We Let the Libertine Tyrants Get Away with It

In a conversation caught on a hidden camera, New York City’s former Covid czar Jay Varma admitted to organizing sex parties in 2020. “The only way I could do this job for the city was if I had some way to blow off steam every now and then,” he explained. In the videos, he also talked about using stigma, shame, and basically the threat of lost livelihood in order to cajole people to take Covid vaccines (even though perhaps half the population already had some form of immunity from contact with the disease itself).

The Atlantic decided to frame these remarks and their hypocrisy as a mistake with regard to empathy. Perhaps there would be less anger at public-health officials if they just admitted that they sometimes broke or bent their own rules. It would make them more “relatable.”

Jay Varma tried to explain that his sex parties were “safe” (LOL!). They might have even met “the guidelines,” reports the Atlantic — as the attendees included ten or fewer people. Of course, that’s not strictly true, as the guidelines also required masking — something I imagine was made optional at the sex parties for public-health officials like Jay Varma.

But these masks were absolutely required for two-year-olds and their speech therapists for more than two years. They were required for mourners at sparsely attended funerals. They were required even as they muffled the words of the dying to their loved ones. They were required as people exchanged wedding vows.

Never has it been so clear that progressive consolidation of nongovernmental institutions — media, medical boards, and academia — translates directly into governmental penalties for non-progressive ways of life. Want to protest George Floyd’s death? Sure, all the rules about public gatherings don’t apply to you. Want to bury your dead and gather the required number of people to pray? The mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, standing in front of a giant crowd, will morally calumniate you as murderers and offer a fake concession that it’s sad you can’t have religious services, but protests for racial justice are more important.

I confess I don’t want to “relate” to any of this at all. It only makes me mourn for America. A country populated by free men and women would not suffer such tyrants.

And all of us, who talk about freedom and claim to care about public policy and the character of this nation, have to face up to the fact that we let this happen here. We allowed our highest moral aspirations — to protect the vulnerable — to be manipulated by freaks like Jay Varma into an indefinite suspension of our human rights, the indefinite postponement or disfigurement of normal human acts of love and care. It was the self-governing people who complied. The libertine tyrants who rule us didn’t comply with their own rules. They did whatever the hell they wanted. We let them get away with it.