PLAGUE JOURNAL January 2021: A Rogue Cuomo, a Failed Press, & How We Know Biden Will Cure the Coronavirus
The press were so deep in the soup they couldn't see up from down, or savior from sociopath.
[Note: I wrote Plague Journals as events unfolded, reflecting what we could see at the time. Over the last few weeks—in August 2021 as I write this—as Andrew Cuomo is in the news again, I recalled my scribblings throughout last year about the Brothers Cuomo. I figured it was time to dust off a few paragraphs and post. I wrote this post in January 2021.]
Postjournalism
To see the corruption of the media was to be a bad citizen. If you didn’t find Trump-bashing to be good dinner conversation, you were right-wing, far-right, a white supremacist, dangerous. Ten months in, I stumbled across an article that gets it right, but none in my social circle would see it, as it would not pass the Google machine or the Apple News feed. Martin Gurri, in City Journal, wrote about the transformation of our media in an article called Slouching Toward Post-Journalism. Gurri takes the term post-journalism and the ideas around it from a book by Anthony Mir called Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers. The media after Trump: Manufacturing Anger and Polarization.
Mir and Gurri examine the core problem facing modern journalism: in the digital age, when the amount of available information is nearly infinite, how do you get people to pay? He explains that the Times found an answer in 2016: “Rather than news, the paper began to sell what was, in effect, a creed, an agenda, to a congregation of like-minded souls.” Quoting Mir, Gurri says that journalists now had to “scare the audience to make it donate.” He writes, “The old media had needed happy customers. The goal of post-journalism, according to Mir, is to ‘produce angry citizens.’” Mir and Gurri recognize that to do so, you need only two ingredients, endlessly intertwined: racism and Trump; Trump and racism.
I noticed long ago that the New Yorker, formerly a magazine of writing and reporting, had narrowed its gaze to these two topics nearly exclusively. (Sexism also; these things have become interchangeable.) Friends and family, late-night comics, talking heads, journalists and editors, tech gatekeepers—everyone signed up for the new ideology. They believed that Trump was worse than Hitler and that we are all hopeless racists, more now than ever.
[I’ve written elsewhere about the New Yorker’s self-destruction. See pandemic examples here, here, here, here, here, and here.]
For the Times, the ideology was lucrative. Gurri writes:
The intent of post-journalism was never to represent reality or inform the public but to arouse enough political fervor in readers that they wished to enter the paywall in support of the cause. This was ideology by the numbers—and the numbers were striking. Digital subscriptions to the New York Times, which had been stagnant, nearly doubled in the first year of Trump’s presidency. By August 2020, the paper had 6 million digital subscribers—six times the number on Election Day 2016 and the most in the world for any newspaper.
I learned in Zoom meetings that people in my social circle pay for subscriptions to the Washington Post and the Guardian and gobble up episodes of Trevor Noah’s Daily Show to support the cause. People are eager to pay, in money and time, for rage.
It was clear from the beginning that there were no correlations between coronavirus outcomes and our approval or disapproval of politicians who were “fighting” or “handling” or “failing to control” the virus. We learned that Trump was failing and that Governor Cuomo was winning. We learned that left-leaning women leaders “handled” or “crushed” the coronavirus. We knew from this disassociation of fact and feeling that, had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, she would have been roundly praised for her steady hand and her calls for unity (her views of “deplorables” notwithstanding). She could have closed borders, or opened them, or closed schools, or demanded more spelling bees, or advocated for hydroxychloroquine. None of it would have mattered. We know she would have been portrayed as a strong female leader facing a tough but manageable threat, and we know that the coronavirus would have been a page-5 story.
We know because we got the stories about Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand and Katrín Jakobsdóttir in Iceland and Angela Merkel in Germany, none of whom “handled” the virus any better than other places with the same weather but all of whom were lavishly praised by the media.
Moreover, we know how the press would have covered Clinton because we know how they covered New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo. Nearly psychopathic in his self-regard and cruelty, Cuomo seems to have it in for old people especially. His early requirement that nursing homes accept infected people killed thousands unnecessarily. Now, nearly a year later, his failure to prioritize the elderly for vaccines will result in more unnecessary deaths. In October, while Trump was still president, Cuomo was a “science-denier,” according to our modern formulation, expressing skepticism about vaccines. He announced that he would create a “task force” of his own doctors rather than trust the government, issuing a statement that read, “The Task Force will advise on the vaccine safety profile, legal authority to withhold vaccine, and clinical best practices if New York State must withhold or pause distribution of the vaccine.”
Cuomo is a perfect instrument of irrationality. His adolescent hatred of Trump caused him to demonize the entire U.S. government, including all the “experts” and “public health officials” so beloved by the press. About the coming vaccines, he said, “I believe all across the country, you’re going to need someone other than this FDA and CDC saying it’s safe.” Although 80% of America’s COVID deaths occur in people aged 65 or older (from just 16% of the population), Cuomo, hero to the oppressed, promised that a great many people would get vaccines before the elderly. According to his plan put forth in the fall of 2020, the elderly rank fourth in terms of priority, after more politically appealing groups such as grocery workers, teachers, and people in “high-risk areas.” It’s as if Cuomo read a few stories in the Times or the New Yorker back in March about transit workers and “black and brown” people and based his policies on the bad reporting instead of data.
Teachers weren’t even going to work. Schools were closed, although Cuomo thought they were open at one point because New York’s Mayor Bill DiBlasio failed to tell him otherwise. Children generally don’t get the virus or spread it. In Sweden, schools have remained open throughout, with no masks and mixed reports of distancing—and yet kids survived, all 1.95 million of them. Teachers survived also. (There are reports of a 68-year-old Swedish teacher who died, though we don’t know where he caught it.) But in Cuomo’s mind, teachers sitting at home with the protection of their union should be vaccinated before the elderly. Notably absent from his list of high-priority populations are, of course, New York’s police. Grocery workers and pharmacists and teachers need the vaccine, but those in close contact with the public while fighting violent crime do not.
In January 2021, as vaccines rolled out, Cuomo has continued his grandstanding, announcing that he would not get vaccinated himself until minorities and poor people were vaccinated. He announced, “Race or income will not determine who lives and who dies. And I mean it.” Yet his words and actions demonstrate that race and income will determine who lives and who dies. By prioritizing vaccines by race and wealth, he put all of New York’s elderly at greater risk, many of whom are minorities.
Yascha Mounk described the lunacy of this kind of thinking in a December Substack article called, “Why I’m Losing Trust in the Institutions,” which pointed the finger at the CDC for issuing vaccine guidance influenced by trendy ideology:
In one of the most shocking moral misjudgments by a public body I have ever seen, the CDC invoked considerations of ‘social justice’ to recommend providing vaccinations to essential workers before older Americans even though this would, according to its own models, lead to a much greater death toll.
His outrage is appropriate, and refreshing:
The difference in the percentage of infected people who succumb to Covid across all age groups is massive. Giving the vaccine to African-American essential workers before elderly African-Americans would likely raise the overall death toll of African-Americans even if a somewhat greater number of African-Americans were to receive the vaccine as a result.
In other words, the CDC was effectively about to recommend that a greater number of African-Americans die so that the share of African-Americans who receive the vaccine is slightly higher. In blatant violation of the “leveling down objection,” prioritizing essential workers in the name of equality would likely kill more people in all relevant demographic groups.
In January, as vaccines were rolling out, we learned that vaccines were being destroyed because of an inability to find enough people in Cuomo’s prioritized groups, while the elderly were still waiting.
Cuomo is a public menace to New Yorkers. In addition to having the worst COVID fatality rate in the U.S. (trading places with New Jersey for the top slot), New York City is experiencing an explosion of violent crime under DiBlasio and Cuomo. Homicides increased 45% in 2020 from 2019. Shootings more than doubled, to 1,868, the largest increase in 20 years. One cause of the spike in crime was that hundreds of police officers became sick with COVID in the spring. But Cuomo would rather give vaccines to teachers, pharmacists, and transit workers than to police. In early November, after Mayor DiBlasio announced that New York’s 25,000 police would get vaccines, Cuomo shot him down, saying, “Police who are not health care workers are not yet eligible. We need to get the health care population done first because they are the front line, as I mentioned before.” Under Cuomo, only 400 police medics would get the vaccine.
The spike in violent crime results from policy (releasing violent criminals from jails) and also from a sense by many police that they are not supported by Mayor DiBlasio. Why Cuomo believes that reducing violent crime is not a form of “health care” is a mystery. New York police continue to quit in droves.
Cuomo’s apocalyptic shutdowns have caused New York’s unemployment rate to be among the highest in the country, at 8.2% as of December. Only five states have higher rates. Not surprisingly, California, run by another governor with authoritarian impulses, is one of the states even worse than New York, with 9% unemployment. (California’s Newsom, like Cuomo, is generally beloved by the press.) These two states combined account for more than 17% of the nation’s population. The amount of suffering caused by their leaders is something to marvel at.
Despite the astronomic numbers of infected and dead in New York, and despite Cuomo’s obvious mismanagement, he not only gets a pass but receives praise from the media. He won an Emmy for his TV grandstanding. He found time to write a book about himself, called “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic.” In October, Nick Paumgarten praised him in the New Yorker in an article titled, “Andrew Cuomo, the King of New York,” with a subhead that read, “The Governor has been widely praised for his response to COVID. But his critics see a would-be authoritarian obsessed with settling scores.”
The article began, as all New Yorker articles begin, with criticisms of Trump. Just a few sentences in, we are told:
Recently, President Donald Trump was ailing at Walter Reed hospital, both a victim and a symbol of his Administration’s lassitude and arrogance in the face of the pandemic. He’d failed to protect the country, and now he’d failed to protect himself—not to mention his staff, his supporters, and perhaps his opponent. Even after he returned to the White House, persistent obfuscations about how long he’d had symptoms and how serious they were called only more attention to the Administration’s negligence and bad faith.
But what about Cuomo? Isn’t the article supposed to be about him? Trump doesn’t make policy for New York or for any other state, county, or city. Cuomo does. He’s the one who required nursing homes to admit infected patients; he’s the one deciding to prioritize young, healthy people for vaccines over elderly vulnerable people; and he’s the one with a total per capita death toll that is 64% higher than the U.S. overall rate by the end of January (2021, the time of this writing). Neither Cuomo nor Trump created the conditions that made the U.S. mid-Atlantic Coast the most dangerous place in North America for the coronavirus last winter, but Cuomo’s policies made things considerably worse.
To the New Yorker and the rest of the press, neither results nor actions matter. They simply decided four years ago who was good and who was evil, and the stories are written by the corona-bots. Paumgarten tells us that many New Yorkers felt Cuomo had done a “miraculous job bringing New York back from the brink.” Paumgarten credits Cuomo’s TV appearances for turning things around: “For the first time, the death rate was at an ebb”—although New York’s corona rise and fall looks identical to the rise and fall of cases everywhere in the high (but not too high) latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, including neighboring Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and all of Northern Europe.
The New Yorker article is very long, and almost all of it is favorable, even glowing, about Cuomo. We get a few blemishes, for balance, including this alarming piece of news: “‘He’s inclined toward tyranny,’ a Democratic legislator told me. ‘But in a crisis that’s what people want. Someone who can exert command and control.’” And so it goes. There is more criticism of Trump in this profile of Cuomo than there is of Cuomo.
Yet nowhere does the article say anything about anything Cuomo did to stem the tide other than talk on TV: “In mid-June, after a hundred and 10 days, Cuomo ended his daily briefings. Deaths had dropped, from around a thousand a day to twenty-five. Hospitalizations were down more than ninety per cent. His approval rating for his handling of covid was in the seventies.” He talked his way out of it.
And that is how we know Biden will cure the coronavirus. It was obvious to anyone reading the headlines and stories about surging, spiking, grim milestones, mass death, all at the hands of Trump. The summer of 2020 brought only what should have been good news, of rapidly falling death rates resulting from milder cases and better treatments, but the headlines made it sound as if every day was worse than anything we’d seen or could imagine.
The fix was in. When asked in September when Los Angeles schools would re-open, LA Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said, “We don’t realistically anticipate that we would be moving either to Tier 2 or to reopening K-12 schools at least . . . until after the election.” What could an election have to do with children’s health? Nothing, of course. The goal was to beat Trump. Then we could see the good news start to appear in the headlines, along with increasingly strident calls for masking (why let go of a good thing?).