“Your mask makes you look stupid,” Man yells toward a group of schoolkids wearing face masks on a parking lot near their school

In the last couple of weeks, the number of new Covid-19 cases is declining nationwide, a trend also seen in California. Following the improvement of the Covid-19 situation, California state officials lifted the mask mandate earlier this week meaning that Californians are no longer required to wear face masks, a measure that was previously enforced for everyone regardless of their vaccination status.

Wearing a face mask has been one of the first pandemic measures and up to date, health experts are urging everyone to wear face mask or face covering especially indoors and in crowded places. The protection offered by the face masks forced many school districts across the country to implement face masks in schools for students and teachers once they returned to in-person teaching, a measure that has been widely criticized by some health experts, politicians and even parents of students.

While majority of the people and the parents of the students in schools with face mask mandates agree masks offer significant protection against the deadly virus, there are people who have been against any type of wearing masks or coverings since the start of the pandemic.

So was the case with a man who was recently caught on a video taunting school children over the masks they were wearing in Southern California. The video that initially appeared on Reddit quickly became viral after multiple local news outlets reported about the incident and even the local police department tweeted they were aware of the incident pending further investigation what had happened.

From what is seen in the video, the man, who seems to have strong anti-masks opinions, was caught yelling at a group of kids at a shopping center parking lot off the school grounds. The video was reportedly taken in the end of January and posted online just days after the incident took place. The man is forcefully spreading his message to the group becoming visibly enraged.

“Masks don’t work! They’re [expletive] child abuse!” the man is heard yelling according to ABC 7.

While the man who was yelling at the group of middle school students wearing a shirt that says, “Your mask makes you look stupid”, the man who recorded the video was trying to calm down the man, asking him to “leave the kids alone.”

“Dude, you need to leave the kids alone,” he’s heard saying. “I don’t want you yelling at these kids.”

“That’s what I said to them … stay scared, keep your masks on … they don’t even work,” he continued yelling as he was leaving the scene in the opposite directions of the students.

The identity of the man involved in the video was not revealed. However, since the video gained a lot of public attention, the local sheriff department officials confirmed they were aware of the incident and they were just about to start an investigation of what had happened prior to the incident.

As per the NBC LA, the cameraman, who did not want to be identified beyond his first name, Ned, says he tried to intervene after he saw the small crowd being yelled at. “I discovered there are kids,” Ned said. “I saw adults stare, they didn’t particularly do anything. And he just kept going, and he kept getting closer to them.”

You can see the video on this link.