After Allowing Mass Protests, Cuomo Says Large Crowds Are Obstacle to Reopening

Never before in history has the media and Democrats in power done a collective 180 on an issue so quickly as when it came to social distancing. Within a single day, the media narrative went from chastising anyone who wanted as much as a haircut as a “grandma killer” to branding anyone who refused to gather in mass Black Lives Matter protests a “racist.”

And politicians didn’t even try to hide their hypocrisy, instead trying to justify it on the basis that it’s for the “right cause.” Unfortunately for their supposed logic, the coronavirus doesn’t have a social conscience, and cases exploded in the weeks following those protests (some of which is also due to increased testing, of course). Like those who attended these protests, most of the newly infected are younger, which we’d expect if the protests were responsible for spreading the virus.

New York City went as far as to prohibit contact tracers from asking the infected if they had attended black lives matter protests in an attempt to cover up the obvious. Recently NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio recently appeared on CNN to double down on his hypocrisy – announcing that while he’d cancelled all large events through September and banned mass gatherings, BLM protests would still be allowed to continue on the basis that “This is a historic moment of change.”

Perhaps Andrew Cuomo should have a word with him, because Cuomo is now citing crowds as the number one reason against reopening the state as a whole.

According to CNBC:

Groups of young people congregating at New York bars and restaurants, especially in the New York City area, are “a threat” to the state’s reopening and could force the businesses to close down again, Gov. Andrew Cuomo warned Monday.

Cuomo said his office continued to receive reports of crowding and mask violations over the weekend in the New York City area, only days after he announced the state would ramp up enforcement of bars and restaurants not complying with the state’s social distancing policies.

“We will have to roll back the bar and restaurant opening if the congregations continue, if the local governments don’t stop it, that is what is going to happen,” Cuomo said at a press conference.

To Cuomo’s credit, while his track record on fighting the coronavirus has been an abject disaster (with a higher death toll per capita than any country in the world and any state except for New Jersey), he has at least been one of the few Democrats in power to acknowledge that mass protests “could” accelerate the spread of the virus.

On the other hand, that acknowledgement didn’t come until after he, like de Blasio, egged the protests on. That was a fact Judge Gary L. Sharpe used to excoriate the duo in a lawsuit over the limitations they placed on religious services. “Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio could have just as easily discouraged protests, short of condemning their message, in the name of public health and exercised discretion to suspend enforcement for public safety reasons instead of encouraging what they knew was a flagrant disregard of the outdoor limits and social distancing rules. They could have also been silent. But by acting as they did, Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio sent a clear message that mass protests are deserving of preferential treatment,” he wrote.

Allowing tens to hundreds of thousands of black lives matter protesters to congregate in one area is going to do more to spread the coronavirus than allowing a dozen people to congregate at a barber shop, but the former is sanctioned while the latter is outlawed – and scapegoated.