Gearhart: Why is New Jersey holding onto mandate on masks?

As the governors of Mississippi and Texas took a lot of heat for dropping their mask mandates and reopening most everything back to normal, Jim Gearhart wondered why do states like New Jersey keep theirs in place for nearly a year?

President Joe Biden called their decisions “Neanderthal thinking” while Gov. Phil Murphy, when asked at a coronavirus briefing, said he was “stunned” and that it was “inconceivable” to drop the mandate at this point.

Or is giving people the freedom to decide on their own what precautions they wish to take an option not available in New Jersey, according to podcast partner Bob Williams.

“One of the problems I have with it is that I don’t see any coherent delineation of what they’re after. What is the end game of this political convolution that’s going on? Nobody’s talking about that. So that leads us to speculate. And we speculate without knowledge and we go wild," Jim Gearhart said during the latest weekly Jim Gearhart podcast and Facebook Live show, presented every Thursday at 10:30 a.m. on Facebook.com/NJ1015.

Jim says speculation is a type of survival mechanism because the human mind is programmed to make sense.

He also compared suspending certain civil liberties in the name of a crisis to ancient times when a stranger who wanted to make some money would come to a town offering to get rid of a dragon.

“So everybody just loads up their bags of coins and everything they have. He’s going to save them from this threat. It turns out he himself is the threat,” Jim said.

Jim said it's an example of politician Rahm Emanuel’s theory of taking advantage of a crisis.

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The post above reflects the thoughts and observations of New Jersey 101.5's Jim Gearhart. Any opinions expressed are Jim's own.