Chris Cuomo picked up his phone and texted fellow media host Adam Carolla to complain about a retweet Carolla had sent out of something he said during Covid. The comment was one of the many ugly things the former CNN anchor said about anyone who questioned the government's narrative about Covid. Apparently Cuomo didn't appreciate seeing his own words reflected back at him.

Carolla had shared a clip from Cuomo Prime Time — a 2020 segment in which Cuomo went after Dr. Scott Atlas and "the Trumpers" for questioning the Fauci line on masks, social distancing, and isolating the elderly. Cuomo saw it circulating and decided to text the man sharing it.

According to Carolla, Cuomo's message was simple: "What's up, bro? Like, what are you doing?"

"I'm just retweeting what you said," Carolla replied.

Here is what Cuomo said during COVID. He told a restaurant owner questioning vaccine mandates on live television: "You sound like an idiot." He compared Americans who hesitated on the vaccine to the national failure after 9/11, calling them "weak people." He said on CNN that "somebody made people think that the vaccine is a personal choice issue" — framing bodily autonomy as a problem to be corrected, not a right to be respected.

While Cuomo was saying those things on national television, real people were paying for it. Healthcare workers who had worked through the worst of the pandemic were fired for declining the shot. Military service members were discharged. Teachers lost positions they had held for years. Businesses were destroyed. Families were divided over holiday tables. Elderly people were forced to die alone in nursing homes withotu their loved ones around them. People who asked reasonable questions — questions now acknowledged as reasonable even by public health officials — were treated as dangers to their communities. The media figures who set the tone made skepticism socially unacceptable, and Cuomo was among the loudest.

Carolla was one of the people who paid a price for not going along. His answer to Cuomo's text was not sympathetic.

"You said a lot of stupid sht during COVID, and I got a lot of sht foisted on me thanks to people like you saying a lot of stupid sht," Carolla said. "Perhaps you should have shut the fck up back then."

"You attacked people, and now people are rubbing it back in your face. That's how the world works."

This is not the first time Cuomo's COVID record has caught up with him in public. During a recent debate with commentator Dave Smith, Cuomo tried to distance himself from the media's ivermectin campaign — the coordinated effort to label a decades-old, Nobel Prize-winning drug as "horse dewormer" because the wrong people were recommending it. Cuomo's argument: "I don't like what people did to Joe Rogan about ivermectin."

Smith stopped him. "You did it." He asked the production crew to pull the clips. They did. The audience watched Cuomo's own words play back on screen — the same words he had just denied saying. They booed.

The pattern is the same both times. Cuomo built his brand on moral authority during COVID — declaring the consensus, shaming the skeptics, calling restaurant owners idiots for asking questions. Now that the consensus has shifted and the clips are circulating, his strategy is to make them disappear. Text the people sharing them. Deny in public what's on tape. Reposition as an independent voice who always had reservations.

The clips exist. The tape rolls. And the man who called vaccine-hesitant Americans "weak people" on national television is texting private individuals to ask them to stop pressing play.

Carolla's answer is the only one that fits: you said it. The tape is there. That's the end of the conversation.