A good summary of the current state of retailing in the USA was made recently by the CEO of one of the nation's largest retailers when he told a friend that he longed for the "good old days" when he was a merchant building a franchise with the consumer. Today, instead of making merchandise decisions, he spends almost his whole day answering questions from Wall Street analysts and mutual fund managers who are interested in daily sales figures against plan and current quarter profit projections. The thinking goes something like this: "We will not let anything keep us from achieving our goal of meeting or exceeding quarterly profit projections". This constant need to reassure his financial audiences keeps him from visiting customers and vendors. Such behaviour could contribute to making the kind of mistakes above which the novelist John le Carré warned about when he wrote: "A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world".What was particularly disturbing to the CEO mentioned above was the limited experience of so many analysts and fund managers. This inexperience is also found in retailing -today's retailers are focusing on their "narrow areas of expertise". This is resulting in a failure to commit sufficient resources to monitoring how changes in the demographic, technological, political and economic environments had and would continue to affect their business. Amazingly, this correct observation was from a CEO in his mid-40s.The failure to understand retailing's history destines managers to misinterpret current trends which are changing the retailing environment. George Santayana warned us about this when he wrote: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". No longer can retailers continue to do the same thing they have always done in the mistaken belief that "what worked in the past will work in the future". This short-sightedness is compounded by the excessive number of retailers offering product assortments, promotions, pricing and visual presentations that are indistinguishable from store to store or region to region.Given that the business environment is changing at a geometric rate, successful retailers need to spot changing trends and develop new strategies that, instead of being forced to react to change after it has already occurred, proactively shape the environment. This 275

When the Seventh Circuit upheld the First Amendment right of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois in 1978, the protection of mask wearers was not far behind. Since then, doctrinal paths have diverged. While the Supreme Court continues to protect hate speech, mask wearing has been increasingly placed outside First Amendment protection. This Article seeks to get to the bottom of this doctrinal divergence by addressing the symbolic purposes of mask bans-rooted in repudiating the Ku Klux Klan-as well as the doctrinal steps taken over the past forty years to restrict the First Amendment claims of mask wearers. It also highlights the dangers posed by the current, state-friendly mask law doctrine in an age of technological growth, mass surveillance, and a move to anoint Antifa as the new Ku Klux Klan. The Article ends with a call for courts to restore mask wearing to its rightful place in the First Amendment pantheon. I. INTRODUCTION: THE DECLINE OF MASK BAN DOCTRINE...72

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In April 2021, as COVID briefly appeared to recede in the United States, Fox News host Tucker Carlson went on a lengthy rant against mask wearers. It appeared as if, to paraphrase Hegel, the owl of Minerva was flying at dusk. Why complain about masks at the very time mask mandates were being rolled back and society was—or so it seemed—returning to normal? The answer must lie in the mask itself, and what it represents. In anti-masking discourse, the mask has had two symbolic meanings—mask wearers as sheep, and the masks as burqas. Sheep are obedient, while burqas are instruments of social control. At a deeper level, the very act of mask wearing becomes seen as oppressive, while revealing one’s face is freedom itself. This view of masking (and revealing one’s face) is not new, rather it dates back in Europe to a “revolutionary transparency” that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution that has been appropriated by anti-maskers. While the sheep and burqa images have some play in anti-masking discourse, the connection between freedom and showing one’s face is the most durable message anti-maskers see conveyed by the COVID face mask.