President Donald J. Trump looks at diagrams and photos during his meeting with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Tuesday, April 28, 2020, in the Oval Office of the White House. (Official Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Governors across the nation have used COVID-19 to seize power and force their residents, especially children, to conform to punishing anti-social rules that keep them away from their families and friends. There have been a few states though where the governors have shown their ability to lead in the face of adversity. South Dakota’s Gov. Kristi Noem, Texas’s Gov. Greg Abbott, and especially Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis, have all stood up against the tyranny espoused by the CDC and the Biden administration. Florida has, in the words of NY Post columnist Kyle Smith, accepted the virus and “learned to live with” COVID-19. So should the rest of America. He writes:
You often see crazy things in Florida, like the couple I saw zipping up the Gulf Coast’s Route 41 on a motorcycle while the passenger was checking her iPhone, neither one of them wearing a helmet. Be careful, guys, that phone is breakable!
The greatest feeling about Florida is the sheer “Gonna ride this hog wherever it takes me” exuberance. I’ve been down there maybe eight or 10 times during the pandemic and arriving in any airport is like crossing the Wall out of East Berlin. Quite a lot of people wear masks in malls and stores, but most don’t. Nobody mask-shames anybody. You don’t need a vaccine card at all, much less have to dig out your Excelsior Pass three times a day.
This is because Florida accepts the basic truth that should have been Washington’s guidance from Day 1: If you’re vaccinated, the COVID-19 emergency is over for you; if you’re not, well, the risk is yours.
Florida schoolchildren have been back in school and unmasked since August 2020. Life is normal for them, except for the amusement value of seeing panicky teachers in masks. New York’s children, like those in many areas where the Democratic Party and its affiliated teachers unions rule, are essentially being used as human shields by educrats committing mass state-sanctioned child abuse until they get good and tired of it. Kids are suffering so badly here that even the New York Times is starting gently to suggest that maybe we should take our hands off our children’s throats — masking them, forbidding them to socialize and exercise and even talk at lunchtime, canceling their extracurriculars, canceling childhood.
The unemployment rate in Florida, heavily dependent on tourism, spiked to 14.2 percent in May 2020, fell to half of that by September and now stands at 4.5 percent (as of November). New York? Peaked at 16.6 percent in April 2020, but remains third-worst in the nation at 6.6 percent. In February 2020, that figure stood at 3.9 percent. New York is stacking its own crises on top of the virus problem.
Florida’s response since the summer of 2020 has been to act as the state embodiment of the Great Barrington Declaration in which academics Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta (of Stanford, Harvard and Oxford, respectively) argued that we are never going to eliminate the virus, so we’d better take mitigation strategies for the most vulnerable but otherwise learn to live with it.
Florida Man (and Woman) are great American lovers of liberty. Did we not come here from Europe in the first place because we were tired of being bossed around by twits and wanted to dream up crazy stuff that had never been tried before? Item from the Walmart in Punta Gorda, Florida: a trashy tank top with the legend, “I can’t hear you over the sound of my FREEDOM.” Doesn’t even make sense! I love it.
One of the great self-owns in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s career of auto-embarrassment came when she took the bait National Review dangled when it published a picture of her enjoying a Christmas vacation drink in Miami Beach.
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