You probably picked up right away that Kirk was referring to the mobs who’ve been wreaking havoc in Portland and other American cities for these past few months.

Any moderately intelligent person would.

But Chris Cuomo clearly spends a lot of time munching on that bowl of lead paint chips CNN evidently keeps around for when their anchors need a snack.

So Kirk’s remark triggered a completely different issue in Cuomo’s brain – one about which he’s obviously a bit touchy.

Cuomo defended the inconsistent way COVID-19 has been used as a justification for shutting down our churches. Though somehow, protesting and even riots have gone unhindered by any such concern for public health:

I feel badly for him that he believes that that’s the world he lives in, that he’s being kept from going to church. Why? Because of a pandemic. I want to go to church. I miss going to church. I understand there’s a pandemic. You know who else does? My priest understands it. Oh, but you can protest. One has nothing to do with the other. You are dealing with people who are responding in this country to outrageous acts of social injustice. To say, well, it’s the same as going to church, no, it isn’t. If you told people they couldn’t protest, if you invoked martial law about these types of situations, you would have chaos.

Cuomo, of course, doesn’t “feel badly” for Kirk at all. He despises him. And even if Cuomo weren’t the vindictive knucklehead he’s repeatedly shown himself to be, responding that you feel badly for someone you despise is the surest sign that whatever they said really got under your skin.

But Cuomo’s response to something Kirk didn’t actually say but no doubt believes is revealing in two ways.

First, it shows us how the elite media can’t even comprehend what it’s like to take religion seriously.

When Cuomo says he “misses church,” it’s clear that he can’t conceive of attending service as anything more than just another recreational activity, like going bowling or attending a concert.

For him, people don’t attend church to gather together in communal worship of God. Instead, they’re, at best, just indulging in another in the long list of activities some folks just happen to go in for. And the only cost of forbidding them to do so is that they’ll “miss” it.

If those who don’t think shutting down churches is a big deal really understood what communal prayer is about, they couldn’t be so cavalier about suppressing it.

It’s because their own spiritually impoverished perspectives foreclose understanding worship of the divine as anything besides just another hobby that they can’t comprehend or respect religious worship as an activity protected by the First Amendment.

What Cuomo calls “responding to outrageous acts of social justice” can only seem vastly more important than joining together to pray for divine grace to someone for whom the sacred is incomprehensible.

Cuomo’s explanation of why protestors aren’t expected to obey the COVID rules is, however, even more revealing. It doesn’t just tell us about the sad limits of his cosmopolitan perspective. He revealed an important truth about which someone not quite so dimwitted would have remained mum.

For once in his life, Chris Cuomo is absolutely right. The reason protestors and even rioters aren’t expected to follow the COVID-1984 rules is there’d be “chaos” if anyone tried to make them.

We’ve already gotten a whole lot of chaos as things stand. And all the violence and refusal to respect the rule of law or the millions of Americans not protesting sends a clear message that those who are won’t put up with being told to stop.

Even the protestors who’ve been peaceful have sent a clear signal that, at the end of the day, they don’t care about all the new COVID-1984 rules and will do as they please. And most of our elected officials have sent the clearest possible signal back that, at the end of the day, they only respond to disobedience and violence.

Tucker Carlson described the awful predicament we find ourselves in a couple of months back:

Major American cities were looted and burned on television. Citizens were beaten and murdered. Works of public art were destroyed by the score. America’s history – those shared experiences that bind us together as a nation – was plundered and completely rewritten by illiterate vandals…

And the question that hangs in the air is: Where are our protectors?…

Congressional Republicans decided to make reining in law enforcement their top legislative priority. They blamed the cops, they didn’t blame the rioters… Then Republicans bragged about springing more criminals from jail. The last thing we needed. In the state of Iowa, the Republican governor announced that she was giving felons the vote by executive order, not even waiting for the election, just doing it, signing it…

The message, unfortunately, could not be clearer: voting is for fools. You vote, you put these people into office with your votes, and in return they patronize you. And when it matters, they abandon you. They have contempt for you. You know they do, you can smell it. It’s obvious.

Voting doesn’t work. But when your riot, and you burn things and you hurt people, you get a very different response.

A month after Carlson made those remarks, 72 Republican congressmen voted along with all 232 of their Democrat colleagues to remove all civil war memorabilia depicting the South from the United States Capitol.

It doesn’t even matter if you think tearing those monuments down is the right thing to do since that’s manifestly NOT why those GOP congressmen voted to do it. They weren’t displaying moral courage. It wasn’t some astonishing coincidence that they happened to be doing exactly what the rioting mobs wanted. They were giving in to their demands, just as Carlson described.

And Chris Cuomo was just giving expression to Carlson’s conclusion about how wretchedly craven American politicians have become – except much less articulately and minus the censure.

Our churches as well as our businesses and schools were shut down because the elected officials responsible know we’ll put up with it.

Not only do they not care about our constitutional rights; they don’t even care about the duty they have to the law-abiding citizens who elected them.

The concept of duty means nothing to them. The only way to get them to respect your rights is to refuse to obey when they try to take them away and make them pay a price for persisting.

The only way to get them to take some positive action on your behalf is to threaten them with dire consequences.

Chris Cuomo said the quiet part out loud. People are allowed to protest because they refuse to submit to any rules saying they can’t and have made it clear they will raise hell if anyone tries to make them.

People aren’t allowed to go to church because they haven’t.

Those abiding by the rules are held in contempt and punished. Those breaking them are worshipped and rewarded.

Like it or not, that’s the unpleasant reality we find ourselves living in.