Andrew Cuomo, the Emmy-award winning governor of New York, made a dangerous U-turn into the cold-hearted world of Trumpism during a speech and series of online posts Monday, in which he appeared to advocate for the wholesale slaughter of more old people in his state.
The comments, which but a few months ago would have got any doctor or plebeian banned from social media and branded a heartless granny-killer, were a statement of the obvious: lockdowns aren’t working and New York has held its citizens hostage in an economic and mental vice-grip over nothing.
Well, not nothing. The timing of Cuomo’s hard-right shift cannot be ignored. The last jigsaw piece of Joe Biden’s controversial assent to the presidency finally was laid last week when Congress certified the Electoral College votes, making the whole mess an official victory for the Democrats across the board. While urbanized Republican states of comparable size, such as Florida and Texas, reopened their economies months ago with no disastrous consequences, there was wild speculation that New York and California had clamped down harder on their campaign of economic domestic terrorism for political reasons, to artificially stifle recovery numbers ahead of the November election.
‘We simply cannot stay closed until the vaccine hits critical mass. The cost is too high. We will have nothing left to open. We must reopen the economy, but we must do it smartly and safely,’ Cuomo wrote on Twitter, echoing nearly word-for-word what the now digitally exiled President Trump had been saying for months.
But in this brave new world of one-party rule, where our national public square is confined to a tiny corner of California in which only one voice, the voice of the Democratic elite, is permitted to speak, why should Cuomo fear the exposure of his monstrous hypocrisy?
Democratic voters certainly don’t care. They fetishize the status quo and expect trophies for fitting in. And so, if yesterday you were throwing pig’s blood on a baker for opening his business and doxxing the neighbor you caught making a maskless trip to the mailbox, today you’re probably thinking it makes sense for things to get back to normal a bit, because a Democrat said so.
At least the trains run on time in Pyongyang, but American socialist leaders seem to even struggle with the very basic operations of a society. Cuomo’s cynical, taunting dictum comes after it was revealed his state’s vaccination rollout has been an utter disaster, with some reports circulating that hundreds of the precious vials of inoculation are ending up in the trash. The draconian website to apply for the vaccine, which includes a burdensome 51-question survey, is nearly impossible to navigate and vaccination centers have reported hundreds of empty slots each day.
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Cuomo is a particularly terrifying figure — and I’m not just talking about his nipple rings. Whereas once he came off as a sort of distant, preoccupied mob boss who you didn’t hear much about — and that was fine by us — he’s been everywhere since the pandemic and seemingly, grotesquely, loving the spotlight. When he was, for no apparent reason, awarded an International Emmy this year for his press conferences, the whole cringe-inducing spectacle reeked of calling in a favor from Hollywood. And then he had the audacity to write a book congratulating himself on his COVID-19 response, in case there were any questions about it. That alone amounts to quite the psychological case study — not only was he oblivious or unconcerned about profiting off the death and destruction in his state, he found the time to produce a work of fiction still months, or years, before the end of the pandemic.
In his announcement Monday, Cuomo specifically targeted opening society’s pressure valves — bars and entertainment venues, such as Broadway theaters, for reopening. This also seems calculated. Gee, Cuomo’s citizen-slaves will muse at last granted permission to freely tipple with friends in public at the new administration settles in, things are so much nicer if the Democrats are in control.
And may they never forget it.
