Public officials and legacy media often complain about the public’s significant decrease in trust for once highly trusted organizations, yet rarely seem to realize that they’ve done everything they could to destroy the public’s confidence in them and their actions:
Dr. Jay Varma, 21 April, 2021.
Photo by the New York City Health Department via Wikimedia Commons.
I don’t want to be a cynic.
While I don’t think anyone should blindly trust anything or anyone who hasn’t earned it, I don’t want to blindly distrust everything and everyone, either.
However, there are areas where distrust is warranted.
Over the weekend, a number of stories popped up in my various feeds that sort of illustrated the point pretty well from a number of different angles.
Let’s start with partying in the time of COVID.
New York City’s former COVID czar was caught on a hidden camera boasting about having drug-fueled sex parties mid-pandemic — and admitting New Yorkers would have been “pissed” if they had found out at the time.
Dr. Jay Varma — who served as senior health adviser to then-Mayor Bill de Blasio and was tasked with running the Big Apple’s pandemic response — made the confession in secretly recorded conversations with a so-called undercover operative from conservative podcaster Steven Crowder’s “Mug Club“.
“I had to be kind of sneaky about it … because I was running the entire COVID response in the city,” Varma was filmed telling the unidentified woman on Aug. 1 in what appears to be a restaurant.
The edited clips of the hidden camera footage, which were all recorded between July 27 and Aug. 14 in New York, were released by Crowder on Thursday. The Post has not reviewed the full, unedited recordings.
Now, let’s remember that Varma admits to doing the exact opposite of what he was telling everyone else to do. He was part of the government and part of the effort to shape New York’s response to COVID-19.
And the city is large enough that their response was likely to inform other communities.
Meanwhile, he’s out partying it up while everyone else is sitting at home, trying to figure out how to survive.
Remember how our current problems stem from this time. People like Varma told us we all had to stay inside. Most of us couldn’t go to work, couldn’t go to bars or restaurants, couldn’t go out to the movies or to take part in activities. As a result, people suffered and the economy suffered. Stimulus plans were put in place to flush trillions of dollars into the economy, only to remain there as more and more got pumped in later, creating inflation and making the economy worse in the long run, but that time locked up was essential because we had to stop the virus.
And this twit is out sexing it up while the rest of us were shut inside trying not to go nuts.
He wasn’t alone, either. A number of folks from various institutions were part of the “rules for thee but not for me” crowd, such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s trip to dinner at The French Laundry — which is the dumbest name for a restaurant ever — during the lockdowns or Austin’s mayor telling everyone to stay inside while he went to Mexico.
Of course, bad public officials are nothing new. We’ve all seen them over the years.
But our media is also failing us.
