So, I’m sitting here on a Saturday morning contemplating the fact that our country is now at a point in which it has become normal for talking heads on TV and print commentators to talk about “free states” and “prison” or “lockdown states”. I did it myself in a piece the other day without even thinking about it.
At any other time in the last 150 years, this kind of discourse would have been shocking, but today it is part of the “new normal” that aspiring despots like Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer now talk about, echoing the kind of language Barack Obama used during his term to convince people to accept his own efforts to regulate every aspect of their daily lives.
It’s easy to tell which states are “free” or becoming more free, anyway, and which states are “prisons”: The Free States have Republican governors, and the Prison states, with a few exceptions like Ohio, are run by Democrats like Whitmer. This dichotomy between the governance by the two parties in this national emergency over a virus with a mortality rate well below 1% becomes increasingly stark with every passing week.
Friday, May 1 was a great example. In Texas, GOP Governor Greg Abbott moved to reopen a vast swath of businesses (with limited capacity restraints), state parks and the beaches along the Gulf Coast. On the very same day, Democrat California Governor Gavin Newsom moved to close all state parks and beaches. As a result, free Texans flocked to local shopping malls or to reopened restaurants to enjoy their first meal out in six weeks, while thousands of imprisoned Californians staged a massive protest in the city of Huntington Beach:
Think about the brutish stupidity of that beach closing order: Given that we now know that heat and sunlight kill this virus, what better place for Southern Californians to spend time than on the damn beach? But Governor Newsom, acting on his fascist impulses, shuts the beaches down because he was personally “disturbed” by video of people enjoying a day in the sun earlier in the week.
Americans all over the country have clearly shown that they are willing to cooperate with restrictions to their freedoms that make sense in fighting the spread of this virus. But irrational nonsense like this and Gov. Whitmer’s ban on motor boats has got to stop.
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