Duce Andrew Cuomo’s Public Health Dictatorship

By John Zmirak Published on July 8, 2021

Apart from New York’s thuggish governor, my favorite people on earth are Italian-Americans. Period. My best friend since age 7 is named Antonio. I spent my happiest hours as a child in his family’s basement, breathing in the garlic my shanty-Hibernian mother literally thought was toxic. (I once slipped some in her chain-smoker’s cough medicine for April Fool’s Day, and Mom called the Poison Control Bureau. The nice man on the phone asked her immediately, “Ma’am, are you … Irish?”)

Ant’s family kept the upstairs all wrapped in plastic slipcovers, with the “nice” furniture set aside for “company.” But no “company” important enough ever appeared. I think it would have required all three of the Holy Trinity showing up, plus the Blessed Virgin Mary. And also Mario Lanza. Then … maybe.

Antonio’s hard-working, upstanding parents came to New York City from Abruzzi in the late 1950s. They both slaved at garment factories, never learned English, but managed to buy a house that’s now worth a million bucks. My parents grew up knowing English, my mom preferred “Catholic parish gambling” to working, and they both died without a nickel. So there’s our American success story.

The Dictatorship of the Guidoteriat

But now our country teeters on the very brink of failure, and it’s thanks in large part to men like Andrew Cuomo. And I do taunt Ant about it, since he still lives in New York. “A disgrazziato,” he calls Cuomo. “A total Guido.” Now in case you don’t know the word, it refers to low-class, thuggish, Italian-American males fond of track suits, flashy gold rope chains, and “getting in your face.” Think of the TV show Jersey Shore.

Cuomo, of course, is little different from other blue-state governors. Except that he adds a special strip-joint bouncer bravado when he tramples all over our rights and the Constitution in pointy, “roach-killer” shoes. On the rare occasions when journalists interrupt his Emmy performance portraying a public servant, he gives them a fierce simian glare. It’s as if they were low-status males sniffing around some member of his harem in heat. While he mouths some bland, WASPy words he may have memorized, his gaping eyes are saying: “You wanna take this outside, pal? I’ll slam that pointy head of yours in the door of my red Trans-Am.”

The Let’s Kill All the Old People Plan

I objected early to Cuomo’s COVID plan, the “Let’s Murder All the Old People in Nursing Homes to Pump the Death Stats Then Close Down the State to Starve Initiative.” Call me sentimental, but I thought dumping COVID patients on the most vulnerable, while leaving beds empty at Samaritan’s Purse and on the USS Comfort was … wrong. Morally speaking, I mean.

Politically, the blue-state mass death initiatives proved brilliant. They did indeed spike the death stats to justify endless lockdowns. And that more than anything else has enabled the destruction of our freedoms, and unleashed the radical left. I could explain, but someone else has done a much better job. The wisest political scientist alive is retired professor Angelo Codevilla. He writes at American Greatness, a site which is absolutely essential reading, if you want to know what’s actually happening around us.

Trump Handed Fauci America’s Car Keys

Codevilla’s latest essay, “What Is Trump to Us?”, explains the great patriotic movement Donald Trump started, and how his actions in office let it (and all of us) down. Trump’s two biggest unforced, catastrophic errors? Refusing to fight the Deep State, except when it targeted him personally. And then caving in to COVID panic. Since I write about that first failure maybe once a week, let me focus on the second. Codevilla observes:

And then came COVID-19. Only President Trump’s complaisance made possible the American people’s submission to scientifically nonsensical regulations that ended up solidifying the oligarchy and transferring more wealth and power from one class to another, possibly, than ever before in mankind’s history.

There never was reason to believe that infection by the COVID-19 virus was any more deadly than other bad flu-like illnesses. On the contrary, most persons infected showed no symptoms. Only the elderly and infirm were at risk — no more than from other bad flu epidemics. President Trump’s reaction to COVID was wholly reasonable in the beginning: Suspend travel from infected areas, safeguard the vulnerable, develop a vaccine. But, for whatever reason, the ruling class had another agenda, best expressed by the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan: “‘Don’t Panic’ Is Rotten Advice.” The ruling class did everything it could to foster panic. The point was to cause Americans to agree to shut down such parts of society as the ruling class said, supposedly to “stop the spread.”

Quarantining infected persons has ever been a powerful tool of public health. But the notion of quarantining noninfected people is inherently indefensible nonsense.

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Welcome to the Hive, Insect

It’s also totalitarian. The basis for a free society is this: the State recognizes the infinite human dignity of each of its citizens as the image of God. It doesn’t try to control their every movement or decision, but only sets firm guidelines protecting our rights, and intervenes when people violate them. That’s the proper political system for human beings.

Sadly, some breeds of political thinkers don’t want to legislate for humans. Many libertarians, for example, believe we’re a race of solitary lizards that only meet up to mate, then abandon their eggs in the desert. Leftists, as always much worse, pretend that we’re ants or termites. No individual means anything at all, except if his body can somehow prove useful to the Hive. Scientists describe individual termites as virtually “cells” in a “superorganism.” That makes sense, since the lowly workers don’t even breed. They leave that to their betters.

Many leftists actually prefer life under lockdown, where every citizen’s movement is tightly regulated and controlled. They’ve tried in one country after another to run economies that way — with results like the Ukrainian Famine. Check out this video by a British advocate of perpetual lockdown, who freaks out when her interviewer asks if her Communist Party membership might affect her COVID advice:

  

Our Public Health Dictatorship

Government exists not to protect our rights and punish crimes, but to pre-emptively control our behavior and goad us toward “altruism” and “equality.” That’s how the queen bees in our own Hive wish to rule us. And weaponizing “public health” is their weapon of choice. Yes, of course, in the useless and counterproductive COVID lockdown that shuttered thousands of small business while making Amazon billions.

But also in other areas — as many parts of life as the left can get away with. Because if you and I are merely cells in a superorganism, none of our rights mean anything when compared to the “common good,” as the left defines it.

Yet Another Pretend Epidemic to Kill Off Our Rights

Which brings us at last back to Andrew Cuomo, Guido-in-Chief of the vast termite mound that is New York State. In his latest strutting, dictatorial edict, Cuomo has declared that “gun violence” is an “epidemic” that amounts to a “state of emergency.” He hopes to grab sweeping new powers to strip New York citizens of their few remaining Second Amendment rights, using this pretext.

As I wrote here a few months ago:

The left finds it handy … to use the language of contagion and “pandemic.” We’ve seen thanks to COVID, the prospect of mass infection provokes too many of us to start throwing away our rights with both hands. Governors like Gretchen Whitmer can seize virtually absolute power. They can close our churches, ban public meetings, insist we wear special clothing … it’s a power-hungry dictator’s dream. So of course the left wants us to abandon all thoughts of a fundamental right to self-defense, as given to us by God and enshrined in the Second Amendment.

Instead the press and tame pastors try to gaslight us into seeing guns as some kind of virus, and gunowners as Typhoid Marys. Gun ranges aren’t places where citizens learn to exercise their basic rights more safely. They’re “superspreader events.”

And elites feel justified in treating pro-gun Americans like vectors of contagion, refusing to wear their masks and coughing all over their neighbors on the elevator. It’s okay, they assure us, to hate people like that, to see them as “deplorable” cretins who are somehow less than human.

We’re Cannon Fodder and Drones, Not Images of God

In cold hard fact, the citizens who suffer from crime have a God-given right to defend themselves and their property. It’s people in violence-plagued, underpoliced cities who suffer most from the left’s elitist gun-grab. There are reasons that crime is much rarer in well-armed Vermont than in Second Amendment deserts run by Democrats. Not every citizen can afford well-armed, ex-military security guards like Mark Zuckerberg’s or Michael Bloomberg’s.

But Andrew Cuomo, with the rest of his party, doesn’t see you and me as humans. We’re ants on a hill, who might just need to form their bodies into human shields for the queen. Or else we’re mere cells in the superorganism of the State. And you can’t have cells going rogue and defending themselves, when their job is to serve as cannon fodder, captive votes, or docile drones.

As another political leader whose name ended in a vowel once observed: “Everything within the State, nothing against the State, nothing outside the State.” That comes from Benito Mussolini’s dictionary definition of “Fascism.”

What a Guido.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”

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