It’s a day that ends in -y, which means there is some execrably stupid dust-up involving Tucker Carlson.

Have you heard about Justin ‘Definitely Not A Psychopath’ Baragona? He possesses 52,000 tweets, ‘spends most of his waking hours consuming cable news‘ and has one of the internet’s creepier fake smiles. He’s also tweeted about Tucker Carlson 29 times just this month. Wow, he sounds well-adjusted!

Justin was the perfect kind of addict to spearhead the newest Tucker outrage spasm.

Tucker Carlson is now telling his audience to harass people who wear face masks outside.

If they see children wearing masks, Tucker says the response should be no different than when you see a kid being abused — “call the police immediately, contact child protective services” pic.twitter.com/4svVH0JY3s

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) April 27, 2021

Wait, that’s it? Tucker doesn’t like kids wearing the Face Diaper of the Beast? Who cares? But in the hyperreality of Twitter, Carlson’s throwaway venom was treated like a criminal offense.

RT if you agree @tuckercarlson is manifestly insane, is now openly inciting violence against innocent passersby and attacks against children, and should be arrested on the appropriate charges by DC police. pic.twitter.com/b9s0RTWzsS

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) April 27, 2021

Bill Kristol, who ought to have some humility about having the blood of children on his hands, seemed to imply Carlson’s segment was setting the stage for genocide:

The masks stuff is performative idiocy and demagoguery. But the key sentence in Carlson’s rant was this: “It’s our job to restore the society we were born in.” The destructive power of reactionary nostalgia jet-fueled by grievances real or imagined shouldn’t be underestimated.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) April 27, 2021

Cockburn will be adding these tweets to his infinity-page book ‘Why Twitter Should Be Banned And Reviving It Should Carry The Death Penalty.’ That’s a joke, to be clear, before he sets off another Twitter firestorm.

Someday, many years ago, these people were forced to go outside, interact with people, and gradually become well-adjusted. Now, they just engage online.

Here is the tricky part: Carlson is right.

Well OK, not entirely right; Carlson says wearing a mask is like exposing oneself, public nudity is occasionally entertaining or invigorating, wearing a mask never is.

Carlson’s segment was specifically about wearing masks outside, and on that topic the science is, as they say, settled. Even the New York Times admitted a few days ago that wearing a mask outside does pretty much nothing. And that’s for adults. For children, it’s an extra heaping of nothing, because children are effectively immune to coronavirus already. We’ve known that since April of last year.

Children who are healthy enough to attend school in the first place are pretty much immune to coronavirus and do almost nothing to spread it, but schools have been shut down for a year in blue states because…well, because science.

Crummy cloth masks might mildly reduce infection risk if they are worn properly, washed or replaced every few hours;  if users wash their hands both before and after taking them off. In other words, they don’t reduce infection risk for children, because none of them are doing that. Come on.

The WHO and UNICEF both say that children should never be wearing masks outdoors, because it would harm children’s breathing while doing nothing to protect them a virus they will only even know they have through intrusive testing.

The last year, then has been exactly what Carlson says: an endless repetitive exercise in neurotic adults foisting their phobias onto unfortunate children, then seeking validation on Twitter.

This is a science reporter at the Toronto Star, entirely on the coronavirus beat. pic.twitter.com/pfWT2VKy9j

— Genève Campbell (@bergerbell) April 22, 2021

(Has Cockburn mentioned that Twitter should be banned?)

Will anything come of this? Mercifully, no. As Cockburn noted a month ago, President Trump has ceased to fill the cavernous void in the inner lives of Twitter-addicted progressives. Secluded in Mar-a-Lago, banned from Twitter, and not very good at using alternatives, the former president has ceased to provide the needed outrage high.

Without Trump, only Carlson is both on TV enough and interesting enough to fill in. And so, Tucker ‘controversies’, previously a monthly occurrence, are now a near-daily non-event. But if a public figure is sparking a new outrage every day, he will cease to spark outrage. Tucker controversies are just a reality TV show for the mentally broken.