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It’s 2026 and Ketanji Brown Jackson Is Still Doing This

LAW & COURT

We already knew Ketanji Brown Jackson’s qualifications for serving on the nation’s highest court were nominal, at best. But now Joe Biden’s DEI Supreme Court pick has taken the cake.

She was spotted at a Washington, D.C. airport Friday wearing a mask like it was 2020 — six years after the pandemic, four years after the last Democrat-imposed mandates ended, two years after the last major COVID outbreak faded from public consciousness.

Brown Jackson, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, one of the most powerful judges in the world, navigating a domestic airport in a mask like it’s March 2020.

Senator Mike Lee’s response was the most restrained and perhaps the most telling: “To keep excessive questions at bay?” That’s it. That’s the whole joke. And it lands because it’s accurate.

There are legitimate medical reasons someone might wear a mask in public — immunocompromised individuals, people undergoing chemotherapy, patients with specific respiratory vulnerabilities. Nobody is mocking those people. If Justice Jackson has a genuine medical reason to mask up in 2026, she has every right to do so and that’s her business.

But if the mask is ideological — a declaration of continued solidarity with the COVID regime, a performance of virtue, a signal to the left that she remains one of them on all the cultural markers that matter — then it is, in fact, a perfect symbol.

Because the same Justice who can’t explain what a woman is to Senator Marsha Blackburn is apparently still living in an era most Americans left behind half a decade ago. The same Justice who lectured the Senate about impartiality while appearing on Michelle Obama’s podcast for 90 minutes is navigating airports in a medical-grade face covering while nobody around her is doing the same. The same Justice who called her own legal reasoning on affirmative action “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” in a dissent is flying in a mask in a post-pandemic world.

The mask, voluntary and conspicuous in 2026, tells you something about the progressive coalition’s relationship to the COVID moment. For much of the left, the pandemic was a peak experience — a period when the things progressives value most (government authority, expert-class deference, collective behavioral mandates, social signaling through compliance) were briefly and powerfully triumphant. The mask isn’t just protective equipment. It became, and for some remains, a political identity.

Ketanji Brown Jackson sits on the court making decisions that affect 330 million Americans. She was placed there because she checked boxes that a president announced in advance he was checking — he said publicly he was searching for a Black woman, and he found one. Her legal reasoning has been criticized repeatedly by colleagues across the ideological spectrum. And now she’s wearing a mask at an airport in August 2026.

It’s a free country. Wear what you want. But don’t be surprised when people notice what you’re wearing and draw the obvious conclusion about what it means and what it says about you.