You may have noticed that America is going insane with finger-wagging, tut-tutting, outrage-ready Mrs. Grundy censoriousness. The legendary Mrs. Grundy was the representative of conservative social control and excessively strict mores.

Today’s Mrs. Grundys — let’s call them Mx. Grundys to be up to the moment — are progressive bullies intent on shutting everyone the hell up lest anyone fail to conform to their narrow sense of what is and is not acceptable. The humorless scolds have decided they are in charge, and for complicated reasons the rest of the culture is going along.

And they are driving us all crazy.

This week the principal of LaGuardia, the performing-arts high school in Manhattan, decreed that all Nazi paraphernalia be removed from the set and production of “The Sound of Music” — an anti-Nazi show (duh) set in Austria just as it’s being taken over by the Nazis.

Apparently, even when Nazi symbols are being used accurately, and being used to provoke exactly the negative emotions one would wish them to provoke, they must be banned lest they upset someone. Here’s the secret, Principal Lisa Mars: It’s supposed to upset people. It’s a damn swastika.

Another case in point: ABC’s 1973 classic “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving” was recently attacked because its only black character, Franklin, was seated alone on one side of the dinner table while his white friends sat on the other side.

Meanwhile, the Huffington Post noted that the 1964 TV show “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was “seriously problematic” because many viewers said they were disturbed by its themes of sexism and bullying.

Then there’s the song “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” In 1944, the songwriter Frank Loesser began performing a skit in song form at the parties he attended in Hollywood with his then-wife, Lynn. He was “the wolf,” she the “mouse,” and they were together at his home when she decided to take her leave.

She shouldn’t go, the wolf says. But her mother will start to worry, she says. With each reason for leaving she offers, he points out that she’ll freeze out there, her hands are like ice and the fireplace is roaring with heat.

The humorless scolds have decided they are in charge, and for complicated reasons the rest of the culture is going along.

“Well, maybe just a half a drink more,” she says, and later, “maybe just a cigarette more.” Even so, she continues to object to staying. After all, there’s bound to be talk tomorrow, she says, especially from her mean maiden aunt. “Think of my lifelong sorrow,” he responds.

It’s clear she’s toying with him as he’s toying with her. “That took a lot of convincing,” the wolf says when the mouse ceases her false protestations. Even this is a tease, because the elapsed time of convincing is two minutes and 20 seconds.

“Baby It’s Cold Outside” is one of the greatest entries in the American songbook, ineffably catchy and irresistibly witty.

The wit is contained in the fact that she wants to canoodle as much as he does but is required by social norms to resist … a little. The point of the song is that her protests are pro forma. They are knowingly, adorably disingenuous.

This isn’t date rape. It’s mutual foreplay; indeed, it’s just about the most harmonious portrayal of foreplay in the annals of Western culture. They are enjoying their own wit, and we are enjoying their wit.

But here’s the problem: Wit often eludes the literal. It did in 1949 when an Egyptian visitor to the United States named Syad Qutb heard “Baby It’s Cold Outside” at a church dance in Greeley, Colo. As it played, Qutb later wrote, “The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips.”

He left America and became a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and is considered the intellectual father of the Islamic extremism that found its darkest flowing in the 9/11 attacks.

Congratulations, Mx. Grundy. You’ve given Sayid Qutb what he wanted. Radio stations in Denver, San Francisco and Cleveland all announced they were banning “Baby It’s Cold Outside” from their airwaves.

“In a world where #MeToo has finally given women the voice they deserve,” wrote Glenn Anderson on the Cleveland radio station’s blog, “the song has no place.”

This is preposterous. The woman in the song has a voice. A loud voice. The problem for Anderson and others is that hers is an ironic voice. Which means, since clearly I have to explain irony to Anderson, that she is saying the opposite of what she actually means in order to strike a sardonic and humorous note.

The idea, I guess, is that there is never a moment in the song in which she grants consent. This was the problem at Princeton University, where a male a cappella group found itself bullied in the pages of the student newspaper for the crime of performing the song “Kiss the Girl” from “The Little Mermaid.”

The accuser is a kid named Noa Wollstein who said the song was misogynistic, apparently because it involves kissing a girl, which is bad if a guy does it, evidently, or something.

“The song launches a heteronormative attack on women’s right to oppose the romantic and sexual liberties taken by men,” she writes, “further inundating the listener with themes of toxic masculinity.”

Yeah. The lyrics were written by a gay man who was anything but heteronormative, Ms. Wollstein, but good on ya. You got those evil a cappella boys to shut their stupid mouths and stop singing the song. There sure is something toxic here, and it isn’t the late Howard Ashman’s toxic masculinity.

What could the Tigertones do but concede to Noa Wallstein? Would a battle over the right to sing a song sung by a crab in a cartoon be worth the agita? One can even understand the radio station decision-makers preemptively ditching “Baby It’s Cold Outside” before they get attacked by a listener or two — falsely assuming, as they would, that those two listeners are stand-ins for thousands.

One can even kind of understand Principal Mars, who was clearly frightened someone would complain he or she was triggered by Rolf wearing a Hitler Youth outfit.

We give into the Mx. Grundys and the finger-waggers in individual cases because that is the path of least resistance. And now we are turning around and finding that the censoriousness is invading every public space and is quickly starting to fill the private spaces in which we live as well, lest any of us might find ourselves on the sharp end of Noa Wallstein’s dagger of stupidity.

This is how a country loses its mind, bit by bit.