If the Biden administration were actively trying to make their messaging on COVID, vaccinations, and mask-wearing completely unintelligible, what exactly would they be doing differently? That’s the question everyone should be asking, given the fact that our president literally wore a mask to walk outside on the way to give a speech announcing that outdoor masking is no longer necessary.

Now, he’s doubled down. In an interview with NBC’s “Today Show,” Biden let it be known that he’s going to ignore his own guidelines and that if you don’t do the same, you aren’t patriotic.

Constitutional amendments aren't absolute, but useless mask wearing is patriotic. https://t.co/QpvzxjR6ko

— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) April 30, 2021

Keep in mind, the question he’s responding to about people who have been vaccinated. Biden, who himself has been vaccinated since last year, is promoting the idea of not listening to his own CDC out of some paranoid, anti-science sense of “precaution.”

As David Harsanyi notes above, the gulf between Biden’s rhetoric on a variety of issues and reality is getting wider and wider. Constitutional rights aren’t absolute, according to the president, but double-masking outdoors, after being vaccinated is patriotic? The mind boggles.

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro responded, getting to the bottom of the issue rather succinctly.

Masking has become "patriotic" because it stopped being a method of disease transmission prevention and started becoming, to the Left, a sign of personal virtue.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) April 30, 2021

That’s the answer. This isn’t about science for Biden or Democrats. It’s not about stopping the spread of the disease. It’s certainly not about encouraging people to get vaccinated. Rather, it’s about a religious obsession with a piece of cloth that these people feel denotes personal virtue upon them. There is no real data to support the efficacy of masking without the vaccine (see Fauci Was Right, Facemasks Don’t Prevent Spread of COVID-19), much less after getting the vaccine, where re-infection rates are already near statistical irrelevancy. Anyone masking up after being vaccinated, especially to go outside, should seek professional help (see Joy Reid’s Latest Admission Could Be Mistaken for Mental Illness).

Lastly, I want to note how disturbing it is to question the patriotism of normal Americans, simply because they choose to follow objective data and not the edicts of Joe Biden and his chaotic administration. One’s patriotism is not bolstered by one’s choice to bend the knee to baseless hysteria. This country was founded on the ideals of individual liberty and the personal choice that comes with that. Someone is not unpatriotic because they don’t want to deprive themselves of oxygen while running. Biden, who still wears his mask to walk outdoors, despite being vaccinated, can live within whatever paranoid, dystopian mindset he wants. No one else is obligated to do so.