Chalk up one more celebrity COVID hypocrite: musical theater great turns out to be a (maskless) ranting mask Karen.
A viral video shows the Tony and Grammy winner screaming “get the f–ck out” at a patron for refusing to mask up after a performance of “Company” at the American Theatre Wing. Yet LuPone wasn’t wearing a mask as she ranted. Color us shocked.
Yes, she was doing a post-show Q-and-A. She likely wanted her face to be seen and her speech to be understood. But the policy of the theater where she was performing requires masking.
So why not her? Does being on a stage mean you can’t get others sick?
LuPone’s obvious hypocrisy was greeted with a surge of pathetic seal-clapping. But it’s typical of the way politicos, celebs and other elites have behaved since the pandemic began.
Witness Mayor Eric Adams carving out a mile-wide celebrity exemption in NYC’s private-sector vax mandate. Or AOC smiling for a glamor shot at the Met gala with a squadron of masked-up servers in the background. Or disgraced ex-gov Andrew Cuomo announcing that he was going to be hosting Thanksgiving dinner after telling the rest of us plebes not to do just that.
As years of data now make abundantly clear, restrictive mandates do nothing, good or bad, for broad-scale COVID outcomes. New York’s gone from having massive restrictions and sky-high COVID deaths to almost no restrictions and steadily dropping death and hospitalization rates — which remain low during the current “fifth wave.”
That’s due to vaccines, rising natural immunity, a better understanding of COVID among doctors and the therapeutics now entering the market.
Not mask or vaccine mandates. Remember: Our outcomes are nearly identical to Florida’s, which never went down the same restrictionist route.
What the LuPone video shows — for the umpteenth time — is that the powerful love hygiene-theater. And privileged petty tyrants will keep obliviously castigating others for breaking rules they only follow when they feel like it until our officials, elected and otherwise, show some spine by killing our last COVID rules and ending this anti-scientific farce for good.
Otherwise, the mask Karens are never going away.
