrutiny from law enforcement will be more likely to be stopped and questioned simply for wearing a mask.

This is not a hypothetical concern. It is reality that is backed by data. Studies have shown that similar policies in our jurisdiction have led to increases in racial bias stops, and we cannot afford to repeat these mistakes in Nassau County. Another critical issue is the matter of health. As I explained to you before, I'm a kidney transplant recipient and I'm on rejection medication which makes me immunocompromised. COVID-19 is still a significant threat, and mask wearing remains a necessary precaution in many situations [someone shouting]. I

ndividuals [interruptions, "ha, where's your mask?"] -- individuals with health conditions that make them more vulnerable to respiratory illness rely on masking for their safety. How can we ask those individuals to prove they need to wear a mask every time they're stopped? This is an unreasonable and intrusive expectation.

Furthermore, the Act does not clearly define what constitutes a face mask. In colder months, ski masks are commonly worn for warmth. Should we penalize individuals for protecting themselves from the cold? We must also consider the broader implication for public safety and community trust. If residents feel that they are more likely to be stopped and questioned without cause, it will erode trust in law enforcement and civic institutions. This trust is crucial for maintaining public safety and community cohesion.

We cannot ignore the potential for the Act to morph into stop and frisk situations. We individuals, especially those from marginalized communities, are subjected to invasive and unwarranted stops. This is not the direction we should be. While the goal of enhancing public safety is commendable, the Mask Transparency Act is not the solution. It just poses too many risks of racial profiling, health privacy violations and the loss of community trust. So I am against it. [cheering and applause] And I didn't wear my mask, because I wanted you to see my face."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 44:14
I've heard this clip a couple times now, and it's still frustrating to just hear people heckle him.

Artie Vierkant 44:20
Yeah, the booing and jeering starts when he says COVID-19 is still a significant threat.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 44:27
Yeah.

Jules Gill-Peterson 44:27
No, it's very much a portrait of the difficulty of making certain forms of political speech, even in formal proceedings, especially at the local level in this country right now, and the disdain being shown for him, and you know, particularly his connection of racist policing to public health and the regulation of public health and masking and COVID-19, right? Those are all -- those are clearly things that the audience in favor of the Act are very particularly hostile too. They don't like that connection being drawn. And then they just take it out on him. Yeah, it's not nice. But I do --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 45:06
Yeah, I mean -- oh, sorry. Go ahead. Jules,

Jules Gill-Peterson 45:08
Well, I was just gonna say, I mean, he's right, you know? I mean, there's just like -- we've talked a little bit about this before, and I know we'll get into this a little bit more later. But talking about these kinds of local level regulations of public space, these sorts of statutes or ordinances that govern -- well, aetter way to put that would be police, literally police public space, right, and the emergence of things like what were called vagrancy statutes and a whole sort of status offenses, right?

We're talking about criminalized or administrative penalties for things that people are doing that aren't really like -- I mean, they're not in the world of criminal law. They're not classically criminal acts. It could be standing on a street corner, right? It's just a status. You're just -- you are somewhere, or you look like this in public space. And think about things like stop and frisk, of course, right? These are -- take people's status, the way that police officers visually decode them and interpret them, regardless of what someone is actually up to or who they are, profiling and the sort. I mean, these is a very old form of policing that emerges in particular in the 19th century.

And just to say, in the United States, I don't think that surprises probably anyone listening, but the emergence of these sorts of laws, they serve a number of different purposes, but one of their primary motives is explicitly anti-Black, and particularly after the Civil War, the passage of state and municipal level laws targeting public space were deliberately created to essentially turn freed Black Americans into an easily arrestable population, so that they could be incarcerated. In some states, that meant so that they could be involuntarily forced back into enslaved labor-like working conditions. It was very obviously an attempt to retrench, in a white supremacist sense, the pre Civil War functioning of the relationship of the economy to the police. And so there just is a long history.

Stop and Frisk is the most well known, and certainly in the New York City area, more recent example. But he's right to point to that longer history. It's just so plainly obvious, except for the fact that none of the other speakers would dare say it, that the purpose of these kinds of laws is to enhance the police's ability to stop people in public space because they are black or brown. I mean, that will be the pretense, right?

And then the masking actually provides a really useful administrative alibi for why you stopped someone, when, in reality, the answer is because you're engaging in racist policing, and that is a structural purpose of a police department, like the Nassau County Police Department. Yeah. He's right about the data. It is all there. So it's just like, I mean, I really appreciate that he came to say all of that. But it's so interesting that the moment that he connected that to COVID-19, right, made that case for a convergence of people's interests here, that's the moment that started to elicit the most kind of jeering from the crowd. That's so incredibly telling.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 48:15
Mhm. Absolutely. And there's a really interesting kind of corner that Nassau in particular has backed itself into with their language. And I was speaking to a disability lawyer who wants to remain anonymous, because there is potentially a pending lawsuit around this. And we were talking about how there's an opportunity here for disability law to protect the pro Palestine movement, but that it requires the pro Palestine movement to make an overt, obvious and really public embrace of Disability Justice and accessibility. The Nassau legislation specifically is very narrow about its health and safety exemption, right?

So the exemption only applies to people who are masking to protect their own health and not to someone who's wearing a mask to protect someone else. Technically, what that has done has created what's called unavoidable discriminatory conduct that essentially requires immunocompromised disabled individuals, especially folks with Long COVID too, all of this is qualifying under the ADA, who are in public space, essentially subject to mandatory additional discriminatory conduct and exposure to the police, right?

There are also all these other ways, but specifically, Nassau County's own charter and ADA policy says,

"No qualified disabled individual shall by reason of such disability be excluded from participation in or be denied the benefits of services, programs or activities in Nassau County, or employment by Nassau County, or be subject to discrimination by Nassau County in employment or in County public services, programs, activities, including, but not limited to meetings, informal materials, health and social services, employment, transportation, recreation and special events,"

So what we have here is an opportunity not to make a disability argument against mask bans. What we have is an opportunity as a disability movement is to provide some support to the pro Palestine movement. We are involved in, overlapping, our struggles are co-constitutive, our struggles are overlapping. This is a targeted attack on pro Palestine movements that has, ironically, the largest standing in ADA implications, which is not great, because the ADA does not offer us a ton of leverage, but this is why this needs to be, in particular, I think, a moment for the left to kind of step up on COVID broadly and demonstrate, make public demonstrations towards that, because it's a way for the left to unite behind the pro Palestine protest, and also put a little bit of weight behind the way that we talk about wanting to fight for people who aren't ourselves, wanting to build a left that can support large demands for better lives that are less full of suffering and ridiculous medical bills, right?

This is something the left needs to do anyways, and what we're faced with right now is an opportunity to kind of double down on our solidarity and know that while we might not all agree about how COVID is right now, right, we can agree that there is a shared political horizon that we are working towards, and what that requires is the Pro Palestine movement to continue to be allowed to develop, and that we need to come together to protect each other from repression and from unnecessary exposure to disease, because these two things come hand in hand, and they're absolutely inextricable to the state. So we can't think of these two things as separate ourselves.

Artie Vierkant 51:58
Absolutely. And one thing that I would hasten to add, too, about this Nassau County hearing and the ban itself is a bit unrelated to what you were just talking about, Bea, but it concerns kind of the clips that we just played. I think just before we move on, again, I just want to reiterate that the whole hearing is worth watching. Even if you can't, please read the account by Jews for Mask Rights. But also, I just want to shout out, there is also just some great testimony against the mask ban that people gave, members of the public, just people who showed up. It's clear that the people in the room there that day did a phenomenal job of waiting it out, even though the atmosphere was so palpably hostile and they were made to wait hours and hours until masked speakers were allowed up.

So, again, we're only playing a portion of the hearing here today. But the whole thing, so important, because you can really just see the scaffolding of the fascist shit going on here. The facade just falls right off, you know. So, with all that being said, there's one final aspect we wanted to talk about with mask bans today, and that concerns something that, I mean, if you look at the hearing, for example, that we're talking about, not the clips that we've played so far, but some of them, for instance, say things like under the old New York anti mask statute, which was in place for something like 175 years. I mean, they explicitly say something like, this could have been used to stop what happened at Columbia, right?

They say this could have been used to stop the Palestine Solidarity encampments in New York State. And this is something, we've talked about this on previous episodes that we've done about the mask bans. Episodes like, I think there was one called The Rise of Mask Bans, there was one that we did called Unmasking Mobs and Criminals, that was about the North Carolina one specifically, but when we talked about how New York politicians specifically were talking about and calling for reenacting this anti-mask statute that had been law in New York State for nearly 200 years, up until the very beginning of the pandemic, when it was repealed in 2020, a lot of these people talk about wanting to have this statute back, about maybe it should not have been repealed in the first place.

And clearly the language of the Nassau County law is also, I think, reflecting this intent to kind of reinstate this. And so with that in mind, I think, one really important aspect of this that we haven't had a chance to talk about so much on the show so far, but we now have some things and some specific historical examples that we can point to actually, which I'm very excited about, to talk with you all about, is the history of the statute being used towards or for the purposes of cracking down on trans people, cracking down on cross dressing.

Jules Gill-Peterson 54:42
Yeah, I think this dimension of mask bans is deeply interconnected with the racist policing history that we were just talking about, for reasons we can get into, and shout out to our wonderful listener, Chloë Feniks, who tipped us off to some of this history, and gave us a chance to really dive into it. Because like I was saying earlier, there's this longer history of policing public space, public indecency laws, vagrancy laws, all these kinds of policing oriented strictures that govern who can be in public space and how they can appear, and give police extensive, extensive subjective power to detain and arrest people, often with the idea of putting them in jail for a couple of days, although actually, historically, people probably spent less time in jail in the past than they do today. It's harder to get out of jail than ever.

But the idea being that you're arresting people to -- literally, to "sweep them off the streets," right? So it's this kind of very aggressive, continuous criminalization of certain groups of people's everyday life. And the history of anti-cross dressing laws, which has come up again in recent years as certain state anti-drag laws sort of, kind of, almost tried to reenact parts of them, I think part of what's been important to me to talk about in that is that, well actually, criminalizing what clothes people wear public is a very long -- has a very long history of the United States. It's not obvious to me that it would be easy to overturn in the courts even today, but in any case, the classic kind of laws that criminalize the clothes you wear, like laws that would say, it's illegal to be in public "wearing a dress not belonging to his or her sex," or "wearing the apparel of another sex."

Those are laws that start to emerge, really, in the mid 19th century. I was looking back at the work of a couple of historians, it's between 1848 and 1900, you have 34 cities and 21 states passing broad prohibitions that include the criminalization of cross dressing, but importantly, they tend to criminalize a whole bunch of different things that they call public indecency or lewd acts, right, like indecent dress in general. But New York and California are the two states that pass big laws that have huge consequences well into the 20th century. Like the California law, we could talk about some other time on another episode, so pivotal for arresting gay people and trans people well into the 1960s, it's like a huge, huge problem in California. The New York law was actually the earliest one though, it's 1845 and like the California law, it doesn't specifically name cross dressing. That's not the reason it was passed, but it becomes an anti-trans law over time. What it did criminalize was being -- wearing a disguise, or to be very 19th century, a masquerade for the purposes of avoiding identification.

And if you go back and look into this history. It's really interesting. It's pretty well documented, because it was -- this is pretty major, kind of early US Republic antebellum history. But it goes back to this anti-rent movement and rebellion in New York State that actually, you can trace it all the way back to the 18th century. There's this sort of old Dutch tenant farmer system -- like this is really in the weeds. You don't really need to know this.

The point is, there were basically feudalism-like tenancy farms all throughout upstate New York that were vestiges of Dutch colonialism, that were incorporated into New York state after the United States was founded. And so there are a whole bunch of people who are basically living in semi feudal conditions and have very little political power to challenge their landlords. And actually, landlords had a lot of political power in New York state. And so, as you move into the early 19th century, you have these periodic rebellions where farmers are getting together and basically going on rent strikes in particular. That was sort of their primary form of political mobilization. But they started to get more and more heated in the 1830s and the 1840s, and the reason why this masquerade law was passed, and this is where, as a good materialist, I don't want to over-idealize this.

Like it's true that the origin of all of these laws is a fight with working people and proletarians over who gets to exercise political power. I mean, the reason masquerading was outlawed is you have these white tenant farmers who are masquerading as what they styled themselves, this is their term, as "Calico Indians."

Artie Vierkant 59:14
Oh boy.

Jules Gill-Peterson 59:14
So they're dressing up in really -- like they're not even referencing local Indigenous nations, that they're well acquainted with in this time period, and who are rival political polities still really trying to exercise their own sovereignty. No, they're just doing the kind of awful, plain Indian thing that white Americans have done for a long time. But this is a very old political tradition in the US, right, like the Boston Tea Party involved this kind of masquerading where white settlers dressed up as what they called Indians, the Sons of Liberty did that. There are groups in Maine that did that. And so there's this sort of long tradition that draws on older European traditions of masquerade that were a little bit different in that context. But the point is, right, they would basically dress up as what they -- as Indigenous people, and then they would hold parades, and they would sing songs. They would also kind of like intimidate the local population and stuff. They're like -- they're flexing political power.

But it's that practice of masking -- or masquerading, rather, that the New York State legislature, when it just moves to absolutely crush this anti-rent, farmers rebellion, that they criminalize. And over time, the idea of masquerading as that sort of older tradition of proletarians rising up and donning Indigenous -- their fantasy of Indigenous aesthetics, as that kind of wanes, the law starts to get applied increasingly more in cities rather than an upstate and it tends to be applied to target people who are "cross dressed." And that is because, not really just the fact of being cross dressed, right? It's like, again, transphobia doesn't like emerge in the world, or anti-trans politics don't emerge fully formed. They're for other purposes.

It's part of this larger racialized policing of public space, of red light districts, it's particularly used to target sex workers, probably more than anyone, people who appear on stage, people working in saloons, people in the nightlife industry, and again, just sort of morphs over time. But what I think is really interesting about that New York history is it just folds everything in together. You have this one law that's so long lived. We go all the way back to the origin of these laws - the purpose is to crush proletarian power. It is to crush leftist movements. It is to crush popular democratic movements that are challenging the political class of the era. That is the explicit purpose of that law. And over time, it morphs to turn into an anti-trans law, to turn into an anti-Black law, right?

I mean, it's just kind of incredible how these things have all been rolled into one. And so again, I think the history lesson here is again that solidarity is inherent to the political struggle, right? The state power has already configured all of these groups of people as having something in common worth targeting, whether it's left wing political movements, whether it's working class trans women, whether it's Black and brown people going to work or hanging out in public space, that all of those groups are understood to be similarly constituted threats to state power, and so they have a vested and shared interest.

But I think ultimately, too, what that gives to us is a kind of another, a similar kind of question to what we've been talking about here, about how masking is an opportunity for solidarity between disability movements and Palestine Solidarity movements. It's also an opportunity for solidarity between trans movements in this moment, right, as it is between racial justice movements. And so that also means, I think, that there's a conversation to be had about how certainly trans advocacy organizing and protest movements, but also, I think, more broadly, trans and LGBT space organizing, like all the kinds of events, especially many of which happened this summer go on, where there's just no real masking, or there's this sort of like, please mask if you can, kind of thing. There are some that have organized around masking, but I think again, there's this opportunity to build solidarity and to build kind of interlocking movement between these different movements in this moment, where obviously, trans people have a lot at stake in this political movement in Nassau County, the same legislative body obviously has already made headlines for its anti-trans legislation.

And then just finally to say -- sorry, I'm going on a long time. But just finally to say, this law will be used to target trans people. Well, let me be more specific. This law will be used to target working class Black and brown trans women in public. And that is important to say because, one, just speaking to all the trans people that listen to this show, for those of us who aren't likely to be targeted by these kinds of laws for being trans, it's important for us to engage in solidarity with the people who will be most disproportionately targeted, and it is people, right, who are going to sit at the convergence points of these forms of state power, right?

Black and brown trans women already, who are working class and who also depend on public space often for social space and for work, already the most likely to be routinely stopped by the police. I mean, New York State has so many laws stacked on top of each other that were deliberately created to target trans women in sex work that like one of them was repealed in 2021. But there are still so many others, like they can come back so easily. And the police often just use the pretense of "solicitation" to stop and detain poor, Black and brown trans women and sex workers.

So I just think again, there's a really important opportunity here to build more interconnection, solidarity between these movements, and also to name these bills and these bans as a form of anti-trans legislation, even if that's not their original scope and purpose. Anti-trans legislation actually rarely is explicitly hatched that way, but our interests are shared here as a group of people, some of whom are highly, highly, highly targeted for policing in public space, and for whom, again, a mass public movement demanding that public space belong to the people, just pays so many important political and material dividends.

Artie Vierkant 1:05:31
I mean, so well said. And also, I want to home in on one of those last points that you just made, which is that, it's rarely -- rarely are these laws extremely explicit in their language about how they're going to be used to target trans people. A perfect example is the law that we're talking about, Nassau County's mask ban. So for example, the text of that law says, "no person or person while wearing any mask or facial covering, whereby the face or voice is disguised with the intent to conceal the identity of the wearer."

I mean, so obviously, if you are reading this from a perspective where you think that trans people are just people, you believe in the humanity of trans people, you may not immediately catch some of the things here, but if you think about just some of the right wing tropes, or also tropes among liberals about trans people, there is so much attack and language around the idea that trans people are, to borrow language from this law, "concealing their identity," right? That they are in some way duplicitous, right? You can very easily see this law being interpreted by a cop who is deciding whether or not that they're going to have grounds to just arrest someone simply for being trans, or, in this case, perhaps for being trans and wearing a mask.

But again, the language is quite broad, so deciding that someone is "disguising their voice," right? You can very easily imagine that happening. In fact, when you look at that very statute that we've been talking about, right, the old New York anti-mask statute that was repealed in 2020 but a lot of these people, including advocates for the Nassau County mask ban, have been saying explicitly, either they want reenacted at the state level, or that perhaps it should have never been repealed in the first place. When you look at the statute, this was a old New York penal law § 240.35(4) read -- again, this is a different one from the Nassau ban, but this read that it applied to "being masked or in any manner disguised by unusual or unnatural attire or facial alteration, someone who loiters, remains or congregates in a public place with other persons so masked or disguised."

And again, it's not conjecture to say that something like the language in the Nassau County mask ban could be interpreted as anti trans, or could be used to police trans people simply for the fact of them being trans. Because if you look at the history of this old New York law, the one that was repealed, but that these people want back, there are cases in the past, including two prominent cases from the 1960s of this law, this section in the law being used for explicitly this. Those cases are the People v. Archibald and the People v. Gillespie. The People v. Archibald was literally just someone was arrested under this statute, which, again, we've been talking about and has been talked about just recently, over the last -- over the last couple of years, as sort of simply an anti mask statute. This person listed as Archibald here in this 1968 case that made it all the way to the New York State Supreme Court was arrested simply for being in public standing on a subway platform in New York City.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:08:53
Classic, classic NYPD arrest scenario, right? No, I think that's so important that like -- and just to say, again, just to really stress, because these are policing oriented laws, the letter of the law is -- I mean, the way they're written is really important, but the point is that they're vague. They might not even sound vague because there's a lot of legalese and verbiage, but what makes them vague is they empower the police to do things regardless of whether those things are even really legal, more broadly or not, right. And so the history of these kinds of laws can involve State Supreme Courts striking down certain applications of them, and the police completely ignoring that. And that's like part of the New York State history.

But just to give one example from the other big state law from this era, which is the California law. In the 1960s, there's a trans woman that I'm writing about right now. In the summer of 1964, she was arrested 20 times walking to work. She could never keep her job because this one police officer was literally tailing her, like he was looking for her every time she left her house. He knew when she was walking to work, and so she'd get thrown in jail. The California State Supreme Court had already ruled that that state law did not apply to transsexual women, that they -- that they weren't -- that they might be cross dressing, but they weren't doing it with an intent to mislead anyone, right? They weren't trying to conceal their identity. They were just wearing women's clothing "for a medical reason," right? And so this was a trans woman who wanted to be upwardly mobile, and was trying to sort of advance a kind of politics of respectability, as they were in the 60s.

So she got arrested 20 times in one summer. Every time she went to jail, she wouldn't show up to work for a few days. She would lose her job, right? She didn't have enough money to pay for a lawyer or to pay any of the fines. But every time she would get hauled in front of the judge, the judge would dismiss the charges and say, oh, well, this is an already unconstitutional application of the state law. The police officer was wrong to arrest you. And then she would get arrested again, and the judge would dismiss it.

These are just forms of administrative violence, where these kinds of burdens, right, allow for the application to working class people and particularly to Black and brown people. That's exactly how this kind of law in Nassau County could be applied, right? It would be -- like police act these ways. They have this kind of body of knowledge in the way they apply ordinances, right? They will go after and they will arrest disproportionately poor people and people of color, because they know those people have the least resources collectively to mount legal opposition to their arrest. They're more likely to have to stick it out in jail for a couple of days before they're released, and they're less likely to have the resources to pay for bail and so on, and so it's easier to target them, right?

That's the way that those laws get implemented. It's the administrative violence, that even if technically the law, if you go and read it and you're like, well, it doesn't really seem like it should allow a police officer -- right, but you're just totally right, Artie, a police officer can be like your voice was disguised. And sure, a judge might say, like, that's absurd, but it's -- the damage has already been done. Someone has been arrested in this situation, right? Someone's already been put in a jail. And also, just to say, the application of these laws disproportionately to working class Black and brown trans women, also a group of people who experience one of the highest rates of interpersonal and sexual assault and violence while incarcerated. So it's just like really, really, really drastic impact from these kinds of laws that are designed precisely to allow police officers to do this kind of thing.

And also, the current Nassau legislature that has just passed this mask ban recently, was sued by the state of New York and the New York Civil Liberties Union for enacting a law that barred trans women and girls from sports participation. So you know, the current overlap, even within the agenda of the legislature is so clear. They're pursuing this reactionary politics of control and exclusion, they're seeking to enforce specific norms they feel entitled to, and punish or remove those who deviate from them with impunity.

Artie Vierkant 1:13:11
And also, I mean, it's important to say too, that while I think the point that Jules, you were making earlier is a really important one too, about how in practice, in the practice of policing, or for instance, like what we can know about perhaps current prejudices within Nassau County, for example, as Bea, you're bringing up, like yes, it may be the case that maybe these laws will be interpreted in broad ways that, yes, perhaps don't stand up in court later. But I do think that for example, actually this 1968 case is a great example of sometimes they're just rubber stamped by the judge. So for -- I'll actually, if you don't mind, I think I'll just read from one of the court case documents from this 1968 case.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:13:56
Yeah, please.

Artie Vierkant 1:13:56
This is very interesting because it's a document from the original case. It explains what -- like anything that is written as a formal opinion of the court, it is these court officials giving what is essentially the state's perspective on what happened in this case. And so I'm going to read this briefly, and I'll just note, I'm not going to change any of the pronouns that they use. But this was a New York State opinion from 1968, so I think we can assume that it's not going to be particularly sensitive to however this individual, Archibald, thought of themselves. But they say:

"The defendant was convicted after a trial of the offense of vagrancy. The statute provides that one is a vagrant who has his face painted, discolored, covered or concealed or being otherwise disguised in a manner calculated to prevent his being identified. At trial, the officer testified that while patrolling a subway station platform at 4am he observed three people engaged in a loud conversation. The officer testified that after he passed the group, 'The defendant turned around and over the right shoulder, winked at me with his eye, and again, turned around and continued walking away from me.' The officer spoke briefly to the defendant, and when asked whether he was a boy or a girl, the defendant replied, I am a girl. The testimony further indicated that the defendant was wearing a white evening dress, high heel shoes, blond wig, female undergarments and facial makeup. The defendant admittedly appeared in a public subway station dressed in female attire and concealed his true gender."

Sorry, the language of this - "admittedly," as in, the defendant admitted to appearing in public as a female, etc. Anyway, continuing the quote,

"In doing so, the defendant was in violation of Section 887, which forbids a disguise in a manner calculated to prevent his being identified."

And I think that language right there, just looking at that old court case, not that long ago, 1968 actually. But looking at that court case and thinking about again, this is -- the Nassau bill having this language of disguise to conceal identity, right? That is literally the language that they use here. And this is something that ended up at the New York State Supreme Court.

This is an example of this happening in a situation that becomes documented in court records. There's plenty of other instances that, of course, this can then be used, as many people have warned about, for many different reasons, about these mask bans, can be used quite easily as a threat too, that never kind of enters into the public record. For example, I was reading a 1997 law journal article about this case, Archibald, and it quotes in that article from this history of the lesbian community in Buffalo, New York in the 1940s and 50s. There's this kind of incredible quote about how people were just kind of actively harassed by police officers wielding sections of the law exactly like this, possibly the exact section that we're talking about of the law, as a threat over them. So here's that quote. This is, again, testimonial of one individual from the 1940s -- 40s and 50s. They said,

"I've had police walk up to me and say, get out the car -- this is while I'm driving -- they say, get out the car. And I get out. And they say, what kind of shoes you got on? You got on men's shoes? And I say, no, I got on women's shoes. I got on some basket weave women's shoes. And he says, well, you damn lucky, because everything else I had on were men's - shirts, pants. At that time when they pick you up, if you don't have two garments that belong to a woman, you could go to jail. And the same thing with a man. They call it male impersonation or female impersonation, and they'd take you downtown. It would give them an opportunity to whack the shit out of you."

And so, yeah, this is -- again, this is exactly the kind of thing that we're talking about.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:17:57
No, I mean, I think that's right. Like that common thread that we've been talking about in each instance is that these laws are basically empowering the police to go after certain groups of people who will experience more and more encounters with the police in everyday life, and those lead so frequently to forms of literal or administrative violence. And so, yeah, I just think it's so important to underline that. That is the purpose of these kinds of laws, and this is not a hypothetical about how they would be implemented. We can simply look to local, state level and other examples of their implementation over decades, if not centuries, and see a very, very, very consistent pattern that these laws are used to target popular, mass proletariat left wing movements, that they're used to target Black and brown people in cities, and they're used to target, in particular, trans people and sex workers. Like that is just the purpose of these laws. That is what they have been used to do. We've seen it time and time again, and even somewhat regardless sometimes of what certain courts say, it doesn't really do anything to tamper down on that police violence.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:19:07
Right. And to state the obvious, again, from just like a pure abolitionist perspective, right, we have to look at mask bans as a way of just simply expanding the carceral state, right? This is an additional way for folks who are already going to be exposed to the violence of the carceral state, to either have more exposure, to have a new pathway of exposure for some folks who might not have been exposed otherwise, right? This is just plain and simple carceral expansionism disguised as a public safety measure. And it actually reminds me of, again, to shout out Victoria Law's book, there's a section in Victoria's book where she's talking about the experiences of a woman and a trans man who are living through COVID in a Texas prison, in a Texas women's prison. They're both in solitary confinement, and they're communicating through the vent in the toilets to each other. One's on the floor above and one's on the floor below.

And Kwaneta, who's on the floor above, is a former nurse and has some outside family support, so she has like a radio, and she's learning about COVID on NPR, and she's shouting down to Jack, who's in the cell below her, also in solitary confinement, in seg, and they're just sort of talking about COVID. And so Jack ends up making a mask out of a piece of cloth that they were given like a year prior to cover their faces to protect themselves from particulate exposure. And the guards actually just like come in and tell him to take it off and take it away. And over and over, sharing information between folks who are on the inside, protecting yourself, these are additional ways to be exposed to risk and punishment within prison, right?

So if we think about this also as how inside and outside, the violence reflects regardless of a prison wall, right? We have to also think about this as a really important way to take a step towards starting to recognize the condition that folks are on on the inside right now, with regard to COVID, the experience of being punished for wearing a mask in public is something that folks who have been incarcerated have been dealing with since 2020, since March of 2020.

This is how folks have been forced to navigate the pandemic for years now behind bars, and this is really important to just think about, from the perspective of this being part of the left's fight against policing and carcerality, not just about COVID and public health. I think a lot of people feel like, oh, this isn't my fight. I don't need to weigh in on this. They might disagree on covid. They might just feel like they're just not a healthcare person or something. And I think that's why it's so important to emphasize over and over, this is not just a healthcare thing.

This is not just about COVID. This is even not just about Palestine, right? This is about a much broader expansion of the state, of the carceral state, and a much more important issue than I think a lot of the people who are sort of involved in the left right now might realize, at face value.

Artie Vierkant 1:22:04
Yeah, it's truly everybody's fight. You know, we spend a lot of time here talking about the connections between struggles. And I think -- you know, I said this earlier to some extent, but I think that mask bans are truly one of the singular things that I can think of that really demonstrate just how fundamentally so many of the things that we talk about on the show are not simply connected, but just inextricable from one another. And I think it's just really worth walking through and just reiterating very quickly, because I think to your point Bea, I think there's a fair amount of people who are otherwise quite politically active, who just shrug off mask bans or shrug off anything COVID related, really, as sort of not for them or not their fight. That fighting against mask bans is just for people who are already involved in COVID or Long COVID advocacy, or who do Disability Justice work. But I think what these mask bans show is that whether you think it's your fight or not, if you're invested in any of these movements, mask bans show that the fight is coming to you, whether you like it or not. For those who want to see Palestinian liberation, I mean, these laws are explicitly targeting the movement.

The rhetoric on display in the Nassau County hearing, I think, should make that enormously clear, right? It's extremely -- there's no equivocation here, to the point that they demure about COVID. They pretend it has nothing to do with COVID, they pretend it has nothing to do with all these other things. And they jeer people when they bring COVID up, presumably, I think, in part because there's -- just from knowing the rhetoric of a lot of these people, it just seems as though a lot of the most prominent organizing against mask bans, which is coming from people who have been organizing around COVID and Long COVID for a long time, that a lot of that gets dismissed as people being duplicitous or something, that it gets dismissed as well, of course, our law doesn't target health or something. You people are fine.

And therefore, just like these people seem to believe about solidarity encampments and all manner of pro Palestine organizing, that people are just masking explicitly only to "conceal their identity" or whatever, which is also, of course, the right to conceal your identity, an important right that we should be defending, regardless of the COVID implication. But so again, this is a key point. Mask bans are a targeted criminalization of specifically one of the biggest mass protest movements happening in the US right now.

The entire left should be talking about them and should be fighting mask bans. But then, again, this runs right into the next point too, to in some ways echo what Bea said, for abolitionists, this is an expansion of police powers, and one that is certainly going to be used to disproportionately police people of color, disabled people and trans people. It's an expansion and reinvigoration of status offense laws, broken windows policing, however you want to call it, and it is a literal criminalization of specific types of protest, of specific protest movements even, and also, as we've talked about too, for our trans comrades, these laws have historically been used specifically to police trans people.

And that is all on top of the fact that also, frankly, just, I don't know if this is just my own personal impression from my own social circle, but it does seem like trans people do appear to be disproportionately good at masking in public, frankly, on average. And so regardless of how they're enforced or from what angle the language is interpreted, this will be used to target trans people. And so just as we come to the end of this, I mean, in many ways, I think there's little I can do but sort of repeat myself on this, but I think, again, I do hope the left can really come to embrace masking as a shared practice of solidarity and disability justice.

But whether you're up to speed or not, these mask bans are happening at a time that could dramatically shape what the coming decade of left political action and political speech looks like. Because these bans, these are bans targeting us, all of us, and that means this will have implications going who knows how far into the future. I mean, the one that was allowed to pass in 1845 was only repealed in 2020 --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:26:36
Oh god.

Artie Vierkant 1:26:36
And they want it back, right, so. And these things do dictate what left political speech can look like, who can be involved in it, and how easy it is for the state to target us, frankly, and so we shrug them off at our own peril.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:26:55
Absolutely. Now is really a time for us to unite and act decisively. Our movements are interconnected, as we've been saying, and this is something that is going to impact all of what we're doing, as Artie said, not just for the next 10 years, but however long, in perpetuity. This is an opportunity to stop this thing from going back into effect. We only know the ways that it has been used, and we can speculate on the many ways that it will be used, but we also know that whatever we've thought of today and discussed today, this is only just scratching the surface of how it will be used by the state for repression. So this is why we have to commit to incorporating resistance to mask bans into our struggles, not just superficially, but with solidarity and with resolve. So I think that's a good place to leave it for today.

Artie Vierkant 1:27:45
Yep.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:27:46
Patrons, as always, thank you so much for your support. We couldn't do any of this without you. To support the show and get access to the second weekly bonus episode and entire back catalog of bonus episodes, become a patron at Patreon.com/DeathPanelPod. And to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, hold listening or discussion groups, post about your favorite episodes, pick up copies of Health Communism and A Short History of Trans Misogyny at your local bookstore, or request them at your local library, and follow us @DeathPanel_.

Patrons, we'll catch you Monday in the patron feed. For everyone else, we'll catch you later in the week in the main feed. As always, Medicare For all now, solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.

Death Panel 1:31:47
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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)