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TAMPA, Florida, February 9, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — At a post-Super Bowl press conference on Monday, Tampa Mayor Jane Castor said that maskless football fans participating in the festivities will be “identified” and law enforcement “will handle it.”
Castor, the city’s former police chief and first openly homosexual mayor, extended the requirements of her indoor mask mandate to the outdoors two weeks ago in anticipation of the many football fans who would be descending upon the city for the Super Bowl. The latter executive order pertained to “Event Zones” and “Entertainment Districts” and had the stated purpose of mitigating “the spread of COVID-19.”
“Everyone knows that simply wearing a mask dramatically reduces the spread of COVID-19,” Castor proposed at the press conference. “And I’m proud to say that the majority of individuals that I saw, out and about, enjoying the festivities associated with the Super Bowl, were complying.”
“I’m proud of our community,” she continued, “but those few bad actors (not wearing masks) will be identified, and the Tampa police department will handle it.”
BREAKING: At a press conference Monday, Tampa Mayor Jane Castor said that maskless fans at the Super Bowl will be “identified” by law enforcement and that police will “handle” the situation pic.twitter.com/S20Xv97jYJ
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) February 8, 2021
Castor’s recent order allows for a $500 civil penalty, and the local Hillsborough County order makes possible a second-degree misdemeanor prosecution.
Ironically, it is not fully clear whether Castor followed her own previous indoor order as pictures have been circulated on social media of her apparently defying her own rules at the game.
Mayor of Tampa will be prosecuting maskless fans from the Super Bowl. Yet…. pic.twitter.com/rL5LnkyCiY
— Chef Andrew Gruel (@ChefGruel) February 9, 2021
It is also unclear if Castor, a Democrat, plans to actually levy such penalties after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis blocked local governments from collecting fines for such violations in September.
That same month, DeSantis also lifted all statewide COVID-19 restrictions on businesses, stating, “I've focused a lot on making sure society continues to function … I think you fight a pandemic better from that posture than if society is in the fetal position. “
While many Democrat politicians have imposed draconian restrictions against citizens in the name of mitigating the spread of the COVID-19 virus, they have often been caught ignoring these same rules themselves.
In December, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany exposed “Democrat hypocrisy” in regard to such orders, as committed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, House Speaker Nancy Peolosi of California, San Francisco Mayor London Breed and more.
In October, Tucker Carlson featured the same type of hypocrisy from CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, the brother of New York Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo, contrasting his “devotion” to mask mandates in his broadcasting with his refusal to wear one in his own residential building, despite warnings from the landlords.
As for “everyone” knowing “that simply wearing a mask dramatically reduces the spread of COVID-19,” as asserted by Castor, this is not the case for the scientists who conducted a major study published by the Annals of Internal Medicine finding no statistically significant difference in COVID-19 cases between mask-wearers and non-mask-wearers.
The same can be said for the scientists of many other studies that come to the same conclusion, finding “little to no evidence for the effectiveness of cloth face masks in the general population, neither as personal protective equipment nor as a source control.”
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