If you don’t think masks work, then you must not think air filters work, either, in your home HVAC system. Remove the filters and see how that goes.

Today, we’re seeing an irrational, emotionally-infused rejection of masks by conservatives that, in every way, resembles the irrational fear of guns by liberals. To liberals, guns are “scary objects that kill people,” while the conservatives, masks are magical devices that “lower the oxygen levels in your blood.”

Neither claim is true. Total hogwash. If masks lowered the oxygen levels in your blood, all the surgeons who wore them during surgery would pass out and die. Masks are not oxygen filters because O2 — the oxygen molecule in the atmosphere — is very, very tiny and goes right through common mask material.

In fact, even if you tried to make a mask that would remove O2 from the air, that would be an incredibly difficult task. I know because I own an oxygen remover machine in my laboratory. They’re called “nitrogen generators” but what they really do is separate nitrogen gas from oxygen gas. Nitrogen is about 79% of the atmosphere, while oxygen is somewhere around 20%. These large machines, which require high-tech gas membranes and high-pressure gas connections, remove the oxygen from the air, providing (mostly) pure nitrogen to lab instruments. Nitrogen is used by lab instruments because it’s mostly inert. That’s why we’re harvesting nitrogen from the air, in case you’re curious.

Trust me when I say that a 25-cent mask made out of cheap filter material will not remove oxygen from the air. Anyone who thinks it does is living in a fantasy world of magic, not science.

Similarly, masks don’t cause any build-up of carbon dioxide in your blood, either. If they did that, people wearing them would drop dead from CO2 poisoning.

Masks are particulate air filters that you wear on your face

What masks do accomplish is filtering large particulate matter from the airstream, and since infectious agents can ride on spittle (aerosolized spit that’s produced when people speak), the entire purpose of masks is to prevent the spittle from being aerosolized when someone speaks. The spittle is trapped inside the mask, in other words. Simple N95 masks are not intended to protect the wearer from someone else’s aerosolized particles; they are intended to block the spittle of infected people from being projected into the air.

In other words, doctors wear masks during surgery not to protect themselves from the germs of the patient, but to prevent their own germs from being projected into the patient during surgery.

But because masks are mandated in Democrat-run states like California, conservatives demonstrate an emotional, knee-jerk response to masks which they now see masks as “symbols of enslavement.” Masks have become politicized, which means the perception of masks is now filtered through all sorts of political bias that immediately disables any rational thought in the minds of most people. That’s why many conservatives have come to the conclusion that wearing a mask means you’ve surrendered to tyranny.

That’s especially ironic, given that according to Leftists, guns are symbols of tyranny. Anyone with a gun is a horrible person, they think, which is why they especially freak out when gun rights activists gather in public places while peacefully carrying rifles or pistols.

Conservatives invent nonsensical myths about masks causing harm, much the same way that Leftists invent fake “mass shooting” statistics to support their own left-wing narratives

To support their anti-gun narratives, Leftists fabricate “mass shooting” statistics and use them to scare the public into thinking the entire nation is an active rifle range where madmen are blowing away large crowds of people by the hour. In truth, most so-called “mass shootings” are gang-on-gang violence where one gang banger shoots 2 or 3 rivals over some drug deal. That’s hardly a “mass shooting” in the way most people think about the term (i.e. a mass school shooting or Las Vegas-style slaughter).

But delusional thinking isn’t limited to the Left. Conservatives have come up with all sorts of bizarre reasons to claim masks don’t work or are even harmful. The whole “masks cause your oxygen to plummet” myth is one of these fabrications. I’ve even heard conservatives say that masks make pollen allergies worse — which makes no sense, since masks would actually help filter out some amount of airborne pollen.

What’s even more bizarre is the fact that many conservatives are preppers, and every good prepper owns a gas mask that uses attached cartridges to filter out chemicals, particulate matter or even radioactive dust. These full-face respirators have far longer air flow paths than a simple cloth mask, yet nobody in the conservative prepper community claims that a chemical defense mask will kill you from lack of oxygen. It makes me curious: Are preppers now going to ditch all their gas masks because they believe masks are symbols of oppression?

By the way, construction workers wear half-face respirators all the time, filtering out paint particles, wood dust, sheet rock dust and other particles, and none of those people drop dead from lack of oxygen or carbon dioxide poisoning. The very idea that a simple cloth mask will block oxygen and increase carbon dioxide in your blood is ludicrous.

Someone could just as easily claim the opposite; that masks block nitrogen and thereby increase oxygen in your blood. But blocking nitrogen with a cloth mask is impossible, due to the laws of physics and chemistry. In fact, I wish I could invent a cloth mask that would filter out nitrogen, because that would mean all the oxygen concentrators used by millions of medical patients all around the world would suddenly become obsolete.

Child-like rationalizations show that emotional narratives are overriding logic and reason in the minds of most

Liberals think guns are mean devices that point themselves at innocent people and pull their own triggers. This shows an irrational, almost child-like stupidity among Leftists who exhibit irrational fear against guns. But conservatives are currently demonstrating a similar child-like “magical thinking” irrationality against masks. Six months ago, if you had asked conservatives a question like, “Does wearing a cloth face mask INCREASE your risk of contracting an infectious disease?” most of them would have said no way, that’s insane. Yet today, that very belief is incredibly widespread among conservatives. They have chosen to align themselves with a fantasy fear about masks, utterly abandoning the simple principle of air filtration that works in their own cars and homes.

Again, if masks don’t work, then air filters don’t work. So why do you eve have an air filter on your HVAC system? And why does it need to be changed from time to time anyway? (Answer: Because it traps all sorts of airborne particles, go figure…)

When liberals talk about guns, they sound like morons. They discuss the “clips” and think that ammunition cartridges are “bullets,” not realizing the bullet is only one component of a cartridge (they forget the brass, the primer, the powder, etc.). Liberals think guns blow people across a room, because that’s how they’ve seen gunshots depicted in Hollywood movies that are scripted by ignorant, anti-gun Hollywood morons. They also think that car doors and common household furniture items block rifle rounds, which is a rather hilarious example of left-wing stupidity on parade.

But when conservatives talk about masks these days, they often sound just as ignorant. They have no clue how masks work and seem to show zero interest in understanding vectors of airborne disease transmission. They invent bizarre reasons for claiming masks are dangerous, even inventing an entire mythology about depleted oxygen levels in the blood — a mythology that has zero basis in fact, by the way. They claim masks are a moist environment that festers disease organisms, not realizing that their own nostrils, mouth and throat are far more moist and conducive to growing colonies of pathogens.

And then there’s the old “it’s no worse than the flu” line that conservatives and pro-liberty journalists are still absurdly spouting, even as the coronavirus deaths in America have surpassed 120,000 and are on the way to reaching perhaps 250,000 by the end of this calendar year.

Even more absurdly, the very same conservative media outlets that have now claimed the coronavirus is a “total hoax” were touting the recent story of the NYC nurse who explained that non-infected patients were being killed in NYC hospitals by being placed in rooms with coronavirus-infected patients, causing cross-infections and death. But how is that possible if the coronavirus is a total hoax as is being claimed by these conservative media outlets? If the virus is a hoax, then the entire NYC nurse story can’t be true, since these conservative sites are claiming the virus doesn’t exist and can’t infect people.

So when they claim, “The hospitals in NY are deliberately killing patients!” that means they must believe the virus is real, and that infections spread through the air in hospital rooms, right? But these very same people will turn right around and claim there is no virus, thereby contradicting their own reporting on the NY nurse.

What you’re really watching in all this is the complete abandonment of rationality and reason by most of the conservative and independent media. They no longer even attempt to practice consistency in their reporting; they go with whatever story seems the most outrageous for that day, even if it completely contradicts what they reported last week.

In fact, the very same conservative media outlets that are right now reporting the coronavirus is a total hoax were telling their audiences in February and March that the coronavirus was a genetically engineered biological weapon designed to exterminate humanity.

Somehow, between March and April, they think the coronavirus went from being a deadly bioweapon to becoming a total fabrication that doesn’t exist… but that somehow infected patients in NY hospitals, according to the whistleblower nurse.

In other words, they have no clue what they’re reporting, and they have no commitment to presenting news and information that’s consistent with reality. They just “make sh#t up” for that day, because that’s the click bait that sells.

Sadly, the upshot of all this is that most conservatives now refuse to wear masks, even when wearing masks is the exact thing that could allow us all to get back to work and restore our economy without having to resort to more lockdowns.

So conservatives will refuse to wear masks, and they’ll spread the infections, and when the next lockdown is announced, they’ll scream bloody murder about being “enslaved,” taking no responsibility for their own role in spreading infections the entire time.

These are the same people, by the way, who will urge you to wear latex gloves when you use solvents to clean your rifles. “You don’t want to get those solvents in your skin,” they’ll say. So they understand that protective equipment works when cleaning your gun, but they now think protective equipment doesn’t work when breathing air. (By the way, you can clean every gun you own with nothing but coconut oil. You don’t need toxic solvents. Trust me, I’ve been doing this for years.)

My final advice in all this is to use nutrition to protect your health, and wear masks in indoor environments until we get through this pandemic. Wearing a mask doesn’t make you a slave; it’s just a piece of cloth on your face, just like you wear a piece of cloth on your chest (i.e. a shirt). I would much rather wear masks for a while than have to endure another round of brutal lockdowns, contact tracing and forced vaccinations. Masks can help us all avoid those demands, which is why masks should actually be seen as a symbol of health freedom, not tyranny.

But framing is everything, isn’t it? And conservative are now convinced that masks are bad. Maybe next somebody will tell them that eye protection isn’t necessary at the gun range, either, and that wearing eye protection might cause your eyes to lose oxygen…