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February 24, 2021

Democrats starting to panic over a reckoning at the polls for blue-state bungling of COVID

By Thomas Lifson

The two most prominent Democrat governors in the country, New York's Andrew Cuomo and California's Governor Gavin Newsom, may both be tossed out of office over their botched handling of the COVID panic.  Both men had been considered presidential material, and because their states are populous media centers, both had high national profiles.  Now Cuomo is facing calls for impeachment and a reported criminal investigation over his cover-up of nursing home deaths, while the recall petition for Newsom appears to be gathering the required number of signatures.

More broadly, the economic and social price paid by residents of states with lockdown hard-line Democrat governors like Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, New York, and California is starting to look way too high.  "Free states" like Florida are not doing medically worse than states where joblessness is stratospheric, restaurants and other small businesses have been killed, their employees jobless, and the families that owned them financially devastated...with no commensurate health benefit.

Stephen Moore writes that, thanks to their COVID lockdown overreach, blue states are now "the beggar states."

Last week, I visited South Florida for four days, and what a shock: Everything was open. The beaches, the hotels, the restaurants (with some sensible safety and social distancing restrictions). The classrooms are full.

The other strange thing about being in Florida was that people were happy. They were playing tennis and golf. They were going to work and getting on with their lives. Florida is a Republican, can-do kind of place.

Then, there is New York. Manhattan is a morose and deserted place to be. It's as if it's boarded up. People are living their lives afraid. They are depressed, which makes the whole place depressing. In Southern California, I experienced the same dreariness. And it wasn't the weather, which was warm and sunny. Restaurants were closed or highly restricted. Stores were sparsely attended, and people were generally grimacing and standoffish. They yelp in horror if you take off your mask, even for a moment.

Yet through it all, there is almost no evidence that lockdowns, business closures, stay-at-home orders and other strategies have reduced the infection rates or death rates from the virus. To take just one prominent example, open Florida has had a lower death rate (adjusted for the age distribution of the population) than closed-down California and New York. Even President Joe Biden's crackerjack health officials can't explain that one.

With the midterm election 19 months+ away, Democrats do not want their party identified as the one that needlessly screwed up the economy, limited personal freedoms, and basically panicked, while wiser leaders in places like Tallahassee, Florida and Pierre, South Dakota kept their heads on straight and guided their states to continued prosperity.

Democrats appear to be giving up on Cuomo, with the long knives unsheathed among his many New York State Democrat colleagues, who have endured years of arrogance, bullying, threats, and credit-grabbing by the entitled son of a former iconic governor and brother of a CNN anchor.  His approval ratings have tanked.  Now that the death toll of his practice of sending infected elders back to their nursing homes, to spread the disease and kill off thousands, can no longer be suppressed by their media allies, and that news of his politically motivated lies to federal authorities was leaked by a fellow Dem, it's hard to find Dems willing to stand up for him.  Dispatching him via impeachment beckons as a remedy before voters return to the polls.

Newsom is another case entirely, because it is voters themselves who are likely to deliver the verdict.  There, Dems are planning to change the rules on the recall in hopes of blunting the momentum.  Victoria Taft of PJ Media summarizes their reported plans.

  • The Bee reports that Democrats are considering trying to change the date of the recall to the "next regularly scheduled primary election, when Democrats are more likely to vote," instead of November of 2021. They played the calendar game with the recall of State Senator Josh Newman in 2018.
  • They're considering sending absentee ballots to every voter whether they've asked for one or not to swamp the system.
  • They will attempt to convince people who signed the petition to remove their names in a 30 day period after the signatures are turned in.
  • Their strategy is to "reduce signatures." As many signatures as possible will be thrown out keep the recall from qualifying for the ballot.
  • Already using COVID shut downs to slow down the signature gathering such that recall backers went to court to get more time.
  • Believe they'll use the extended lock downs to keep people from voting.
  • They've begun spinning the recall as a "distraction."
  • Tried to convince Californians that with all the money being wasted by Democrats (see EDD scandal) spending more on a recall for a new governor is wasteful.

Democrats wouldn't be contemplating measures like this unless they feared the consequences of letting the people speak.

Jordan Schachtel thinks that after a year of public hysteria and frequent changes to advice, voters may be "awakening from COVID psychosis."

Over the course of the past year, a coalition including the corporate media, international "health" institutions, a maniacal mega billionaire, Big Pharma oligarchs, and power drunk governments consumed massive amounts of power left and right, with little to no observed resistance in sight.

With COVID mania in full swing, they moved the goalposts as they pleased. Free of any science, data, or logical reasoning, the ruling class had the terrified masses completely under their thumb. Under the spell of a mass social psychosis, we willingly surrendered our liberties and even happily enforced draconian edicts on our own peers, despite the global trampling of our basic rights.

The ruling class moved seamlessly from "15 days to stop the spread" to "30 days to stop the spread" to "Zero COVID."

From "everyone needs to wear a mask" to "everyone needs to wear two masks" to "maybe we should wear three masks."

From "lockdown to preserve healthcare capacity" to "lockdown to slow/stop the spread" to "lockdown until we have a vaccine."

All of these aforementioned restrictions and guidelines were abided by without resistance. Across the globe, citizens remained firmly trapped in perhaps the most self-destructive mass social psychosis in human history, convinced that a respiratory virus (that causes a disease with a 99.8% recovery rate) was responsible for their economic and societal devastation. The authoritarians did as they wished, without a hint of pushback. 

However, it seems we have finally reached one particular narrative that has been met with firm resistance. (snip)

We're now being told that the vaccine is not in fact a ticket to normalcy. Instead, we've been told that even with the vaccine, people still need to wear a mask, social distance, and act as if fellow human beings are nothing more than mere vectors of disease.

This "rug pull attempt," as Schachtel terms it, may indeed be the straw that breaks the camel's back, to mix metaphors.  Vaccines have been touted as the hope for getting life back to normal.  Taking hope away after first raising it is a dangerous thing to do, because it causes lots and lots of resentment.

The Democrats have a serious dilemma.  Authoritarians (which is what the Dems have become) don't want to give up "emergency" powers once the emergency ends, as Naomi Wolf told Tucker Carlson two days ago.  So people like Fauci are telling us that the emergency will never end, basically.  But with free states proving that not only has the emergency ended, but it may never have really existed to the extent that people like Newsom, Cuomo, Whitmer, Walz, Pritzker, and others believed, this leaves Republicans as the party of hope and prosperity, with Dems the party of doom and poverty.

It is almost inevitable that Democrats will use their media and social media dominance to suppress and demonize the success story of Florida and other red states.  Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, regarded as a 2024 presidential contender, is already seeing a stream of negative stories and personal demonization.  But reality bats last, and people now trust the mainstream media less than they do used car salesmen.

Panic rarely yields successful strategies.

Caricature by Donley Hotey (cropped), CC BY-2.0 license.

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