Hypocrisy is all the rage these days, so much so that new depths of irony hardly register with the already-numbed soul. But this one is so visual, so visceral, so clear that it’s hard to ignore. In fact, I’m surprised more people haven’t pointed it out.

Back around Covid times, the ancient history of 2020, MAGA people couldn’t wait to rip those masks off. Never mind that wearing a mask was a public service. It wasn’t just about protecting the wearer from disease; it was about protecting society from disease.

Protesters, mostly in Red States, objected to any impingement on their freedoms, which included the right to infect others with their disease. MAGA just couldn’t summon up enough of a sense of collective society to save others … or even themselves. If you followed the Johns Hopkins daily statistics on Covid infection and death rates, which I did obsessively, you could see how places like Texas and Florida were having the worst outcomes, more people infected, particularly in the early days when there was no effective treatment, and more people dying.

And yet, governors of Red States, like Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, expressed extreme anger at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for even suggesting that their constituents might do better if they followed some basic…