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.
For example, they’re trying to stack the deck on American politics.
Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., has accused ABC News of partiality and left-leaning bias during the recent presidential debate, saying that Kamala Harris’ campaign may have “inappropriately influenced the proceedings” against Donald Trump.
In a letter Wednesday, the senator demanded that ABC release all pre-debate communication and coordination with the Harris campaign, saying the public deserves “transparency” and “accountability” from the mainstream media.
“I demand that you make public all correspondence, records, and potential coordination between the Harris campaign and ABC News ahead of the Sept. 10 ABC debate,” Marshall wrote to ABC News President Almin Karamehmedovic.
And yes, there’s ample reason to believe that the Harris campaign played at least some part in how things shook out during the debate, but the more terrifying thing is if they didn’t.
If the campaign played no role in what transpired, that means the two “moderators” and the decision to “fact-check” what Trump said while ignoring Harris’s own lies and misinformation was a unilateral thing done on their own.
And while it might be more scary to view it that way, I have no problem believing it after Stephanie Ruhle’s appearance on Bill Maher’s show, where she defended Harris not giving interviews to the press or answering basic questions for voters.
Finally, we have our own government.
Yeah, I don’t trust the government and never have, but many still do. They shouldn’t, though, because the government is simply not trustworthy.
A prime example revolves around January 6th.
At most, what we saw was a riot. It was a pretty orderly riot, admittedly, but it wasn’t an insurrection and it was far more peaceful than the “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests that burned entire neighborhoods to the ground.
Since that day, the media and Democrats have labeled it an insurrection and blamed Trump directly for it. “He incited it,” they maintain. “He did nothing to stop it,” they argued, despite his calls for people to be peaceful.
Yet let’s understand what Trump actually did.
Days before January 6, 2021, President Trump met with senior Pentagon leaders urging them to do their jobs to protect lives and property. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, recalls a conversation between the Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, and President Trump:
Milley: “The President just says, ‘Hey, look at this. There’s going to be a large amount of protestors here on the 6th, make sure that you have sufficient National Guard or Soldiers to make sure it’s a safe event.’… [POTUS said] I don’t care if you use Guard, or Soldiers, active duty Soldiers, do whatever you have to do. Just make sure it’s safe.' [SecDef] Miller responds by saying, 'Hey, we’ve got a plan, and we’ve got it covered.'”
On January 5, the Secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy, placed unprecedented restrictions on DCNG Commander Major General William Walker to prevent any movement to the Capitol without Secretary McCarthy’s explicit permission on January 6 and 7.
On January 6, 2021, the outer perimeter on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol was breached by rioters at 12:53pm. The DCNG arrived five hours later. Click here to view the timeline.
These transcripts prove President Trump’s senior Pentagon leaders were focused on OPTICS, instead of doing their job, as the Capitol was breached:
Miller: “There was absolutely – there is absolutely no way I was putting U.S. military forces at the Capitol, period.”
The Department of the Army expressly disobeyed the directives laid out by President Trump designed to keep January 6th from happening in the first place.
Even after it became clear that things were going sideways, requests for National Guard help were denied, thus allowing it to go down like it did.
All while they argued that this was all Trump’s fault.
The truth is that it’s not just these examples, either. These were just some I snagged since Friday morning when I was writing. Throughout the years, I’ve highlighted plenty of other reasons to distrust the institutions that we should be able to allow to function without tremendous oversight.
Hell, just this morning I wrote about how schools are dropping the ball in yet another way. I’ll probably be writing about that again tomorrow. It’s just that bad.
So failing to trust our institutions isn’t really cynicism so much as sanity based on the total body of information we currently have.
And the worst part is that there’s not a lot we can do about it, either. Even electing Trump, who has been the victim of the same machine, won’t do anything because he can’t fire literally everyone at ever level of government and make us start over.
It’s a shame, too, because I’m more and more leaning toward just burning everything to the ground and rebuilding it from the ashes. The only problem is that without some systemic changes, we’ll just end up right back here sooner or later.
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Why….its…as…if they just dont give a $hit about getting caught. Like they KNOW that one hand is protecting what the other is doing and reciprocating…
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me. Fool me 137 times. I'm a Republican.
The Press isn't biased. Bias is easy to understand and easy to combat. Everyone is biased. I'm biased in favor of Chocolate Ice-cream over Vanilla.
Old Joke: Editor calls in reporter and says he wants her to interview a D candidate and an R candidate for Congress, not be biased and ask them about their polices on children. She does. Calls in the story. (Said it was an old joke). Editor calls her into the office and chews her out. She doesn't understand. Editor yells I told you to interview both candidates and not be biased. She says I did.. I asked them both questions about how children should be treated. Editor yells and says: Yes you asked the D candidate if he thinks children should be treated with kindness and helped. Then you asked the R candidate if he had raped any children, thinks they should all have to work after school and wanted to close all the playgrounds. Reported replies. Yes I asked them both about children. Editor fires her, she sues, gets her job back.
The press isn't biased. It's become dishonest and has been for a long time. Walter Duranty lied. And the editors and publisher of the Times knew it. The Pulitzer Board refused to revoke the award. That's not bias. That's dishonesty not bias. The press has become increasingly dishonest. Time to put "they are biased" out to pasture and to admit they are lying.