One wonders whether Joe Biden had the self-awareness to notice last week that so few of the 40 world leaders in the virtual room for his two-day “climate summit” were wearing a mask. Biden, as seen on numerous video snapshots, appeared at times to be the only masker there. We’re told by the always-helpful fact-checkers that he wasn’t, but he was nonetheless the leader of a tiny and embarrassingly conspicuous minority. (COVID, for the record, is not a computer virus — it can’t leap through the ether and nail us from afar.)

What, though, must those other world leaders have thought about the American president? Hadn’t he already been vaccinated? (Answer: yes.)

Perhaps Biden was masked because his handlers were right there next to him, just off screen, telling him exactly what to say next. But hadn’t they already been vaccinated, too? (Answer: certainly.)

What kind of message, then, was Biden trying to send to the American people and the rest of the world? (Answer: search us, but it’s not about science.)

“He is sending a message to the world,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told us, “that he is putting in place precautions and continuing to do that as leader of the United States.”

Uh-huh.

Then we saw Biden earlier this week wearing a mask outside while walking alone to a podium in front of the White House to tell us that we don’t need to wear masks outside anymore.

What gives? One thing we know for certain: Joe Biden ain’t Donald Trump. Recall that our last president, having contracted the virus, left Walter Reed Medical Center just three days later while telling the American people, “Don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it.” This was precisely the show of strength and confidence that we’ve come to expect from an American president.

President Biden, on the other hand, has consistently projected a sense of fear and uncertainty, and a seemingly reflexive compliance to unnecessary masking. Even last night, at his address to a joint session of (part of) Congress, we were treated to the bizarre spectacle of a sparsely populated chamber with everyone socially distanced and wearing masks. Everyone in attendance had already been vaccinated. And yet they were, all seated at a social distance and all wearing masks.

Again, what message are we sending with this sort of behavior? What are we saying about the importance of getting vaccinated if we’re going to continue to follow strict protocols? And what sort of long-term psychological damage are we doing to the sheeple among us — those who are now terrified of ever unmasking because Anthony Fauci has been telling us to wear a mask? Or two masks?

And speaking of psychological damage, what long-term harm are we doing to our children when we force them to wear masks despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that the threat they pose is virtually nonexistent?

“By putting masks on two- to ten-year-olds,” writes National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty, “we are fitting upon the most intimate part of their body a constant reminder that they may be in danger, or that they are a danger to others. This will inevitably have some effect on their mental model of the world, of the security they feel in their schools, and their willingness and ability to develop friendships or cultivate a rapport with their teachers.”

Power Line’s John Hinderaker has had enough. “There is no argument,” he writes, “for wearing masks (which don’t do any good in any event, the case data show) if you have been vaccinated, except one: the harpies can’t tell by looking whether a person has been vaccinated or not. So if vaccinated people take their masks off, the unvaccinated will swiftly follow, and the harpies won’t know whom to shame. … What we need now is a preference cascade … Basically, in a preference cascade people start piercing the veil of silence. One person turns to another and says, I want this to end. Pretty soon — amazingly soon, once it starts to spread — it turns out that most people agree.”

Closer to home, our Nate Jackson wondered earlier this week, “When’s the mask burning party?”

Joe Biden and his control-freaky fetishists might not like it, but for a free people in a free country, those bonfires can’t come soon enough.