> Message matters, and saying "why do I have to do something smart if at least one person in a person of power is doing something dumb" is itself a message, and not a productive one.

EXACTLY. That is the message being sent - it's unproductive! That is my exact point. Our leadership sends unproductive messages all the time -and when half the country doesn't think it's a big deal, they see rich people doing whatever, their confirmation bias kicks in and says "see if it was bad they wouldn't be doing X"

> concretely: hypocrites will exist for any principle or situation imaginable, so you can take it as a given, reason about a situation independently of them, and ignore them.

You can't ignore hypocrites if they have influence. If Trump was pro-mask a good deal of this country would have been too.