Instead, rules like this are a social-signaling device. The role they serve isn’t to protect young people, whose risk of dying or becoming seriously ill from COVID was already almost nonexistent.

Rather, the point is to show that they aren’t like the uncouth MAGA morons. You know the people I mean: the morbidly obese red-state monsters who drink bleach at the bidding of their exiled emperor Drumpf and inject themselves with horse medicine in between ritually sacrificing Hispanic and transgender youths at their nightly mask-free motorcycle rallies.

Unlike these figments of the liberal imagination, educated members of our establishment class — in politics, business, media and, of course, education — understand that putting two ill-fitting cloth garments in front of their faces will protect them from a virus against which they have already been vaccinated. They know this, just like they know that small children and the disabled don’t rely on facial cues obscured by masks and that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo was on top of things when he was introducing live COVID infections into New York nursing homes while lecturing his GOP counterpart in Florida, Gov. Ron De Santis.