It turns out we didn't have to mask, social distance, or lock down after all.

Those were just gentle suggestions, but thanks for complying!

I guess Andrew Cuomo didn’t like it that baby brother Chris was getting all the media love last week. In a split-screen chat with Leana ‘we-can’t-trust-the-unvaccinated’ Wen, the former New York Governor sat down—apparently on purpose—to completely re-write history, while also lamenting how stinking hard it’s going to be to get folks to comply with the next pandemic’s draconian marching orders.

“If the government were to now say, ‘we just made a finding that there’s a new virus and everyone should do XYZ,’ the amount of compliance with XYZ would be much, much lower than it was at the beginning of Covid,” the senior Cuomo (accurately) pointed out. “Because people do not trust the government, especially on this issue, the way they did at the beginning.”

Let’s all give a warm welcome to the new Secretary of the Department of the Blazingly %@!^#? Obvious.

“And that would be a complicating factor, right? When you have people who don’t listen. Because government had no capacity to enforce any of this [i.e. mandates]. ‘You must wear a mask.’ People wore masks in New York. But if they said 'I'm not wearing a mask' there was nothing I could do about it. ‘You must close your private business.’ 'I won't.' Well, there was nothing I could really do about it. It was really all voluntary. And it was extraordinary when you think about it, that society acted with that uniformity voluntarily. Because I had no enforcement capacity. So you have a reduced trust in government."

Extraordinary! Voluntary uniformity! Do duplicitous dolts like the Cuomos not realize that the rest of us have handy things like memory, common sense, and the internet at our disposal?

Alas, he’s not saying he didn’t sign, order, or issue these bullshit mandates—he’s merely admitting he was powerless to enforce them. Maybe he should have mentioned that fact to the New York City cops who wrestled a 22-year-old mom to the ground and arrested her for wearing her face mask improperly on a subway platform. Or the ones who arrested a Brooklyn bar owner for keeping his establishment open and thus violating social distance orders. Or the ones who arrested protesters by the dozens for breaking curfews, gathering in public, and ridiculous mask infractions.

You know how when your kids are little and you’re taking them to Disney [this is before you discovered it was a human trafficking hub staffed by known pedophiles] and they’re whining and moaning and picking fights with each other in the backseat and you tell them if you don’t quit your bitching I’ll turn this car around and go straight back home but you’re never actually going to do it because you already spent $795 on the tickets and took the day off work and you’re nearly there? Why would you issue such an absurd ultimatum? Oh, right. Because you know you’re not going to have to follow through. The mere threat of it—even if there’s only a whisper of an unlikely possibility you’ll follow through—is all you need to get them to comply.

(Also one of parenting’s greatest joys is telling them later, “Yeah, that was a one-hundred-percent bluff. You literally could have stabbed each other in the eye sockets and we were still going to that overpriced hell hole.”)

The willingness of people to do exactly what they’re told—even if there is zero logic behind it or they don’t even understand the thing they’re being told to do—is legendary. The TV show Brain Games, a family favorite when my girls were little, often centered around social experiments that highlighted the human drive to conform. One memorable episode featured the production crew placing a “LINE STARTS HERE” sign in a busy shopping mall and having a single actor stand behind it. Almost immediately, people began falling into place behind him—with absolutely no idea what the line was even for. These people were merely mall-goers, in case you missed that part. They were not in on the experiment. A sign told them to line up… so they did.

Oh, the irony.

A much more disturbing—but undeniably compelling—example is the Milgram experiments. In the early 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to measure subjects’ willingness to obey an authority figure (in an effort to determine how Holocaust accomplices could in fact justify the atrocities they committed with “we were just following orders”). Milgram instructed participants to administer electric shocks to another person—“the learner”—when that person answered questions incorrectly; after each incorrect answer, the participant was instructed to turn the voltage up a notch and continue. The participants could not see the “learners” they were torturing, but they could hear their pained reactions. While some participants expressed concern for the distressed learners, Milgram repeatedly assured them it was fine and urged them to continue. Sixty-five percent of participants complied fully to administering the maximum voltage possible (after which often the learner would become entirely unresponsive).

Just following orders.

I know that I don’t have to educate the evolved, enlightened, faithful readers of this Substack on the perils of blind, uncritical compliance. I’m positive most if not all of you, like me, plan to be part of the growing group of dissidents who’ll flip a quick, angry finger or two at anyone who tries to tell or force them to do something immoral, shameful, or just plain nonsensical. Is it going to be easy? Probably not. Will it be worth it? Only if you care about preserving freedom, integrity, posterity, and inner peace. And if one day my great, great grandchildren tell their friends, “My mom’s mom’s mom went to a FEMA camp jail for what she believed in,” I won’t have a single regret.

On an unrelated note: Wednesday is my thirty-fifth forty-fifth none-of-your-business birthday, which I am celebrating by flying to Commiefornia for a week to be with my amazing, un-woke [despite going to university in Commiefornia] daughter and some of my BFFs. I will not be working or writing anything new… however I didn’t want my loyal regulars to forget about me, so I will be recycling some of my earlier posts during this period. If you’re a recent reader of this ‘stack, they’ll be brand new; if you’re part of my early-follower crowd and you’re old and mildly senile like me, they might feel brand new. If you’re an OG reader and sharp as a tack, sorry for the redundancy. I’ll be back at real-time reporting the week of May 27th. Thank you for understanding and supporting this much-needed break. As soon as I get back, I’ve got an anthology to launch! [*Dances on the table while it’s still legal*]

Available for pre-order NOW! Check out the excerpts if you haven’t. ;)