Back in the 1780s, there was a lot of economic distress in France and the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette is reported to have been told that there was no bread for the people to eat. And she supposedly said, “well, then let them eat cake.” Now I know this was Marie Antoinette just being pompous and saying, well, she didn’t care about the fact that the peasants didn’t have any bread to eat, or it could be that she simply didn’t understand and figured, well, if there’s no bread around there certainly there must be cake around either way. It was certainly of an out-of-touch elite attitude. Well, today our elites are a little bit mandate-crazed. They mandate vaccines. They mandate masks. In fact, the governor of Oregon, even mandates masks for being outdoors in their many national parks. It’s crazy — who is being protected by those masks except for the trees?

Well, it really is a form of virtue signaling and speaker Pelosi, took this to a good extreme. The way she signaled it was to have color coordinated masks, a different mask for every dress that she wore…making it stylish to wear masks. Of course, when speaker Pelosi had a big fundraiser out in California, none of  the attendees wore masks. And you might remember speaker Pelosi going to her hairstylist without a mask even when hair stylists were closed. Then there was the Met Ball in New York, which is their big arts center, big fundraising ball, $30,000 a ticket. 

You may remember having seen Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, often known as AOC, wearing a dress, a very stylish dress, adorned with the huge phrase “tax the rich.” Well, she was not wearing a mask. We also had the Oscars; no one wore masks.

We had the UN general assembly meeting in New York — no one wearing a mask. You might also remember President Obama’s 60th birthday up in Martha’s Vineyard. Again, no one wore a mask who was one of the invitees. So this happens over and over again. The mayor of San Francisco, Mrs. Breed, had just imposed a mask mandate on the city and then went to a nightclub and started dancing, all without a mask. When she was criticized for that, her response was, “we have no need for the fun police.” Well, why insist everyone else wear a mask? Here is the problem. Although all the invitees to all these swanky parties didn’t wear a mask. if you looked around the room, one group of people had to wear their masks. And that was the people who were serving the elites. All those people, the waiters, the waitresses, the cleanup people, they wore masks while the elites did not.

Well, you know, this strikes a lot of people the wrong way. And there’s a poll question that says, does someone care about people like me? And you can either say I care a lot, he cares a little, he cares some, he cares not at all. Well, let’s leave out the squishy middle for a second. And just look at what happens about people who say the elites care about them a lot versus not at all. There was one group where those two were tied. It was among college-educated women. Uh, they were tied at 32 to 32, cares a lot/doesn’t care at all. But for women who did not go to college, it was 17 cares a lot, where 42 said doesn’t care about me at all. The situation for men was even more extreme, both for college educated and non-college educated people. When Hispanics were asked about these people and specifically about President Biden, 18% said he cares a lot. Thirty-three percent said he doesn’t care at all. 

So here we have a bit of a problem. It’s obvious to the ordinary people that the elites really don’t care about them. That they are free to tell ordinary people what to do, but don’t follow their own rules. Now, one of the key aspects of leadership is you have to avoid hypocrisy. You can’t be a leader when you tell your followers to do one thing, and then you turn around and do another. So there’s two things leaders can do. Either they can stop going to all their fancy parties without masks and wear the masks just like the waiters and waitresses do, or they can stop lecturing everybody else that they have to wear a mask. My bet, they won’t change at all. They’ll keep going to their parties maskless, and be surrounded by waiters who are required by their own decrees to wear a mask. So basically their attitude comes back to the same as Maria Antoinette, and that is let them eat cake or at least try to, through those masks we’re making them wear. This is Larry Lindsey for Straight Arrow News.