Yet what’s most striking about so many of these school-board spectacles is not their political valence but the sense they exude of an anonymous comments section coming to life. They seem to represent the trollification of real-life local politics. There might be legitimate, even passionate, debate to be had about the wearing of masks. (In the United Kingdom, for instance, schoolchildren are not required to wear them, and even here not all public-health experts agree with the C.D.C. that they are necessary.) But, in so many cases, legitimate debate is not what’s on offer. Online, the thinking usually goes, people sometimes say the kinds of venomous things they wouldn’t in person; but, in these public forums, they seem all too ready to. They boo and jeer at people who express an opinion different from theirs. They find ways to bring up and rant about child-trafficking conspiracies. In one notorious case, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, audience members laughed as a high-school junior, Grady Knox, described losing his grandmother to covid. A woman behind him held a sign that read “Let our Kids Smile.” The “kids,” or, more often in this kind of rhetoric, “the children,” are usually props and symbols in these scenes; this is a parents’ war, and they mostly don’t want to hear the students speak. “At these school-board meetings, students have tried a lot to get on the docket,” Laats told me. “They’ve been on the agenda at some points, but they’re being frozen out of the discussion because parents are shouting and yelling and cops have to clear them out.”

Amy Evans, a pediatrician who practices near the sparsely vaccinated Grundy County, Tennessee, told the Washington Post this week that “she has seen more infections in the last two months than the rest of the pandemic combined.” (Just seventeen per cent of young people aged twelve to seventeen have been immunized in that state; nationwide, the figure is fifty-two per cent.) Some of her patients wanted to wear masks to school, she said, but were scared. “They were more concerned about the backlash from parents who would be opposed to masks,” she said. “The adults aren’t making it easy for kids to do the right thing.” The Justice Department’s efforts may help, though they could also provoke more fury against a familiar target: the federal government. The onus is on the adults in the room to give up on dreams of going viral and act better.