Sen. Rand Paul is not the kind of guy to mince words, especially when it comes to the left’s constant pursuit of more political power during the coronavirus pandemic.
In fact, Paul recently stated that Democrats have an “authoritarian impulse” when it comes to mask mandates, which he then said reveals an “elitism that people aren’t smart enough to make their own decisions.”
During a chat on Newsmax’s “National Report,” the Kentucky senator said that his new piece of legislation to repeal travel mask mandates “will ultimately be assigned to a committee and the Democrats are in charge. So far, we’ve had at least one vote in the Senate and it came down on party lines. Republicans voted to repeal the mandate, all the Democrats voted to keep it. Think that there’s an authoritarian impulse in the Democrat Party, that … they know better, sort of this elitism that people aren’t smart enough to make their own decisions, that the government needs to make decisions for you as far as your medical care.”
He also said that “if you look at the evidence, the evidence is pretty strong that airplanes are pretty safe. We didn’t have a mask mandate during the first surge, and people continued to fly. There really were not significant accounts of super-spreader events on planes. If you look at the filtration system on the planes, they’re 15-times better than your house and about five-times better than your average hospital.”
Paul said that “the thing is, when you look where COVID[-19] was spreading during the subsequent waves of COVID[-19], the most common place was in the house. And there was not a lot you can do as far as mandating people’s behavior in their house. So, I think it’s time to let freedom reign again. I think it is important that, when we look at this, that the science doesn’t show that the masks have done a great deal.”
The senator claimed that “some of the masks, like the cloth masks, don’t work at all because the virus is smaller than the particles in your mask. And so really, it’s a false sense of sort of security, people telling people to wear something that doesn’t work, and this is one of the lies that continues to be promulgated by Dr. [Anthony] Fauci.”
Paul and Dr. Fauci are not big fans of each other. The two of them have been in several big verbal scrapes over the course of the last few months, particularly after Fauci’s emails were leaked by the press. Much of the beef between the two stems from Paul taking issue with the safety recommendations Fauci made during the pandemic, along with his position on the origin of the virus.
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