CROSSPOST: SARAH JEONG: Best Gas Masks
<http://theverge.com> is becoming essential reading, and not just because of its coverage of tech gadgets and its editor Nilay Patel’s insistence that its staff “role no sevens”—that is, never rank anything 7/10…
There are two ways to tell the story of American authoritarian drift. One is through court decisions, legislation, and constitutional hardball. The other is from ground level, in the streets where the state chooses to meet dissent with chemicals rather than arguments. Sarah Jeong’s piece is about the second—and that makes it essential.
This is, nominally, a buying guide for gas masks. In reality it is an anatomy of what happens when a liberal democracy decides that tear gas is a routine tool of “crowd control,” and when ordinary citizens must learn how to armor themselves simply to exercise rights the Constitution supposedly already guarantees. Jeong uses the fine-grain details—strap designs, filter reliability, price points—to illuminate the coarse-grain fact that the boundary between policing and political repression has become dangerously thin.
You should read this because it makes concrete what is otherwise an abstraction: “illiberalism” here is not a think-tank white paper, but the question of whether you can see or breathe when the federal government arrives in your city after dark. The most important takeaway, in one phrase: tear gas exists to incite riots, not to prevent them.
Sarah Jeong: Best gas masks <https://www.theverge.com/policy/868571/best-gas-masks?ueid=744e123caca9fa6942a2af37a0645716&bxid=647608dadd0977448126c2ef&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Verge%20Daily%2030%20January%202026&utm_term=Verge%20Daily>: ‘On tear gas, and what it means when the government uses it on civilians: I was tear gassed by the government for the first time in July 2020 at one of the many Black Lives Matter protests that broke out all over the country. The feeling is excruciating, like your lungs are trying to kill you from the inside out. The sting in your eyes is painful, too. But oddly, after you’ve been tear gassed enough times, you mostly just resent the inconvenience of having to stand around and involuntarily gasp and sob. That summer, I learned the art of walking out of a cloud of tear gas — briskly, but not too briskly, lest you lose breath control and take in a huge huff of aerosolized pain.
I thought about this five years later, as I watched Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi appear on Fox News after Customs and Border Protection agents killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. “How did these people go out and get gas masks?” she asked, incredulously. “These protesters — would you know how to walk out on the street and buy a gas mask, right now? Think about that.”
As a longtime gas mask user, I can sympathize. There isn’t a lot of reliable information out there about how to buy a gas mask, especially for the specific purpose of living under state repression. But hopefully after reading this guide you’ll feel equipped to make an educated decision.
The best gas mask for most people
Parcil Distribution PT-100 Respirator Mask
$120
The Good
Full face
Blocks out tear gas from both federal and local law enforcement
Adjustable straps to fit a range of head sizes
Filters included
Affordable price point
The Bad
Rubber straps can tug on your hair
Plastic cinching components broke five years after purchase
Does not fit with most bike helmets
Difficult to wear for longer than an hour at a time
Unclear how well the default filters handle particulates
$120 at Amazon$120 at Walmart$120 at Parcil Safety
The first time I went out into the Portland protests, I walked into a cloud of pepper spray and ended up crying and coughing while doubled over on a nearby sidewalk. So I bought some goggles. The next time, I was tear gassed. I bought better goggles and a half-face respirator. About a week later, I owned a full-face gas mask; one ex-military friend remarked that the gas mask looked more hardcore than the ones that the US Army handed out to joes. This was just silly, since the mask I had bought was technically a full-face respirator, rather than a proper military-grade mask, but I had to admit that my new equipment looked very extreme.
Dozens of my fellow journalists were already on the ground by the time I got there; as the feds escalated in force, we all upgraded our equipment bit by bit. The mask I got was pretty good…