XPost: alt.tv.pol-incorrect, alt.rush-limbaugh, alt.politics.usa
XPost: sci.med.diseases

Despite larger populations, currently freer peoples, and a
media narrative that screams otherwise, there are far, far
fewer deaths in Texas and in Florida than in New York.

Thus far in Florida, approximately 20,000 people have died of COVID-19.
In Texas, the number stands around 24,000, and in New York, about
35,000.

New York is the smallest of the three, with 19.54 million residents.
Then comes Florida, with 21.67 million, before Texas, with 28.7 million residents.

COVID numbers are difficult to trust. Cases are often counted more than
once as patients go in and out of the hospital, and some deaths are
attributed to COVID that are barely related, if at all.

There’s a perverse incentive to write down “COVID” and get state and
federal money, no doubt, but one thing rings clear through all the din:
Despite larger populations, currently freer peoples, and a media
narrative that screams otherwise, there are far, far fewer deaths in
Texas and in Florida than in New York.

For months, American media consumers have been treated to news of
Florida and Texas’s incoming death spirals. For months after, we were
promised those death spirals were just around the bend. The funny thing
with COVID, though, is unlike global warming doom science — always 3-12
years away and “too complex” to explain when it inevitably doesn’t
happen — COVID doom predictions are checkable in just a few weeks. And
COVID doom didn’t happen.

Along Florida’s Gulf Coast, the streets are packed on weekends. In
Naples, Florida just one week ago, lights hung majestically from lamp
posts, a live Nativity stood in the road, Santa let children sit on his
lap, and live bands performed every few blocks. Indoors, the bars were
busy, and just after midnight the last pub’s band wound down for the
night.

Young parents and some of the elderly wore masks (some old, masked
couples dancing adorably to the music), but most people didn’t, and the
next morning the beaches and pools were once again bustling. It was the
first glimpse of the old normal — truly normal — I’d seen since March.
It was wonderful.

Florida’s freedom isn’t some new and dangerous experiment, by the way —
the Sunshine State has been open for nearly three months. Yet in New
York this past weekend, Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered indoor dining shut
down again.

Since COVID began in earnest in late March, I’ve had the opportunity to
travel to 23 states and see all kinds of behaviors and impacts. I’ve
been to Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Indiana. I’ve
traveled to California, Louisiana, Minnesota, and South Dakota. I’ve
visited Michigan, Kentucky, Nebraska and Wisconsin. I’ve slept in
Missouri, Wyoming, Maryland, and Florida. I’ve taken a look at
Virginia, Illinois, Nevada, and Ohio, and I’ve swung through Idaho,
Utah, and Kansas.

Most of the people I’ve spoken to have shared a general impression that
the whole country was acting the same as they were, and subject to the
same rules. The funny thing is in reality, I didn’t even have to travel
from Washington, D.C. to Hillsdale, Michigan to remember what sitting
at a bar felt like, when just a four-mile walk from my house to
Maryland would have scratched that itch.

Just now, blocks away on Capitol Hill’s Lincoln Park, children as young
as two are wearing masks while they walk with their parents. Meanwhile
across the river in northern Virginia, few if any parents make their
young children do the same.

Virginia’s Democrat governor, however, is not in the national media’s cross-hairs for this local break with New York’s COVID culture. Nor is Maryland’s anti-Trump Republican governor. Nor was New Orleans’s mayor,
whose French Quarter raged until dawn the October Friday she surprised
bar owners with a sudden end to the lockdown.

Why? Because as with global warming science, COVID science has become a political weapon for the left. While their allies escape judgment no
matter their sins, political opponents from President Donald Trump to
Dr. Scott Atlas, and governors from Florida’s Ron DeSantis to Texas’s
Gov. Greg Abbott to South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, are the targets of
vicious media attacks on themselves, their states, and their families.
Just Friday, a New York Times psychiatrist demanded that doctors who
question masks efficacy lose their licenses.

In America today, left-wing politicians obsessed with control are
crushing the lives and dreams of their citizens while in the same
country just across state lines, young and old celebrate Christmas like
we used to without any notable difference in risk and impact. How long
can this continue before we all figure it out?

Early in the pandemic, some reports indicated that COVID-19 might have
been an intentional weapon against us. Since then, we’ve learned this
is very unlikely, although this hasn’t stopped it from being used as a
weapon against us: Not by the Chinese, but by our own elites.

: Christopher Bedford is a senior editor at The Federalist, the vice
: chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, a board member at the
: National Journalism Center, and the author of The Art of the Donald.


--
Joe Biden went from stealing someone's wife, to stealing speeches, to
stealing money, to stealing an election.
He has really grown as a politician.
-- Michael Moore

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