The Best NYC Scandal Has Nothing to Do With the Mayor. It's the Covid Czar Who Admits He Spent the Lockdowns Throwing Molly-Fueled Orgies.

Lev Radin. Shutterstock Images.

I take a back seat to no man when it comes to a good, nonpartisan, small "d" democratic political scandal. Regardless of party affiliation. One that bridges the divide, reaches across the aisle, and shames and humiliates some bureaucrat in a spirit of cooperation. 

So while I can appreciate what's going on with NYC Mayor Eric Adams:

… it's only slightly moving the needle for me. Maybe because it's because I haven't set foot in the city since before civilization collapses. Perhaps it's because what he's being charged with is the kind of thing politicians in my state do every day before they've finished their second cup of coffee or groped their first intern. In Massachusetts, Eric Adams crimes would be lucky to make Page 3 of the Boston Herald. Hell, it wasn't that long ago we had a consecutive streak of four Speakers of the House in a row who were all convicted of felonies. And the guy who ran the Commonwealth with an iron fist for two generations did so because his brother was Whitey Bulger. It's funny how much you can accomplish when the people who might vote against your proposals know you're backed by your brother who knows where the literal bodies are literally buried, because he put them there. 

With all due respect to the good citizens of New York who are fascinated by how this thing with Adams is going to play out, I ask that you do not let this scandal cast a shadow over the much better one playing out this week: 

NY Post - The city’s ex-COVID czar got the boot from his job at a pharmaceutical firm Monday — a week after he was caught bragging about hosting sex parties and attending an underground rave at the height of the pandemic.

Dr. Jay Varma was serving as a senior health adviser to then-Mayor Bill de Blasio during COVID-19 when he and his wife put on the sex- and drug-fueled debauchery and attended a packed Wall Street rave, according to secretly recorded conversations the doctor had with a woman. …

Varma’s seamy chats — which included him boasting, “I did all this deviant, like sexual stuff,” and, “I had to be kind of sneaky about it … because I was running the entire COVID response in the city” — were made public last week by conservative podcaster Steven Crowder. …

Varma said at one point on the tape, “My wife and I had one with our friends in August [2020] of like that first summer.” 

“So we rented a hotel … we all took, like, you know, molly [MDMA] and like it was like eight or nine or us, eight to 10 of us were in a room and everybody had a blast because everybody was like so pent up.”

He said of the June 2021 rave, which hundreds of partygoers attended, “People were like, ‘Aren’t you afraid? Aren’t you embarrassed?’ and I was like, ‘No, actually, I’m like, I love being my authentic self.'”

He also hosted another sex party in November 2020, a source close to his camp told The Post.

And of course, no decent political sex scandal would be complete without an insipid, self-pitying, non-denial denial in the form of a released statement:

Varma himself has said in a statement, “In those private conversations that were secretly recorded, spliced, diced, and taken out of context, I referred to events that transpired four years ago. Between April 2020 – May 2021, I participated in two private gatherings. I take responsibility for not using the best judgment at the time.”

OK, now we're talking. A Mayor accepting graft or whatever Adams is accused of doing is par for the course. Just another day at the office. And in the normal course of things, even an MDMA sex party or two is what we can expect of the corrupt kleptocrats who run our lives. 

But these circumstances were the furthest thing from the normal course imaginable. In fact, we need a new word for "hypocrisy" because we're asking it to do too much heavy lifting in this context. 

You know who else might have loved being their "authentic self" between April 2020 - May 2021? 

Not popping Molly and watching two stock brokers Eiffel Tower their wife, necessarily. Though I'm sure there were plenty of those in the city Jay Varma shut down. New York is a big place, after all. But there are millions who would've liked to have taken a walk. Sent their kids to school. Gone out to dinner. Jogged. Attended church services. Hit the gym. Watched the Yankees in person. Visited their grandparents in the nursing home. Paid their last respects at the funeral of some loved one died alone and afraid. Just had an interaction with another human being without talking through a mask that no medical science ever justified. 

It begs the question how exactly these parties worked. Did ruining people's lives make them all the more erotic? Was the lockdown all part of the sex play? Was he getting a blowie from someone's girlfriend while telling her how many family pizza places he put out of business that day? Was he getting pegged while bragging about how he forced all the bodegas to put one-way arrows in their aisles? Was he role-playing how he's the public health official and she's the beauty salon owner who tried to keep her shop open as he bones her? Maybe engaged in a little spanking where he says, "I'm such a bad boy. I made it mandatory to mask up 2-year-olds. Please, sir, may I have another?" 

Those of us who never held an unelected and therefore unaccountable position where we get to play god with other people's lives can't relate to what that's like. So maybe all that enforcing made-up social distancing rules that never existed before and wiping your ass with the Bill of Rights is so arousing, you can't control your impulses. All you can do is get together with a bunch of strangers, run train on each other and swap every bodily fluid you have. Sure it sounds a little counter-intuitive, since people like Jay Varma were telling us breathing air within 5-feet, 11 inches of another person was going to kill people by the thousands. But he's the expert, after all.

I'm an Irishman. Which means I forget things I should remember, and remember things I should forget. And I know a lot of people would rather move on and pretend this never happened. But I won't. The people who shut everything down and destroyed everyone's financial, mental, emotional, and spiritual health were violating their own rules from one end of the country to the other. And in cases like Jay Varma, had a blast doing it. His words, not mine. 

Never forget. And never let it happen again.