Pause and reflect that in all the angry debate over masking — meaning cloth masks — there has been only the faintest whisper of a discussion about mass-manufacturing N95s, which would require no breakthroughs of new technology.

Why do both the biggest shutdown hawks and the biggest self-proclaimed defiers of expert social control seem almost totally uninterested in giving space in our collective mental toolkit to mass usage of N95 masks, known to be highly effective?

My brand is supposed to be Nuance and ten-thousand-word deep dives, but it’s so hard to resist the sense that 90% of Covid politics is explainable with this pair of images.

It’s not that we lack for capable adults whose main interest is in dealing with actual problems — we have so many good ones! But they’re mostly standing on the sidelines, kept by mutual agreement of the managerial class and The People from being put in the game.

We’ve also heard again and again that expert consensus on masks flipped in March due to new evidence. Aside from evolving understanding of Covid itself, that simply isn’t true. What changed so rapidly was the permission structure on masking views.