In its grand munificence, the Peoples Republic of Massachusetts banned citizens from throwing their used clothes in the garbage. No matter how worn, torn, or stained your tattered duds are, residents are required to either donate them to the needy or bring the unwearable detritus to a textile recycling repository.

How can dutiful subjects be morally conditioned to obey such overreaching and ridiculous government mandates with neither complaint nor mockery? Enter the world’s leading STEM university, dedicated to inculcating woke virtues and docile compliance in tomorrow’s leaders.

Infinite Threads is a spinoff of MIT’s vaunted Undergraduate Association Sustainability Committee. It has leapt to the forefront of the virtue signaling performance arts by running pop-up used clothing stores. The goal is to encourage students at one of America’s most expensive universities to dress like Freddie the Freeloader in order to save the world from … it’s hard to say what.

Thanks to their diligent efforts, these secondhand rag merchants temporarily diverted about 750 pounds of clothing from regional landfills. To put that accomplishment in perspective, US landfills dispose of 146 million tons of waste a year. So this will have about as much impact on waste management as efforts to drive MIT’s campus to NetZero will have on global atmospheric CO2 concentration.

Mater Gaia, ignosce mihi. Sacramentum recirculationis perficiam.

The credulous leaders of Infinite Threads contend that “according to the Environmental Protection Agency, blue jeans account for 5 percent of landfill space.” What a powerful sound bite supporting the sacrament of recycling! But ponder for a moment what it means that students being trained as scientists and engineers at frigging MIT can’t immediately detect that such a preposterous claim is as ludicrous as their Goodwill Thrift Shop cosplay.