RUSH: Oh, don’t you love this. The governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, is literally begging rich people who have left the state and the city to come back. You gotta come back. Please, you gotta come back. He wants ’em back. He says, “If I stay there, I pay a lower income tax because they don’t pay the New York City surcharge.” He wants the people that left New York to come back. Please, please come back, you gotta come back.

He’s begging them to come back. People like me, although I’m sure he doesn’t mean me. But gotta just love that, too, folks.

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RUSH: So New York City is setting up some COVID checkpoints. In other words, Checkpoint Charlie is back. You’re going to need your papers if you want to get into New York while Cuomo is begging you to return. Remember when Cuomo threatened to sue Rhode Island for doing the same thing Cuomo is now trying in his state? We’ll refresh your memory we get back.

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RUSH: Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced plans for checkpoints. Yeah, checkpoints to get into New York City. So you gotta have papers now. Gotta go through checkpoints in order to travel around America and to get into New York because you might be carrying the virus.
Now, how is that for squelching commerce, travel, entertainment, confidence?

New York City has imposed citywide checkpoints. You are required to register at checkpoints, state where you are coming from, where you are going, and for how long. And if you don’t and they catch you, you face a $10,000 fine or a forced quarantine. Now, where did de Blasio get the idea for this kind of policy?

Well, I hate to tell you, folks. It comes right out of East Germany. It comes right out of East Germany, it comes right out of the Soviet bloc. de Blasio announces checkpoints, $10,000 fine for people that don’t check in. Let’s remember March 28th, this year at TheHill.com, “Governor Cuomo threatens to sue Rhode Island over a new policy to find New Yorkers in the state.” Remember when he was killing all these senior citizens by sending them to nursing homes?

Remember when New York was going crazy back in March with the number of cases and the number of deaths and we needed new hospitals, we thought, all this stuff? Rhode Island, which didn’t want any part of it, was trying to root out anybody who is from New York, and they wanted them to leave. And Governor Cuomo threatened to sue Rhode Island. Now we’ve got New York essentially doing the same thing. Checkpoints, $10,000 fine, 14-day quarantine if you are caught. This is on top of Cuomo pleading with rich New Yorkers to come back to the city.

“Cuomo revealed Monday that he has begged wealthy New York City residents who fled during the pandemic to return to the big Apple. He said, ‘I literally talk to people all day long who are in their Hamptons house who also lived here, or in their Hudson Valley house or in their Connecticut weekend house, and I say, “You gotta come back, when are you coming back?”‘”

We’ll go to dinner, I’ll buy you a drink, come over, I’ll cook. They’re not coming back right now, he says. You know what else they’re thinking? They’re thinking if I stay, meaning if I’m in the city and I stay there, I’m gonna be paying a higher income tax ’cause they gotta raise taxes, and if I stay outside the city they’ll pay a lower tax ’cause they don’t pay the New York City surcharge.

So he knows what he’s up against here. But who is it that forced them all out? Who is it that shut down livelihoods? Who is it that shut down commerce? Who is it that shut down the biggest city in the country proudly and happily? It was Andrew Cuomo. Now all of a sudden, after reality sets in – I mean, you just can’t shut down the city from March to the present and expect things just to pick up where they left off.

He knows what he’s up against. People no longer having to pay exorbitant rent in New York because they’ve discovered people can work in New York but not have to be in New York. They can work in New York but not have to live in New York. San Francisco’s discovering the same thing.

I don’t think — and I said this two months ago — I don’t think these people, these governors and mayors, particularly on the left, I don’t think they have the slightest idea what their policies, cheered on by the media, will ultimately mean for their cities and states. While the media cheers them for things they were not doing successfully, while the media was cheering them because it was all about getting rid of Trump, it was all about making Trump look bad and all about making Democrat mayors and governors look great, all about making DeSantis look bad, all about making Governor Kemp in Georgia look bad, all about making Greg Abbott in Texas look bad, make Trump look bad, praising all these Democrats.

It’s the same thing with California now. I’m telling you, folks, they have instituted policies that are going to forever change the structure of those cities. People have learned they don’t have to be there, they don’t have to pay exorbitant rent. They don’t have to pay exorbitant real estate prices. They don’t have to live in the city. They don’t even have to live nearby. They don’t even need to live in Connecticut. Virtual work, remote work. While they’re out of there touting it and while they’re out there claiming this is great, they’re saving people from getting COVID, what they were really doing was hammering nails in the coffins of their cities, without knowing it.

Ditto, New Jersey and that guy, Phil Murphy, is that his name? Meanwhile, let me give you a state that you won’t even find a word written about because things are going great guns there. That state is Georgia, a Republican governor. Remember they opened up. They were one of the first to open up. The predictions came from left and left and left that it was going to be the end of Georgia, gonna be the end of that governor, biggest mistake that could have been made, and now you don’t even find any news about the status of COVID-19 in Georgia. You don’t find any news about the status of the economy in Georgia.

You know why? Because there isn’t very much bad news. There isn’t bad COVID-19 news, there’s not bad infection news, there’s not bad death toll news, there’s not bad economic news. That’s why you’re not hearing about Georgia. I’ll tell you something else. Florida and Texas are on the way to replicating what happened in Georgia. Florida and Texas are soon to be over the hump, Arizona to follow, and all of these Republican led states that the media and the Democrats have had just grandest time in the past few weeks trashing and ridiculing are once again gonna end up with all kinds of embarrassment and egg on their faces because the governors in these states have known exactly what they’re doing, and they all decided to stay resolved and push through.

When times got tough, they did not fall to the media demands to re-shutdown, to re-lockdown, to change what they were doing. They stuck to it. You’re gonna see, folks, that the problem areas, as they are with rioting and looting, civil unrest, bye-bye police departments, the problems with COVID-19 and this out of control virus are going to be pronounced in Democrat-run states and Democrat-run cities like every other freaking problem in this country is focused on those areas. There’s some exceptions of course, but you wait. It’s only a matter of time.