First Things editor R.R. RenoWe have written before about R.R. Reno and the First Things magazine response to the coronavirus. On March 20, 2020, we noted Reno’s call to open churches (with a Wendell Berry-inspired response from Eric Miller). Three days later, we called attention to Reno’s claim that “there are many things more precious than life.” On April 8, 2020, we linked to a piece describing Reno and his staff as “the bitter and angry remnant” at First Things magazine. On April 29, 2020, Reno said that the government’s measures to protect Americans from the coronavirus “have been pointless.”
In the last twenty-four hours, Reno seems to have doubled-down on all of these claims via Twitter:
Trump does not wear mask, compromising the possibility that WWII vets might live forever! Heather Mac Donald on the current hysteria and the paralyzing safetyism that makes healthy 30-year-old cower with fear behind their masks. https://t.co/q6UAXgZ0Jj
— R.R. Reno (@rr_reno) May 12, 2020
By the way, the WWII vets did not wear masks. They’re men, not cowards. Masks=enforced cowardice.
— R.R. Reno (@rr_reno) May 13, 2020
Just to reinforce. Talked to my son in Seattle. The mask culture if fear driven. Masks+cowardice. It’s a regime dominate by fear of infection and fear of causing of infection. Both are species of cowardice.
— R.R. Reno (@rr_reno) May 13, 2020
Now we know who want to cower in place. By all means rage against those who want to live.
— R.R. Reno (@rr_reno) May 13, 2020
Look, let’s face it. There are those who are terrified, and those who are not. Where do you stand? Terror or a more reasonable position? Will you visit our mother? If so, the mask is a PC gesture. If not, you are a moral monster.
— R.R. Reno (@rr_reno) May 13, 2020
Conservative writer Rod Dreher called it a meltdown. “It doesn’t make me angry,” he wrote today at The American Conservative, “it makes me sad to see this happening.”