By JOSH HAMMER
Tuesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves announced they would be lifting their statewide mask-wearing mandates, business capacity limitations and various other COVID-19-related restrictions. “COVID still exists,” Abbott said, “but it is clear from the recoveries, from the vaccinations, from the reduced hospitalizations and from the safe practices that Texans are using that state mandates are no longer needed.”
Texans and Mississippians might be forgiven for wondering why their governors did not earlier follow the courageous path of South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, who has garnered national headlines for her stubborn refusal to enact various mask-wearing mandates and other lockdown orders. But still: Better late than never.
Abbott now joins Florida’s standout governor, Ron DeSantis, who recently finished second behind former President Donald Trump at the 2024 presidential straw poll conducted at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as a fellow leader of a highly populous red/red-leaning state who has dared to defy the histrionic groupthink and draconian lifestyle restrictions that have far too often defined America’s COVID-19 response. DeSantis’ leadership on getting Florida back to semi-normal again (CPAC itself, normally held outside Washington, D.C., was held in Orlando, Florida, this year due to laxer COVID-19 restrictions) has dramatically elevated his national political profile. Abbott, a less sure-fire 2024 presidential contender, similarly stands to politically benefit, at least within the Lone Star State.
President Joe Biden, never known for his eloquence, lambasted Abbott and Reeves for making a “big mistake” and succumbing to “Neanderthal thinking.” But federalism is a stubborn thing, and Uncle Joe has no say in how Texas and Mississippi exercise—or don’t exercise, as the case may be—their “police power” regulatory authority over their respective citizenries.
In reality, though, it is Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci and the ruling class’s myriad other lockdown apologists who evince something closer to “Neanderthal” logic. For they are the ones who, a full year after the explosion of unprecedented restrictions on our most rudimentary of rights, would seek to continue circumscribing those rights—freedom to worship, freedom to associate and so forth—in the name of a virus with a recovery rate of 98 percent to 99 percent.
Remember the Trump White House’s “15 Days to Slow the Spread” program? That was now approximately 350 days ago. And while the issue of hospital capacity overload—sold by the ruling class to the masses as the singular putative justification for lockdown restrictions—continues to merit close attention, the national landscape at this point has changed substantially. “Operation Warp Speed,” one of the greatest public-private partnership success stories in American history, has now given way to a tremendous, if a bit disorganized, vaccine distribution rollout across the 50 states. We may not reach herd immunity soon, and we may not match our Israeli friends in terms of staggering distribution efficiency, but we are rapidly approaching the point in which the elderly, the immunocompromised and the otherwise-vulnerable will be vaccinated.
At the outset of the pandemic, I joined others in taking a cautionary approach. If ever there were a time to countenance short-term restrictions on cherished liberties to better protect the elderly and secure the common good, this would have been it. But it quickly became obvious that far too many politicians of both parties saw fit to follow the all-too-candid advice of former Chicago Mayor and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”
By prolonging the mandates, restrictions and lockdowns far past their natural expiration date, power-hungry politicians have also exacerbated fractious class tensions. COVID-19 lifestyle restrictions do not impact our well-educated ruling class, which can get by just fine working white-collar jobs from the socially distanced comfort of a home office, but they have destroyed countless small businesses and sidelined innumerable blue-collar workers. Combined with the fact that the pandemic seemingly provides many Democratic governors, such as New York’s Andrew Cuomo and California’s Gavin Newsom, with a fig leaf to crack down on religious service attendance, it is difficult to see how the common good is being well served at the present time.
Especially in those failed blue states, the lock downs will continue until that big, fat, bloated pork bill is passed. Once all that money bailing out Democrat failure is secured and the purpose of all that phony fear served, they will reopen their economies. Once the economy is finally reopened, it will EXPLODE in growth and activity, not due to any “stimulus” but because it is a totally healthy economy that had a boot on its neck. The idiot Biden will benefit from unleashing Trump’s economy.