'The Daily Show' Talked to Anti-Mask Parents. Good God.
The ‘Daily Show’ clip featuring correspondent Jordan Klepper will make you laugh and cringe in equal measures
How is it that in all the years The Daily Show has been on the air, people haven’t yet learned that they’re going to expose you as an idiot if you agree to be interviewed? Because that exact thing happened when a bunch of anti-maskers converged on a North Carolina school board meeting.
Correspondent Jordan Klepper headed to a North Carolina school board meeting to talk to anti-mask parents.
COVID-19 conspiracy theorists have been regularly storming school board meetings across the country, sometimes even getting violent. The crowd of anti-maskers at Klepper’s event seemed peaceful enough, but while the video is funny, it’s also absolutely rage-inducing.
“Masks don’t work,” one mom told Klepper. “My child was suffering after wearing his mask for so long.”
“What kind of issues has he had?” Klepper asks.
“He’s had acne,” the mom explains. Seriously. That’s what she came up with in the midst of a pandemic that is infecting literally hundreds of thousands of kids a week. She says her son’s skin “couldn’t breathe.” By the way, you know who else can’t breath? All the people on life support in North Carolina’s packed ICUs!
People, if you’re going to be OK with risking your child’s life by refusing to mask up, please come up with a better reason than pimples.
“You’re breathing in the toxins that your body is trying to get rid of,” another woman complains about masks.
“How do surgeons do it?” Klepper asks.
“That’s a good question,” she says — one which I’ve yet to see any anti-maskers answer coherently.
Parent after parent dismisses Klepper’s perfectly reasonable questions, brushing off the science in favor of their own “research.”
Klepper also dissected the slogan so many of the parents had emblazoned on their shirts and signs: “I don’t co-parent with the government.” But um, except, we all kind of do? That’s how living in a society works? The government builds schools and playgrounds and parks for our kids.
“If you don’t want to co-parent with the government, don’t get pregnant in Texas!” Klepper jokes, and ouch, too soon.
The video ends with the most head-spinning comments of all, from a woman who has apparently uncovered the link between protecting kids from COVID-19 and worshipping the devil.
“I discovered in my research also that satanists stand six feet apart, they wear masks during their rituals,” she says. “Is it coincidence? I don’t know.” She then claims to have “no fear,” a popular refrain you hear among COVID deniers and anti-maskers, completely missing the irony of invoking devil-worshippers literally one sentence earlier.
The video is as disheartening as it is funny, but there is one silver lining not mentioned. That school boarding meeting where the protestors gathered? It ended up voting to keep the mask mandate in schools — at least for now.
